{"id":152028,"date":"2021-04-16T09:00:43","date_gmt":"2021-04-16T13:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=152028"},"modified":"2021-04-16T12:07:13","modified_gmt":"2021-04-16T16:07:13","slug":"cooking-with-herman-melville","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/04\/16\/cooking-with-herman-melville\/","title":{"rendered":"Cooking with Herman Melville"},"content":{"rendered":"

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona<\/a> for a virtual, Melville-themed wine tasting on Friday, May 7, at 6 P.M.<\/small> on <\/em>The Paris Review\u2019s Instagram account<\/a>. For more details,\u00a0visit our events page<\/a>, or scroll down<\/a> to the bottom of the article.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Photo: Erica MacLean.<\/p><\/div>\n

Whenever I would tell someone I was cooking from Herman Melville\u2019s Moby-Dick <\/em><\/a>for my next column, they would gleefully shriek, \u201cWhale steaks!\u201d And I would dither a bit and explain that no, those are illegal in America, and that I was instead planning to make two forms of chowder, clam and cod, that weren\u2019t going to be very different from each other. In our Chowhound-fueled, extreme-eating kind of world, I felt a little silly. Chowder is an easy dish, and while there\u2019s raging conflict over the primacy of New York style (tomato-based) versus New England style (white), and the finer variations of each, the topic seems to inspire passion in inverse proportion to its importance. (Potatoes or no potatoes? Avast.) In fact, as Perry Miller reports in The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville, and the New York Literary Scene<\/em>, Melville meant for Moby-Dick<\/em>\u2019s chapter on chowder to be a sardonic response to just such an ongoing foodie feud. (Many thanks to the novelist Caleb Crain for loaning me Miller\u2019s book and writing two excellent essays on Melville, sexuality, and cannibalism, published in A Journal of Melville Studies <\/em>and American Literature<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Moby-Dick<\/em>, however, is a book in which pulling on a single thread can reveal a universe. I had some contact with it in my all-girls middle school\u2014to my recollection, just enough to ask why this book had dick<\/em> in the title and so many mentions of \u201csperm\u201d in its pages\u2014but it\u2019s only as an adult that I\u2019ve fallen madly in love. I understand it now as a \u201clifelong meditation on America,\u201d as the Melville biographer Andrew Delbanco writes in his introduction to the edition I own. So when I looked at the book\u2019s two main food passages\u2014one on chowder, the other on eating whale\u2014I found a central theme: the question of what man (specifically gendered man<\/em>) is doing here in America, what he\u2019s cooking up, and how it nourishes him. In this system, eating chowder is on the side of our better nature, and eating whale is on the side of our worst, so I felt a little better about my dinner plans. <\/p>\n

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Clams of this type are often referred to as \u201cquahogs\u201d in Moby-Dick<\/em>. Boil them in a little water until they open up and you get a fragrant stock with a pearly hue. Photo: Erica MacLean.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Herman Melville (1819\u20131891) wrote Moby-Dick<\/em> quickly: the first reference to it appears in his letters in 1850, and the novel was published in 1851. He believed he was working on a masterpiece\u2014and he needed to write a masterpiece, too, because he was perennially short of money. (\u201cDollars damn me,\u201d he famously wrote while composing it.) The married Melville was also possibly in love\u2014and not just with Nathaniel Hawthorne, as has been suggested for decades, but with the married woman who lived next door to him in the Berkshires, a bluestocking poet and free spirit named Sarah Morewood. The biographer Michael Shelden makes a speculative but powerful case for this in his 2016 book Melville in Love<\/em>. Whatever Melville\u2019s reasons, he set out in a blaze of divinity to do nothing less than \u201cproject a vision of the world\u2019s essential constitution,\u201d as Richard H. Brodhead writes in New Essays on Moby-Dick<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Literary history and legions of readers say he succeeded. Moreover, the symbolic structure of the text has allowed it to keep up nearly seamlessly with the times. It\u2019s extraordinary how the reader finds today\u2019s themes directly present, despite how language and ideas have changed. In 1851, Melville would have had neither word nor concept for homosexuality<\/em>, but Moby-Dick<\/em> could be considered America\u2019s first piece of queer literature\u2014at the heart of America, our greatest novel, queer! Nor did he always speak of race in terminology that would seem correct today, but the ship our heroes set sail on is called the Pequod<\/em>, named after an American Indian tribe massacred by Puritans in the eighteenth century. The boat\u2019s multiracial crew is dragged, tricked, financially incentivized, and, most ominously, inspired<\/em> to its doom by a deranged white man, a creature of blind will, in pursuit of an \u201cevil\u201d white whale. The congruence with today\u2019s issues is clear.<\/p>\n

