Cuisine and Symbolic Capital

Cuisine and Symbolic Capital
Cuisine and Symbolic Capital:

Food in Film and Literature
Edited by
Cheleen Ann-Catherine Mahar

Cuisine and Symbolic Capital: Food in Film and Literature,
Edited by Cheleen Ann-Catherine Mahar
This book first published 2010
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2010 by Cheleen Ann-Catherine Mahar and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-2219-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2219-0

TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Images ............................................................................................ vii
Preface ........................................................................................................ ix
Contributors................................................................................................ xi
Culinary Translations of Identity: From Britain to China
Chapter One................................................................................................. 2
Translating Crepes: Politics, Economics and Culture in Philipe
Massonnet’s “La crêperie de Pékin”
Michelle Bloom
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 27

Culinary Jane: Austen’s Domestic Discourse
Christopher Wilkes
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 61

Pavlova Paradise: Arcadia in New Zealand
Cheleen Ann-Catherine Mahar
Food as Metaphor in Contemporary German Writing
Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 88

Frozen Foods and Frozen States of Being: The GDR on Ice in Annett
Gröschner’s novel Moskauer Eis
Martina Caspari
Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 104

How to Cook a Hedgehog: Ceija Stojka and Romani Cultural Identity
through the Culinary Literary Arts
Lorely French
vi Table of Contents
Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 130

“Do they feed you properly up here?” Towards a Gastrosophic
Interpretation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain
Simona Moti
Love, Feasting and the Symbolic Power of Food in French Writing
Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 152

Food as Battleground in Medieval French Epics
Andrew Cowell
Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 172

Le Repas Controve: The Three Witches’ Meal in Amadas et Ydoine
Denyse Delcourt
Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 181

Cooking with Julia (Child) in 1950 France, or An American in Paris:
A film-inflected essay
Syvie Blum-Reid
Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 198

Food and Character in Nemrovksy’s Suite Francaise
Jann Purdy
Index........................................................................................................ 214
LIST OF IMAGES
Figure 1. A Waterfall in dusky Bay, April 1773, by William Hodges.

National Maritime Museum, London.
Figure 2. A View of Wenderholm, Auckland 1880, by Arthur Sharpe,

collection of Fletcher Holdings.
Figure 3. Poster Emigration to New Zealand. In Phillips, 1987 A Man’s

Country? The Image of the Pakeha Male; A History. Auckland: Penguin.
Figure 4. Playtime (Jacques Tati).
Fiigure 5. Playtime (Jacques Tati).

PREFACE
This collection of interdisciplinary essays examines food as it mediates

social relationships and self-presentation through the mediums of film and
literature. As well as providing a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary look
at food and the uses of food as a way to apprehend cultural meaning, the
essays presented here, also provide theoretical templates for the study of
food in film and literature.
Each essay focuses upon a variety of cultures and literary traditions in

order to investigate culinary practice and how it intersects with such
cultural constructs as class, gender and sociability. The essays here also
explore how food and social practice are connected to concepts of hearth
and nurturance, as well as to patterns of hierarchy and social reproduction.
Culinary practice is central to human civilization and forms a quotidian
terrain upon which struggles for symbolic capital routinely take place. The
elements of this struggle, and the hierarchies, which are fought over, are
very complicated and subtly nuanced.
Culinary struggles and the use of food metaphors evoke larger struggles
for symbolic capital that are closely connected to a sense of community
and humanity. For instance, often in a world as globalized as ours is now,
there is a fundamental struggle over sustaining a historically bound vision
of authentic food and family identity, (at least of home), as opposed to the
food marketed as ‘authentic’ in restaurants and shops.
The essays gathered together here focus on the literary, film and quotidian
terrain upon which food and culinary practices reveal the deeper logics of
social practice and cultural meaning. Chapters explore a range of ideas
from identity through food in China to Romani cultural identity in
Germany to a consideration of Julia Child. Each chapter focuses specifically
on a culture area as well as particular literature and films. The threads of
identity and culture run through each chapter, while revealing how food
and culinary practices as symbolic capitals mediate relationships.
CONTRIBUTORS
Michelle Bloom is Associate Professor of French and Comparative

Literature and Director of Comparative Literature at the University of
California, Riverside. Author of Waxworks: A Cultural Obsession
(University of Minnesota Press, 2003), Michelle is currently completing a
book length manuscript on the contemporary aesthetic an cultural
interactions between France and China. She has published articles on
Balzac, Champfleury, Villiers, Zola, on Truffaut and Henry James: and on
filmmakers Tsai Ming-liang and Dai Sijie in journals including
Comparative Literature, Literature/Film Quarterly and Symposium.
Sylvie Blum-Reid studied French and Film at the University of Iowa. She
is Associate Professor of French & Film at the University of Florida. Her
research interests cover twentieth and twenty-first century French
literature, as well as French, European and North African cinema. Her
publications include East-West Encounters, Franco-Asian Cinema and
Literature, (London: Wallflower press 2003). Some of her essays appear
in such film and literary/cultural journals as Quarterly Review of Film and
Video (2009), Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies
(2005, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (2003), Iris (2001), and Sites, The
Journal of 20th Century Contemporary French Studies and the Contemporary
Journal of French and Francophone Studies. (2000, 2007)
Marina Caspari, nee Eidecker completed graduate studies at Westfälische

Wilhelms-Universität Münster (1992), and her Ph.D. at the University of
California, Los Angeles (1996). She was Assistant Professor of German at
Georgia State University (1996-1999), and currently works at the
Intentional School of Stuttgart (since 2003) and is an adjunct lecturer at
the University of Applied Sciences in Esslingen (since 2005). She
publishes on German literature and the didactics of literature as well as on
language pedagogy.
Andrew Cowell is Professor of French and Italian and Linguistics at the

University of Colorado. His research focuses on the historical anthropology
of medieval Europe, and also on linguistic anthropology (in contemporary
Native America). He has published At Play in the Tavern: Signs, Coins
xii Contributors
and Bodies in the Middle Ages, which examines the rise of the concepts of
‘profit’ and ‘play’ in medieval society, and the way the two concepts come
together in the tavern, inn and brothel, as part of the founding of a new
discourse of class (for the urban bourgeoisie) and new models of
community, which reject earlier religious and aristocratic models of
community based on charity and gift-giving. A second book, The Medieval
Warrior Aristocracy: Gifts, Violence, Performance and the Sacred,
focuses on the ways in which contemporary anthropological theories of
violence and gift-giving have been elaborated in response to contemporary
(20th century) economic and geo-political conditions, and how the
applications of these theories to medieval European society has produced a
distorted and “colonizing” understanding of the warrior aristocracy.
Denyse Delcourt is a writer and a medievalist. She is the author of two

books, L’Ethique du changement dans le roman francais du Moyen Age
(Geneva: Droz, 1990) and “Gabrielle au bois dormant” (Montréal: Trois,
2001), a novel. Gabrielle au bois dormant has been a finalist for two
literary prizes, “Le Prix Anne Herbert: (2001) and “Le Prix Marguerite-
Yourcenar” (2002).Translated into English by Eugene Vance, it was
published in 2007 by Green Integer under the title Gabrielle and the Long
Sleep into Morning. She is currently working on her second novel. Denyse
Delcourt has published articles on French medieval romances in Le Moyen
Francais, The Romanic Review, Medieavalia & Humanistica, Medieovo
romanzo, and MLN, among others. She has been teaching at the
Univeersity of Washington since 1990. Other teaching experiences include
Queens (Canada), Emory, Northwestern and Duke universities. Her
teaching interests are Old French language and literature, contemporary
Québéois literature and French fairy tales.
Lorely French is Distinguished University Professor and Professor of

German at Pacific University in Oregon. She is the author of the book
Geman Women Letter Writers 1750 to 1850. She has published numerous
book chapters and journal articles on German women writers, including
Bettine von Arnim, Rahel Vanhagen, Dorothea Mendelssohn-Veit-
Schlegel, Sophie Mereau-Brentano, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Marlene
Streeruwitz, and Elfriede Jelinek, as well as Austrian Roma writers and
Afro-German poets. She is presently completing a book manuscript
examining gender and ethnicity in writings by Roma in the German-
speaking countries. Her research has been supported by grants from the
Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst/German Academic Exchange
Service (DAAD), the American Council of Learned Societies, and the
Cuisine and Symbolic Capital: Food in Film and Literature xiii
Fulbright Commission. She is presently co-editor of Pacific Coast

Philology: The Journal of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language
Association.
Cheleen Ann-Catherine Mahar is Professor of Anthropology and Chair

of International Studies at Pacific University Oregon. She is co-editor of
An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu (Macmillan, 1990, St.
Martin’s Press 1990), and publishes in the fields of social theory and
migration. Her book, Reinventing Practice in a Disenchanted World:
Bourdieu and Urban Poverty in Oaxaca, Mexico was recently published
by the University of Texas Press. Currently she has begun a mansuscript
in the area symbolic capital as it pertains to British Colonial migrants to
New Zealand.
Simona Moti is a PhD candidate in the German Department at the

University of California, Irvine. She studied English, German, and
Applied Linguistics at the University of Timisoara (Romania), Humboldt
University in Berlin (Germany), and Lancaster University (UK). She
received her M.A. in German at the University of California, Irvine, and is
currently completing her dissertation which focuses on a postcolonial
approach to Austrian and Central European Modernist literature.
Jann Purdy earned her doctorate from the University of California,

Berkeley. Currently she is a professor of French at Pacific University in
Oregon. She has published articles on the intersection of autobiography
and ethnography in French literature and enjoys, in her spare time, reading
about and eating new foods.
Chris Wilkes is Professor of Sociology and Vice-Provost for Research at

Pacific University. Trained first as a natural scientist and then as a
sociologist at Stanford, he has worked on issues of social class and the role
of the state in social democracies. In addition to his wide body of work on
New Zealand social class and social history, he has co-edited a book on
Bourdieu’s social-theoretical project, written and taught in the area of
social theory and the sociology of food, and has recently completed his
book on the sociology of Jane Austen called Social Jane.
CULINARY TRANSLATIONS OF IDENTITY:
FROM BRITAIN TO CHINA
CHAPTER ONE
TRANSLATING CREPES:
POLITICS, ECONOMICS AND CULTURE
IN PHILIPPE MASSONNET’S
“LA CRÊPERIE DE PÉKIN”1
MICHELLE BLOOM
In Phillipe Massonnet’s humorous 2003 story “La crêperie de Pékin”

(The Creperie of Beijing), “beurre sucre” (butter sugar), the dying
utterance of the unnamed character based on Deng Xiaoping, is
supposedly translated into Chinese characters to report the death of the
“Grand Dirigeant” (Great Leader) in newspapers throughout China. This
linguistic translation of the crepe is but one of several kinds of translation
operating in the importation of the French pancake to China in this story,
the last in the eponymous collection authored by Massonnet, a French
journalist and former director of the Agence France Presse in Beijing and
Shanghai.2 On a visit to France, Massonnet’s protagonist Chen discovers
the crepe because it provides relatively inexpensive sustenance relative to
other types of French cuisine. When he imports crepes to China and
becomes the personal, clandestine chef of the Great Leader, they undergo
“economic translation,” becoming the food of the elite. The culinary
1
My appreciation goes to Flannery Wilson for her diligent and insightful research
assistance on this project and for her patience with the nuances of preparing the
article for publication. I would also like to extend my thanks to Jeanne Boyer for
her invaluable editorial assistance. My gratitude goes to the University of
California, Riverside for the COR grant facilitating this assistance. Thanks also to
Heidi Brevik-Zender, Perry Link, Véronique Olivier, Theda Shapiro and Kelle
Truby for sharing their expertise as bilingual French-English wordsmiths, to which
I owe the success of the translations of Massonnet's story. Any errors are my own
responsibility.
2
Massonnet stepped down from his position as Director of the Agence France
Presse in September 2008.
Translating Crepes 3
translation involved in importing French crepes to China entails

modification of ingredients, utensils and eating habits. Through the
examination of political, economic, culinary and cultural translation in
Massonnet’s story, I will argue that food goes beyond nutrition and even
surpasses the social, as it embodies cultures and cultural differences.
To Translate or Not to Translate

