Passing by the florist’s yesterday, I had to restrain myself from buying tuberoses — not for decoration, but for consumption. Tucked away among the many treasures in the Virago Book of Food is this gem, marrying the domestic art of flower arrangement with an opulent exoticism: “Put an ounce of tuberoses in a vase, having removed the leaves of the plant. Pour six quarts of (lukewarm) water on top, in which you have already dissolved 12 ounces of sugar…” and so on, until you have made tuberose ices.
At the other end of the scale is My Lady Widderington’s recipe for looseness of bowels: “Take hogs dung newly dunged and boyle it in a pint of milke…”. In the long history of food and the exploration of what may be brought to the table, we have left few avenues, flowerbeds, or hogs unexplored.
The editor’s emphasis on the joy of eating — the pleasures of the table, rather than the culinary history many anthologies force down one’s throat like dry crusts — makes this book a delightful read, from Kitchens through Faux Food via Works of Art down to Amuse-Bouches.
Jill Foulston, in her introduction, sounds a nostalgic paean to the glories of the household book — “a kind of hybrid cookbook-cum-diary”, containing “recipes, accounts, remedies — even veterinary advice”. (These still exist in India, where regional language cookbooks in particular adhere to the old system of offering advice on food storage, pots and pans, and the care and tending of inconvenient or demanding guests.) The Virago Book of Food offers a similar pleasure: you can dip into this at any moment for sustenance and entertainment, and be sure of hearing the voices of women who will joyously share their favourite cooking and eating memories.
The pantheon of great women food writers are here, marching across the page: MFK Fisher, Amanda Hesser, Madhur Jaffrey, Nigella Lawson, Ruth Reichl, Julia Child, Shoba Narayanan. But so are Emilys Bronte and Dickinson, Gertrude Stein on how to make a meal that looks like a Picasso painting, Banana Yoshimoto on the lure of untenanted kitchens in the dark watches of the night, Frida Kahlo’s wedding feast, Ursula K Le Guin on the diet of Karhiders and Gethenians, Virginia Woolf on eating dry biscuits at Oxford.
Every reader will have their favourite section; On the Hoof, blending food with travel, is one of mine, for its descriptions of Byltonesque picnics with hard-boiled eggs, Lady Wortley Montagu on a dinner of “fifty dishes of meat”, meals on trains, planes and automobiles. Others might prefer the predictable but still delectable The Food of Love — it is getting harder and harder, in the 21st century, to write about aphrodisiac food, perhaps because our concerns these days veer more towards sanitation and health than sensuality. And there are surprises: Anne Frank in the ghetto, dreaming of feasts while consuming a steady and meagre diet of potatoes and vegetable trimmings, a recipe for Scripture Cake with the ingredients drawn from the Book of Job and Exodus, Colette on a pet spider with a fondness for chocolate.
The Virago Book, published by the feminist Virago Press, excludes men of necessity from the list of contributors, and that gives the familiar sections of the anthology — the art of cooking, comfort food, magical meals drawn from fantasy and children’s literature, feasts — a feel that veers between the claustrophobic and the cozy. Women write about food with as much detachment or intimacy as men do, and notice the discomforts and the peculiar traditions of cooking sometimes more than their male counterparts. They are every bit as adventurous, and as open to the lure of new tastes.
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But it would be a rare reader who could browse the section on feasts and picnics without missing Kenneth Grahame and his description of Ratty and Mole’s repast: “coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrolls cress sandwidges pottedmeat gingerbeerlemonadesodawater...” In other places, I miss Eric Newby’s descriptions of cooking on the rivers of India, Soyer’s baroque evocations of banquet food, Bill Buford’s apprenticeship with “the dark carnality” of meat in a Tuscan butcher’s. The editor might well argue that they are available in other anthologies, while this one can barely find space for Isabella Beeton and Maya Angelou, with Angela Carter jostling Jhumpa Lahiri for space.
The final word should rest, perhaps, with Kate Burridge as she pours over a “lost lexicon of gastronomy”. She comes across a wealth of forgotten words: “Osophagist ‘frequenter of pastry shops’; symposiast ‘one of a drinking party, banqueter’; pabulous ‘abounding in food’; eubrotic ‘good to eat’” and so on to the wonderful “gulch ‘to swallow hungrily’, and pinguedinize ‘to make fat’”. The Virago Book of Food does the job of these lost words, offering a hundred different and sometimes almost-forgotten ways of looking at the table and the plate anew.
THE VIRAGO BOOK OF FOOD
The Joy of Eating
Edited by: Jill Foulston; Virago;
Distributed by: Hachette;
405 pages; Rs 395