What She Ate by Laura Shapiro
NICOLA SHULMAN What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories by Laura Shapiro Fourth Estate £14.99 Oldie price £13.34 inc p&p
Isaac Bashevis Singer didn’t think much of Shakespeare. He felt he’d only written one decent line, which was ‘While greasy Joan doth keel the pot’. With greasy Joan, he felt, Shakespeare finally came up with someone you could see. He might have preferred the works of Laura Shapiro, who has spent a writing life making the case for Joan and all her kitchen sisters, arguing that food has been under-represented in the biographical record, especially of women; while sex has had all the attention.
Recently much has been done to redress the lack, with historians finding the larder a new resource for information about private lives and world events. And yet, in the search for emotional truth, it often seems that what Shapiro calls a woman’s ‘food story’ is not, as she claims, really like ‘the underside of the [Norman] Rockwell painting’ of the Thanksgiving turkey at the family table ‘where all those feelings we’re trying not to notice start dribbling down the sides of the bowls and crawling out from under the platters’. On the contrary. Food, here, acts much more like a painting’s upper side, in the sense that it’s the public face of private impulses, usually connected with sex.
Of the six women studied here, four – Eleanor Roosevelt, Eva Braun, Dorothy Wordsworth and Helen Gurley Brown, editor of American Cosmopolitan – had notions of wife-hood as the focus of their lives to an extent that was obtrusive even by the standards of their own times. The other two, the great Edwardian chefcaterer Rosa Lewis and the novelist Barbara Pym stood at a tangent to the feminine nurturing role. There is perhaps an irony in the fact that Lewis, famous feeder to history’s most gluttonous age, was one of the few women in that society who could claim to be cooking for herself. Pym, who in life cooked and ate to please herself, wrote books about women who seldom did – yet were shrewdly aware of food as a register of social relations and orchestrator of sexual politics.
The wife-women’s stories offer mainly variants on the model of stuff and starve. We see food weaponised for wars against loneliness, spinsterhood, neglect and unhappiness, wielded by women who (exception for Pym) show remarkably little insight into their patterns of behaviour. You wouldn’t expect insight from Braun, one of history’s prize geese, but how about Gurley Brown: a woman who genuinely believed she was a feminist while marching under a banner that read ‘Get a man!’ and ‘Starve yourself!’? Still, there’s something curiously likeable about the guilelessness of her strategies, her cheerful advocacy of anorexia, and the disgustingness of the food in her cookbook.
Not all the ‘food stories’ here are equally revelatory, but some are positively gothic in their enactions of female rage. Roosevelt’s is one (clue: no chats for her at her mother-in-law’s fireside); Wordsworth’s another. Dorothy’s life as wife-substitute to her brother William fell into two distinct, food-related chapters. In the first, food is a means to demonstrate her aptness as a helpmeet for the great man. She feeds him and suffers glad privations herself, picking up his discarded, half-eaten apple with the same reverence she brought to gathering the scraps of poetry that dropped from his mouth on their walks. She was thin, to gauntness.
Then William got a real wife and she turned from provider to eater. Confined to bed, immensely fat and often raving, she proceeded to consume: food, the nurture of others, and firewood in such quantities that her bedroom was unendurable, all in pursuit of a ‘comfort’ that never came. When someone sent her a whole turkey, she cuddled it on her lap like a baby.
Taken together, these acts of her life operate like some Reptonian lift-the-flap book of a very dark order, where the rolling Grasmere Lakeland scene lifts, to reveal part of a John Martin apocalypse: men and mountains hurled into the pit of damnation.