Massonnet’s story not only represents “literal translation,” but also
foregrounds it. Massonnet creates the character of Chen, whose
supposedly Chinese dialogue the author, bi-lingual in French and Chinese,
represents in French, thereby translating it, in a sense. Given that
Massonnet places Chen, a retired professor of Chinese literature, on
vacation in France, this linguistic translation almost makes sense. I say
“almost,” because being in France does not mean Chen speaks the
language, even if Massonnet takes the fictional leap of representing his
speech in French. Like the words of many a literary or film character
placed “abroad,”3 Chen’s dialogue is represented in the foreign language,
even though he does not speak the language in question. Further,
Massonnet of course continues to represent Chen’s spoken words in
French once he returns to China with his scheme to make crepes there.
The Grand Dirigeant’s dying words “beurre sucre” reflect Chen’s post-
voyage success translating French crepes for the Beijing consumer, be it
the Great Leader himself, or the customers who frequent Chen’s creperie.
The Great Leader’s last words are recounted near the opening of the story,
which is told not only retrospectively, but also posthumously, and not only
after the Leader’s death, but also, at least partly if not fully, and certainly
fantastically, after the narrator-character Chen’s decease: “Huit années
plus tard [after the Great Leader’s death], je mourus en héros national”
[Eight years later, I died a national hero].4 Massonnet represents the
Grand Dirigeant’s last words in French, describing the Chinese characters
representing beurre sucre, even quantifying them, but not representing
3
For instance, although Lasse Hallström's 2000 film Chocolat takes place in
France, and Juliette Binoche plays a French woman named Vianne, she speaks
English throughout the film alongside Johnny Depp. Bernardo Bertolucci is
another good example of a director who employs this technique, most notably in
his films 1900 (1976), which takes place in Italy, starring Robert De Niro and
Gérard Depardieu, and The Last Emperor (1989), which takes place in China,
starring John Lone and Peter O’Toole.
4
Massonnet, La crêperie de Pékin, et autres nouvelles de Chine, 168. Hereafter
cited in text.
4 Chapter One
them pictographically. He thus keeps the text in French rather than

includes a translation into Chinese:
“Tous les quotidiens sans exception, du Tibet à la Mandchourie, de la
Mongolie à la frontière vietnamienne, imprimèrent les trois caractères en
typographie géante” [All of the daily newspapers, without exception, from
Tibet to Manchuria, from Mongolia to the Vietnamese border, printed the
tree characters in giant topography.] (131)
A footnote further breaks down the three characters, explaining that there
are two characters for “butter” and one for “sugar,”5 but we never see
those characters, even in the intermediary form of pinyin, the romanization
system used to indicate the name “Chen” and designed to allow westerners
easier access to Chinese. Massonnet refrains from representing Chinese
characters, instead remaining faithful to the French language and
readership.
The explanation for the French text and thus dialogue of “La crêperie
de Pékin” lies in the bilingual journalist Massonnet’s project of
“translating” Chinese experiences and characters (of both sorts) into
French for a francophone audience, and probably a specifically French one
at that. The story is accessible to date only to francophone readers, as it
remains thus far untranslated. Indeed, as Massonnet himself claims, the
entire collection is written in accessible French, presumably for a
readership of his compatriots: “‘C'est une écriture simple, humoristique,
sans misérabilisme, accessible à tous, qui permet de faire avancer la
compréhension du pays.’” [It is simple, humorous writing, without sordid
realism, accessible to all, which allows for the advancement of the
understanding of the country].6 It is accessible to readers who are literate
in French, while the qualification “sans miserabilisme” [without sordid
realism] suggests that it is not simply the language that is easy, but the
upbeat and humorous tone that makes the text accessible. The unnamed
country in question is of course the People’s Republic of China, rendered
understandable ironically through the Chinese protagonist’s efforts to
understand France.7
While Massonnet serves as a linguistic and cultural translator for his
French readership, when in France, his character Chen requires the
translation services of his friend Ling, a compatriot and “vieille
connaissance exilée en France” [old acquaintance exiled in France] (140).
5
Note 1, 131.
6
Carre Chen, “Un patchwork tendre,” [an unpaginated electronic interview].
7
Ibid.
Ling serves as Chen’s “interprète,” [translator] for instance, in order to ask

Madame Lagadec, the proprietress of a Norman creperie, for her
permission to film the establishment for a few minutes (147). Dependent
on translation in order to function in France and to read French literature,
Chen relies on his friend for oral translation.
Consuming Literature and Food

Chen is ambivalent about both his consumption of French literature
and his consumption of French food, since both are simultaneously
appealing and unfamiliar to him. He first encountered French literature
during the “Cultural Revolution,” the intellectually and politically
repressive period from 1966 to 1976 under Mao during which youth were
“sent down” to the countryside to be “re-educated.” Chen consumed the
works of Balzac, Flaubert and Hugo, three of the grands écrivains [great
writers] of the nineteenth-century who were authorized prior to the
Cultural Revolution but banned during it. He read these authors, “Dans
ma langue, puisque je ne maîtrisais pas celle de mes écrivains préférés” [In
my language, because I hadn’t mastered that of my favorite writers] (137).
Although Chen embraced Madame Bovary, his ignorance of Flaubert’s
language accounted for his distance from it and her. Nevertheless, being
caught in the illicit act of reading Flaubert—even in translation—
accounted for his being “sent down” for “re-education.” Flaubert’s chef-
d’oeuvre was no less scandalous in Cultural Revolution China than in its
birthplace and time, mid nineteenth-century France.8
Chen is no more able to consume Flaubert’s work in the original years
later when he purchases it on the same visit to France where he discovers
crepes. He possesses the original French text, but it does not follow that
he can read it:
“quinze ans plus tard, je harponnais solidement le chef-d’oeuvre de
Flaubert dans mes mains. En français cette fois. À Paris. Tant pis si je ne
savais toujours pas lire la langue du cher Gustave à qui je ne tenais pas
rigueur de m’avoir fait découvrir la Chine profonde!” [Fifteen years later, I
solidly harpooned Flaubert’s chef-d’oeuvre in my hands. In French this
time. In Paris. Too bad if I still didn’t know how to read the language of
8
Flaubert’s novel was attacked by public prosecutors after it appeared in the Revue
de Paris in 1856. The scandal resulted in a trial in 1857, but was published in
book form soon after, and became a best seller. See Dominick LaCapra’s book
Madame Bovary on Trial.
6 Chapter One
dear Gustave, whom I didn’t hold it against that he made me discover rural
China!] (138)
It would be inaccurate to say that the French version of Madame Bovary

meant nothing to Chen, given the work’s role in shaping his personal
history; indeed, its responsibility for his “re-education.” As an object,
albeit one whose writing is illegible to him, the French book means a lot to
him. However, Chen’s ignorance of French keeps him at a distance from
French literature in the original.
Like French literature, French food is difficult for Chen to consume.
While the act of reading Madame Bovary during the Cultural Revolution
resulted in a three year punishment, Chen finds the act of eating baguettes
to be torture, albeit humorously so.9 Baguettes in the French sense of
bread in addition to chopsticks, as the French plural les baguettes denotes,
provide the object of Chen’s critique of the French. Rather than offer the
typically western praise of the long, thin French bread, he focuses on the
equally compelling and rarely articulated downside of the baguette:
“Je vais vous dire, la première fois que je mordis dans une baguette
fraiche, mes gencives exproprièrent des litres et des litres de sang!
J’exagère un peu, d’accord. Mais sur le coup, je m’étais vraiment
interrogé: ‘Comment les Français endurent-ils ce supplice?’” [I am going
to tell you, the first time that I bit into a fresh baguette, my gums
expropriated liters and liters of blood! I exaggerate a little, okay. But at
the time, I truly asked myself: how do the French endure this torture?]
(140)
Chen’s self-consciousness as narrator allows him to acknowledge the

hyperbole of his bloody account of the French bread. Chen-the-narrator
contrasts Chen-the-experiencer,10 who views the French, hyperbolically
and amusingly, as victims of torture executed by the weapon called the
9
Of course, it is not out of the question to portray the torture of re-education
humorously. Dai Sijie, for instance, does so in his novel Balzac and the Little
Chinese Seamstress (2000) and in his film adaptation of the same name (2002).
Likewise, in terms of the comparison between the Cultural Revolution and the
Holocaust which Gao Xingjian evokes through the German Jewish character
Margarethe in One Man’s Bible (2002), other collective historical traumas such as
World War II have been represented humorously, for instance in films such as
Roberto Benigni’s hit Life is Beautiful (1998). Such comedies do of course
provoke mixed reactions amongst viewers, and particularly negative responses by
survivors.
10
Käte Hamburger makes a distinction between the “I-narrator” and the “I-
experiencer” in her book The Logic of Literature, 140.
baguette. Chen’s commentary is contingent upon the concepts of cultural

difference and cultural relativity.
Food is not only about what we eat but also about how we eat, in terms
of presentation and with regard to the physical act of eating, which in turn
includes manners and utensils. In Gérard Kracwyzk’s 2001 French action
film Wasabi, Jean Réno as the Frenchman Hubert in Japan eating a bowl
of wasabi with his hands creates humor out of cultural difference. This
French character is no more in tune with Japanese food and manners than
he is with the language. Wasabi is a spicy condiment, not a main dish, to
be eaten in small quantities as an accompaniment.
Kracwyzk, like Massonnet, derives humor from cultural difference.
Indeed, a Frenchman speaking through his Chinese character, Massonnet
engages in occidentalism, which I define simply as the reversal of the
hierarchy of the “west” over the “east.”11 The Chinese, the supposedly
weaker party in the hegemonic relationship, have more license to critique
the stronger party without violating the rules of political correctness, as
Chen does, quite humorously. Further, since Massonnet is French,
occidentalism is a cover for western self-critique, which seems more
acceptable than the critique of the other. Accordingly, whereas it would
be unacceptable to call the Chinese “primitive,” Massonnet, through the
voice of Chen, can deem the French “barbares,” as he does on more than
one occasion (145, 149). Calling the French barbaric for using knives and
forks rather than chopsticks reverses orientalism, humorously:
“Je plantai vigoureusement fourchette et couteau dans la galette de
sarrasin. Je maniais de mieux en mieux les ustensiles des barbares mais
collais toujours un peu trop le nez dans mon assiette…” [I planted my fork
and knife vigorously in the buckwheat crepe. I manipulated the barbare’s
utensils better and better, but still stuck my nose a little too much into my
plate.] (145)
Chen’s humor lies in his description of his physical movements,

specifically of his aggressive manipulation of the western utensils, and in
the constant threat of contact between nose and plate. In addition to
subverting the orientalist assumption of the superiority of knife and fork
over chopsticks, 12 Chen calls into question French manners: “J’essayais de
11
Xiaomei Chen, in her book Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in
Post-Mao China, defines the term “Occidentalism” as “a discursive practice that,
by constructing its Western Other, has allowed the Orient to participate actively
and with indigenous creativity in the process of self-appropriation, even after being
appropriated and constructed by Western Others,” 4-5.
12
See Barthes on chopsticks in Empire of Signs, 15-18.
8 Chapter One
mâcher moins bruyamment qu’en Chine, pour respecter le code de la

politesse française” [I tried to chew less loudly than in China, to respect
the French code of politeness] (146). Chen points out that cultural
difference accounts for manners, which are cultural constructs. He thus
avoids buying into the orientalist view of western “civilization” versus
eastern “primitiveness,” indeed critiquing this dichotomy.
Cultural and Culinary Translations

Mastery of language without understanding of culture does not suffice
to facilitate meaningful translation. “Things in China can’t be explained
by language alone,” as per the protagonist of Nobel prize winning Chinese
born, French expatriate writer Gao Xingjian’s One Man’s Bible.13 As a
result, in Gao’s novel, even if the protagonist’s German lover Margarethe
“does know the language,” (Chinese, but more specifically Cantonese,
since the present day segments of the text take place in pre-Handover
Hong Kong) she does not understand – or indeed, cannot understand- why
“Gao,” or the author’s fictional incarnation, cannot be both a writer and an
artist in China.14 Such barriers to understanding even in the face of
mastery of “language” apply universally, although the Gao example
provides a precise case in that it nicely inverts the Europe/China relation
of Massonnet’s story: a European character’s knowledge of “Chinese”
does not allow her to comprehend Chinese culture, any more than Ling’s
French language translation alone suffices to facilitate Chen’s
understanding of French culinary norms.
As Lydia Liu says in Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation
in Global Circulations (2000), “we can no longer talk about translation as
if it were a purely linguistic or literary matter.”15 Literal translation, which
stands in opposition to “cultural translation” as per Wang Ning in
Globalization in Cultural Translation,16 constitutes translation of a text
from one language to another. In “La crêperie de Pékin,” culture as well
as language keeps Chen at bay from France even while he is physically
13
Gao, 29. See note 10 above.
14
Ibid.
15
Liu, 1.
16
Ning, 23. In his famous essay “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin
notes that “literal translations,” when too heavy-handed, are often damaging to
meaning. He adds: “…the significance of fidelity as ensured by literalness is that
the work reflects the great longing for linguistic complementation” Illuminations,
79. In other words, good translations must never overshadow the original; fidelity
and freedom must be balanced.
present there. Understanding the Other (language and culture) requires

cultural translation, and more specifically what I will call “econoculinary”
translation in this case. Given that Ling resides in Paris and knows the
language, he is able to offer his friend some insights into the finances of
French food. However, the information that Ling offers is insufficient,
due to cultural relativity. It allows for cultural misunderstanding. When
Chen looks for a budget restaurant, a “formule économique” (140) other
than the unsatisfying French version of Chinese cuisines to satisfy his
appetite, Ling suggests crepes.
Chen tastes “French pancakes” not because they are the quintessential
French food but, more pragmatically, and amusingly, because they cost
relatively little in the context of late twentieth-century France. Indeed,
crepes, originally from Brittany, were “peasant food,” which farmers
would give to their landowners as a sign of respect. Displaced from
Brittany to Paris, they become street food wrapped in paper and sold by
vendors for modest prices to eat on the go. They rise a notch in creperies,
sit-down restaurants where they constitute either main dishes made with
farine de sarrasin (buckwheat flour), oil, butter and eggs, or dessert. What
are currently considered main dish crepes (crepes did not originally
constitute a meal) may be filled with cheese, ham, vegetables or a
combination of these and other ingredients. Dessert crepes are made
similarly, but they typically contain regular flour, powdered sugar, and all
sorts of fillings, from chocolate to fruit preserves to Nutella (hazelnut
spread).17
In France, even relatively inexpensive French restaurants charge more
for less food than do run-of-the-mill Chinese restaurants. Although Ling’s
suggestion that his friend eat at a creperie is not misguided, under the
circumstances, Chen’s response to the bill at a Montparnasse creperie, like
his gustatory reactions to the food, is one of indigestion:
“À la fin du repas, mon estomac entama une marche de protestation qui
allait compliquer une digestion déja perturbée par les cent soixante-trois
francs de l’addition. Cidre et service compris” [At the end of the meal, my
stomach began a protest march which was going to complicate a digestion
already disturbed by the bill for 163 francs. Cider and tip included.] (141)
Massonnet expresses Chen’s economic indigestion when the protagonist

