I may have reached an even lower point as Natural History’s plant sleuth at the sloshed, sunbaked chili cook-off in the Texas ghost town of Terlingua, near a desolate stretch of the Rio Grande, where Texas Rangers waited for the drunk, self-appointed saviors of the U.S.-Mexican border’s signature dish to weave into the night and fail a Breathalyzer test.d
A tall Humpty Dumpty kept flashing his Vietnamese driver’s license to catch my attention long enough to try to sell me a box of his own commercial chili mix. And then there was the young man in a T-shirt that promoted a regional dish that had hopped the river from Mexico. The illustration made no sense until you read the caption under it on the shirt: “If God didn’t want Man to eat pussies, why did he make them look so much like tacos?” While noncooking young women competed in a wet T-shirt contest and some young men took their pants off for a hairy leg competition, other very serious chiliheads stirred their pots. I watched the chili cooks closely and ended up admiring their dogmatic efforts to preserve the purity of a popular but often misunderstood regional dish. Texas chili, by the rules of the cook-off and according to the universal belief of Texas chiliastes, may contain no vegetable other than the onion. This exclusionary principle focuses the dish on its essential ingredient—beef—and segregates it from other regional chilis, such as New Mexico’s, which contain beans.
So the wild, red-faced revelers at Terlingua, like the downmarket mutton-barbecuing Catholics in Kentucky and the Dogpatch, Virginia, moonshiners, were doing their part to uphold honorable food traditions, even if it meant risking trouble with the law in locations you wouldn’t want your daughter to visit. I quite enjoyed the seediness and kept out of trouble with the law, although I was anxious about that libel retraction in Natural History, since it appeared soon after I had been hired to create a daily Leisure and Arts page for the Wall Street Journal.
Apparently, none of my new colleagues at the Journal read Natural History, or cared about the retraction if they did notice it. For the next nineteen years (1983–2002), I ran an eclectic page with articles that ranged over pretty much anything that wasn’t economic or political news.
For twelve of those years, until I retired from Natural History in 1994, I continued to write that magazine’s food column. At the Journal, I made it a practice not to write about food, thinking that it was wiser to keep my arts journalism as separate as possible from my lingering career in food. I was concerned about diluting my authority as a cultural editor with a confusing presence in the paper as a food writer.
This policy, it seems, was not important to anyone but me. My boss, Robert L. Bartley, the neoconservative editor of the Journal, who ran the paper’s three opinion pages (the editorial page, the oped page, and my page), never complained about my outside food column or the cookbooks I wrote while working for him. In fact, I think it increased my value in his eyes that I had a separate identity outside his world.
The Natural History column got written on weekends, and it continued to evolve in new directions through the 1980s and early 1990s, until I decided I’d done whatever I had it in me to do with it. I wouldn’t have been able to put a succinct label on what I’d been doing, until the summer of 1981. That July, I flew to England to participate in the first public meeting of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, a weekend conclave of food historians, journalists, cooks and foodies from Britain and the rest of the world. I didn’t know it then, but I would continue going to the Symposium almost every year thereafter, presenting papers, making friends and shaping this new intellectual force in the world of food as it shaped me.
In Oxford, for the first time, I found colleagues with a passion for studying food—and I found myself.
The Symposium had started out as a series of seminars on the “impact of science on the kitchen” at St. Antony’s College, a relative upstart in Oxford founded in 1950 up the Woodstock Road from the medieval center of the university. The Symposium’s original subject derived from the research of a highly unusual fellow, in both senses of the word. Alan Davidson, a retired British diplomat who had invented the field of gastroichthyology with practical guides to the seafood of the Mediterranean and Asia (including Laotian Fish and Fish Cookery), was the Alistair Horne Fellow at St. Antony’s for the academic year 1978–79.
Davidson’s sponsor in this unorthodox intrusion upon the college’s normal diet of graduate research in the social sciences and international relations was Theodore Zeldin, a social historian of France. Davidson was not only intellectually eccentric in his focus on food but eccentric in the normal way, given to turquoise vintage sports jackets, an antique Bentley, Laotian string bracelets and the American screwball comedies of his youth, with which he was utterly besotted.
