4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018
Copyright © Laura Shapiro 2017
Cover illustration © Getty Images
Laura Shapiro asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
The author is grateful for permission to quote from letters and other materials held by the following: The Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Grasmere; Nancy Roosevelt Ireland and the literary estate of Eleanor Roosevelt; Justice Michael A. Musmanno Collection, University Archives and Special Collections, Gumberg Library, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA; the Estate of Barbara Pym; the papers of Barbara Mary Crampton Pym (1913–80), Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford; Julia Child Materials © 2016; Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts
Photo credits: Dorothy Wordsworth: Artist unknown. Photo by Hugh Thomas. This image has been reproduced by kind permission of the Wordsworth family, direct descendants of William Wordsworth and owners of Rydal Mount. Rosa Lewis: Granger, NYC. All rights reserved. Eleanor Roosevelt: Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library. Eva Braun: Photo by Heinrich Hoffmann. Bavarian State Library Munich/Hoffmann collection. Barbara Pym: Photo by Mark Gerson. Helen Gurley Brown: Photo by John Bottega. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Collection, Library of Congress.
Portions of this book have appeared, in different forms, in The New Yorker and Food and Communication (Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2015) and on the website of the Barbara Pym Society.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008281106
Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008281083
Version: 2018-06-08
For Jack
How many things by season seasoned are …
—William Shakespeare,
The Merchant of Venice
Many a non-Chinese has come away from a meal cursing the “inscrutable” Chinese for saying nothing but bland, polite phrases, when the meal itself was the message, one perfectly clear to a Chinese.
—E. N. Anderson and Marja L. Anderson, in Food in Chinese Culture, edited by K. C. Chang
Contents
Tell me what you eat,” wrote the philosopher-gourmand Brillat-Savarin, “and I shall tell you what you are.” It’s one of the most famous aphorisms in the literature of food, and I thought about it many times as I was probing the lives of the six women in this book. Food was my entry point into their worlds, so naturally I wanted to know what they ate, but I wanted to know everything else, too. 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. 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. Tell me what you ate when you were a child, and whether the memory cheers you up or not. Tell me if you cook, and who taught you, and why you don’t cook more