asks his friend, “‘Tu m’avais pas dit que c’était pas cher, les crêpes?’”
17
This paragraph’s brief history and discussion of crêpes is informed by sources
including Epicurious.com's adaptation of Pappas' 'Crêpes'’. See also “Bnet
Business Network” and “Worldwide Gourmet.”
10 Chapter One
[‘Didn’t you tell me they weren’t expensive, crepes?’] In his role as first-
person narrator, Chen reveals, “Je détestais ne pas en avoir pour mon
argent” [I hated not getting my money’s worth] (141). As Ling explains in
response, inexpensive is relative: “‘Pas cher comparé à d’autre repas, on
est à Paris’” [‘Not expensive compared to other meals, we’re in Paris’]
(141). If French restaurants are expensive, the capital’s establishments are
even pricier than those in province. Chen claims with reference to Paris’s
20th arrondissement “mini-Chinatown,” that “‘A Belleville, je me gave
pour quarante francs,’” [‘In Belleville, I stuff myself for 40 francs’]
meaning that he indulges in its vague – albeit inexpensive - approximation
of “Chinese food”:
“Je dénigrais pourtant les restaurants chinois de Paris, indignes pour
certains de revendiquer cette appellation incontrôlée. Je ne retrouvais
jamais le goût de la cuisine pékinoise ou shanghaïenne” [I nevertheless
disparage Chinese restaurants in Paris, some of them unworthy of claiming
this certificate of authenticity. I never found the taste of Beijing or
Shanghai style cuisine.] (140)
However, Chen also claims that he can eat “chez McDo pour vingt francs”
[at McDonald's for 20 francs] (141). Interestingly, quality does not enter
into Chen’s equation, even though he has already criticized the
authenticity of Belleville’s “Chinese” restaurants and “McDo” is well
known to be fast food.
Quality aside, he admits, to the reader albeit not to his personal
translator, that this claim entails “mauvaise foi” [bad faith] due to portion
size:
“Je savais pertinemment qu’un hamburger, même double, ne colmatait
qu’un recoin de mon estomac d’ogre” [I absolutely knew that a
hamburger, even a double, would fill only a nook of my ogre’s stomach.]
(141)
He admits that he had not yet mastered “the subtleties of the market
economy” (141), with portion size coming into play in the rapport
qualité/prix (relationship between the price and quality) of restaurant food.
At the Norman creperie, by contrast to the Parisian one that Chen and Ling
frequent, the crepes measure up, according to Chen-as-narrator: “La part
était copieuse, même s’il en aurait fallu deux pour apaiser ma faim” [the
portion was copious, even if two would have been necessary to appease
my hunger] (146). Chen’s qualification of his approval of the Norman
crepes’ size reflects that portions are generally bigger in China than in
France. As Massonnet puts it accurately, “En Chine, la quantité compte
autant que la qualité, sinon plus” [In China, quantity counts as much as
quality, if not more] (161). Indeed, to French moderation, China counters
excess. More than the size of each dish, in China, the number of dishes
constituting a meal accounts for the large amount of food served, if not
necessarily consumed.
In France, crepes constitute what Priscilla Ferguson defines as
“regional cuisine” rather than national cuisine,18 although they circulate
throughout France to feed the French from different regions as well as
non-French tourists imagining they are consuming quintessential French
food, rather than Breton cuisine par excellence. Indeed, crepes might
qualify as what Maryann Tebben calls iconic French cuisine, even if they
are a far cry from the pot-au-feu she writes about as such.19 As Massonnet
depicts accurately in his fiction, the creperies in the Montparnasse
neighborhood near Paris’s southernmost train station await tourists and
charge accordingly: “Je rémemorai la crêperie du boulevard Edgar-Quinet
et ses prix pour voyageurs à peine descendus du trains et bons pour
l’arnaque” [I recalled the creperie on the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet and its
prices for travelers scarcely off of trains and ripe to be swindeled] (144).
The creperie that Chen and Ling frequent in Etretat, one of Monet’s
favorite Normandie locales, also involves displacement from Brittany, the
birthplace of crepes. Designed with rustic decor to appeal to Parisians, the
establishment is decorated with old photos of Bigoudens, ambiguously
evoking either the region in Brittany or the hairstyle, on the walls.20 Even
though the restaurant is a Breton transplant, the manager/owner Gilberte
Lagadec is as well, thus connecting it to the origins of crepes and in that
sense rendering it more “authentic.”
Importing Crepes: Sanlitun, Beijing, China

Massonnet transplants crepes internationally as well as domestically,
the former importation occurring when Chen imports the idea and
ingredients to Beijing. Massonnet feeds his French readership the idea
that crepes were unknown in Beijing prior to Chen’s importation of the
idea, equipment and ingredients to make them. Indeed “the famous Chen”
is characterized as “the one who brought the crepe to China” (133), with
the French word crepe clearly restricted to the French concept as well,
18
Ferguson, Accounting For Taste, 5.
19
Tebben. “French Food Texts And National Identity: Consommé, Cheese Soufflé,
Francité?”
20
Thanks to Véronique Olivier for her consultation regarding “Bigoudens.”
12 Chapter One
since China has its own such thin pancakes, sold on the streets of Beijing
or served in dishes such as Peking Duck and Mushu Pork in restaurants.
The sign, “Chez Chen, la meilleure crêperie de Chine et la seule” [Chez
Chen, the best creperie in China and the only one] (134), denotes the
uniqueness of Chen’s establishment in front of which it hangs. With this
sign, Massonnet no doubt satirizes Chen’s crepe fantasy as well as the idea
of monopoly versus competition, since the assertion of uniqueness
undermines the superlative statement: if Chen’s creperie is the only one, it
is definitionally the best, but not necessarily even good; and it is also the
worst. In terms of delusions of the importance of his endeavor and its
political overtones, Chen even has a dream that “la Cité interdite était
transformée en une gigantesque crêperie dont j’étais l’empereur...” [The
Forbidden City was transformed into a giant creperie of which I was the
emperor] (154). This dream becomes reality in spirit if not to the letter
when Chen becomes the personal chef of the Great Leader, thus realizing
the political connections embodied in the satirical transformation of the
Forbidden City into an enormous creperie. However, as “Chinese”
restaurants in Paris are localized in Belleville and in one other (13th
arrondissement) Chinatown, French crepes in Beijing are found primarily
in the French and more generally “foreign” neighborhood of Sanlitun.
This is to say that, as reflected by Massonnet’s reference to crepes as “that
speciality little known (méconnue) in China,” they are little known but not
unknown.
Indeed, Sanlitun, the Beijing location where Chen opens his creperie,
appropriately next to the French school, is host to several French
establishments which, while not devoted exclusively to crepes and thus not
constituting creperies, offer crepes on the menu. The internet would have
it that the straightforwardly named “La Crêperie,” the first creperie in
Shanghai, a “more French” city than Beijing due to its French concession,
opened as recently as 2007.21 Shifting to Beijing, the Sanlitun
neighborhood might be considered the equivalent of Shanghai’s French
Concession, if only in the sense that it is an expatriate heavy
neighborhood. In the Chaoyang District, Sanlitun houses several
embassies, including the French one. In Sanlitun, “Crazzy Crepes” was
“solely devoted to making crepes,” which you can thus “expect… to be
great,” according to one internet user: “This place serves up everything
from deep fried crepes to sweet crepes filled with Nutella and other
fillings.” However, “Now Closed,” as per the same website where we find
21
City Weekend. “Crazzy Crepes.” Beijing Dining European Listing.
http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/beijing/listings/dining/european/has/crazzy-
crepes/
the review, it seems to have come and gone. A March 2009 web search on
the site http://bbs.english.sina.com/ yielded the Far Away Café, what
sounds like a bona fide creperie, serving “traditional French crêpe.”
During my November 2006 research trip to Beijing and crepe-tasting
tour localized in Sanlitun, I found French and other restaurants serving
crepes but not focused on them or qualifying as creperies. “Le Petit
Gourmand,” one of the establishments where I tasted my standard
butter/sugar crepe, the last request of Massonnet’s Great Leader, remains
at the heart of the Sanlitun neighborhood. Like the nearby Beijing
Bookworm,22 Le Petit Gourmand is not a creperie or even a restaurant, but
a bookstore which houses a non-lending library and a restaurant. The
bookstore is situated in compatriot company, next door to a more upscale
French restaurant called Le Petit Bistrot (sic), and across the street from
“Mèche,” not surprisingly a hair salon. In fall 2006, the menu at the Petit
Gourmand was a hodge podge of crepes, salads, pizzas and couscous
along with sandwiches – western lunch fare – and accompanied by hot and
cold beverages and desserts. Since the crepe constituted my focus, that is
what I sampled. Like those at several other French restaurants, my beurre
sucre was standard French fare, but not particularly tasty or notable, and I
certainly would have fared better on a Chinese meal for the same price.
Indeed, the same money would have bought a meal rather than one dessert
crepe.
Le Petit Gourmand’s then-new manager, Frenchman Axel Moreaux,
articulated the admirable goal of “democratizing French cuisine” in China,
to lower its cost so that it is more accessible. He explained in my
November 2006 interview with him23 that the restaurant’s location was
good and that 70% of its clientele consisted of foreigners. However, he
also indicated extra-culinary motivations for the Chinese interest in his
offerings, when he said,“the Chinese are more and more interested in
occidental cultures” and that they have the “cultural desire to make foreign
friends.” Meanwhile, in Beijing, he notes that French restaurants represent
la mode and le luxe and that there is a certain snobisme about all that is
French. The high prices of French restaurants result not only from this
reputation, but also, he explains, from the difficulty of finding the
ingredients for French cuisine in China, and the cost of obtaining them.
Whereas a French salad in a French restaurant in China would cost less
than the same thing in a French restaurant in France, it would still cost
more than a Chinese salad, thus the difficulty drawing in Chinese
22
The Bookworm Beijing. “Welcome to the Bookworm Beijing.” Home page.
http://www.beijingbookworm.com/
23
Michelle Bloom, personal interview with Axel Moreaux, November, 2006.
14 Chapter One
customers. For renowned chef Daniel Boulud of the eponymous New

York City restaurant (“Daniel”), acquiring “high-quality” ingredients for
his new French restaurant in China also poses “one of the big challenges
of setting up in Beijing”: “Boulud is known for his fresh, seasonal fare,
and this discriminating chef likes to source as locally as possible. He’s
been happy with the fresh seafood but less enthralled with the herbs and
meats.”24
Manager Moreaux raises some of the same issues regarding the
availability of ingredients which Chen faces in terms of making crepes in
China, and which the Great Leader underscores as well, with the solution
of Massonnet’s character lying in importation. However, I would also
suggest that Massonnet’s inventive Chen improves what he can offer to his
Chinese clientele by translating it for them, rather than resign himself to
the uninspiring original version I tasted in China, like the mediocre
“Chinese” food typically found in restaurants in France, some exceptions
aside. Chen’s creative solution to this problem lies in part in sinifying
French crepes, which diminishes the problem of attaining requisite foreign
ingredients and adapts foreign food to the Chinese palate. Chen recounts
his experimentation concocting diverse main dish crepes: “Je bourrai trois
galettes. Une avec des oreilles de cochon et des haricots secs, l’autre avec
des palmes de canard à la moutarde, la troisième avec des tripes” [I filled
three crepes. One with pig’s ears and dried beans, the other with duck feet
with mustard, the third with tripes] (161).
Deng Xiaoping and/in France: “Il faut prendre

ce qu’il y a de bon à l’Ouest”
Despite his attempts to translate crepes to make them accessible to his
compatriots, Chen’s importation of non-Chinese ingredients upholds the
Great Leader’s motto, “We must take what is good from the West” (“Il
faut prendre ce qu’il y a de bon à l’Ouest”) (159, 166). Massonnet never
names the Great Leader, even referring to him in an interview as “un grand
dirigeant” with the vaguer indefinite article (“un”/a) rather than the
definite article “le” (the).25 It is in part the character’s openness to “the
west” that reveals his identity to the reader—even if he must keep his
private chef and culinary arrangement confidential. We know that the
“Grand Dirigeant” is not Mao, whom Massonnet refers to by name, even
comparing Nixon’s famous 1973 encounter with Mao to Chen’s own
24
Lin-Liu. “Boulud-y Marvellous.” [Unpaginated electronic article].
25
Carre Chen, “Un patchwork tendre.”
meeting with the anonymous Grand Dirigeant (165). Massonnet’s Great

