Food (writing) as therapy

Writing about
food, eating and drinking – as distinct from how-to cookery manuals – goes back
at least to antiquity, from Juvenal’s biting Satires and Petronius’s detailing
of the excesses of Trimalchio’s feast, to the dietary prohibitions of the Old
Testament. It would be both interesting and a little tedious to trace food
writing through the ages; however, there has always been a self-consciously
literary tradition, as in Petronius’s mocking exaggerations of a decadent Roman
cena. In the hands of really good
writers, as we’ve seen in our own time in the work of Elizabeth David and Jane
Grigson, even collections of recipes can have literary worth – though this is
exceptional, and most writers of recipes do not have literary pretensions, or
even ambitions.

         Something
new is happening, though. Julie Powell’s Julie
and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, which had its origins online in
a blog, has turned into a movie with a magnificent role for Meryl Streep. One
of the effects of this has been to make high-end food a subject for mainstream
entertainment – as it has been for 25 years anyway for affluent urbanites, for
whom eating out is a major leisure activity (as Social Trends reported yet again in 2006), and cooking a hobby. But
perhaps the correct way to view this is as the crest of a foodie wave, in which
people are thinking and writing about food in all sorts of novel ways.

A fresh literary genre has appeared recently – food writing as
therapy. We’re used to the idea of food itself as therapeutic; that is what
accounts for the ease with which a book advocating a new slimming diet finds
itself on the best-seller list. Sometimes diet books claim to make you
cleverer, sexier, more productive or even happier, and there have been plenty
of memoirs by cooks who find some sort of serenity at their stoves.   But these new books aren’t
exactly about food, or even cooking or eating, but about the comfort writing
about food brings. For example, Kim Severson, now a food writer on the New York
Times, has just published Spoon Fed: How
Eight Cooks Saved My Life,http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/books/review/Levy-t.html not a Julie/Julia, but profiles of eight female
cooks interspersed with misery-memoir, confessional musings about her recovery
from alcoholism and coming to (happy) terms with her lesbianism. She does
sometimes cook recipes garnered from her heroines. But that’s not what makes
her better; what does that is the sycophancy-tinged interviews she conducts
with them, and the career she builds upon these. 

Matt McAllester was a foreign correspondent for Newsday, known as a war reporter, imprisoned for a week in Iraq in
2003, and for his previous books about his time in Kosovo and Iraq.  Bittersweet:
Lessons from My Mother’s Kitchen (Bloomsbury  £16.99) is not the book you’d expect from a man
who writes: “A year later I was back in Baghdad, sitting in my hotel room one
afternoon, when a bullet ricocheted around my balcony.” That was in 2005, and
the result of the rifle shot was to persuade McAllester to propose marriage to
his girlfriend when he returned to London in February. All in all, he seems an
unlikely person to be writing a book about how he learned to cook.  But he had two crucial connections with
food. The first was his father, the well-known advertising photographer, Don
McAllester, who took the photographs that illustrated many of Jane Grigson’s
cookery columns in the Observer Magazine, and who presumably took the lovely,
though uncredited family photographs that are one of the joys of Bittersweet. The other link with food is
the writer’s mother, Ann, who told him, “If you want to know how to cook, read
Elizabeth David. She’ll tell you everything. Read French Provincial Cooking. Her books are marvelous. We all learned
to cook from Elizabeth David.” This conversation took place on May 4^th,
2005, at his mother’s nursing home in Swiss Cottage, where she died,
unexpectedly, of a heart attack two days later, leaving a good deal of
unfinished emotional business for her son.

During that last visit his mother had asked him if he thought he was
a good cook, and he answered that he thought he was “not bad.” She then asked
if he always left the cookery book open, so as to be able to consult the recipe
while doing the cooking, and he admitted he did. “Then,” she concluded, “you
can’t cook….If you need to keep the book open, you’re not really cooking.”  They had had these “companion”
conversations many times before. His mother’s behaviour had for many years been
unpredictable, except that it was likely to be bad and embarrassing, and her
appearance went from the chic woman we see in the book’s illustrations to a
raggedy bag lady.

Ann McAllester was alcoholic and bipolar, and it appears that the
diagnosis of the latter condition came too late to treat it and save her
marriage, or her relationships with her children, who had enjoyed an idyllic childhood
living with their near-bohemian parents in London and Edinburgh, with holidays
on the west coast of Scotland at Port an Droighionn, first in a caravan, and
then in a Norwegian-designed log house they built overlooking the bay. The
first cracks in the façade of family happiness appeared when he rebelled at his
ambiguously religious mother’s attempts to send him to a Catholic boarding
school. (His mutiny took him to live and work in America, and finally to report
from some of this century’s most dangerous places.) Though he never really had
a faith to lose, there were times during and after his mother’s final illness
when he derived some comfort simply from being in the beautiful, socially smart
Jesuit Church at Farm Street, Mayfair. But he recognized he was there, trying
“to bluff my way past my own dogged atheism,” not just to conjure up happier
memories of his mother, but also to try to influence the God whom he didn’t
believe in to help his wife conceive by IVF the child they longed for. Though he
sometimes appealed to an image of the Virgin, Our Lady of Lourdes, at the Farm
Street Church of the Immaculate Conception, what he really sought was the
intercession of St Elizabeth David.

Even as a child McAllester was most in touch with his mother when they
were cooking together. His grief took the strange form of trying to learn to
cook as well as his mother did. On the first anniversary of her death and
cremation, “I had no grave to visit so in the afternoon I went to the Waitrose
on Finchley Road.” But the chief thing was to get over the open-cookbook
hurdle: “My form of cooking and shopping was inseparable from words on the
page.” Eventually McAllester does learn to internalize recipes, and approach
cooking analytically – and learns from his aunts that, whatever his mother
preached, she always kept the book
open while cooking. By three years after Ann’s death, his own “goal to memorize
one hundred Elizabeth David recipes had faded away.” He continues to idolize
Mrs David (a bit deceived by his research in an unreliable biography of her,
which he read in addition to Artemis Cooper’s excellent one), and though
unaware of the hard-drinking, difficult woman she became in her own old age, “I
let her go. And with her, I had begun to let my mother go.” Therapy complete,
the patient is cured, as recounted in an elegantly written memoir. More books
in this genre are already scheduled for publication; I don’t expect to read another  as compelling as this one.