Book traces women via food consumption

I was startled to learn that Laura Shapiro’s new book about women and food includes the stories of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, whose tenure was marked by some of the worst White House meals ever; Eva Braun, mistress of Adolf Hitler; and Helen Gurley Brown, the iconic editor of the magazine Cosmopolitan. (Did she ever actually eat?)

Where is Julia Child? Lidia Bastianich? Fannie Farmer?

Yet that's why “What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tell Their Stories” is such a fun read.

Spinning Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s famous saying, “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are,” Shapiro reveals the lives and times of these women through the food they consumed.

Beyond those already mentioned, the list includes Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth; Rosa Lewis, the ambitious Cockney cook whose life inspired television’s “The Duchess of Duke Street”; and Barbara

Pym, the midcentury English novelist.

“Tell me what you eat, I longed to say to each woman, and then tell me whether you like to eat alone, and if you really taste the flavors of food or ignore them, or forget all about them a moment later,” Shapiro writes in her introduction. “Tell me what hunger feels like to you, and if you’ve ever experienced it without knowing when you’re going to eat next. Tell me where you buy food, and how you choose it, and whether you spend too much. ...

“Keep talking,” Shapiro continues, “and pretty soon, unlike Brillat-Savarin, I won’t have to tell you what you are. You’ll be telling me.”

Questions about food and eating and self, Shapiro notes, are what prompted her writing about food and women some 30 years ago.

Her past work — including “Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century” (1986), “Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950’s America” (2004) and “Julia Child: A Life” (2007) — make her well-suited to write holistically about these six women.

Food is a means for Shapiro to frame their stories.

There’s the sisterly yet intense devotion of Dorothy Wordsworth for her brother, a focus that, in her later years, would turn to food itself; the unwillingness of Roosevelt to submerge herself in a public role and her discovery of “what food could mean when love did the cooking.”); the willful obliviousness of Hitler’s mistress, sipping purloined Champagne and nibbling on sweets amid what Shapiro describes as the “saga of starvation” that was of the Nazi regime; and Brown’s obsession with her weight and body image.

When Gloria Steinem asked Brown to “say something strong and positive about herself,” her reply was “I’m skinny! I’m skinny!”

Each sharply drawn profile reflects the personality, the opportunities and the challenges, as well as the times in which they lived.

Shapiro’s placement of Lewis’ rise from kitchen to drawing room in the context of late Victorian and Edwardian culinary and social mores is particularly well-done.

By writing about these women and not focusing on gastronomy’s usual suspects, Shapiro is able to use the unexpected context of the book to provide great insight into the roles and expectations of women and men, particularly during the 20th century.

Reading these stories, one realizes how Shapiro deftly uses food to link one woman to another — and to us today.

Wordsworth and Brown saw food through their men, she writes, while Braun and Lewis used food as a mark of rank.

Brown might have splashed sex all over Cosmo’s pages, but it was Pym, writing in and out of popular favor, who “loved food and she loved love, and most of all she loved the connection between them, which was writing.”

Writing this book, Shapiro notes, has made her “aware of all the food stories that will never be told.”

“The women in these pages were prominent in their time, and they’re still visible in ours; but most women don’t live that way,” she wrote.

“They never attract public attention, they don’t leave boxes of their personal papers to delight historians, and unless they happen to be unusually captivated by cooking and eating, they don’t write memoirs.”

“What She Ate” (Viking, 320 pages, $27) by Laura Shapiro