Edward White’s monthly column, “Off Menu,” serves up lesser-told stories of chefs cooking in interesting times.

Still from Fanny Cradock’s BBC Christmas Special

On the evening of November 11, 1976, the BBC broadcast the third episode of The Big Time, which followed members of the public as they tested themselves in high-pressure situations. It was what we’d term today a reality TV–style show, and that week was the turn of Mrs. Gwen Troake, a middle-aged woman from rural Devon in southwest England, who was being given the chance to design and cook a special banquet at the world-famous Dorchester Hotel in London. Troake, an amiable, soft-spoken lady any audience would root for, was assigned the most demanding mentor the production team could muster: Fanny Cradock, an extraordinary character who was the face and voice of cooking on British television from the mid-’50s to the mid-’70s and was once described by one national newspaper as “a preposterous character, the foodie you loved to loathe.”

Cradock built an entertainment brand on her putative brilliance in the kitchen, but also her superciliousness, hectoring her husband, mistreating her colleagues, and patronizing her audience, the great British public, whom she regarded as gastronomic philistines. Evidently, this included Gwen Troake, the amateur cook on The Big Time. As Troake ran through what she was planning to serve at the banquet—a seafood cocktail, followed by duck, and rounded off with a rum and coffee cream pudding—Cradock rolled her eyes, gulped, and grimaced in a pantomime of disgust and disbelief at the overbearing richness of the menu, at one point blowing her cheeks out as though she were about to be physically sick. When Troake revealed that the duck would be served with a blackberry jam, Cradock could stomach no more and unleashed what she thought was the ultimate insult. “All these jams,” she said, “they are so English.”  Despite being stereotypically English in so many ways, in her mind the only really good English—or, indeed, British—food was really just French food by a different name. “The English have never had a cuisine. There’s nothing English. Yorkshire pudding came from Burgundy.”

She was probably wrong about Yorkshire pudding, but she definitely had a point, both about the heaviness of Troake’s menu and about the sorry state of her nation’s cuisine. In the postwar decades of Cradock’s great success, amid heated debates about what it meant to be British in a post-imperial world, British food was an international laughingstock. It was fitting, then, that Cradock herself seemed to be in a perpetual identity crisis. Her personality was as peculiar as many of her famous recipes, and nobody was quite sure which of the stories she told about herself were true, and whether, despite her constant talk of refined French food, she was half as accomplished in the kitchen as she claimed to be. As Kevin Geddes, in his biography Keep Calm and Fanny On, quotes one of Fanny’s friends, Evangeline Evans, as saying, “She wasn’t real … she didn’t know who she was. She made herself up as she went along.” Read More

Edward White’s monthly column, “Off Menu,” serves up lesser-told stories of chefs cooking in interesting times.

Original Kellogg’s cereal box (left), Ella Eaton Kellogg (right)

Few novels in American history have had the seismic social impact of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s 1906 work set among the gore and misery of Chicago’s slaughterhouses. Though the critics were sniffy about Sinclair’s drum-beating prose, his vivid descriptions of the insanitary conditions inside America’s abattoirs caused an outcry that hastened the passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Despite the sales figures, Sinclair was only partially satisfied with the public reaction to his book. His aim had been to convert Americans to socialism; instead, he lamented, he had succeeded only in turning them into fussy eaters. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” he later wrote, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

1906 turned out to be a landmark year for both the American food industry, and American cuisine. While The Jungle was lighting fires in Congress, in Battle Creek, Michigan, William Keith Kellogg struck a deal with his brother John Harvey Kellogg that would begin a new, acrimonious chapter in the peculiar psychodrama of their relationship, and spark a revolution of the breakfast table. William bought from John full ownership of the company that produced their Toasted Corn Flakes, and swiftly turned a niche health food product into one of the biggest American brands in history, changing the diets of billions around the world.

