The pace of life at Dartmouth leaves time for very few lingering meals, of the sort good writers can render with such mouthwatering abandon. Yet we deprive ourselves of a great source of aesthetic pleasure, both in tunneling through our meals, and in ignoring the splendid writings about them from more easygoing ages.
For surely we must admit that the language of eating and drinking is extremely vivid, perhaps inevitably so. Eating and drinking, after all, are to be counted among the few natural functions whose elucidation is not only tolerable, but welcome, on the page.
Though even here there are revelations we could do without: there is, for instance, the repellent passage in Boswell's "Life of Johnson" which describes its subject red-faced and sweating profusely while stuffing himself with grotesque speed.
Nevertheless the actions involved in consumption generally convey a striking poetic force. One thinks of Coleridge's mariner: "Fear, at my heart, as at a cup, My life-blood seemed to sip."
I remember the first time this force impressed me, at the age of seven, while avidly reading the details of Heidi's introduction to fondue. No one, of course, need be reminded of the Dickensian proficiency in this area. Joyce, in "The Dead," presents a banquet scene with sensuous gusto -- one of the finest descriptions of its kind. The superb short story of Chekhov's called "The Siren" lays out a perfect meal in the most painfully appealing manner, perfectly matching the rhythm of the plot to that of human hunger and satiety. Dumas was quite a gourmand, not to say gourmet in his own right, and one might recommend particularly his description of a banquet given by Louis XIV in "Le Vicomte de Bragelonne."
There is, however, an amusing counter-example in Cormac McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses," which exemplifies how NOT to write about food. The pungent descriptive phrase is totally absent. Instead, we get formulaic repetitions of what seem extremely banal (and unhealthy) meals, listed seriatim and apparently wolfed down with untoward haste. Page 60: "They drank the last of the coffee and ate cold tortillas with a thin stripe of hot sauce down the middle." Page 102: "eating a cold tortilla wrapped around a scoop of cold beans and no coffee and carrying their fortyfoot maguey catchropes coiled over their shoulders." Page 154: "they drank coffee and ate a dish containing some kind of pale and fibrous tuber, some kind of meat, some kind of fowl."
And so, with the dusty cowpokes having downed enough tortillas, beans, coffee and nauseating grub of "some kind" to choke all the pretty horses, we are left wondering when all the fun was ground out of eating. This sort of economic gastronomy is similar to the "masculine" scenes in Steinbeck and Hemingway and the like -- and is just as ludicrous.
But the recent mistress of the craft in the English language is undoubtedly M.F.K. Fisher. "It is difficult," Fisher points out in reference to her spiritual ancestor Brillat-Savarin, "to write about physical pleasures without being either coarse or over-delicate, vaguely sentimental or dry and scientific." But she succeeds with apparent effortlessness.
Consider her thoughts on the humble potato, from "Serve It Forth": "Baked slowly, with its skin rubbed first in a buttery hand, or boiled in its jacket and then 'shook,' it is delicious. Salt and pepper are almost always necessary to its hot moist-dusty flavor. Alone, or with a fat jug of rich, cool milk or a chunk of fresh Gruyere, it fills the stomach and the soul ... If, French fried, they [potatoes] make a grilled sirloin of beef taste richer; if, mashed and whipped with fresh cream and salty butter, they bridge the gap between a ragout and a salad; if, baked and pinched open and bulging with mealy snowiness, they offset the fat spiced flavor of a pile of sausages -- then and then alone should they be served."
We may note here the lovely simplicity of the Anglo-Saxonisms: "fat jug," "rich cool milk," the glorious "chunk" and so on. This is an admirable pacing of words to fit sense; for it is in fact blunt and simple tastes and textures which are so appealing about the hearty fare described.
If you need escapist material to pore over while squatting over the red trays of that revitalized wonder, the DDS, you could scarcely do better than Fisher; all of her writing is, to use contemporary slang, "phat".