Leader is clearly not Mao because of this openness to the west; the
character’s selection of Chen as his private crêpier because he is not a
communist (166); as well as the chronology: Mao died in 1976 and this
story takes place two decades later.
We do know that Massonnet’s “Grand Dirigeant” is inspired by Deng
Xiaoping, who died in 1997, six years before the publication of the story
and who, like the story’s Leader, spent time in France. In “La crêperie de
Pékin,” one of the photos accompanying the obituary presentation printed
systematically in newspapers throughout the Mainland, extending as far as
Tibet, testifies to the Great Leader’s longstanding ties to France and to
crepes. The photo’s caption reads: “‘Le Grand Dirigeant devant une
crêperie en Bretagne, en compagnie de son propriétaire, un dénommé
Martin.’ Suivait la date: ‘6 janvier 1924’” [‘The Great Leader in front of a
creperie in Brittany, in the company of its proprietor, named Martin.’ The
date followed: ‘6 January, 1924’] (132). Deng Xiaoping not only visited
France, but did so at precisely this time, or rather was there during a five
year period including this moment. Deng participated in francophile Li
Yuying’s “Movement for Diligent Work and Frugal Study,” under whose
auspices he went to the Chungking preparatory school where he studied
French and Chinese in preparation for his work-study in France. 26
According to Richard Evans, the Franco-Chinese program created by Li
was an attempt to circumvent the poor state of affairs in China:
“Because the political condition of the country was so bad, and also
because jobs were hard to come by for the first generation of modern
middle-school graduates, a large number of young Chinese were attracted
by Li’s Programme. Between March 1919 and December 1920, almost
1600 worker-students, about thirty of them women, sailed for France.”27
In France, Deng studied, worked in factories and engaged in (communist)

political activities.
According to Evans, Deng’s time in France may well have opened him
up to “foreign influences” rather than to France per se:
“France as such may have influenced him less strongly than the experience
of living abroad. . . . there is no evidence that he took an interest in French
art or literature, or even as a practical man, in French engineering and
26
In chapters 1 and 2 of his biography of Deng, Richard Evans describes Li
Yuying’s program in depth.
27
Evans, Deng Xiaoping and the Making of Modern China, 11. Hereafter cited in
text.
16 Chapter One
architecture. Nor is there anything in the record – the archives of French

government departments, factories and schools, and the memoirs of other
worker-students – to indicate that he had French friends…” (23-24).
Evans continues by specifying that other “worker-students” did engage in

activities or arrange living situations which facilitated more contact with
the French, thus suggesting that Deng could have done so had he wanted
to but opted not to (24). Evans calling into question the specificity of
France’s influence on Deng’s political perspectives meshes with
Massonnet’s fictionalization of Chen’s singular role in introducing the
crepe to China and the author’s exaggeration of the French crepe’s
significance in China once it arrives at this destination.
Although Evans makes the compelling point that France represents the
foreign and the west, he goes a bit far in diminishing the specificity of
France in Deng’s life and its resulting influence on his politics. At the root
of the Chungking program was founder Li Yuying’s longstanding goal of
forging closer ties between China and France and to “bring to Chinese
workers and students the benefits of education and vocational training in
France” (10). Li himself had gone to a French secondary school and had
studied at Paris’s prestigious Pasteur Institute (10). Thus, Li’s choice of
France as the destination for his program was hardly arbitrary. Further, if
Deng did not take full advantage of the interpersonal possibilities with the
French, even Evans presumes that, “By the time he left Paris for Moscow
he must have read French without difficulty and spoken French at least
passably well” (23). As the “must have” indicates, Evans is speculating
here. Earlier, he recounts that the class in Bayeux where Deng first
studied in France dissolved only months after his arrival, due to lack of
funds, leaving students who could not pay their ways at the school to fend
for themselves (15). Nevertheless, one can safely speculate with Evans
that Deng’s French advanced in five years, even without much official
instruction.
Paul Bailey points out both the genuine and the not-so-genuine Franco-
Chinese connections at the root of the work-study program, as well as its
ultimate failure, which supports Evans’ view that France did not ultimately
play a unique role in influencing Deng. On the one hand, Bailey points
out that the affinities between French and Chinese culture, which were
“benign and humanistic” rather than dominant like the Anglo-Saxons,
made such collaborations such as Li’s work study program promising.28
However, France’s competitive motivation for these programs, which
constituted her effort to combat the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon
28
Bailey. “The Chinese Work-Study Movement in France.” 453.
influence on the Chinese, detracts from the cross-cultural project.29

Finally, the failure of the programs in France, as seen in the lack of
funding of the Chinese students’ education and in the poor working and
living conditions endured by the Chinese students, accounts for France’s
failed attempt to counter Anglo-Saxon hegemony or to shape the Chinese.
Though Massonnet fictionalizes the entrance of the French pancake
into China, the crepe is a variation on a theme found throughout the “east”
as well as the “west.” The crepe symbolizes China’s opening up toward
the world and introduction to capitalism. Chen’s embracing of the French
pancake exemplifies China’s then newfound receptiveness to non-Chinese
nations, and particularly “western” ones, but a specialty of many a western
nation, such as Italian pizza, might have played this role just as well.
When he recounts the competition between nations in reaction to Chen’s
dying words, Massonnet goes so far as to come close to the suggestion that
McDonald’s hamburgers could have just as easily played the role of the
crepe: “les derniers mots du Timonier allaient déboucher sur un
renforcement des relations franco-chinoises. Pantois étaient les Américains:
pourquoi ‘the old guy’ ne s’était-il pas éteint en commandant un ‘dubble-
cheese’?” [The last words of the Tillerman were going to open up a
reinforcement of Franco-Chinese relations. The Americans were
dumbfounded: why didn’t ‘the old guy’ expire while ordering a ‘dubble-
cheese’?] (132). Massonnet’s near-comparison of crepes to McDonald’s
hamburgers hyperbolizes the low status of crepes.
Evans’ underscoring of Deng’s role in opening China up to the world,
rather than to France in particular, harks back to Francis Deron’s
assessment of Deng’s politics in an article in Le Monde upon his death: “A
l'initiative de Deng Xiaoping, la Chine s'est spectaculairement ouverte sur
le monde à la fin des années 70. La quête des capitaux et des techniques,
pour alimenter son développement, n'était pas la seule motivation” [At
Deng Xiaoping’s initiative, China opened itself spectacularly to the world
at the end of the 70s. The search for capital and techniques, to feed its
development, wasn’t the only motivation]. 30 Deron’s use of the word
“alimenter” resonates with Massonnet’s writing of political commentary
through cuisine in his story. China historian Jonathan Spence echoes both
Deron’s and Massonnet’s interpretations of Deng’s movement from
communism toward capitalism:
“While Mao is now mainly associated with the idea of revolutionary
excess and periods of colossal suffering, Deng has come to be linked to
29
Ibid.
30
Deron, “Un retour tumultueux”, 1.
18 Chapter One
China's astonishing economic development, and to the steering of China

away from its Leninist and Maoist organizational straitjacket into a wider
world of technological growth and international trade.”31
Deng’s French experiences offer a historical explanation for “Le Grand

Dirigeant’s” taste for crepes, which in turn represent his political leanings
away from communism toward capitalism and “The West.” The Great
Leader appreciates Chen’s crepes, giving them high compliments: “Même
réchauffées, tes crêpes et tes galettes sont un délice…” [Even reheated,
your crepes and galettes are a delight] (166). Given the taboo against the
reheating of crepes, the “most illustrious” ruler’s praise is high. However,
there is one caveat to it: “Mais, si je peux me permettre, ton chocolat, c’est
pas ça. Nous l’importerons” [But, if I may permit, your chocolate, it
doesn’t cut it. We’ll import it.] (166). Then he repeats his
abovementioned dictum, “We must take what is good from the West, no?”
(166). The leader’s views on the inferiority of Chinese chocolate are
consistent with his assessment of the flour of his country:
“Du chocolat importé discrètement, comme les farines. Le blé chinois
n’était pas assez noble pour réussir les crêpes. Quant au chocolat de la
République populaire, le vieil homme se demandait comment ses ouailles
pouvaient se régaler avec une pâte de cacao sucrée comme une barbe à
papa et indigeste comme un gâteau de lune rassis. Fallait-il qu’ils aiment
la patrie!” [Chocolate imported discreetly, like the flour. Chinese wheat
isn’t noble enough to make crepes successfully. As for the People’s
Republic’s chocolate, the old man wondered how his flock could revel in a
chocolate as sugary as cotton candy and as indigestible as a stale moon
cake. They would really have to love the fatherland!] (136)
The Grand Dirigeant privileges high quality food over “native” ingredients
and products. He favors Swiss chocolate over the overly sweet, artificial,
cotton candy-like Chinese version, and unabashedly so. Still, the
chocolate needs to be imported “discreetly,” like the ten kilos of flour that
Chen brings home from France, not without raising the suspicions of
French customs officers (155-56). The discretion that must be exercised in
importing foreign ingredients suggests the illicitness of culinary infidelity
and the betrayal of one’s nation (buying foreign), consistent with the
obligatory clandestinity of the Chinese head-of-state having a private
crepe chef. As the fictional creation of a Frenchman, in a comic story no
less, Massonnet’s Great Leader may be more open than an actual Chinese
politician to accepting his own country’s weaknesses – even culinary ones
31
Spence, “60 Years of Asian Heroes.” [Unpaginated electronic article].
– or in any case declaring them openly. However, the need to import

ingredients in order to make “foreign cuisine” is typical, as in the
importation of Japanese flour to make soba noodles in United States
restaurants,32 or chocolate chips to make tollhouse cookies in France.
Quality versus Caché

In addition to ingredients, Chen must import utensils and equipment,
suggesting the cultural specificity of the tools required. The difficulty
manipulating forks versus baguettes foreshadows Chen’s need for a
specifically French piece of equipment to make crepes in China, even
though he concedes to awaiting the ability to make that purchase:
“Quand la crêperie tournerait à plein régime, j’avais prévu d’installer une
véritable crêpière électrique, importée. Pour l’instant, j’en étais réduit à
me servir d’une simple poêle. Mais qui n’attachait pas. Choisie par Ling
dans un magasin spécialisé de la rue Montmartre. J’avais voulu en acheter
une en grande surface, mais mon ami m’en avait dissuadé. ‘Un bon
travailleur travaille avec des bons outils’, répétait-il chaque fois que nous
évoquions mon projet hallucinant. J’étais convaincu par sa sagesse, mais
pas habitué à payer pour la qualité. Je craquai quand même pour une
bonne poêle et Ling pour sa soeur jumelle, dans une boutique aux articles
de cuivre rutilants, agencés comme des pièces de musée. Le goût
français.” [When the creperie got going full force, I anticipated installing a
true electric crepe maker, imported. For the moment, I was reduced to
using a simple pan. But it was non-stick. Chosen by Ling in a specialty
store on the rue Montmartre. I had wanted to buy one in a supermarket,
but my friend dissuaded me. ‘A good worker works with good tools,’ he
repeated every time we mentioned this delirious project. I was convinced
by his wisdom, but not used to paying for quality. I broke down
nevertheless and bought a good pan and Ling bought its twin sister, in a
boutique with items made of shiny copper, displayed like museum pieces.
French taste.] (153)
Chen’s difficulty digesting the French valuing of quality over price in

terms of equipment echoes his indigestion at the prices of restaurants in
France. Once again, Ling serves as cultural translator to impress upon his
friend the importance of the quality of his professional tools. Even while
awaiting the bigger purchase and importation of it, Chen does adapt to the
“French way,” inculcated to him by Ling, in purchasing an upscale pan
from a specialty store rather than a cheaper, supermarket variety. The
French value aesthetics as well as functionality, as reflected by the display
32
Los Angeles Times, August 24, 2005, F1.
20 Chapter One
and the sheen of the material of the objects exhibited. Of course, the
question remains whether the object in question is any better from the one
sold at the supermarket, with the possibility that the display alone accounts
for the price differential.
Similarly, one might ask whether the caché of the French chef plays
upon a myth rather than reflects better cooking. Indeed, as Chef Gusteau
says in the hit animated film Ratatouille, (2007) “anybody can cook,”
meaning that it is not social class, nationality or gender that makes one a
good cook. It follows that neither birthplace nor nationality renders a
person a good cook of his or her nation's cuisine. Chen’s critique of the
authenticity of the French Chinatown’s Chinese restaurants based on the
ethnicities of the cooks is, accordingly, not compelling: “Et pour cause, les
compatriotes venaient du Sud ou, carrément, du Viêt-nam ou du
Cambodge” [And, for good reason, the compatriots came from the South,
or, frankly, Vietnam or Cambodia] (140). That said, training certainly
comes into play, suggesting that a Chinese chef can learn to cook French
cuisine – or vice versa. Interestingly, despite the need to import authentic
French equipment, utensils and ingredients from the source, the “numéro
un chinois” chooses a Chinese “crêpier” rather than a French one. It is
ironic that Chen assumes the role of a crêpier after criticizing Chinese food
in Paris on the grounds that it is made in establishments run by Cambodian
and Vietnamese and presumably cooked by them. Ultimately, though, he
concedes—oddly tossing a Chinese ethnicity into the mix of nationalities--
that even if the duck served in Chinese restaurants in Belleville is
“laquered” in Cantonese style, it offers him a change from French food.
The Great Leader’s trans-cultural hire represents a fantasy as much as does
the very idea that Chen introduced crepes to China, when the Chinese have
their own version of them, and when they have been found on menus in
French and western restaurants for several years even if they have only
recently begun to merit dedicated establishments.
French restaurants in China—as elsewhere for that matter—tend to be
upscale, and French chefs, even more than French-trained Chinese chefs,
are considered a status symbol which attract customers to their restaurants.
However, such reputations are problematic. The abovementioned Daniel
Boulud, “one of the world’s most recognised French chefs,” according to
the English language Time Out Beijing Guide, “is making a splash as the
first global celebrity chef to set up shop in China’s capital.”33 According to
the Time Out guide:
33
Lin-Liu.
“Boulud, like many celebrity chefs, has been plotting his entry into Asia
for years in order to take advantage of what he calls a ‘growth market.’
Jean Georges has gone to Shanghai, Joel Robuchon has chosen Macau and
Alain Ducasse is in Hong Kong. Why has Boulud chosen Beijing? ‘It
could just as easily have been Shanghai or Hong Kong,’ he says.”34
Time Out’s characterization of this “chef that everybody wants and wants
to be” whose “mini-empire” focuses on New York and extends to Palm
Beach and abroad, to Vancouver, evokes imperialism. If “entry into Asia”
suggests conquest, Boulud’s equation of Shanghai, Hong Kong and
Beijing exemplifies orientalism. Consistently, Boulud refuses to translate
his cuisine to China and indeed argues that common tastes make that
unnecessary: “He says he will not water down his unabashedly French
cuisine – he calls it French ‘soul food’, for a Chinese audience. It helps, he
says, that the French and Chinese share a love for pig’s trotters and
tripe.”35 These last two ingredients are not coincidentally precisely those
which Chen puts in his previously mentioned crepes, which I dubbed
“sinified.”
Resistance to the translation of French cuisine for the Chinese clientele
of Boulud’s Beijing restaurant makes sense in the case of the much lower
class French dish that is the crepe. As French crepes are translated for the
Chinese palate, they converge on Chinese pancakes, making two distinct
dishes into one, or at least blurring those boundaries. Modifying any
national cuisine to satisfy the palate of clientele from the target country
might be said to compromise the authenticity of the cuisine. However, as
Chen himself concedes, the inauthentic Chinese food in Belleville
restaurants still offers a refreshing (and less expensive) change from
French food. If an American cannot tolerate the spice quotient of an
authentic Sichuan Chinese or Indian dish, should s/he be denied all access
to such food, or is a modified version an acceptable compromise? Even
when certain translated national cuisine is not “authentic,” is it not worth
eating, and can it not even be good? If one requires “truly authentic”
cuisine and nothing less – or simply different—one should travel to the
source.
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid.
22 Chapter One
Conclusions
Ironically, Massonnet’s story says a lot about food despite itself. I say
“ironically,” because of course its title and its plot suggest that the story is
about food. However, it is far more about politics than about food.
Massonnet tells us from the get go that, “La crêpe n’était donc qu’un
pretexte” [The crepe was only a pretext] (135). The Great Leader’s last
words are “beurre sucre,” but we never know whether he has time to eat
that last crepe before his death. The words themselves, and the way that
they are consumed by the world, are more important than the butter sugar
pancake in question, consistent with Ferguson’s insistence on the
importance of culinary discourse, the semantics and linguistics of the
culinary: “French cuisine also stands apart not simply as a set of culinary
practices, but as a grammar, a rhetoric of that practice, a discursive
space.”36 The words “beurre sucre” mean nothing to the Chinese not only
if they do not know English, and thus the words are foreign, but also
because the concept (and content) of butter is unfamiliar to them: “La
plupart des Chinois n’avaient jamais beurré quoi que ce soit de leur vie!
La plupart ignoraient jusqu’à l’existence du mot ‘beurre’” [Most Chinese
had never buttered anything in their life! Most were not even aware of the
existence of the word ‘butter’] (132). Yet the words, rather than the crepe,
smelled good: “l’expression sentait bon” (132). Not purely aesthetic,
however, the expression smelled good because of its political implications:
“Elle sonnait come un slogan. Et allait le devenir. Quelques jours plus
tard, des millions d’ouvriers, de paysans et d’intellectuels défilaient au
seul cri de ‘Beurre sucre, beurre sucre!’” [It sounded like a slogan. It was
going to become one. A few days later, millions of workers, peasants and
intellectuals marched to the cry ‘Butter sugar, butter sugar!’] (132)
Massonnet creates political satire when he asks: “Quelle était la