Both these events, the regulation of the meat industry and the rise of breakfast cereal, were redolent of the Progressive Era of the early 1900s, in which it was assumed that a mixture of moral zeal and technocratic expertise could remedy all social ills, and alleviate individual suffering. But they are also wonderful examples of an unmistakably American approach to cooking and eating, what the academic Nicholas Bauch describes as “an obsession with getting food right … never being satisfied with the movement of organisms from nature to the eater’s body.”

In the Kellogg story there was one person in particular devoted to getting food right—not the flamboyant, egocentric John, nor the embittered, entrepreneurial William, but Ella Eaton Kellogg, John’s wife, one of the most overlooked but most important names in the ever-twisting story of America’s relationship with food. It was Ella who applied the Progressive mindset to a working kitchen, sowed the seeds of dietetics, and devised a new culinary philosophy for ordinary Americans which she outlined in 1892 with her book Science in the Kitchen. In her sober, efficient way—which perfectly mirrored the sober, efficient dishes she concocted in her kitchen—Ella bequeathed a huge legacy. Beyond the content of her recipes, which promoted vegetarianism and swore off refined sugar, she articulated the heady idea that perfecting food (and the systems in which it is created and consumed) is the key to perfecting human civilization. From Diet Coke to the Impossible Burger, America has long sought to perfect its food through scientific intervention. Few have gone at it as successfully as Ella Eaton Kellogg.

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Edward White’s monthly column, “Off Menu,” serves up lesser-told stories of chefs cooking in interesting times.

When a devastating cholera pandemic reached Italy in 1884, the disease took its heaviest toll on the sharp-edged, unpolished jewel of Naples. The authorities’ response was disastrous, and as panic and anger rose, a conspiracy theory circulated that the suffering was an orchestrated attack on the city’s poor. Physicians and public health officials were attacked in the street; a popular rumor had it that doctors received twenty lire for each person they bumped off, and that some were greedily chucking patients who were still alive onto funeral wagons. One man was arrested for inciting rebellion when he spread the notion that tomatoes, a symbol of Neapolitan peasant identity and a staple nourishment, were being laced with poison.

The discord caused alarm in the government. The Risorgimento—the movement behind the creation of a single, unified Italian nation in 1861—had promised a new era of prosperity and progress for all. Events in Naples made a mockery of that. Italy’s King Umberto I became a passionate advocate of a radical transformation of Naples that would improve the health of the city, and tie Naples closer than ever to the Italian nation. Corruption and chaotic administration kiboshed the plans, but the royal desire to celebrate the Italian-ness of Naples remained. When Umberto and his wife, Queen Margherita, visited the city in 1899, the queen, bored of overly complex French food, supposedly asked for some real food, a true taste of Naples. A local chef served her a pizza in the colors of the Italian flag—the red of tomato sauce, the white of mozzarella cheese, the green of fresh basil—which Margherita loved so much that it’s been named after her ever since. Whatever the precise truth behind the yarn, its intended message is unmistakable: the experience of being Italian is baked into the food of the ordinary Neapolitan.

It’s a story that would have intrigued Vincenzo Corrado, a man born and bred in the south a century and a half before Queen Margherita’s supposed conversion to the delights of Neapolitan cuisine. Corrado explored that cuisine in the pages of his series of cookbooks, which are a vivid testimony to the cultural life of eighteenth-century Naples, a city of dizzying social disparities and abundant artistic expression. Unwittingly, Corrado did more than almost anybody to define what we think of as Italian food, in which—especially as the food exists in its international incarnations—the flavors of Naples are so prevalent. Yet, one wonders what Corrado would have made of the ways in which food has been used as an important binding agent in the creation of an Italian national identity. Sincere as he was in his passion for the food of his homeland, he recognized that a plate of food is layered, like a Neapolitan timbale, with meanings and associations. As his recipes testify, much of what we consider to be authentically local, regional, or national, rests on small acts of self-deception and selective memory, the endless making and remaking of myths.

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Edward White’s new monthly column, “Off Menu,” serves up lesser-told stories of chefs cooking in interesting times.