Since the book is a cultural artifact more known than read, it contains many surprises for the adult reader. The first, for me, was the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg. In the opening chapters, our hero\u2014a dreamy, educated white boy who wants us to call him Ishmael, though we\u2019ll never know if that\u2019s really his name\u2014is forced to share a bed at an inn with a \u201ccannibal,\u201d a tattooed nonwhite \u201csavage\u201d named Queequeg. After the terrifying moment when Queequeg discovers Ishmael in his bed and threatens him, Melville subverts expectations. Ishmael decides that Queequeg is \u201ccomely looking,\u201d and because, as he reasons, it\u2019s \u201cbetter to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian,\u201d he\u2019s happy to pull back the sheets. More than happy. The two achieve what now reads as a sexual union in the bed, an idyllic, mutual feeling that Melville compares to being \u201cmarried.\u201d Ishmael overcomes his hesitations about Queequeg\u2019s difference, saying, \u201cthe man\u2019s a human being just as I am,\u201d which must have been provocative to some readers, since the book was published during the run-up to the Civil War. The bedmates set out as a \u201ccozy, loving pair\u201d to sign up for a whaling voyage. (\u201cI have written a wicked book,\u201d Melville said in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, \u201cand feel spotless as the lamb.)<\/p>\n

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At risk of igniting another chowder war, I used carrots in my cod chowder, following the example of Sam Sifton\u2019s \u201cno-recipe recipe\u201d in the New York Times<\/em>. Photo: Erica MacLean.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Another surprise was the treatment of the whale. Because Moby-Dick<\/em> is about whaling and betrays no modern squeamishness over the matter, it takes some time to realize that what many readers imagine to be the boring parts, the chapters on cetology, function as a meditation on the whale\u2019s profound beauty, spiritual value, and miraculous body. Even Moby-Dick, the antagonist, \u201cwhen seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea,\u201d leaves behind himself \u201ca milky way of creamy foam, all spangled with golden gleamings.\u201d Melville celebrates the whale\u2019s head, his tail, his eyes, his skin, his lungs, his skeleton, and even the composition of his spouting (is it water or vapor?). In one of the most beautiful stretches of the book, Melville observes that the whale has no skin beyond a glass-like transparent membrane, beneath which \u201cthe visible surface of the Sperm Whale \u2026 is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line-engravings.\u201d In such passages, the whale becomes the world.<\/p>\n

There are two main food passages in Moby-Dick<\/em>: a pair of chapters on eating whale and one on eating chowder. Melville understood the tragedy of whaling. The scenes in which one of the shipmates, Stubb, kills the book\u2019s first whale and then gobbles up fresh steaks from the small of its back are among its most terrible. The author writes that Stubb \u201cslowly churned his long sharp lance into the fish, and kept it there, carefully churning and churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold watch that the whale might have swallowed \u2026 But that gold watch he sought was the innermost life of the fish.\u201d After this, Melville declares Stubb \u201ca high liver \u2026 somewhat intemperately fond of the whale as a flavorish thing to his palate.\u201d Stubb commands a Black crewmate to jump overboard onto the whale\u2019s carcass and \u201ccut me one from his small.\u201d Next, he awakens another Black crew member, the cook, and humiliates him, all while stuffing himself with \u201creddish morsel[s].\u201d<\/p>\n

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The Try Pots inn on Nantucket is the \u201cfishiest of all fishy places,\u201d where Ishmael and Queequeg eat chowder three times a day. Its landlady \u201cwore a polished necklace of codfish vertebrae.\u201d Thankfully, my cod came boned. Photo: Erica MacLean.<\/p><\/div>\n