signification politique de ce nouveau mouvement de masse? Etait-il
durable? Un marionnettiste tirait-il les ficelles en coulisses?” [What was
the political significance of this new mass movement? Would it last? Was
a puppeteer pulling the strings in the wings?] (132).
Even the gourmet Great Leader with a taste for crepes manipulated the
situation politically, rather than taking it as a purely culinary phenomenon,
if such a thing exists. He chooses Chen not purely based on his ability to
make crepes, or even that know-how combined with the success of his
36
Ferguson, 9.
creperie, but also because of his former occupation and his transition to his
new one:
“Chen, vous êtes un modèle pour la jeunesse: un professeur à la retraite
qui devient entrepreneur. Oui, un modèle. Le travailleur modèle de
l’économie socialiste de marché! Un jour, cela se saura” [Chen, you are a
model for youth: a retired professor who became an entrepreneur. Yes, a
role model. A model worker for the socialist market economy. They’ll
hear of you one day.] (167)
Indeed, Massonnet does not portray Chen as a chef or even a cook, but as
someone engaged in a business venture born of the need to feed himself.
His efforts to make crepes are more like scientific experiments than artistic
creation.
Consistently, rather than about butter and sugar, the story is about
communism and capitalism. As Chen only later realizes, although he was
hired by the “Emperor” to give him culinary pleasure, he was also used as
a pawn to advance the Great Leader’s political and economic agendas,
even posthumously:
“Le Grand Dirigeant m’avait parrainé à mon insu. Dès le début. Pariant
sur ma réussite et envoyant son secrétaire en éclaireur pour goûter ma
cuisine. Pendant plus de trois ans, j’avais été son crêpier fantôme pour
satisfaire sa gourmandise. Je fus aussi son dernier pion pour qu’il mette en
scène sur son lit de mort son ultime facétie politique: ‘Beurre sucre!
Beurre sucre!’, ‘Que cent crêperies rivalisent!’, ‘Il est glorieux de
s’enrichir en faisant des crepes!’, ‘Prenons exemple sur le camarade
[
crêpier!’” The Great Leader supported my efforts without my knowing it.
From the start. Betting on my success and sending his secretary as a scout
to taste my cuisine. For more than three years, I was the phantom crepe
chef to satisfy his gourmandise. I was also the final pawn in the final
political jest staged from his death bed: ‘Butter sugar! Butter sugar!’, ‘May
one hundred creperies compete!’, ‘It’s glorious to get rich from making
crepes!’, ‘Lets take the camarade crepe chef as our role model!’] (168)
The Deng-inspired character’s death constitutes a political event leading to

further economic change, though presumably not in the hundred creperies
competing with each other, as per the vision anticipated by the dying
leader. Instead, the “seule véritable conséquence de cette campagne
politique inédite dans les annales de l’histoire du monde” [the only true
consequence of this political campaign never before recorded in the
history of the world] was the opening of hundreds of franchises of Chen’s
creperie in China (168). So, rather than competition, we have something
24 Chapter One
closer to a monopoly, but also the proliferation of French crepes

appropriated by the Chinese, in restaurants named after a Chinese crêpier.
Although I have suggested that “La crêperie de Pekin” is not only
about food, I will also concede that this statement is a truism, as cuisine
always and necessarily embodies more than its ingredients—and indeed,
even its ingredients are complex and have political, social, historical,
economic, cultural as well as gustatory resonances. The culinary
represents both the individual, whether it takes the form of the chef, the
region or the nation, and the collective (e.g. gathering at a table to eat a
meal together). Crepes reflect French regionalism (Brittany); represent
Frenchness; and speak to the class implications of food. They also
embody the fluidity of such class implications: when crepes leave France,
they become exotic, embody “Frenchness” and become more upscale and
expensive (rather than inexpensive) relative to other local options. Crepes
also forge Franco-Chinese connections. In Massonnet’s story, crepes
connect the French and the Chinese in Chen’s creperie and through the
symbolic figure of the Great Leader. Such Franco-Chinese connections
also come about through Chinese venues serving French crepes, and in the
resonances between Chinese pancakes and French crepes. Crepes not only
constitute accessible cuisine, available on the streets of Paris as of Beijing,
but they also provide a form of food that transcends Franco-Chinese
connections and links many different nations with their own variations on
this culinary theme. They constitute both French fare and transnational
cuisine.
If we take Chinese openness to the West for granted today,
Massonnet’s fictional vision, which mirrors the reality of the international
restaurant scene and franchises in Chinese metropolises today, represents
the results of Deng’s embracing of capitalism--for better or for worse.
Massonnet’s story uses humor to show the crucial political, social,
economic, historic, linguistic and, yes, culinary resonances of food in
forging cross-cultural relations, as well as embodies the role of literature in
mediating Franco-Chinese interactions and (mis)understandings.
Indeed, the same issue of accessibility versus authenticity in the
translation of cuisine applies to the translation of literary works. “La
crêperie de Pékin” itself is, as already noted, thus far inaccessible to
anyone who does not read French. Even if French crepes in China do not
measure up to those made in France, importing them is a worthy cross-
cultural and cross-culinary endeavor. Similarly, the translation of
Massonnet’s story will distance the non-French reading audience from at
least some of the nuances of the original text, at the same time making the
text accessible to this audience. Despite the definitional loss in translation,
making foreign texts, and food, available to foreign audiences is certainly

worth the cost.
Bibliography
Bailey, Paul. “The Chinese Work-Study Movement in France,” China
Quarterly 115 (September 1988), 441-61.
Barman, Genviève, and Doulioust, Nicole. “Les années françaises de Deng
Xiaoping.” Vingtième siècle. Revue de l’histoire 20, (Oct-Dec 1988):
17-34.
Barthes, Roland. Empire of Signs. Translated by Richard Howard. New
York: Hill and Wang, 1983.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by
Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken
Books, 1969.
Bnet Business Network. “Crepes: Art Culinaire.” Bnet.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JAW/is_2001_Fall/ai_79805067
Carre Chen, Bleuenn. “Philippe Massonnet, ou un patchwork tendre de la
société chinoise.” Comme à la maison 3 (June 4, 2008),
http://www.chine-informations.com/actualite/philippe-massonnet-ou-
un-patchwork-tendre-de-la-societe-chinoise_9614.html.
Chen, Xiaomei. Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-
Mao China. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Deron, Francis. “Un retour tumultueux sur la scène du monde; le règne de
Deng Xiaoping aura été celui de l'amélioration des avec les autres
nations.” Le Monde (February 21, 1997): 1-3. http://www.lexis-
nexis.com/.
“epicurean.com.” “Crêpes: Adapted from Lou Seibert Pappas’ Crêpes.”
http://www.epicurean.com/articles/crepes.html
Evans, Richard. Deng Xiaoping and the Making of Modern China. New
York: Viking, 1994.
Ferguson, Pricilla Parkhurst. Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of
French Cuisine. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004.
Gao, Xingjian. One Man’s Bible: A Novel. Trans. Mabel Lee. New
York: HarperCollins, 2002.
Hamburger, Käte. The Logic of Literature. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1973.
La Capra, Dominick. Madame Bovary on Trial. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1982.
26 Chapter One
Lin-Liu, Jen. “Boulud-y Marvellous.” Timeout Beijing, 2007,

http://www.timeout.com/cn/en/beijing/restaurants/feature/5354/boulud
-y-marvellous.html.
Liu, Lydia. Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global
Circulations. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
Massonnet, Philippe. La crêperie de Pékin, et autres nouvelles de Chine.
Paris: Aube, 2003.
Spence, Jonathan. “Deng Xiaoping: The Maoist Who Reinvented
Himself, Transformed a Nation, and Changed the World.” Time, 2006,
http://www.time.com/time/asia/2006/heroes/nb_deng.html.
Tebben, Maryann. “French Food Texts and National Identity: Consommé,
Cheese Soufflé, Francité?” In You Are What You Eat: Literary Probes
into the Palate, edited by Annette M. Magid, 168-189. Cambridge:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.
Wang, Ning. Globalization in Cultural Translation. Materializing China.
Singapore: Marshall Canvendish Academic, 2004.
The Worldwide Gourmet. “Crêpes bretonnes: Brittany-Style Pancakes
Recipe.”Recipes.
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brittany-style-pancakes/
1900. DVD. Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, 1976. Hollywood, CA:
Paramount, 2006.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. DVD. Directed by Dai Sijie,
2001. New York, NY: First Run Features, 2005.
Chocolat. DVD. Directed by Lasse Hallström, 2000. New York, NY:
Miramax, 2001.
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Life is Beautiful. DVD. Directed by Robert Benigni, 1998. New York,
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Wasabi. DVD. Directed by Gérard Krawczyk, 2001. Culver City, CA:
Sony Pictures, 2003.
CHAPTER TWO
CULINARY JANE:
AUSTEN’S DOMESTIC DISCOURSE
CHRISTOPHER WILKES
In the world of domestic intimacy that Jane Austen fashions for us,
food, its production, preparation and consumption, appears almost
nowhere, at least in the novels themselves.1 But there is a complex moral
economy that surrounds food, and its analysis tells us much of the broader
social and economic hierarchies that swirled around the Austen families,
as they engaged in a struggle for social recognition and social
maintenance. When we take the Austen films into account, this analysis
gains sharpness and detail, and makes what is often inferred in the novels
become very clear indeed.
This paper examines the social meaning of these culinary habits, first
in the letters of Jane Austen herself, then through the novels themselves,
and finally through their filmic counterparts. I set these accounts in the
wider context of the economy of the late Georgian and Regency period, a
larger environment that we often neglect. So, using Bourdieu’s theoretical
schema as an aide, I interpret these infinitely small practices in the larger

1
As a first take, Maggie Lane’s Jane Austin and Food (Hambledon Press, London,
1995) is a thorough introduction to the use of food in her novels. See also Olsen,
K. (2005). Cooking with Jane Austen, Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood
Press. A book that outlines the kind of recipes and meals that might have been
served in the Austen household is The Jane Austen Cookbook, by Maggie Black
and Deidre Le Faye (McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Canada, 1995). Even
closer to home, Martha Lloyd’s recipes, a woman who lived with the family for
many years, are kept in a ‘Household Book’, available only in manuscript, but
many of her recipes are repeated in the Black and Le Faye book. Black and Le
Faye also tell us a second volume of recipes was compiled by Mrs. Philip Lybbe
Powys, a friend of Mrs. George Austen. Austen family names were attached to
some of these recipes. Together with more general histories of the time, we can
reconstruct much of what is likely to have occurred at the Austen table.
28 Chapter Two
frame of social history. I argue that culinary practice is one of the

overlooked elements of the Austen account of social distinction, and that a
new look at her work, and the films that the work inspired, provides
different understandings of her period.
The Letters and the Household