From their start in May 1979, the seminars attracted a diverse group of “students,” from the physicist Nicholas Kurti to Britain’s leading food writer, the literate and opinionated (“I hate people who eat duck at lunch”) Elizabeth David.
Although the first series of symposia stuck to their technical subject—investigating the work of eminent food scientists of the past; Count Rumford, the inventor of the modern oven; and Justus von Liebig, the father of the bouillon cube—these were not conventional academic sessions. Word spread quickly. People who had theretofore pursued their interest in food history on their own now found a meeting place and flocked to it: restaurateurs, cooking teachers, food-oriented antiquarian booksellers, gastronomes—among them American expats and Dutch intellectuals.
The unexpected demand for places, and for continuing the program beyond Davidson’s fellowship year, persuaded Zeldin and Davidson to create an annual symposium at St. Antony’s that could welcome a sizable crowd.
The first of these meetings took place in 1981. Roughly 150 people attended, among them J. J. Flandrin, the doyen of French food historians; Rudolf Grewe, the editor of the first European cookbook, the fourteenth-century Catalan treatise I Sent Sovi; the food editor of the London Observer, Paul Levy; the Arabist and Rolling Stone writer Charles Perry; two American cookbook authors who had married rich and titled Englishmen;e a cookbook dealer; a cookbook shoplifter; experts on the cuisines of Sumatra, the Balkans, precolonial New Zealand; a colorful assortment of serious foodies;f and me.
I had persuaded Alan Ternes that I should cover the first international conference ever held in my “field.” He agreed and kept sending me right through the end of my column, fourteen years later. That first year, right away in the registration line, I knew I was among real colleagues for the first time. Up until then I had been working in a vacuum. Here was a room full of people who’d been doing the same thing in isolation from one another. Now we were a community, all in one place, chattering away. And the name for what we were chattering about came to be “food history.”
The topic of that intellectual love feast was National and Regional Styles of Cooking. And the papers were appropriately all over the map. Several were in French, among them Marie-Claude Mahias’s analysis of Jain meals in northern India. But the papers weren’t, and never have been, the only purpose of the Symposium, which is not a conventional academic meeting.
In the Symposium’s early years, there were no academic programs in food history or food studies. The whole idea of food history was a renegade notion, even a laughable notion in the hidebound world of university history departments. The professional scholars in attendance at that first symposium had not made their careers with their articles on food (with the exception of a few mainstream historians who had published or edited texts that happened to touch on food). The majority of the symposiasts were amateurs, serious intellectuals but amateurs nonetheless. In those days, no symposiast expected to advance an academic career with a paper she had submitted to this fledgling organization.
The structure of the meeting was deliberately informal. Papers were not read in their entirety—not read, in fact, at all but briefly summarized by their authors, usually in a panel with authors of essays with related subjects.
Plen
ary sessions in 1981 were even less structured. Basically, we sat in the dining room of St. Antony’s and tried out our ideas on one another. It reminded me of a freshman-year bull session, but these were adults who knew things. Maria Johnson knew everything about the intricacies of Balkan regional foods, as an emigrant fluent in all the many languages spoken in this literally Balkanized former Ottoman territory. Sarah Kelly, a San Franciscan transplanted to German-speaking Europe, had made an encyclopedic study of baking in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and shared it with us, analytically.
In the background, Alan Davidson and Theodore Zeldin hovered benignly. Neither of them ever gave a paper or joined in the discussions much. They were conducting a social experiment as well as a mildly subversive scholarly meeting. The Symposium had a deliberately unhierarchical, Summerhillian, sixtyish air of freedom and classlessness. Davidson and Zeldin were just Alan and Theodore. The Saturday lunch was a potluck affair, for which local symposiasts brought food from home and shared it in the most cosmopolitan display of exotic dishes anyone has ever seen under one roof. This lasted for years, until U.K. regulations about food served in public places snuffed it out. At the end of each year’s weekend, there was a plenary session in which suggestions from the floor for the next Symposium were discussed and put to a vote. And if Theodore did somehow manage to guide the ultimate choice of topic in a direction he favored, the process was still public and nominally democratic.
