Plath’s daily dishes fuel my appetite
“Hot tea, a devilled egg and a face wash.”
Sylvia Plath cooked that haiku in 1959.
“I stayed in my pajamas in scandalous laziness, ate apples, bananas & malt bread & hot coffee for breakfast which lasted 2 hours.”
Plath, too, four years earlier.
“I drink sherry and wine by myself because I like it and I get the sensuous feeling of indulgence I do when I eat salted nuts or cheese; luxury, bliss, erotictinged.”
1963. Plath, yet again, TMIing in a way that would have made her a hit in our social media age, and also living a life that sounds eerily like our own yawning days of the pandemic.
Having long loomed as one of the original oversharers — a poet of simple potency who endures as a sad-emoji of a woman — the English icon was recently reborn on Twitter, through a very particular lens. Her taste memories, her recipes: all making up the daily posts on @whatSylviaate . The handiwork of writer and scholar Rebecca Brill, who lives in Minneapolis, Minn., it’s been one of the delights of quarantine life for me — and not just because Plath once cooed, “My favorite dishes are full of butter and cheese and sour cream.”
So, how did the Twitter project come about, revisiting Plath through her appetites? I tracked down Brill to spill.
The pandemic did actually spur it, she confirmed. Having previously drilled down into a whole other feed that tracks the words of another famous female scribe — Susan Sontag’s Diary, @sontagdaily (which was itself inspired by another feed called Andy Warhol’s Diaries, @WarholDiary, which no longer seems to be updating, although archived tweets are still up) — “I felt a similar desire to alleviate my boredom with a project that would entail a daily (but small) commitment.”
Enter: Sylvia. “As I combed through the journals, her lush, often lyrical, and near-daily musings on cooking and eating really struck me. Then I visited Plath’s letters for the first time and discovered many more passages about food. I liked the specificity of focusing on this very particular, kind of mundane and rarely discussed aspect of Plath’s life, and hence the account was born.”
A “foodie” she’s not, she disclaims — “I eat a lot of Cheerios and string cheese and Diet Coke” — though she has long been fascinated by what people eat. “I love the Grub Street Diet column (in New York mag), Laura Shapiro’s book ‘What She Ate’ about the appetites of famous historical women … there’s an intimacy in learning about people’s personal habits that I find extremely compelling, especially when the habits are unusual, as Sylvia’s dietary habits often are.”
As for particular taste memories that have been a revelation, in ways good and bad, Brill continued: “Fifties food is really gross and a lot of the things Sylvia mentions eating are totally unappealing. What I love, though, is that Sylvia often makes disgusting meals sound delicious by using delicious language. “I created an esoteric dinner beginning with jellied consommé in champagne glasses, an elegant compote of sliced peaches, grapes, cherries and apples marinated in sherry and lemon dressing, cheese and crackers, chocolate cake and hot coffee. 8/4/54” describes a meal that makes absolutely no sense, and jellied consommé sounds atrocious, but I kind of want it anyway because of Sylvia’s gorgeous attention to detail …”
Sometimes, Brill admitted, “she is shamelessly dramatic about something as quotidian as a lacklustre lunch and I love that. This strategy — elevating the everyday to almost comically theatrical heights — seems necessary right now (during the pandemic): nothing really happens … and sometimes the only way to imbue pandemic life with meaning is to make meaning of stuff like food.”
Another entry she finds particularly enchanting: a breakfast scene Plath paints in a dining car. This, because “I dream of being transported to a British dining car in the 1950s.”
Also: “I’d love nothing more than to go to a dinner party right now, and Sylvia’s — full of lamb chops and multiple wine courses and garlic bread and lemon meringue pie — sound perfect to me.”
She is, though, concerned — as are many of her followers — about the large consumption of milk in the Plath diet, “sometimes as high as eight cups a day.” Yikes. And then there’s this entry, “He taught me how to eat avocados by melting grape jelly and French dressing together in a saucepan and filling the cup of the pear with the garnet sauce. 1963,” which “seems a blasphemous thing to do to an avocado.”
Avocados, of course, have long been a part of the Plath mystique — in part, because there is a luncheon scene in “The Bell Jar,” in which she describes eating avocados stuffed with mayonnaise-y crab meat salad. Long before avocado toast would become an Instagrammable obsession, Plath was apparently a millennial before her time.
Brill added: “Sylvia ate a lot of toast and really liked putting stuff on toast (mushrooms, herring, bacon), so I’m sure she would have gone for avocado toast.”
Then there is baking, a whole Plath sub-genre unto its own. Something touched upon in the 2003 biopic “Sylvia,” starring Gwyneth Paltrow. “It is obvious that she loved baking … I think it also relates back to the oven thing; there might be something subversive about engaging with your oven in the image of Sylvia Plath and the experience yielding not death but cupcakes.” (Plath, of course, killed herself by putting her head in the oven, with the gas turned on, at age 30.)
Though much has been mused about Plath from the context of her world of 1950s housewifery, Brill has a more nuanced take. “A lot of people’s only context for Sylvia Plath is her depression and her eventual suicide, often seen as a response to the entrapment of housewifery. I think more people know that Sylvia stuck her head in a gas oven than are familiar with her poems. That image is etched into the cultural memory and it reduces Sylvia to a trope. Moreover, that trope is inaccurate … the fact is that she had a zest for life and revelled in a lot of earthly delights, as I think the food diary shows.”
In addition, though, there seems to be a widespread myth that Plath had an eating disorder. Brill rebutted: “she loved eating and she loved eating a lot. She never restricted her appetites, and her diet is full of butter, cream, cheese, bacon and mayonnaise … I find this really refreshing and radical, not just for its time, but also for now. We rarely get images of women luxuriating in food with total glee and without guilt.”
Asked how her love of the poet came to be and why she continues to inspire, Brill painted this picture of discovering her in high school: “I fell totally in love with her work’s juncture of the morbid and the beautiful. I went to a yeshiva and was very angsty about the rigidity, sexism and hypocrisy of Orthodox Judaism … I adopted Sylvia Plath as a kind of symbol of my nonconformity — read ‘The Bell Jar’ during prayer services.
“I hope,” she concluded, “that this account can reimagine Sylvia Plath’s relationship to the kitchen, because it is clear she experienced a lot of joy, fulfilment and pleasure there.”
Back in 1963, Plath was oversharing in a way that would have made her a hit in our social media age