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In these scenes, we see a continuity of horrors: the white man\u2019s abuse of other races, his exploitation of nature, his destructive power, his thoughtless sadism. And perhaps more significantly, Melville portrays this behavior as the white man\u2019s destruction of himself. The next chapter, \u201cThe Whale as a Dish,\u201d starts and ends with the suggestion that to eat a whale is akin to cannibalism. We learn that most people consider whale meat too rich, but there are some exceptions: \u201cIn the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish. The casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump, whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large puddings), they are then mixed with flour and cooked into a most delectable mess.\u201d Viewed in the light of cannibalism, such passages are excruciating, as is the narration\u2019s bright, reportorial tone. The author emphasizes that we accomplish our awful ends with cheerful industry, ingenuity, and vigor. D.\u2009H. Lawrence, writing somewhat feverishly about Moby-Dick<\/em> in the twenties, called the whale \u201cthe deepest blood-being of the white race. He is our deepest blood-nature. And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moby-Dick<\/em> is a tragedy\u2014Delbanco calls it an \u201celegy to democracy\u201d\u2014but it indicates alternatives. The chapter where the characters eat chowder is one of these. When Ishmael and Queequeg arrive on Nantucket, they stay at an inn called the Try Pots and, in a comic sequence, discover that the place serves nothing but two types of chowder, \u201cclam or cod.\u201d The clam chowder is made of \u201csmall juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with a pounded ship\u2019s biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.\u201d The cod is just as savory but \u201cwith a different flavor.\u201d Ishmael and Queequeg have \u201cchowder for breakfast, chowder for dinner and chowder for supper, till you began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes.\u201d This wildly abundant food is a wedding feast of sorts, celebrating a relationship that is \u201ca critique of power in the society that Melville depicted,\u201d writes Robert K. Martin in his groundbreaking book of queer theory Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville<\/em>. Martin posits that Ishmael and Queequeg\u2019s love represents \u201ca democratic eros \u2026 a generalized seminal power not directed toward control or production,\u201d which Melville opposes to Captain Ahab\u2019s \u201chierarchical eros expressed in social forms of male power as different as whaling, factory-owning, military conquest.\u201d If that\u2019s true, then it\u2019s also significant that chowder is a mixed, sloshy, ill-defined kind of dish, subversive in definition and structure.<\/p>\n

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Due to the Try Pots landlady\u2019s taciturn ways, at first our heroes believe they\u2019re getting only a single cold clam for supper. \u201cBut when that smoking chowder came in,\u201d Melville writes, \u201cthe mystery was delightfully explained.\u201d Photo: Erica MacLean.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Thus I am firmly for eating chowder and against eating whale. Like the Try Pots, I made both clam and cod, taking one recipe from my cooking-from-literature sister Cara Nicoletti, who made the clam chowder from Moby-Dick<\/em> in her 2016 book Voracious<\/em><\/a>. My recipe for cod chowder comes from Sam Sifton\u2019s \u201cno-recipe recipe\u201d for speedy fish chowder<\/a> in the New York Times. <\/em>And though the Try Pots was not a wine-list kind of place, and most beverages in Moby-Dick<\/em> are quaffed from the barrel of a harpoon, I wanted to pay tribute to Melville\u2019s time in the Berkshires by adding a wine pairing. In 1850, shortly after meeting Sarah Morewood, Melville abruptly bought an estate he could ill afford situated next door to hers in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Pittsfield was a wealthy place back then, and Mrs. Morewood was known for her picnics, dining, and entertaining. On one notable excursion with Melville, she is documented as having brought \u201cbrandy cherries,\u201d champagne, and \u201cextra supplies of rum and port wine.\u201d<\/p>\n

My interest in Sarah Morewood is more than gossip-related. What strikes me most about Moby-Dick<\/em> is not that the author condemns the things we should condemn but that he was wrestling with what men are. <\/em>Is man\u2019s will itself the problem\u2014that clever-monkey urge to expand, create, innovate, colonize, dominate, write, whale? Or is the problem will without limit, will without containment or partner? The queerness in Melville\u2019s work, which runs through all his books, is one form of redefining power hierarchies. I see the exposure of the great white phallic symbol on the book\u2019s title page as another\u2014brave Melville, the penis is not so powerful when it\u2019s hanging out there for schoolchildren to giggle at for all eternity. Placing the work of art in the context of a relationship could be a third. It might be silly to call Morewood \u201cthe muse of Moby-Dick<\/em>,\u201d as the subtitle of Shelden\u2019s book does, but using one\u2019s power to make something for someone<\/em> is also a better use.<\/p>\n