I liked this libertarian approach to the intellectual study of sensuality. It suited my situation as an intellectual operating outside academia. The Symposium, as deliberately uninstitutional as an institution could be, seemed almost tailor-made for me. It did not offer me a career path, as an academic department would have. It was more like a club, in which all the members shared my previously idiosyncratic passions and pursuits.
But it lasted for only one weekend, once a year. And during the next twenty years, I was only a part-timer in the food world. For those two decades, I worked for Dow Jones & Co. Before I joined its Wall Street Journal, in my first real job since I’d left the Times in 1973, I edited a dreadful Dow Jones magazine called Book Digest. It was a magazine I’d never even heard of, and my connection with it began, fittingly, with a phone call from a man I’d never heard of either.
Francis X. Dealy, Jr., a dramatically good-looking former ad salesman, ran the business side of Book Digest, which did its tacky best to copy the Reader’s Digest formula in the world of books. Basically, it ran excerpts of best sellers. I’m not sure I quite understood this, even after “Bud” Dealy tried to explain it to me. But I needed a job. I made an impressive enough living for a freelance journalist and writer of books, but that wasn’t saying much. And I had two children in an expensive private school in New York City. So I accepted Bud’s invitation to interview for the top editor’s job.
I was in the competition because Peter Kann, the anointed successor to Warren Phillips as the Dow Jones chairman, had known me at the Harvard Crimson in the early 1960s and was a fan of mine. Phillips and Kann were about to hire a woman from the staff of Ms. magazine, Ruth Sullivan, to run Book Digest. In a final interview, as Ruth told me years later, they asked her if she’d had any experience editing men. Why, yes, she replied, she had edited Ray Sokolov.
This was true. She had edited a short piece I’d written for Ms. on the French Jewish philosopher Simone Weil.
Kann perked up at the mention of my name. He told Bud Dealy to find me. Bud succeeded, and I was hired.
Life as an executive at a major media corporation was beautiful. My office, on a high floor of a classy building at Fifty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue, overlooked Bergdorf’s and offered an unobstructed view above Central Park all the way to the Metropolitan Museum. I had been able to handpick an intelligent and amenable staff. The work was incredibly simple.
Each month, I would scan the best-seller list and buy the rights to reprint a short excerpt from a mix of those and other current books. Technically, such rights are known as second serial rights. First serial rights give a magazine (a serial publication) the right to publish material from a book before it is published. The New Yorker buys first serial rights and pays plenty for them. Second serial rights allow a magazine to publish material from a book after it is published. This is not a lively marketplace, but we managed. The problem was to sell subscriptions to readers and to sell ads. Our readers tended to be women over fifty living in retirement communities, a highly undesirable demographic.
This was dispiriting, but the end came soon. By the beginning of the summer of 1982, Dow Jones had shut down the magazine and fired the entire staff, except me.
Peter Kann said to me cheerfully, “You’ve wrecked our magazine. Come downtown and see what you can do to our newspaper.” There ensued a kind of nirvana.
After some initial weeks with the Wall Street Journal news department, during which I wrote front-page features on the kiwi and tofu,g I moved upstairs to the neoconservative editorial page, where I’d been an occasional contributor of book reviews for years. Bob Bartley needed somebody to create a daily arts page, and he picked me.
I foresaw, correctly, that it would be easy and fun to fill a single page of the Journal every day by soliciting three to four pieces, mostly from freelances. New York was teeming with talented, lively cultural writers. Good ones needed only light editing. The less good ones I could edit without strain. In fact, I found it positively rejuvenating to rewrite a swatch of lame copy. It took me back to my twenties at Newsweek, when I often was assigned to take a file from a bureau reporter and, as we used to say, run it through my typewriter.
