Not for Bread Alone: Writers on Food, Wine, and the Art of Eating by Daniel Halpern

Author:Daniel Halpern
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Food, Gastronomy, Essays, Cooking, General
ISBN: 9780061673825
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2008-12-01T10:00:00+00:00

PAUL SCHMIDT

What Do Oysters Mean?

T his is an excerpt from a book about food in fiction. It began as a cookbook, but it got more complicated and more interesting the longer I worked on it.

When we think and write about food we are often thinking and writing about something else. Food always means something beyond the fact of what we put into our mouths. Food, I found, is about loving and living and dying.

Eating, like making love, is a sign we will not die. But food and death

are inseparable. To prepare food is to destroy one thing in order to

preserve something else. Eventually I came to realize that I was really

writing about passion and death, just like Tolstoy and Dickens and

Joyce and Proust—and like most cookbooks. And that struck me funny,

finally.

The piece opens with part I, chapter 10 of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, translated by myself.

—P. S.

As Levin entered the restaurant with Oblonsky, he couldn’t help noticing a certain expression, almost a contained radiance, that suffused Oblonsky’s face and his whole presence. Oblonsky took off his coat, and with his hat cocked to one side he made his way to the dining room, giving orders to the Tatar waiters in tail coats who flocked about him with their napkins. He bowed right and left to friends who greeted him joyfully—here as everywhere else—and went to the hors d’oeuvres buffet, where he drank a glass of vodka, took a bite of fish, and said something to the heavily made-up Frenchwoman in her ribbons and lace behind the cashier’s counter, something that made even that Frenchwoman burst out laughing. Levin drank no vodka, precisely because he found that Frenchwoman offensive; she seemed to him stuck together out of fake hair, poudre de riz, and vinaigre de toilette. He moved immediately away from her, as if she were something unclean. His entire being overflowed with the memory of Kitty, and his eyes smiled with triumph and happiness.

“This way, your Excellency, if you please; your Excellency won’t be 103

disturbed here,” said an especially attentive old Tatar with white hair, whose hips were so wide the tails of his coat parted over them. “If you please, your Excellency,” he said to Levin; his courtesy to Oblonsky’s guest was a sign of respect for Oblonsky.

In an instant he had spread a fresh tablecloth on a table already covered with one, a round table beneath a bronze light fixture, brought up velvet-covered chairs, and stood beside Oblonsky, a napkin in one hand and a menu in the other, waiting.

“If you’d prefer, Your Excellency—a private dining room will be free in a moment; Prince Golitzin is with a lady. And we have fresh oysters.”

“Ah, oysters…”

Oblonsky began to reconsider.

“Should we change our plans, Levin?” he said, as he took the menu. His face expressed serious indecision. “Are the oysters any good? Eh?”

“Flensburgs, Your Excellency. We don’t have any Ostends.”

“Flensburgs or not, what I asked was, are they fresh?”

“They arrived yesterday, sir.”

“Well, then. What do you think? Should we start with the oysters, and then change our entire program?”

“It doesn’t make any difference to me.

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