My chowders were delicious\u2014and they are for<\/em> you! Nicoletti\u2019s clam chowder recipe gives instruction for making your own clam stock, a necessary step that defines the flavor of the dish. The only tricky part is adding flour and butter to the saut\u00e9ed onions, then slowly whisking in the stock without creating lumps, a process similar to making gravy. The recipe calls for only small amounts of bacon, celery, onion, and potato, and I was tempted to overstuff in order to create an impression of bounty befitting Melville\u2019s chowder chapter, but I followed the recommended quantities and was glad I did so: the broth-to-morsel ratio was just right. Nicoletti also allowed me to skip a potentially tedious step by explaining that the ship biscuit in Melville\u2019s recipe was used as a thickener \u201cin the days when heavy cream wasn\u2019t so readily available.\u201d I had considered making ship biscuit (recipes exist on prepper websites), but the heavy cream was a better choice.<\/p>\n

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In modern recipes, heavy cream replaces pounded ship biscuit as a thickening agent. Photo: Erica MacLean.<\/p><\/div>\n

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The cod chowder also lived up to the source material. The premise of Sifton\u2019s \u201cno-recipe recipes\u201d is to give the home chef guidelines on how to cook while improvising. For his fish chowder, he suggests bacon, onion, potato, corn, and carrots (similar to Nicoletti\u2019s recipe, except that hers calls for celery instead of carrots). Because the no-recipe premise allows one to make it up, and because I wanted the two dishes to be different, I made my own adjustments. When Sifton said to use fish stock, white wine, water, \u201cor any combination of the above\u201d to make broth, I used water, white wine, and tomato juice, making the second bowl more New York style. The wine-tomato broth was ambrosial, and the results were wonderful, though I found myself, somewhat foolishly, overriding my own cooking instincts in order to follow the words of the nonrecipe. Subverting structure is harder than it seems.<\/p>\n

For the wine pairing, my spirits collaborator, Hank Zona<\/a>, suggested an American beverage that was all the rage in Melville\u2019s time and is currently having a revival: a bubbly ros\u00e9 made from Catawba grapes. These wines, Zona said, are \u201clight-bodied, pink, fruity, slightly funky, slightly sweet\u201d\u2014perfect for a picnic like those Melville went on with Mrs. Morewood. The new versions \u201cprobably taste much like they did back then.\u201d Zona sourced two from the nearby Finger Lakes. One is from Ch\u00ebpika<\/a>, a collaboration between the Finger Lakes winemaker Nathan Kendall and a woman who is a pillar of the natural wine movement, Pascaline Lepeltier. The other<\/a> is from Lakewood vineyards; I found it in cans at Convive Wine & Spirits<\/a> in New York\u2019s East Village, for a bargain at five dollars per can. The Ch\u00ebpika is tart, floral, and light in alcohol; it has a summery flavor, like a rhubarb shrub. The Lakewood has mild, pink-fruit sweetness, balanced with florals and a foxy scent characteristic of the grape.<\/p>\n

My picnic was wonderful, though I felt some sadness, as all Melville lovers probably do. Moby-Dick<\/em> in its time was a commercial flop and mostly a critical one, too. Melville was \u201cbitterly shocked,\u201d Delbanco writes, by the book\u2019s reception. His next book, Pierre<\/em>, cemented his lack of commercial viability, and he eventually gave up publishing, moved back to New York City, and took a job as a clerk. Moby-Dick<\/em> would be rediscovered around the turn of the twentieth century and undergo a major revival in the twenties, never to be obscure again. Melville died well before that, by all accounts an angry and broken man: he had written Moby-Dick<\/em> and seen it fail. Could any amount of posthumous chowder make up for that?<\/p>\n

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Photo: Erica MacLean.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Clam Chowder <\/strong><\/p>\n