Even a cursory glance at Jane Austen’s letters tells us that she was
heavily involved in finding food and managing the kitchen. Yet there’s
very little sign of this activity in her novels. She was a woman of limited
means. She came from a parson’s family, but when he died, she, her
mother and her sister had few resources. She had a wealthy brother,
indeed, but for most of her life she lived in conditions of genteel poverty,
conditions which are reflected, for example, in the life of the four women
in Sense and Sensibility when they lose their family house. Given her
conditions of near-poverty, it is not surprising that she and her close
family members were pre-occupied with collecting and managing food.
It was commonplace for individual households of the period to keep
their own recipe books, and for those same households to specialize in
certain foods.2 But the daily organization of mealtimes was quite different
from the timetable we now recognize, and, of course, it was dramatically
shaped by class and social position. Hours of daylight regulated the
domestic household3 much more directly. Households rose at seven or
eight, and much business was conducted before ten, when breakfast was
often taken. The ‘morning’ then extended into what we now call the
afternoon, and a meal called ‘dinner’ was commonly taken at three or four
in the afternoon:
…during these ‘morning’ hours ladies would drive out to pay calls or go
shopping, while the gentlemen continued to pursue the duties of their
estates or profession. Dinner lasted about two hours; in summer a gentle
stroll in the grounds or to some urban promenade might follow, while in
winter the family and guests would gather round the fire in the drawing
room for cards, conversation, perhaps impromptu music and dancing, until
tea, accompanied by cakes or similar light refreshments were served there
at about eight o’clock … there might yet be a supper-tray brought in with
wine and further cold food, about eleven o’clock or midnight. (Black and
Le Faye, pages 8-9)

2
Black and Le Faye, op. cit. See also Olsen, 2005.
3
Black and Le Faye, pages 8ff.
Culinary Jane: Austen’s Domestic Discourse 29
Fashion and level in the social hierarchy dictated the time of meals, the
later the meal, the more fashionable, because it indicated social distance
from the acquiescence to desire and appetite. During the day, light
refreshments and tea might be offered to callers. Meals were often served
at a single moment, with all the food on the table at once:
As far as our Georgian ancestors were concerned, as soon as they walked
into the dining-room they saw before them a table already covered with
separate dishes of every kind of food – soup, fish, meat, game, poultry,
pies, vegetables, sauces, pickles, sweet and savoury puddings, custards and
jellies – in number anything from five to twenty-five items, depending
upon the grandeur of the occasion, and arranged symmetrically around the
centre dish; this spread constituted a course – and even then formed only
part of the dinner. (Black and Le Faye, page 11)
Men and women separated after such a meal, the time of separation
reducing during the Georgian period. But meals of this substance were
clearly the domain of middle and upper class families, in which world
Austen resided, or hoped to reside. In Austen’s time, most food was local,
and many items were produced in the home and the surrounding
community. Those with more resources provided poorer relations and
neighbours with gifts of food routinely. Most country houses of any size
had poultry, producing meat and eggs. Milk cows were common, and
milk, cheese and cream were plentiful. Vegetables and fruit were
available seasonally. Many forms of preservation, whether ‘… salting,
pickling, drying, potting, candying, jamming, cheese-making, brewing,
wine-making …’4 took place during the summer months to ensure a year-
round supply of various foods.
Jane Austen liked to eat, and she liked to be involved with domestic
arrangements concerning food. There are mentions of food in almost
every letter she wrote, often as a backdrop to a social engagement, a
dance, or a gathering of neighbours and friends:
We sat(e) down to dinner a little after five and had some beef-steaks and a
boiled fowl, but no oyster sauce. (Wednesday October 24, 1798, letter to
Cassandra Austen)…5

4
Black and Le Faye, page 17.
5
These letters come from Jane Austen’s Letters (New Edition), collected and
edited by Deirdre Le Faye, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1995.
This is from pages 14-15.
30 Chapter Two
Mr. Lyford was here yesterday; he came while we were at dinner, and
partook of our elegant entertainment. I was not ashamed at asking him to
sit down to table, for we had some pease-soup, a sparerib and a pudding.
(To Cassandra Austen, Saturday 1-Sunday 2 December, 1798, pages 23-4)
We shall be with you on Thursday to a very late Dinner – later I suppose

than my Father will like for himself – but I give him leave to eat one
before. You must give us something very nice, for we are used to live
well. (To Cassandra Austen, Post-script, June 19, 1800, pages 48-49)
When you receive this, our guests will be all gone or going: and I shall be
left to the comfortable disposal of my time, to ease of mind from the
torments of rice puddings and apple dumplings, … (Captain Foote) …
dined with us on Friday, and I fear will not soon venture again, for the
strength of our dinner was a boiled leg of mutton, underdone even for
James; and Captain Foote has a particular dislike to underdone mutton; but
he was so good-humored and pleasant that I did not mind much his being
starved. (Letter to Cassandra Austen, Wednesday 7-Thursday 8 January
1807, page 115)
The Hattons’ & Milles’ dine here today-& I shall eat Ice and drink French
wine, & be above Vulgar Economy. (Letter to Cassandra Austen, Thursday
30 June-Friday 1 July, 1808, page 139)
But she also liked to manage the provisions and the wine cellar when
possible:
I carry about the keys of the Wine & Closet; & twice since began this
letter, have had orders to give in the Kitchen: Our dinner was very good
yesterday, & the Chicken boiled perfectly tender; therefore I shall not be
obliged to dismiss Nanny on that account. (Letter to Cassandra Austen,
Saturday 27-Sunday 28 October, 1798, page 17)
My mother desires me to tell you that I am a very good housekeeper,

which I have no reluctance in doing because I really think it my peculiar
excellence, and for this reason – I always take care to provide such things
as please my own appetite, which I consider as the chief merit in
housekeeping. I have some ragout veal, and I mean to have some haricot
mutton tomorrow. We are to kill a pig soon … I am very fond of
experimental housekeeping, such as having an ox-cheek now and then; I
shall have one next week, and I mean to have some little dumplings put
into it. (Letter to Cassandra Austen, Saturday 17-Sunday 18 November,
1798, page 20)
… I endeavour as far as I can to supply your place, & be useful & keep
things in order: I detect dirt in the Water-decanter as fast as I can, and give
the Cook physic (medicine), which she throws off her Stomach. (Letter to
Cassandra Austen, Friday 14 September 1804, page 93)
We began our China Tea three days ago, & I find it very good-my
companions know nothing of the matter. – As to Fanny, & her 12lb. in a
twelvemonths, she may talk until she is as black in the face as her own
Tea, but I cannot beleive her;-more likely 12lb. to a quarter. (Letter to
Cassandra Austen, Friday May 31st 1811, page 191)
She kept her eye on the cost of produce when required:
Meat is only 8d. per pound, butter 12d & cheese 9 ½d. … the exorbitant
price of Fish (however) – a salmon has been sold at 2s. 9d. per pound the
whole fish. (Letter to Cassandra Austen, Tuesday 5-Wednesday 6 May,
1801, page 82)
But this was not a woman who cooked, as far as we can tell, nor kept a
recipe book of her own. As a member of the marginal middle class whose
personal well-being was dramatically affected by the death of her father in
1805, Jane Austen always lived in a house with servants, usually a cook,
but also maids, a nanny, and others to help around the house. Her
involvement in the kitchen usually focused on budgetary matters, on
arranging for the distribution and reception of fruit, meat and vegetables to
and from her own house, and on keeping an eye on the servants as they
prepared food.6
In particular, Jane Austen was a tea specialist. She delighted in getting
up early in the morning to play piano, write (usually letters) and make the
tea for the family. Wilson comments:
At 9 o’clock she made breakfast – that was her part of the household work
– the tea and the sugar stores were under her charge.(Wilson, 2004, page 3)7
Thus Austen was in charge of tea, a small art that took considerable
skill and touch. She liked to eat, and doubtless made the tea to suit her
palette. Wilson speculates that:

6
And Cassandra did most of the household management. Many of Jane Austen's
letters about her own management are to Cassandra, when Cassandra was absent
from the house.
7
The reference cites the memoir My Aunt Jane Austen, by Caroline Austen as the
origin of this comment. Published first in 1867, it was part of James Edward
Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen. (Oxford University Press, Oxford.)
From Tea with Jane Austen, Kim Wilson, Jones Books, Madison, Wisconsin,
2004.
32 Chapter Two
She would have made (the tea) much the way we make it today, with
freshly boiling water poured bubbling over high-quality loose tea in a nice
fat, warmed teapot. Jane probably would have boiled the water in the
Austens’ large, copper kettle right in the dining room, on the black hob
grate set into the fireplace. (Wilson, 2004, page 2)
Tea was probably served with sugar, but not necessarily with milk or
cream, though this is undocumented. Both tea and sugar were scarce and
expensive. There was an active black market in both commodities, so they
were both kept in locked cupboards, with Jane holding the key.8 The
Austens, even though living in modest circumstances, as we already know,
always had servants, and certainly had a cook. It was probable that the
sterner duties of the kitchen fell into the cook’s domain, including the
cooking for breakfast, though Wilson claims that Austen probably made
the toast for breakfast. Breakfast was usually a limited and informal event
during this period. People tended to drop in and out, read the paper, make
notes, and serve themselves food, a tradition carried into the 20th century

8
Tea, of course, has a complicated history of its own. Drunk in China three
millennia before Christ, it did not reach England until the late 1600s. It was first
sold through coffee houses, and its presence annoyed tavern owners because it
began to take the place of ale and liquor. One source argues that ‘ By 1750, tea
was the favored drink of the lower class’, but it is unlikely this remained the case
for long. The government, having suffered losses on tax income from liquor,
turned its attention to tea, which at one time was taxed at 119%, thus putting it out
of the reach of ordinary mortals. (See www.britainexpress.com/History/tea-in-
britain.htm, recovered November 6, 2008). Tea smuggling then rose up as a growth
industry until the intervention of the famous William Pitt the Younger, a minister
at 22, and Prime Minister by 24. He passed The Commutation Act of 1784, which
reduced the tax rate on tea to 12.5%. The origins of the ritual of ‘afternoon tea’ are
in this era. From the same source we find: ‘Afternoon tea is said to have
originated with one person; Anna, 7th Duchess of Bedford. In the early 1800's she
launched the idea of having tea in the late afternoon to bridge the gap between
luncheon and dinner, which in fashionable circles might not be served until 8
o'clock at night. This fashionable custom soon evolved into high tea among the
working classes, where this late afternoon repast became the main meal of the
day.’
Sugar came in large lumps and various grades, the ‘finest, white’ grade being
reserved for the well-to-do and high prices, the brown, coarse unrefined material
being more readily available. The phrase ‘one lump or two’ comes from this era,
and refers to the ‘snipping off’ of small pieces of sugar from a larger block with
sugar snipers, small tools designed for just this purpose.
in many ‘great houses’. Toast, muffins and rolls were probably the major
accompaniment to tea at breakfast.9
Austen’s own letters therefore reveal a series of insights into her
analysis of social categories, and the role that the culinary plays in her
assessment of the subtle games of hierarchy. While a recent film of the
life and times of Jane Austen10 shows Austen’s sister Cassandra up to her
elbows in chicken entrails, it’s hardly likely that Jane Austen spent much
of her time transforming the raw into the cooked. Like all women of her
class, the fight for position in the social hierarchy was a very serious battle
– she ensured that a thin layer of servants separated her and her family
from the necessity to clean, sweep, cook, kill animals or make beds.
Certainly she was interested in food, and she chose to be involved in
preparing breakfast to some extent. But the Austens had a cook, a maid
and several other servants most of the time, as far as we can tell, and thus
her culinary involvements were largely gestural and managerial in nature,
as they had to be if she were to continue to succeed at the edge of the
landed gentry, as commentators have suggested.11 The boundaries of

