May 10, 2019

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

In ancient Rome, poetry was pop culture, and being a poet was a viable living of sorts—you attached yourself to a patron and wrote flattering words about him, nasty verse about his enemies, and humorous epigrams to enliven his dinner parties. You kissed political ass, stuck in well-timed barbs, snarked about fashion and stupid food trends, and called out friends, foes, and former lovers. And while many wrote elevated, epic work, there was a thriving culture of poets like Martial (A.D. 40–103) and Catullus (84–54 B.C.), whose catty, witty, often obscene poems reflect daily life and circulated first through gossipy word-of-mouth and graffiti.

If it seems surprising that the enjoyment of bitchy public ephemera (see: Twitter) is as old as human civilization, it’s only one way in which the psychology of ancient Rome seems eerily similar to our own. Martial and Catullus cared about money and sex, status and partying, making art and having dinner, just like we do today. Their city, as described by Martial, has “grimy restaurants” that “spill out too far” onto the sidewalks, “inn posts … festooned with loads of chained flagons,” and at least one bar that’s a “smoke-blackened dive.” It’s populated by “bar owners, butchers and barbers,” but the elite pretty boys have “long hair and soft beards,” and there is a brisk economy of gift-giving. In one epigram, Martial notes that “this month,” trendy items include “napkins, pretty spoons, / Paper, wax tapers and tall jars of prunes.” In another, wishing to be written into someone’s will, he sends gifts of “cakes flavored with honey from Hybla.” Even in the ancient world, the provenance of gourmet food items mattered. Read More

Eat Your Words

Cooking with Anzia Yezierska

By Valerie Stivers

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

At one of my first jobs in New York, I worked with an elegant, slim, freakishly tall young woman who occupied a cubicle by a window. She said things like, “I want to work for a couple of years before I get married and have children.” Men sent her flowers at work, and she had several handbags, rumored to be gifts, that were worth our month’s salaries. To me, this was an unimaginable alternate world, horribly antifeminist but also seductive. Where did one find men who sent flowers? Was there really a magic trick by which one could stop working? I knew better than to want such things. So why did it seem like this girl—her name, I’ve just recalled, was Suzanne—knew something I didn’t? Suzanne and I weren’t friends, but I occasionally lurked by her cubicle, looking at the graceful lines of her shoulders and the back of her head, wondering about her.

I thought of her recently while reading Anzia Yezierska (1880–1970), a Polish Russian Jewish immigrant to New York in the 1890s, whose best-known work is the novel Bread Givers (1925). As the Columbia University professor Alice Kessler-Harris puts it in the foreword to that book, Yezierska writes about being an immigrant and a young woman “in a world where ambition was the path to Americanization and ambition seemed designed for men.” In a distinctive and vibrant vernacular, Yezierska’s books capture the life of a now-vanished Jewish Lower East Side. She experienced brief acclaim in her lifetime, died in obscurity, and since 1975 (in part thanks to Kessler-Harris’s tenacity) has been back in print, slowly becoming a part of the new feminist canon. Read More

Eat Your Words

Cooking with Colette

By Valerie Stivers

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

Any writer who has recently been the subject of a film starring Keira Knightley can be said to be having a moment, and this is especially true of Colette (1873–1954), a star of the belle epoque Parisian literary scene whose life lends itself well to the themes of our own time. Colette, born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, was a gender nonconformist more than a hundred years ago who adopted her surname as a one-word moniker. She was born to prosperous parents in the French village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, and at twenty years old, with a “little pointed face,” a “well-made body,” and braids that touched her calves like “whips” or “reins,” she made an improbable love marriage to “Willy” (Henry Gauthier-Villars), a wealthy thirty-four-year-old Parisian aristocrat and publishing impresario. Willy was the ultimate networker, a critic, society hound, and a provocateur who ran a workshop where impecunious young writers pumped out popular novels under his name. He brought his countrified young bride to Paris and was disowned for the ensuing scandal.

Colette quickly went to work for him, and the series of semierotic autobiographical novels she wrote as “Willy,” which begins with Claudine at School, was “one of the greatest, if not the greatest” success stories in French literature, according to a contemporary. Colette’s biographer Judith Thurman even credits her with having invented the teenage girl. Later Claudine books reveal the queer and genderqueer ferment in Parisian society at the time (Proust was a contemporary); Colette’s affairs with women, including Mathilde de Morny, Marquise de Belbeuf, a woman who dressed as a man and went by “Missy”; and Colette and Willy’s open marriage, which could be considered an early attempt at polyamory. The approach of the Keira Knightley movie is to portray Colette’s struggles to leave Willy, regain the rights to her work, and begin writing under her own name as a feminist parable.

As a person allergic to orthodoxies, I never want to like the writer who is having a moment, especially when the reasons are ideological (even when the ideologies are ones I mostly share). I’d been resisting Colette until cracking a spine and discovering, like most of Paris did once before me, that she’s irresistible. Read More

February 15, 2019

Eat Your Words

Cooking with Patrick O’Brian

By Valerie Stivers

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

The discovery of a new series of novels to love is often accompanied by joy (a new lifelong friend!) and resentment (why did none of you tell me about this?).