Adapted from <\/em>Voracious<\/a>, by Cara Nicoletti. Serves two.<\/em><\/p>\n

Note: I divide clams into the vague classifications of quahogs and steamers. Quahogs are hard-shelled and include common supermarket varieties like littlenecks; steamers have a flatter, thinner shell and usually have the foot hanging out. In my experience, steamers have sand in them and need to be processed differently than the recipe below calls for. The quahogs I buy aren\u2019t sandy, but do check yours once you\u2019ve made the stock. <\/em><\/p>\n

2 dozen clams
\n2 cups water
\na strip of bacon, diced
\n1\/2 rib celery, chopped
\na small onion, chopped
\n2 tbs butter
\n2 tbs flour
\na small potato, cubed
\n1\/2 cup corn kernels, fresh or frozen
\na sprig of thyme
\na bay leaf
\n1\/2 tsp salt
\n1\/2 cup cream
\noyster crackers to serve<\/p>\n

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Photo: Erica MacLean.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Carefully wash the clams under cold running water. Add them to a medium saucepan, with two cups of cold water to cover. Bring to a boil. Cover and simmer for around five minutes, until the clams have just opened. Do not overcook. Strain, reserving both clams and boiling liquid. Ideally, you\u2019ll want to pour the clam liquid into a light-colored opaque bowl so you can see any sand. Remove the clam meat from the shells. Discard the shells.<\/p>\n

Rinse the pot you boiled the clams in. Add the bacon, and cook over medium heat until crispy. Reserve. Turn the heat down to medium-low, add the onions and celery, and saut\u00e9 until the onions are wilted and translucent. Add the butter, and let it melt. Whisk in the flour, and let it cook until it is lightly toasted and smells fragrant, like a biscuit\u2014this should take a minute or two. Whisk in the clam liquid, a little at a time, until it is all incorporated, leaving any sand at the bottom of the bowl.<\/p>\n

Add the corn kernels, potatoes, bay leaf, thyme leaves, and salt, and simmer until the potatoes are fork-tender, ten to twelve minutes.<\/p>\n

Add the clam meat. Add the cream, and stir to combine. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve with oyster crackers.<\/p>\n

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Photo: Erica MacLean.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Speedy Fish Chowder <\/strong><\/p>\n

Adapted from the <\/em>New York Times<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

a strip of bacon, diced
\na small onion, chopped
\na carrot, diced
\na small potato, chopped
\n1\/2 cup corn kernels, fresh or frozen
\n1\/2 tsp salt
\n1\/4 tsp smoked paprika
\n1 cup white wine
\n1 cup tomato juice
\na pound of cod filets, cut into one-inch chunks
\n2 tbs heavy cream
\n1\/4 tsp Aleppo pepper
\ncrusty bread (to serve)<\/p>\n

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Photo: Erica MacLean.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Cook the bacon in a medium-size Dutch oven set over medium-high heat until crispy. Remove and reserve the bacon. Add the onions to the bacon fat. Lower the heat, and cook until wilted and golden, about ten minutes. Add the carrot, potatoes, corn, salt, and paprika. Toss to combine. Add the white wine and tomato juice, and bring to a boil. Simmer, covered, until the vegetables are soft. Add the cod, and cook until it has turned white and flaky, about five minutes. Finish with the heavy cream and Aleppo pepper. Serve with crusty bread.<\/p>\n

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Photo: Erica MacLean.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Wine!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona on Friday, May 7, at 6 P.M.<\/small> for a virtual, Melville-themed wine tasting on The Paris Review<\/em>\u2019s Instagram account<\/a>. We will discuss food in Melville\u2019s work and recommend wines inspired by his life.<\/p>\n

The wines seen in the story are the Ch\u00ebpika Catawba and the Lakewood Vineyards Bubbly Catawba. The Lakewood Bubbly Catawba can be ordered through the vineyard\u2019s website<\/a> (there is a six-bottle minimum). For an alternative, we recommend any high-quality sparkling wine in a can, such as those from Underwood<\/a>\u00a0or Old Westminster<\/a>. Anyone who would like more specific advice on choosing a wine for the tasting can email us (hank@thegrapesunwrapped.com<\/a>).<\/p>\n

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Valerie Stivers is a writer based in New York.\u00a0Read earlier\u00a0installments of\u00a0Eat Your Words<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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