The Art of Eating

It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it… and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.

The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight... [Breadmaking is] one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the world's sweetest smells... there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel. that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.

I think that when two people are able to weave that kind of invisible thread of understanding and sympathy between each other, that delicate web, they should not risk tearing it. It is too rare, and it lasts too short a time at best....

No yoga exercise, no meditation in a chapel filled with music will rid you of your blues better than the humble task of making your own bread.

...for me there is too little of life to spend most of it forcing myself into detachment from it.

I was horribly self-conscious; I wanted everybody to look at me and think me the most fascinating creature in the world, and yet I died a small hideous death if I saw even one person throw a casual glance at me.

There are very few men and women, I suspect, who cooked and marketed their way through the past war without losing forever some of the nonchalant extravagance of the Twenties. They will feel, until their final days on earth, a kind of culinary caution: butter, no matter how unlimited, is a precious substance not lightly to be wasted; meats, too, and eggs, and all the far-brought spices of the world, take on a new significance, having once been so rare. And that is good, for there can be no more shameful carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts.

But if I must be alone, I refuse to be alone as if it were something weak and distasteful, like convalescence.

You may feel that you have eaten too much...But this pastry is like feathers - it is like snow. It is in fact good for you, a digestive!

Or you can broil the meat, fry the onions, stew the garlic in the red wine...and ask me to supper. I'll not care, really, even if your nose is a little shiny, so long as you are self-possessed and sure that wolf or no wolf, your mind is your own and your heart is another's and therefore in the right place.

I sat in the gradually chilling room, thinking of my whole past the way a drowning man is supposed to, and it seemed part of the present, part of the gray cold and the beggar woman without a face and the moulting birds frozen to their own filth in the Orangerie. I know now I was in the throes of some small glandular crisis, a sublimated bilious attack, a flick from the whip of melancholia, but then it was terrifying...nameless....

All these, though, are relatively unimportant. There are only three things I need, to make my kitchen a pleasant one as long as it is clean. First, I need space enough to get a good simple meal for six people. More of either would be wasteful as well as dangerously dull. Then, I need a window or two, for clear air and a sight of things growing. Most of all I need to be let alone. I need peace. From there—from there, on the sill of my wide window, the plan is yours. It will include an herb-bed surely, and a brick courtyard for summer suppers.

Perhaps they should feel this safe sand blow away so that their heads are uncovered for a time, so that they will have to taste not only the solid honesty of my red borscht, but the new flavor of the changing world.

The problem of an ideal kitchen grows more complex as I ponder on it. There are many small things I am sure about: no shelf-papers; no sharp edges or protruding hooks or wires; no ruffled curtains; and no cheap-coloured stove, mauve or green or opalescent like a modern toilet seat. Instead of these things I would have smooth shelves of some material like ebony or structural glass, shelves open or protected by sliding transparent doors. I would have curved and rounded edges, even to the floor, for the sake of cleanliness, and because I hate the decayed colours of a bruise. Instead of curtains I would have Venetian blinds, of four different colours for the seasons of the year. They would be, somehow, on the outside of the glass. And the stove would be black, with copper and earthenware utensils to put on it. It would be a wood stove, or perhaps (of this I am doubtful, unless I am the charwoman and janitor as well as the cook) electrical with place for a charcoal grill.

...after rare beef and wine, when the lobes turn red, was the time to ask favours or tell bad news.

PROBABLY one of the most private things in the world is an egg until it is broken.

Painting, it is true, was undergoing a series of -isms reminiscent of the whims of a pregnant woman.

Mere parsimony is not economy. . . . Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part of true economy. —Letters to a Noble Lord, EDMUND BURKE, 1796

Thus Parisian restaurants blossomed from a few dark corners. Their trembling chefs, not long out of hiding, grew confident—and rich. They gathered round them enough of the old guard of pastry cooks, roasters, and sommeliers to keep things moving, and soon had more apprentices than they needed. Their furtive restaurants moved into fine quarters, and quickly became those boulevard palaces of fat gourmets, twinkling mirrors, pink plush, and belles, that Zola and Maupassant knew so well for us.

It has been said that the foundation of all of French cookery is butter, as that of the Italian is olive oil, German lard, and Russian sour cream. In the same way water or drippings may be designated, unfortunately, as the basis of the English cuisine, and perhaps the flavour from innumerable tin cans, of American! France today possesses what is probably the most intelligent collective palate. I do

Time, so fleeting, must like humans die, let it be filled with good food and good talk, and then embalmed in the perfumes of conviviality. Let us kill it in slow parley, over the leisured savourings of fare both simple and elaborate, in the tempered colour of a room lighted softly, clearly, by living fire of wax or oil or wood, or by the most artful disguises of electricity.

I had long believed that, once having bowed to the inevitability of the dictum that we must eat to live, we should ignore it and live to eat, in proportion of course.

and we continue, perversely, to enjoy them probably as much as the Frenchman with his white wine and the Britisher with his ale.

On the other hand, I have had Pouilly-Fuissé, various kinds of champagnes nature, a pink Peau d’Onion, and both bottled and open wines of Anjou with oysters in France, and whether they were correctly drunk or not, I was. Nobody knew it except my own exhilarated senses and my pleased mind, all of which must enter into any true gastronomic experience.

And for the person who likes oysters, such a delicate, charming, nostalgic gesture would seem so delicate, so nostalgically charming, so reminiscent of a thousand good mouthfuls here and there in the past . . . in other words, so sensible . . . that it would make even nostalgia less a perversion than a lusty bit of nourishment.

In the Good Old Days, those good old days so dull to hear about and so delightful to talk of, thin slices of real pumpernickel-ish brown bread (No machine-sliced beige-colored sponge, for God’s sake!) and honest-to-Betsy lumps of juicy lemon used to come automatically with every half-dozen of oysters,

Down South there is a long marble or hard wood counter between the customer and the oyster-man, sloping toward the latter. He stands there, opening the shells with a skill undreamed of by an ordinary man and yet always with a few cuts showing on his fingers, putting the open oysters carefully, automatically, on a slab of ice in front of him, while a cat waits with implacable patience at his ankles for a bit of oyster-beard or a caress. He throws the top shells behind him into a barrel, and probably they go into a road or a wall somewhere, later, with cement to bind them.

But further north, men choose their oysters without sauce. They like them cold, straightforward, simple, capable of spirit but unadorned, like a Low Church service maybe or a Boston romance.

According to the little black-and-gold booklet published for Antoine’s centennial, Oysters à la Rockefeller contain “such rich ingredients that the name of the Multi-Millionaire was borrowed to indicate their value.” Some gourmets say that any oyster worthy of its species should not be toyed with and adulterated by such skullduggeries as this sauce of herbs and strange liqueurs.

A bushel basket is set to receive the empty shells, and the click of the oyster-knives forms a constant accompaniment to the music of laughing voices. Nor are roast oysters amiss upon your own quiet supper-table, when the “good man” comes in on a wet night, tired and hungry, and wants “something heartening.