So life was a dream and stayed that way for me for nineteen years. All that time I worked at the same job, for the same intelligent boss. I disagreed with his political and economic views, but I could easily ignore his loony passion for supply-side economics, and he just as easily—actually, more easily—paid no attention to my views on classical music.
Also, the job came with an expense account. Like every other editor in town, I needed to meet with writers, and that is how I managed to stay current with the New York restaurant scene during the 1980s and 1990s. It was much better than being a restaurant critic. I ate only at good places, and I didn’t have to write reviews. For most of this period, I continued to think about food for my Natural History column, and I produced four cookbooks, while I watched the food trends of the 1970s explode into the glamour scene of star chefs and the TV food hysteria of today.
* I had in mind, as well, a fictional Rachel, a probably Jewish prostitute turned actress in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. That Rachel’s name is part of an elaborate tangle of references: to the biblical heroine and to the historical actress of the same name.
Proust linked the fictional Rachel with his own life and with the contemporary Parisian opera scene when he had her aristocratic lover, the character Robert de Saint-Loup, refer to her as “Rachel, quand du Seigneur” (Rachel, when from the Lord). This was the first line of the popular aria from Fromental Halévy’s opera La Juive (The Jewess).
This was not simply a throwaway cultural allusion for Proust. Halévy’s daughter Geneviève married the composer Georges Bizet. Their son, Jacques, was pursued amorously by Proust at the Lycée Condorcet. After Georges Bizet died, Geneviève Halévy Bizet married a Rothschild-connected banker named Émile Straus and presided over an elegant salon, at which Proust was a frequent guest. He used Madame Straus as one of the models for the duchesse de Guermantes, the aunt of Proust’s Rachel’s Saint-Loup in In Search of Lost Time.
† “It is Michel Guérard who is France’s true pioneer of low-fat, high-pleasure cuisine,” said Newsweek. “Joyful penitence for the overindulger,” declared Gael Greene in New York magazine. “An assault on the twin modern enemies of trenchermen: calories and cholesterol,” opined Joseph Wechsberg in the New Yorker.
‡ He had them still in 2011.
§ They never ate or heard about such fancy food, of course, but even their sh
tetl-Yiddish culinary vocabulary could reflect Escoffier’s jargon from time to time. My grandmother’s chopped-meat kutlett was a country cousin of côtelettes de veau Pojarski. Both of these patties were invigorated with chopped onion. Both emanated from the Russian empire. Pojarski, by legend, improvised the first of his eponymous patties for Czar Alexander I (who ruled from 1777 until 1825) out of veal, because he didn’t have any beef for the chops the autocrat was demanding. Evidently, Pojarski didn’t have veal chops either, but he ground up the meat he did have, perhaps veal shoulder, and then formed the chopped meat into the shape of a chop (côtelette or, literally, riblet). Grandma Mary knew nothing about any of this, had never heard of Pojarski and made no effort to shape her oniony beef kutletts (stressed on the last syllable) into chops.
‖ After Suzanne Reichenberg (1853–1924), a French actress whose stage name was Suzette. In 1897, she played a crêpe-making maid at the Comédie Française.
a http://www.whitings-writings.com/essays/chez_panisse.htm
b Fingers took the palm.
c Orujo never made much of a splash outside Spain, but it is well worth asking for in Spanish restaurants.
d This was developed by an Indiana policeman named Robert Borkenstein, later a professor at Indiana University. The Breathalyzer was preceded by Rolla Harger’s invention of the Drunkometer in 1931.
e Such unions inevitably remind me of the lead-in to the daytime U.S. radio soap opera Our Gal Sunday, which I listened to devotedly during many bedridden weeks with severe cases of all three traditional children’s diseases: “Once again, we present Our Gal Sunday, the story of an orphan girl named Sunday from the little mining town of Silver Creek, Colorado, who in young womanhood married England’s richest, most handsome lord, Lord Henry Brinthrope. The story that asks the question: Can this girl from the little mining town in the West find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman?” The answer, on air as in life, was: Not always. The theme song was “Red River Valley.”
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