What She Ate by Laura Shapiro

Author:Laura Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-07-24T16:00:00+00:00

Barbara Pym

(1913–1980)

Tonight she set before us a pale macaroni cheese and a dish of boiled potatoes, and I noticed a blancmange or “shape,” also of an indeterminate colour, in a glass dish on the sideboard. Not enough salt, or perhaps no salt, I thought, as I ate the macaroni. And not really enough cheese.

—Excellent Women

Like generations of food lovers before her, Julia Child came away from her first trip to Britain convinced that there really was no hope for such a nation. It was the spring of 1949, and she and her husband, Paul, had come over from Paris to tour the north of England. “[We] stopped at a beautiful Tudor Inn, which was truly oldey woldey and charming,” she recalled several years later in a jovial letter to her friend Avis DeVoto. “Dinner, and we had boiled chicken with the hair still on partially covered with a real honest to goodness English white sauce. I had always heard of it, but thought it was just a lot of French chauvinism. But this was really it, flour and water with hardly any salt, not even made with the chicken bouillon.” The fact that rationing was still on, that hotels and restaurants had taken a dive during the war, that many hadn’t recovered—none of this entered into her appraisal. By the time she was looking back on that meal it was 1953, and she had returned to England many times, always staying with friends who served delicious meals. No matter. These particular friends loved France and French food, she pointed out. So as far as Julia was concerned, they didn’t really count as British, at least when they cooked.

Julia’s attitude toward British food—that it was inedible, that it had little relevant history apart from being inedible, and that a more sensible population would simply take its meals in France—had been locked into place for a long time, and no respectable gourmand would have contradicted her. Even Rosa Lewis, unusual in her day for freely criticizing French cooks as well as British, made sure that her menus were written in French no matter what was on the plate. After all, her clients were perfectly aware of the difference between “Soup” and “Soupe,” even when the former was “Clear Turtle” and the latter was “Tortue Claire.” By 1928, when classic French cuisine had been priced out of most British homes and restaurants, critics such as the food and wine writer Morton Shand were castigating “faded lettuce . . . bottled sauces . . . and flaccid, malodourous cabbage,” and four years later a story in the Manchester Guardian about a movement to promote the best in British cooking was headed, defiantly, “Our Cooking Not Stodgy.” Elizabeth David, who spent the late 1940s working on what would become a landmark of culinary literature, A Book of Mediterranean Food, once remarked that it was almost the first British cookbook to appear after the war. “It was a time really when they didn’t have cookery articles,” she pointed out.

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