In our food-besotted culture, chefs and cookbook authors get far more
respect, by and large, than poets or classical musicias or scholars ever did
before post-modernism had undermined the prestige of the “high” arts. Even a
poet as successful as W.H. Auden found it expedient to conceal his "profession"
from strangers seated next to him on planes.
What did he “do”? Medieval history. He had found that telling the truth
about himself aroused incredulity and dialogues of unbearable tedium. But at
least Auden would have been treated with wondering respect.
Now we have the bewildering phenomenon of the star chef, a fast-talking
prestidigitator of improbably conjoined ingredients, famous primarily for his
performances on television, rather than for the food his restaurant kitchen
serves to a more limited and traditionally discriminating audience of
gastronomes.
Few equivalent stars of old-fashioned literature, music and art ever
existed. And even Chopin or Picasso or Dickens never penetrated the world
audience to the same extent as that lout Gordon Ramsay. Well, maybe Dickens
dominated his potential audience as decisively as Ramsay, but it was a smaller
audience.
Perhaps it will give comfort to fogey esthetes (I am one) to consider
how low the status of cooking was across the pre-video millennia, especially in
literature. Before the modern era, even within the culinary profession, only a
few cookbooks achieved high status. And during the heydays of Careme (1784 –
1833) and his follower Escoffier (1846 –1935), not even their most devoted acolytes would have
considered their written work part of literature.
Food does
inevitably appear in works of high literature from the very beginning. Those
“equal feasts” on the banks of the Scamander in the Iliad are serious events, as
important to the unfolding of the epic poem as is the laundry expedition to the
seashore that leads Nausicaa to the shipwrecked Odysseus. But such
interruptions of the main heroic fighting and manly adventure are Homer’s way
of giving extra shock value to his bellicose story by contrasting it with the charm and safety
of everyday life. The similes, with their celebrated outward expansion from a
pinpoint in the bloody foreground to a barely related full image of peace and
beauty, are the most intense examples of this approach.
But Homer treats
the humblest things with respect; his barbecues are dignified, religious in
fact. But in the hands of other classical writers, food, when it does get
mentioned, is usually either a joke or a symbol of gross appetite and
carnality.
Perhaps the earliest food poem is a culinary
parody of the opening lines of the Odyssey, in which the much-traveled
(polytropon) hero (andra) is replaced by
a copious (polytrophon) and metrically equivalent banquet (deipnon).
Aristophanes
frequently uses food as a tool of mockery. The plot of The Acharnians hinges on the protagonist’s passion for the eels of
Lake Copais in Boeotia, off limits to Athenian epicures because of the war with
Sparta. Dicaeopolis solves this problem by declaring a unilateral peace.
The most
important work of gastronomy from antiquity, really the only important work of
gastronomy from antiquity, is the Deipnosophistae (The Feasting Philosophers)
by the Greek-Egyptian anthologist Athenaeus (fl. 200 ad). A grab-bag of mostly
food-related quotations from hundreds of authors, it would be dismissible as
frivolous pedantry if it did not also preserve fragments from serious writers
who would be lost to us if they had not happened to mention a turnip or a stew.
The most
ambitious food poem that survives from the ancient world is Moretum, a versified
recipe for what may be pesto, that is included with other minor poems in the
so-called Pseudo-Vergilian Appendix. Most authorities do not believe that
Vergil composed the 124-hexameter account of a peasant toiling at his mortar
and pestle.
The best food
poem in either Greek or Latin is a tongue-in-cheek invitation to a dinner where
the host will not provide any food at all, just good cheer and revelry.
Catullus couches his mock invitation in the most august language, of prayer and
elegiac romance:
You’ll dine well
at my place, Fabullus,
In a few days,
if the gods favor you,
And if you remember
to bring along a fine big meal,
As well as a
lovely girl and wine and salt
And lots of
laughs.
If, I stress,
you bring all these things, beloved friend,
You’ll dine
quite well: because the wallet of your Catullus is
Full of spiders.
But in return
you will receive unadulterated love,
Or whatever
there is as elegant or fine:
I’ll give you a
lotion,
Which Venus and
Cupid gave my girlfriend,
And when you
smell it, you’ll beseech the gods, Fabullus,
To make you
All nose.
So far, I’ve
left out the other main literary food genre, cannibalism, the mythographic dark
side of the banquet. . For example, there is the dinner at which Thyestes is
served his own sons, in a horrific
profanation of the ideal feast. Such scenes are, I suppose, food literature,
but far from the positive, non-satirical treatment of cooking and eating that
enters literature in modern times.
Perhaps there
already exists a study of the rise in respectability of gastronomy in the
novel. It would inevitably show how the kitchen and its products gradually lost
their trappings of Rabelaisian and Falstaffian debauchery in an arc of
embourgeoisement that eventually gave us Proust’s madeleine and Virginia Woolf’s
nod to gourmet cookery in To The
Lighthouse, the boeuf en daube.
Neither Mrs. Woolf
nor her character Mrs. Ramsay seems to know much about the actual cooking of
the dish, as the British chef Rowley Leigh has shown in a clever analysis. The
Ramsays’ cook Marthe does the actual cooking, which may excuse the
self-satisfied if faintly idiotic warnings from Mrs. R. about the need for
scientific precision in making this extremely forgiving, long-simmering classic
of Provençe. Perhaps Woolf meant to satirize Mrs. Ramsay’s pretensions as
an upper middle class non-cook dining out, as it were, on the skills of her
domestic employee.
Today, the
equivalent person wouldn’t be cooking either. She would either order takeout or
make a reservation. But we may doubt that she would be able to supply Catullan
wit or an odor more divine than what emanates from a eucalyptus-spearmint
aromatherapy candle ordered from the gods of the internet.