These were precisely my feelings upon finding the Aubrey–Maturin books, a series of twenty naval adventures written by the brilliant British historical novelist Patrick O’Brian (1914–2000). The books take place during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15) and explore the friendship between Jack Aubrey, a jolly and bellicose naval captain, and Stephen Maturin, his ship’s surgeon, a laudanum-addicted naturalist. Most of the action occurs at sea—the first volume starts on the island of Minorca (at the time a British possession), with Jack waiting desperately to be assigned a ship and Stephen ducking out on his lodgings because he’s unable to pay the rent. Shore time, when it comes in the second volume, is set in the carriages and country houses of England. I realized about halfway through Post Captain that O’Brian is like a male Jane Austen, writing from the point of view of the soldiers who populate Austen’s fiction.

As a newly minted O’Brian addict, I feel he deserves an Austen-like cultural renown and am sad that despite his cult status and best-selling run in his own time, it never quite happened. (Master and Commander, a 2003 movie starring Russell Crowe and loosely based on the books, failed to capture the magic.) I can conclude only that the extraordinary depth of the books’ historical detail—especially their verisimilitude regarding naval jargon, which is nearly impenetrable, though it creates a rich texture of “fo’c’sles” and “bosuns”—puts readers off. Read More

February 1, 2019

Eat Your Words

Cooking with Iris Murdoch

By Valerie Stivers

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

Some novels are so full of eccentric food and cooking instructions that it seems the best treatment of them would be to write a second book trying all the recipes. The Sea, the Sea, by the British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919–99), is one such novel. In its first pages, Charles Arrowby, a retired actor and theater director, veers from his description of the English coast, where he’s come to work on his memoirs, to discuss his lunch. I’m reproducing the following passage in full, since it’s exemplary of the book’s treatment of food.

It is after lunch and I shall now describe the house. For lunch, I may say, I ate and greatly enjoyed the following: anchovy paste on hot buttered toast, then baked beans and kidney beans with chopped celery, tomatoes, lemon juice and olive oil. (Really good olive oil is essential, the kind with a taste, I have brought a supply from London.) Green peppers would have been a happy addition only the village shop (about two miles pleasant walk) could not provide them … Then bananas and cream with white sugar. (Bananas should be cut, never mashed, and the cream should be thin.) Then hard water-biscuits with New Zealand butter and Wensleydale cheese. Of course I never touch foreign cheeses. Our cheeses are the best in the world. With this feast I drank most of a bottle of Muscadet out of my modest ‘cellar’. I ate and drank slowly as one should (cook fast, eat slowly) and without distractions such as (thank heavens) conversation or reading. Indeed eating is so pleasant one should even try to suppress thought.

Charles’s food descriptions are wonderful in their particularity and spur all kinds of culinary thoughts, such as, Can canned baked beans be redeemed by good olive oil?, and, Why hasn’t the old-fashioned dessert of fruit in heavy cream made a comeback? The preparation details are a boon for a person wishing to replicate the food. Another simple dessert of apricots with shortbread cookies specifies that the apricots, if not available fresh, should be obtained dried, and soaked for twenty-four hours. Each meal comes with a wine pairing. Read More

January 18, 2019

Eat Your Words

Cooking with the Strugatsky Brothers

By Valerie Stivers

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

Yellow Bouillon #1, from a legendary Russian cookbook, approximates the broth served at the Dead Mountaineer’s Inn.

The Soviet science fiction masters Arkady (1925–1991) and Boris Strugatsky (1933–2012) had that particular Russian knack for making humor out of tragedy, the first but not last reason their work transcends genre. Famous in Russia, the brothers are known in the West for the 1972 novel Roadside Picnic, which the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker is based on. Roadside Picnic and another of my favorites, The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn (1970), have thrilling plots the way best sellers should, but they also have a depth of social commentary and layered metastructuring that are revelatory of the brothers’ Soviet world—and relevant to our times as well. To this end, I supped with the brothers Strugatsky, making some of the classic dishes mentioned in their books. Readers should be forewarned that the following article contains spoilers, though it offers blini and caviar in return.

To return to sardonic wit: Roadside Picnic is the story of earth after extraterrestrial contact. The aliens came, did something mysterious, and then left, leaving a handful of sites contaminated with toxic but possibly useful junk. As one character explains, it’s as if “a car pulls off the road into the meadow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor radios … A fire is lit. Tents are pitched. And in the morning they leave. The animals, birds and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters. And what do they see? An oil spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about … A roadside picnic.” The human survivors devote themselves to studying the alien detritus, but they’re like the insects and animals of the anecdote: unable to understand it. Roadside Picnic’s portrait of humanity isn’t particularly flattering, and it’s a spoof on the grandiose alien-contact science fiction of the era. As another character remarks, “Somehow this isn’t at all how I envisioned it.” Read More

Advertisement

Category Archives: Eat Your Words

Eat Your Words

Cooking with Martial and Catullus

Tags

Eat Your Words

Cooking with Anzia Yezierska

Tags

Eat Your Words

Cooking with Colette

Tags

Eat Your Words

Cooking with Patrick O’Brian

Tags

Eat Your Words

Cooking with Iris Murdoch

Tags

Eat Your Words

Cooking with the Strugatsky Brothers

Tags

Sign In

Advertisement

Tags

Tags

Tags

Tags

Tags

Tags