9
Wilson comments on the history of breakfast: ‘The typical “tea and toast”
breakfast that Jane Austen enjoyed was a relatively new invention. Traditionally,
British breakfasts had consisted of hearty fare that often included beef and ale. By
the end of the eighteenth century, however, many people, especially those of the
upper classes, considered such breakfasts to be antiquated and rustic. In the early
1700s, Queen Anne first set the mode of drinking tea for her morning meal,
preferring the light, refreshing drink to the heavy alcoholic beverages … Ladies
and gentlemen followed her lead, and tea soon became part of the truly fashionable
breakfast. To accompany the stylish new beverage, the upper classes developed a
taste for a more delicate breakfast, gradually abandoning meat and other heavier
breakfast foods.’ (Pages 7-8) The tradition of the heavy breakfast lingered on in
working class households, and, as we know, a ‘traditional English’ these days is
much more than tea and toast.
10
Miss Austen Regrets, BBC and WGBH Boston, 2008, directed by Jeremy
Lovering, and starring Greta Scacchi as Cassandra, and Olivia Williams as the 40
year old Jane Austen.
11
Jane Austen for Dummies, Joan Kline Ray, Wiley, Hoboken, 2006. Page 39.
Remember, of course, the swift rebuke that Mrs. Bennet gives to Mr. Collins in
Pride and Prejudice when he asks which of her daughters did the cooking:
The dinner … was highly admired, and he (Mr. Collins) begged to know to
which of his fair cousins the excellence of its cookery was owing. But here
he was set right by Mrs. Bennet, who assured him, with some asperity, that
they were well able to keep a good cook, and that her daughters had
nothing to do in the kitchen. He begged pardon for having displeased her.
In a softened tone she declared herself not at all offended; but he continued
to apologize for about a quarter of an hour. (Pride and Prejudice, 65)
34 Chapter Two
social class were closely protected at all times. Austen did like to eat, and
says so directly to her sister in one of her letters.12 Thus, her primary
impulse was to see that good food and good cooking reigned in the Austen
household, and that the day started well with a breakfast that she directed.
But she didn’t plan to spend her life looking after the kitchen; she had
better things to do, and so did her family. She had better have servants to
do the normal work of the kitchen, or there were consequences. People in
her social category simply didn’t do these things.
We also notice how deeply social the business of eating was at this
time, and in this social milieu. Most families of her rank and above
entertained all the time. People came and stayed, sometimes for months.
Thus the way the family ate, the kind of cutlery they used, the quality of
silver on show, the manners they displayed, and the china they could
afford were all matters of wide discussion and quotidian judgment, a
judgment so quickly made and so soon forgotten that it rapidly became
part of the social wallpaper of Georgian England. Jane herself went
visiting, sometimes for weeks on end. Relatives and friends of the
families came and went on a regular basis. Visits and stays in London
were common. The larger houses and estates were expected to play their
part as public arenas of discourse and ceremony. It was entirely
acceptable to visit the larger houses and ask for a tour of the house.
Indeed, in Austen’s time, this particular fashion became very popular, and
fees were often paid. Given these circumstances, the provision,
consumption and display of food became a central part of the schema of
social judgment that Austen and her contemporaries invoked on a daily
basis. Along with the goings-on at dances, the clothes that were being
worn, the furniture on display, and the nature of the landscaping efforts,
food played its part in setting people apart, and keeping social groups
together in their common customs. Thus both social distance and social
proximity were established and reproduced through these simple practices.
The Novels13
When we come to the novels themselves, these inferential differences
are much more clearly on display. But Lewis comments:
Jane Austen’s correspondence indicates that she was deeply interested in
food, which is not surprising as she was a woman of limited means and

12
Letter of 17-18 November, 1798 to her sister Cassandra.
13
The seminal work in this area is Jane Austen and Food, Maggie Lane,
Hambledon Press, 1995, London. I have drawn extensively on her work here.
therefore necessarily involved in its production. What is surprising is that

Austen’s quotidian culinary interests do not carry over into her fiction.
Indeed, she appears to use her novels to escape the tedious concerns of the
body, thus reinforcing the longstanding fairy tale food morality that deems
those who starve virtuous and those who consume ogres. (Lewis, 2006:1)14
On closer reading, there is actually a good deal of action in the novels

surrounding food, and it could not be otherwise in a genre that is so
powerfully domestic. Class plays a prominent role, for a start, and it leads
to extremes of behaviour. There are on the one hand, the piles of food, of
fruit especially, stacked high like miniature pyramids, as was the formal
style at banquets at large stately homes like Pemberley in Pride and
Prejudice, so much food, as it appears in the depictions of the day, that it
seems it would take an army to demolish it:
The next variation which their visit afforded was produced by the entrance
of servants with cold meat, cake, and a variety of all the finest fruits in
season … There was now employment for the whole party; for though
they could not all talk, they could all eat, and the beautiful pyramids of
grapes, nectarines, and peaches, soon collected them round the table.
(P&P, 268, cited in Lane, xii)15
Indeed class and appetite are largely inversely connected. Few upper
class women in these novels seem to eat at all. Consider the women in
Darcy’s circle as they sit endlessly not eating in their drawing rooms or
attending dances. They are surrounded by food, but make little use of it.
On the other hand, in Mansfield Park, the heroine, Fanny Price, having
dismayed the head of the household, is sent back to her original family in
Portsmouth, and there she sees humans eating at the trough like animals,
tearing at their food with their hands, starving and desperate to eat with
little available to them. Where the need is greatest, it seems the supply is
least. We can overstate this case, of course. Changes in the agriculture of
the early Georgian period meant that mass starvation was a thing of the
past, though irregularities and uncertain supplies had not ceased. But the
quality of food, the way it was prepared, and most especially, the fashion
in which people ate their food, was central to the social judgments of the

14
Tanya Lewis, a talk, Soup and Snobbery: Food in the Novels of Jane Austen, for
the Jane Austen Society, Vancouver, British Columbia, given on 8 April 2006, on
the occasion of Jane Austen Day, and quoted in summary at the Vancouver Jane
Austen website at jasnavancouver.ca/members/Soup_and_Snobbery_Summary.
pdf. I draw on her ideas in this section.
15
This version of Pride and Prejudice is R.W. Chapman’s third edition (Oxford
1923) of The Novels of Jane Austen.
36 Chapter Two
period. It is precisely because Mr. Hurst in Pride and Prejudice eats too
much and snores the rest of the time that we have little regard for him, and
think ill of his manners. He is a comedic figure. Similarly, the shame that
Elizabeth feels about some of the behaviors of her family, and especially
her mother, is not eased by the way in which Mrs. Bennet devours food
like a woman possessed at Sir William Lucas’s, party where Elizabeth
again meets Darcy.16 Thus it is not in the quantity of food that we see
social distinction, but rather in the way that the culinary world is fashioned
by custom, taste and judgment.
Second, the weight of this moral economy rests most heavily on
women.17 Men can eat like ravenous pigs, and still survive the barbs of
the social order. Mr. Hurst is not cast into outer darkness because he eats
barbarously. Yet he lacks all manners:
… as for Mr. Hurst, by whom Elizabeth sat, he was an indolent man, who
lived only to eat, drink, and play at cards, who when he found her prefer a
plain dish to a ragout had nothing to say to her. (Pride and Prejudice,
p.35)18
And men hunt, thus bringing them into direct contact with nature. But
for women, the capitals at stake are much more serious. As Lewis shows
us, Marianne, in Sense and Sensibility emaciates herself for love, and
hardly eats at all for weeks after. Willoughby has discarded her, but Lucy
Steele simultaneously ‘dreams greedily of cows and cream at Delaford’.19
Anne Elliott in Persuasion hardly ever eats, seeming apparently content to
feed others and look to their needs. But her sister Mary eats all the time,
and rarely considers others, even her injured son, who she abandons as
soon as she can once Anne is on the scene. Few have a healthy, balanced
approach to their eating, though Mrs. Jennings, in Lewis’s view, may be
an exception, a woman who eats a deal, but is essentially kind and selfless.
She is a rarity in the Austen novels. There are many more examples of
gluttony on the one hand and abstinence on the other.
Indeed, Lane reminds us that:

16
Pride and Prejudice, pages 24. This outburst of ‘eating’ is not depicted in the
book, but rather in the 1995 BBC TV film.
17
Lane, op. cit., spends a whole chapter, chapter four, on this theme in her book.
(pages 77-100) The chapter is titled ‘Greed and Gender.’
18
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, with introduction and notes by Carol Howard,
Barnes and Noble Classics, New York, 2003.
19
Lewis, page 1, op, cit.
Jane Austen was not quite twelve years old when the Reverend John
Trusler’s book The Honours of the Table for the Use of Young People was
published … Trusler declares, with perfect seriousness, that to eat very
much ‘is now deemed indelicate in a lady, for her character should be
divine rather than sensual’.20
Austen was closely attuned to the absurdity of these attitudes, but she
also understood their power. However absurd they might be, they still
carried the force of social convention with them. Lane imagines, and I
think rightly so, that Austen took the middle ground on these issues.
Noble indifference to food implies an insult. High thoughts depended on
full stomachs, and such attitudes implicitly demeaned those who struggled
to make ends meet, and to feed their families. This very struggle might be
considered unworthy, yet to those engaged in the struggle, there was very
little choice. Austen’s view seems to have been that a moderate and
steady supply of food was all that was needed. The excesses of
Pemberley, that we assume Elizabeth Bennet will moderate when she
takes control, ( I always imagine Jennifer Ehle running things there to this
day) are unnecessary. In the same light, the daily struggle so many faced
for adequate provision was equally reprehensible to her.21
Several writers comment on the difference between the so-called
Juvenilia22 and the more mature work. The argument we are given in a

20
Cited in Lane, page 77. The reference is to John Trusler, The Honours of the
Table for the Use of Young People (London, 1787) further cited in Elizabeth
Burton, The Georgians at Home, (London, 1967) page 196. Lane’s line of
argument is that while Austen might ridicule this distinction between the ‘divine’
and the ‘sensual’, many of her heroines were closer to the divine than to the
sensual.
21
Lane also comments: ‘Of all writers she is the one who seems ready to eschew
physical detail in order to concentrate on a higher plane of existence altogether.
Her most esteemed characters are rarely if ever preoccupied with ‘the mean and
indelicate employment of eating and drinking’. They eat to live, but certainly not
live to eat. To take an interest in food in a Jane Austen novel is to be almost
certainly condemned as frivolous, selfish or gross. (Lane, op. cit., page 78)
22
These works are collected in The Works of Jane Austen, vi. Minor Works, edited
by R. W. Chapman. (2nd. Edition reprinted with corrections, Oxford, 1979). They
include an unfinished fragment called The Watsons, a finished work in letters
called Lady Susan, four short pieces on male heroes, three short plays, and a series
of letters. Between 12 and 15, she wrote Amelia Webster and The Three Sisters, the
first a romance though letters, the second an account of sisterly rivalry. She also
wrote a history of England when she was 15, as well as The Beautiful Cassandra,
the tale of a ‘pleasure-loving female’, The Three Sisters, a precursor to Pride and
Prejudice, Evelyn, the tale of unrepentant male egoism, and Frederic & Elfrida,
38 Chapter Two
general sense is that her ‘young works’, as we might anticipate, lack the
sophistication and subtlety of the canonized texts of maturity. Thus here
we see women more clearly eating huge meals or eating nothing at all.23
Such extremes are largely elided in the later novels:
After the Juvenilia, Jane Austen imposes on herself a greater delicacy in
her handling of food. Her art becomes more subtle; her characterization
less crude, her satire more oblique. (Lane, 82)
The powerful theme of ‘divine’ abstinence is exemplified by Marianne

in Sense and Sensibility.24 In an archetypical section of the book,
Marianne feeds her grief at the realization that her life with Willoughby is
not to be, by disdaining food entirely, as if her banishment from society
also requires her to destroy herself through self-imposed emaciation:
At breakfast, she neither ate nor attempted to eat anything … As this was a
favourite meal with Mrs. Jennings, it lasted a considerable time … (S&S,
131)25
Mrs. Jennings … returned to Marianne, whom she found attempting to rise

from the bed, and whom she reached just in time to prevent her from
falling on the floor, faint and giddy from a long want of proper rest and
food; for it was many days since she had any appetite, and many nights
since she had really slept; and now, when her mind was no longer
supported by the fever of suspense, the consequence of all this was felt in
an aching head, a weakened stomach, and general nervous faintness. A

which focuses on proprieties. Most interestingly, perhaps, is Catharine or the
Bower, her first serious attempt at fiction, and a clear precursor to her ‘serious’
work. This list should give pause to those who accuse Jane Austen of low
productivity. An excellent commentary on some elements of this early collection
is provided by G.K. Chesterton in his The Apostle and the Wild Ducks/Jane
Austen’s Juvenilia, to be found in Dorothy E. Collins’ (edited) Selected Essays of
G.K. Chesterton, Methuen, London, 1949. Chesterton was a fan, and championed
her cause against the so-called great male writers, Coleridge and Carlyle, of her
period. He said:
Jane Austen was not inflamed or inspired or even moved to be a genius;
she simply was a genius. Her fire, what there was of it, began with herself;
like the fire of the first man who rubbed two sticks together. (page 3 of 4,
at en.wikisource.org/wiki/The Apostle and the Wild Ducks, recovered
November 11, 2008)
23
Lane, op. cit., page 79ff.
24
Lane 83ff.
25
The edition is Sense and Sensibility, Wordsworth Classics, Jane Austen, with
illustrations by Hugh Thomson, Ware, 1995.
glass of wine, which Eleanor procured for her directly, made her more
comfortable … (S&S, 134)
Had not Elinor, in the sad countenance of her sister, seen a check to all
mirth, she could have been entertained by Mrs. Jennings’s endeavours to
cure a disappointment in love, by a variety of sweetmeats and olives …
‘Poor soul!’ cried Mrs. Jennings, as soon as she was gone, ‘how it grieves
me to see her! And I declare if she is not gone away with finishing her
wine! And the dried cherries too! Lord! nothing seems to do her any good.
I am sure, if I knew of anything she would like, I would send all over town
for it. (S&S, 140-141)
Mrs. Jennings, for whom food is a central pleasure, rushes around in

circles, believing deep in her heart that there must be something – a glass
of wine, an exotic treat from the mid-east, an olive, a Madeira, a fruit -
something in all of London, that will tempt the palette and bring Marianne
round:
‘My dear,’ … ‘I have just recollected that I have some of the finest old
Costantia wine in the house that ever was tasted – so I have brought a
glass of it for your sister. My poor husband! How fond he was of it!
Whenever he had a touch of his old cholicky gout, he said it did him more
good than anything else in the world. Do take it to your sister.’ (S&S, 143-
144)
It is also food that is at the heart of recovery from the brink, but this is
hardly richly covered in the Austen text. Indeed, one will search in vain in
Sense and Sensibility for any discussion whatsoever that Marianne ever ate
at all after this episode of enforced starvation, though this could hardly be
the case. And after this period of self-imposed abstinence and social
exclusion in Mrs. Jennings’ London house, Marianne becomes, as readers
will readily remember, ill and close to death in the house of Mr. Palmer,
on the way home to her mother. An apothecary is called, and she comes
through, though it is a close call, and there are well-founded doubts about
her survival. After the fever breaks, Marianne ‘…. continued to mend
every day …’26, though food is never mentioned. We must infer that
normal meal service has slowly been resumed.
Interestingly, however, one of the servants mentions, during this
recovery period, that Mr. Ferrars is married,27 which sends the three
women in the household, and the youngster Margaret, into a state of grave

