What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories- Laura Shapiro

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“Food always talks.”

There is this thick tamarind gravy, a South Indian traditional dish called “Vathal kozhambu”, that I absolutely love. I never got it right the first few years of my marriage. It was always had this soup like consistency when I tried to make it. The way my mother and grandmother made vathal kozhambu, the gravy was so thick that a dollop was sufficient to coat all the rice on my plate. After I managed to get it right, I started making it more often. In recent times I have noticed that it shows up on my menu on days I feel something is not right, or when I need some external stimulus to get things done. What can I say, some people need coffee, I need my dose of tamarind.

It is amazing how food is a reflection of our emotions, our moods, more so- a reflection of who we are. Reading culinary historian and journalist Laura Shapiro‘s book “What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories,” reinforced this fact for me. Shapiro is the recipient of the James Beard Award For Magazine Writing On Diet, Nutrition and Health. She also won the award for Literary Food Writing from The International Association of Culinary Professionals for her book Julia Child: A life. Her other works include Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century and  Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America along with numerous contributions to leading publications like Condé Nast, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Gastronomica among others. She was recently featured on Michael Pollan’s Netflix series- Cooked.

In What She Ate, she explores the lives of six famous women- Dorothy Wordsworth, Rosa Lewis, Eleanor Roosevelt, Eva Braun, Barbara Pym and Helen Gurley Brown. We live in a time where virtual food sharing makes the task of looking at one’s life through the lens of food, a piece of cake. But for Shapiro, it was anything but a piece of cake. Combing through letters, personal food notes, diary entries and other available records, Shapiro connects the dots between words and food to give us a glimpse of the person holding the plate. Over a Skype call, she spoke to me about the women in her book, writing their stories in the presence and sometimes in the absence of food, and on food writing today.

Q. A book that looks at people’s lives through the lens of food, one would assume, would stem from a feast or a celebration where food is present in abundance. Oddly enough, you write at the very beginning of the book that the impetus to write “What She Ate,” came from “a stodgy mess of blood and oats” – a black pudding eaten by Dorothy Wordsworth. How did that serve as an inspiration to delve into people’s lives through food?

Laura Shapiro: I had discovered this note in a short biography of Dorothy Wordsworth- “Eating a dinner of black pudding.” Everything about that jumped off the page. First of all, it was dinner. Dorothy’s class, the years and the way she was raised in the 18th and early 19th century-that whole social, cultural, economic context was the opposite of a dinner of black pudding. She might have had it for breakfast. But people who ate it for dinner would have been the working class- what one would call as the common people. I was immediately struck by that. It was just so out of place for her. I could see that when she made that note she was living in a situation that was completely different from what we know of Dorothy Wordsworth. Dorothy Wordsworth is this famous figure of the romantic movement. She is always seen in Dove Cottage, one of the most beautiful areas of England in the Lake District, helping her beloved brother work on his poetry. Its this enchanted very blessed life, which she describes in the Grasmere Journal. Now, 25 years later, she is living the opposite of that. I looked at the blood pudding and thought – what is this about? What’s the relation between Dorothy Wordsworth- the person I thought I knew and this meal. I thought if you could find out enough about the food and that person’s relationship to it, you are going to see something that will surprise you. One of my first ambitions was to keep my mind on this meal of blood pudding as I was reading the Grasmere Journal and her other diaries. If it had been a lovely meal at Dove cottage, I wouldn’t have been that interested, because that was expected. What you don’t expect that is what is interesting.

“What you don’t expect that is what is interesting.”

Q. Except for Rosa Lewis, the women whose lives we read about in What She Ate are not necessarily culinary influencers.  Along with Dorothy Wordsworth and Lewis, the narrative includes stories about Eva Braun, Barbara Pym and Helen Gurley Brown. How did you decide that you would be reading between the plates of these women?