Seth Gilliam as James Hemings in Jefferson in Paris (1995)

Among his many claims to distinction, Thomas Jefferson can be regarded as America’s first connoisseur. The term and the concept emerged among the philosophes of eighteenth-century Paris, where Jefferson lived between 1784 and 1789. As minister to France he gorged on French culture. In five years, he bought more than sixty oil paintings, and many more objets d’art. He attended countless operas, plays, recitals, and masquerade balls. He researched the latest discoveries in botany, zoology and horticulture, and read inveterately—poetry, history, philosophy. In every inch of Paris he found something to stir his senses and cultivate his expertise. “Were I to proceed to tell you how much I enjoy their architecture, sculpture, painting, music,” he wrote a friend back in America, “I should want words.”

Ultimately, he poured all these influences into Monticello, the plantation he inherited from his father, which Jefferson redesigned into a palace of his own refined tastes. More than in its domed ceilings, its gardens, or its galleries, it was in Monticello’s dining room that Jefferson the connoisseur reigned. Here, he shared with his guests recipes, produce, and ideas that continue to have a sizable effect on how and what Americans eat.

In keeping with his republican ideals, Jefferson eschewed lavish banquets in favor of small, informal dinners where conversation flowed as freely as the Château Haut-Brion. According to his own account, the famous dinner table bargain of June 1790 was just such an event. Preparing the menu for the “room where it happened” that night was James Hemings, arguably the most accomplished chef in the United States. He was Jefferson’s trusted protégé, his brother-in-law—and his slave. Read More

Edward White’s new monthly column, “Off Menu,” serves up lesser-told stories of chefs cooking in interesting times.

Alexis Soyer, artist unknown (courtesy Alexis-Soyer.com)

When the potato blight arrived in Ireland in September 1845, many of those in power downplayed the threat it posed. The disease had already blackened potato crops across the Americas and Western Europe, but dire predictions about the damage it could wreak on Ireland’s staple food were dismissed as irresponsible scaremongering, “deluding the public with a false alarm,” in the words of the mayor of Liverpool.

That line didn’t last long. By October it was obvious that the lives of millions were at risk. In response, the British government offered half measures, unwavering in its determination that the solution should not be worse than the problem. To break economic orthodoxy by providing direct aid to those in need would be tyrannical, it was argued, and create a culture of dependency and deception. Charles Trevelyan, the government official leading the relief effort, put it bluntly: “The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated … The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.”

1847 was the nadir of the crisis. Countless people died of starvation and disease, others fled in droves. The mayor of Liverpool could no longer contest the reality of the crisis; so many destitute refugees came to his city that it was described by the registrar general as “the cemetery of Ireland.”

Into the bleakness stepped Alexis Soyer, the most famous chef in London, a man who had made a fortune from catering to the outsize appetites of sybarites and playboys, and about as unlikely a savior of the famished as it’s possible to imagine. A peacocking, Rabelaisian embodiment of modern London, Soyer was as adept at self-promotion as he was at creating the extravagant high-society banquets for which he was famed. Nevertheless, in Dublin on April 5, 1847, he unveiled his plan to end the suffering of the Irish people: a specially designed soup kitchen, combining the traditional craft of French cooking with the efficiency of modern science.

The launch was attended not only by thousands of famine victims, but by representatives of the press, and hundreds of well-to-do observers, including the Duke of Cambridge and the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. As the hungry stood behind metal railings outside, VIPs were given a first look inside the kitchen, where they sampled for themselves what the famous Soyer had rustled up with food aid rations. “The contrast was sudden and striking,” reported the Dublin Evening Post the following day. “A moment before, and the lovely faces which lighted up the pavilion, smiled their approval of every thing they saw; a moment after, their places became filled by the poor, upon whose persons famine and misery and time had seemed to have done their worst.”

As laudable as it was unsettling, Soyer’s soup kitchen experiment was a precursor of the awkward union of celebrity and humanitarianism so familiar to our own times. But it was also the emblematic moment of Soyer’s unique culinary life, lived at extremes—poverty and wealth, toil and glamor, feast and famine.

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