Laura Shapiro: A lot of different things went into the choices of the women, but one of them was exactly what you mentioned. I didn’t want the domestic goddesses. I didn’t want women who made a career in food. Rosa Lewis is the only one. What I was really trying to get at, was a woman’s whole relationship with food. I thought that women who were famous for their cooking would have a relationship with food which would be right on the surface. That seemed straightforward. I wanted to find relationships with food, that the women themselves didn’t know they had. My belief is that everyone has a food story. Everyone has a relationship with food. Whether or not you cook, whether or not you remember what you ate two minutes after the meal- you have a relationship with food. So the whole point of the book was to dig into the life and pull out that relationship. For that reason, I eliminated right at the outset, culinary professionals. But then, I couldn’t resist writing about Rosa Lewis, because nobody had written about the food. Here was a culinary professional where they didn’t really tie the food into the life. People were more interested in her journey from a maid to being called the “Queen of Cooks”. Looking at how the food rose and fell during that period was much more interesting.

Even though I wanted to look at women who did not have an obvious food story, I needed some kind of paper trail or documents – letters, memoirs, diaries, biographies- something that would tell me what they had eaten. For the most part, people don’t put that in their letters and diaries, but some do. I was looking for people about whom I could do the research. If I had many more years, I could have brought in women from a wider socio-cultural ethnic world, but I didn’t have time to look more widely. It’s too bad, you could have a more varied group than this one, but that’s going to be some other writer.

“My belief is that everyone has a food story. Everyone has a relationship with food.”

Q. We see a strained marriage in the case of Roosevelt, and a fear of food in the case of Eva Braun and Helen Gurley Brown. In fact, we find that Brown lived a dubious life. She extolls the deliciousness of food in the written form, but in reality, she was constantly on a diet. No matter how many notes you can uncover, it’s not easy to draw these pictures when food is the villain or a revenge weapon of sorts. How did you work around that?

Laura Shapiro: I really had one person that I would say food was her friend, and that was the novelist Barbara Pym. Several of the others and very strikingly as you say with Helen Gurley Brown and to another extent, Eva Braun- their relationship with food was so full of conflict and fear. Helen Gurley Brown was a very public figure and never turned down a chance to be interviewed or to have somebody do a story about her. She was constantly speaking to the public and very often she was speaking about food. What’s so remarkable is this wild swing in her own public statements – “I love food”, “I hate food”, “I eat all the time”, “I never eat”, “I am a wonderful cook”, “I am a terrible cook”- she just swerved all over the place. You just have to use the fact that it is a life full of these contradictions. You put these wildly various comments on food into the larger context of how she lived and this relentless focus on being sexy and being young. Once you get that, these contradictions sort of make sense.

Q. And Eva Braun? There was not much of food there in the literal sense. 

Laura Shapiro: She could never play out her role as the lady of the house in public. She could only play that role at home, and where did she play it? At the dinner table. It was food that created a fantasy domestic situation for her, where she could come into her own as she pictured it. Sitting at that table where she would be the lady of the house. It’s not that she was cooking or eating or planning the menus or anything else. It was the symbolic power of food. I thought of her as living in this fantasy and constantly reinforcing it with food, the champagne and the sweets. Its more of an indirect connection and it’s full of symbols than actual food. But I did think that the food was a way to get into her character for which have very little evidence. We don’t know much about her. But we do know that she presided over the table in that way.

Q. In the chapter on Barbara Pym you write- “Barbara was a culinary historian’s dream,” and yet she is not a food writer. Her well-documented food notes served a completely different purpose- to fuel her fiction.

Laura Shapiro: Barbara had a freedom in her relationship with food, and it shows up everywhere. She indulges in that relationship. She loves food, she loves to eat, and she is very interested in it, and that’s why it shows up- in the letters and the diaries and in the books. She does not have an agenda, and she is not trying to prove that British food is great or British food is terrible- it’s not in the picture. She lived at a time when there was wonderful food, and there was terrible food, and she ate all of it. There are two things about that. First of all, it gives you a much different view of that post-war food; then you get anywhere else. Secondly, the fact that she truly believed that food was the key to character. The way people ate, their attitude towards food and what was on the plate could tell you something about them. That shows up over and over in her books. I gave a book talk not long ago, and somebody asked me- “did you write this whole book just so that you could write about Barbara Pym?”. In a way I did, I’ve loved her books for years and years, and I have always wanted to write about her. She is the perfect person to do this because she left that food record all over her diaries. I can look at that, and I can look at her fiction and see connections. It’s not to easy to do that with most people, so I am very grateful for Barbara Pym.

“Secondly the fact that she truly believed that food was the key to character.”

Q. Towards the end of the book you write about your stay in India, and your own food journey cooking vegetable curries, chickpeas and pakoras. Please tell me a little bit about that.

Laura Shapiro: We were in Brindavan. My husband had been working there (a graduate student back then studying religion). He still goes there for his work and research. We were living in a flat part of a temple compound. It was being a wife and being in a country that I had no reason to be in except that I was married and a wife. All my moorings were suddenly gone. I remember the day I was leaving; I packed so much stuff that I had to repack and give some away to my friend. I knew we were not going to starve. I didn’t need cans of tuna fish and bottles of cooking oil. I love Indian food, and to this day it is one of my favourite things to eat. Back then also I loved all the food we got in India, but it was inconceivable to me that I could cook it. There were two worlds that clashed. Shopping in the bazaar, practising my Hindi, making those connections and coming home with all the delicious stuff- that’s what changed things for me. The simplest of things tasted so much better; every tomato had flavour. That food won me over and made me want to try out Indian recipes which were new to me. Even if I botched them, it was worth trying to make it. It was the farmer’s market that got me over the barrier. Coming to terms with the cooking helped me come to terms with everything else. That was the whole point.

Q. In a review of What She Ate on the Washington Post, Jennifer Reese writes – “That this reviewer, a food writer and lifelong cookbook collector, opened a book titled “What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories” with a slightly weary sigh suggests that our appetite for food narratives might be close to sated. That after reading food historian Laura Shapiro’s bracing first essay I devoured the rest of her book in one sitting suggests that there’s plenty of room left for work like Shapiro’s.”

Do you think that our appetite for food writing might be close to sated?

Laura Shapiro:  I am amazed that our appetite for food writing is anything but sating, it seems to be growing. I certainly don’t read a fraction of what I should be reading, because there is so much of it. The internet has made food writing possible from anybody who wants to do it. You could have two readers or two thousand or two million readers. There’s going to be somebody to read it. People want to do this. I used to say this about food on television, and now I think it applies to food writing, as we see it flowing through the internet. People are hungry for food- to watch cooking, to read about cooking- they are hungry for that. They may or may not be doing much of it in their own lives but its something they want- that connection to food. People are hungry to experience it through words and pictures. I am not sure what direction it’s going to go, but every day more and more people discover they have something to say about food.

Q. What kind of food writing would you like to see out there?

Laura Shapiro: There is a tonne of stuff out there, but more and more its just a picture, a photograph. People are photographing their meals more and writing about it less. There are many food blogs and websites, but I see so much of it are pictures. I wish people would worry less about the pictures and more about the reporting. If you cook something, I want to know what made it delicious or what made it awful. I want to know everything. That is what I was looking for when I was researching for my book. That is what history needs. It needs our active, ongoing, articulated relationship with food and not just a picture of the dish. A hundred years from now if somebody writes “What She Ate”  and starts looking for information, they will find a million photographs. We have vastly more information about the food, but not so much about the person. People are going to want more. My wish for food writing is that there be a lot more writing.  I want people to use their memories, their imagination, their powers of observation to tell us really what they felt. That’s what I want. More words, not fewer.

“My wish for food writing is that there be a lot more writing.”

The conversation has been edited for length.

What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories is published by 4th Estate. For more information visit https://laurashapirowriter.com/

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