26
S&S, 255.
27
S&S, 270. Of course it is the ‘wrong’ Mr. Ferrars.
40 Chapter Two
concern and disappointment until the ambiguity is removed. And at this

point we are told:
28
Marianne had already sent to say that she should eat nothing more; Mrs.
Dashwood’s and Elinor’s appetites were equally lost, and Margaret might
think herself very well off, that with so much uneasiness as both her sisters
had lately experienced, so much reason that they had often to be careless
of the meals, she had never been obliged to go without her dinner before.
(S&S, 270)
It was ever thus; tragedy brings on an incapacity to eat, but when

things get better, and food is once again possible, the story of its re-
emergence becomes hidden from us.29
Elsewhere in the other novels abstinence and denial are the order of the
day:
The attitude towards food of the remainder of Jane Austen’s heroines can
be expressed in just one word: indifference. By this I don’t mean just that
Jane Austen does not trouble to give them feelings on the subject, but that
their positive indifference is at some point in the text clearly demonstrated
and approved … Jane Austen’s heroines eat to keep themselves healthy, to
be sociable, to conform. But not one ever anticipates or expresses pleasure
in a meal, or admits to liking a particular food … The indifference to food
of Catherine Morland is explicitly stated towards the end of Northanger
Abbey … (Lane, 86-87)
‘I did not like quite like at breakfast’, says Mrs. Morland, ‘to hear you talk
so much about the French bread at Northanger’, to which Catherine
replies. ‘I am sure I do not care about the bread. It is all the same to me
what I eat.’ (Northanger Abbey30, page 209, in Lane, op. cit. page 87)
Third, there is the matter of moral gifts. In Emma, our heroine is

endlessly tied up with good works, and many of these good works are
associated with food. Emma, of course, eats no more than any of the

28
Marianne is so distraught on behalf of her sister, that she has hysterics, and is
helped from the room, and away, of course, from the table.
29
As we shall see, this situation is remedied in several of the film versions of the
novels. The BBC version of Pride and Prejudice has many scenes where food is
displayed, and there are several occasions where the family sits down to meals,
takes tea, nibbles, bites and devours food in various setting in Sense and
Sensibility. The family do sit down at four for dinner, (p. 275) and at that meal,
Edward secures Elinor in marriage.
30
Northanger Abbey, Penguin Classics, edited with an introduction by Marilyn
Butler, London, 1995.
Austen heroines, but she acts as a center of nutritional distribution. Emma

teaches her friend and follower Harriet Smith the virtues of providing for
the poor, with gifts of food, and much more besides. She brings soup to
the local community, and boxes of apples and pork to Mrs. Bates. This
ritual of culinary redistribution routinely reflects Emma’s social
superiority, dispensing social virtue and a surplus of wealth at the same
time. And while these mechanisms were necessary and valuable to poorer
households, they were also clearly ways of maintaining networks of social
obligation and moral debt.
Lane explains this condition perfectly:
One thing we can be sure of is that nobody will ever starve in Highbury.
Food is always passing hands there. Indeed we hardly ever hear of
anybody eating anything that has not been given by somebody else.
Sometimes it seems that people only exist to feed their neighbors …
(Lane, 154)
But while such ‘beneficence’ was expected from those of social rank, it
was a promise not always delivered upon. Indeed in Pride and Prejudice,
when Mr. Bingley, under the management of his prideful friend Darcy
closes up the house for months, people are thrown out of work, tradesmen
lose their income, and the flow of food from rich to poor is stopped in its
tracks.
Emma has an unusual social status for an Austen heroine. Unlike the
gothic Northanger Abbey and Catherine Morland, or the subjugated roles
that Anne Elliot, the Dashwood sisters, and the Bennet sorority endure,
Emma presides over a household in which her antique father is the only
patriarchal control to hand in her immediate family.31 Given his adoration
of his daughter, and his entire acquiescence to her plans, she has power
enough to disperse goods of all kinds, and primarily advice, of course, to
the community, whether they like it or not. In the famous opening we
hear:
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable
home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of
existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very
little to distress or vex her.

31
One could argue that Mr. Knightley is just such a patriarch, but he is only
loosely connected to Emma by way of family ties, being her brother-in-law’s
brother. And she seems mostly to do what she wants, independent of his advice,
except on one or two crucial occasions.
42 Chapter Two
She was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate,

indulgent father, and had, in consequence of her sister’s marriage, been
mistress of his house from a very early period. (Emma, 1)32
It is not difficult to work out that Emma’s culinary dispensations are

closely tied up with her strategies of social domination and patronage.33
The novel is truly obsessed with food, the obverse of the other writings.
This obsession takes several forms beyond the accounts of Emma’s
‘generosity’ to her neighbours. There is a parallel focus on health, and Mr.
Woodhouse’s endless concerns. Mr. Woodhouse’s attitude to food is
interesting because it is also rare among the men in the Austen novels. He
is a beautifully-wrought hypochondriac, whose defining quality is caution
and nervousness. He is frightened of eating the wrong foods and being up
too late. He doesn’t like drafts much either, and senses they could be
lethal. And he carries his counsel on food to all those around him:
His own stomach could bear nothing rich, and he could never believe other
people to be different from himself. What was unwholesome to him, he
regarded as unfit for anybody… (Emma, 19, cited in Lane 155)34
Because of his solicitude for the welfare of others, he provides detailed

advice on all culinary matters. As Lane tells us, within his house during
supper, he is at pains to advise every woman present what is best for them
to eat:
Mrs. Bates, let me propose your venturing on one of these eggs. An egg,
boiled very soft is not unwholesome. Serle understands boiling an egg
better than anybody. I would not recommend an egg boiled by anyone else
– but you need not be afraid – they are very small, you see – one of our
small eggs will not hurt you. Miss Bates, let Emma help you to a little bit
of tart – a very little bit. Ours are all apple tarts. You need not be afraid of
unwholesome preserves here. I do not advise the custard. Mrs. Goddard,
what say you to half a glass of wine? A small half glass – put into a
tumbler of water? I do not think it could disagree with you.
(Emma, 25, cited in Lane, 156)35
For Mr. Woodhouse, eating is an adventure, but it is a dangerous

adventure; one should travel with caution and care if one is not to be

32
Emma, with an introduction by Lionel Trilling, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, the
Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1957.
33
Lane provides a whole chapter on Emma and food, chapter eight, op. cit.
34
This reference to Emma is to the Chapman edition.
35
The Chapman edition is used by Lane for this reference.
ensnared by illness. Smallness of portions and apprehension are his

watchwords. Double negatives are the strongest forms of praise he can
provide for the act of eating. But his caution reaches beyond absurdity
when he counsels against his own custards. One can think of no greater
contrast to the robust young men of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and
Prejudice, whose large appetites and eagerness to devour are not merely
explained by the difference in age, but rather by a very separate set of
dispositions. Consider, for example, this episode in Emma:
… Emma and Mr. Elton, having inquired after the sick Harriet, are
overtaken by ‘Mr. John Knightley, returning from a daily visit to Donwell,
with his two eldest boys, whose healthy, glowing faces, showed all the
benefit of a country run, and seemed to ensure a quick dispatch of the roast
mutton and rice pudding they were hurrying home for. (Emma, 109, cited
in Lane, 161)
One cannot imagine that Mr. Woodhouse was somehow very different
as a younger man, and then underwent some magical transformation in
middle years. When he talks of his own needs, he always includes the
needs of others, and his advice, as we might predict, is always guided
towards caution and removal from the world:
36
“My poor dear Isabella,” said he, fondly taking her hand, and
interrupting, for a few moments, her busy labours for some one of her five
children – “How long it is, how terribly long since you were here! And
how tired you must be after your journey! You must go to bed early, my
dear – and I recommend a little gruel before you go. – You and I will have
a nice basin of gruel together. My dear Emma, suppose we all have a little
37
gruel.” (Emma, 101)
The medicinal concerns of Mr. Woodhouse, and the redistributional

tendencies of his daughter combine halfway through the book:
“…. we have killed a porker, and Emma thinks of sending them (the
Bates’s) a loin or a leg ; it is very small and delicate – Hartfield pork is
not like any other pork – but it is still pork – and, my dear Emma, unless
one could be sure of their making it into steaks, nicely fried, as our’s are
fried, without the smallest grease, and not roast it, for no stomach can bear
roast pork - I think we had better send the leg – do you not think so, my
dear?”

36
Mr. Woodhouse’s oldest married daughter.
37
Chapman edition.
44 Chapter Two
“ My dear papa, I sent the whole hind-quarter. I knew you would wish it.
There will be the leg to be salted, you know, which is so very nice, and the
loin to be dressed directly in any manner they like.”
“ That’s right, my dear, very right. I had not thought of it before, but that
was the best way. They must not over-salt the leg ; and then, if it is not
over-salted, and if it is very thoroughly boiled, just as Serle boils our’s,
and eaten very moderately of, with a boiled turnip, and a little carrot or
parsnip, I do not consider it unwholesome. (Emma, 172)
Emma, by contrast, is not parsimonious with food:

Emma allowed her father to talk – but supplied her visitors in a much more
satisfactory style (compared to her father); and on the present evening had
particular pleasure in sending them (her guests) away happy. (Emma, 25)
And it is soon clear to the reader that she is at the center of the
village’s circulation of foodstuffs from one house to another. Moreover,
Emma uses the instrument of the dinner party as a way of ensuring that her
distribution of goods and largesse is not extended merely to the deserving
poor, but is also used as a method of domination of those who she chooses
not to like, but would still like to command. For example, the new Mrs.
Elton brings her own ‘high’ standards about food from Bath:
She was a little shocked at the want of two drawing rooms, at the poor
38
attempt at rout-cakes , and there being no ice in the Highbury card
parties. Mrs. Bates, Mrs. Perry, Mrs. Goddard and others, were a good
deal behind hand in knowledge of the world, but she would soon show
them how every thing should be arranged. In the course of the spring she
must return their civilities by one very superior party – in which her card
tables should be set out with their separate candles and unbroken packs in
the true style – and more waiters engaged for the evening than their own
establishment could furnish to carry round the refreshments at exactly the
proper hour, and in the proper order. (Emma, 290)
But Emma is not one to allow some upstart from the outside, and
certainly not one as unworthy as Mrs. Elton, to replace her as the most
distinguished hostess in the village. As she says:
Of the lady, individually, Emma thought very little. She was good enough
for Mr. Elton, no doubt ; accomplished enough for Highbury – handsome
enough to look plain … (Emma, 183)

38
Rout-cakes are somewhat like shortbread cookies.
But her own plans to ensure her own continued ascendancy must be
put in place:
Emma, in the meanwhile, could not be satisfied without a dinner at
Hartfield for the Eltons. They must not do less than others, or she should
be exposed to odious suspicions … A dinner there must be. (Emma, 290-
291)
Emma duly assembles those in her closest circle of acquaintances,

taking care to keep the group small and select, and filled with the right
judgments. It is the perfect stage on which to allow Mrs. Elton to ‘be what
she is,’ a woman who lacks all discernment and taste. And this
performance is not long in coming, as the new arrival sails into Miss
Fairfax, with an ill-judged set of advice. After Mrs. Weston has gently
suggested to Jane Fairfax that she should take care with early walks in the
rain, Mrs. Elton moves from gentle persuasion to absolute insistence,
turning a kindness into something much harsher and more blunt:
“Oh! She shall not do such a thing again,” eagerly rejoined Mrs. Elton.
“We will not allow her to do such a thing again : ” – and nodding
significantly – “there must be some arrangement made ...” (Emma, 295)
When the time to eat dinner arrives, Mrs. Elton is ready to charge in,
taking her place as the most prominent person present:
Dinner was on the table. – Mrs. Elton, before she could be spoken to, was
ready ; and before Mr. Woodhouse had reached her with his request to be
allowed to hand her into the dinner-parlour, was saying – “Must I go first?
I really am ashamed of leading the way.”(Emma, 298)
But Mrs. Elton is not done yet. She is eager to be of further service to
Jane Fairfax, who she now embarrasses with further entreaties to gain her
a position as governess as soon as possible. In conversation with Jane, she
comments :
“Oh! my dear, we cannot begin too early; you are not aware of the
difficulty of procuring exactly the desirable thing.”
“I am not aware!’ said Jane, shaking her head; “dear Mrs. Elton, who
can have thought of it as I have done?”
“But you have not seen so much of the world as I have! You do not
know how many candidates there are for the first situations…”
“… I am exceedingly obliged to you, Mrs. Elton, I am obliged to any
body who feels for me, but I am quite serious in wishing nothing to be
done till the summer…”
46 Chapter Two
“And I am quite serious too, I assure you,” replied Mrs. Elton gaily, “in
resolving to be always on the watch, and employing my friends to watch
also, that nothing really unexceptionable may pass us.”
In this style she ran on ; never thoroughly stopped by anything till Mr.
Woodhouse came into the room ; her vanity had then a change of object,
and Emma heard her say in the same half-whisper to Jane,
“Here comes this dear old beau of mine, I protest! – Only think of his
gallantry in coming away before the other men! – what a dear creature he
is ; -
… I fancy I am rather a favourite ; he took notice of my gown.”
(Emma, 299-302)
The self-referential language is endless, and at every step Mrs. Elton

manages to transgress every unspoken social code that matters to those
present. Emma could have hardly wished for more. By the end of the
evening, Mrs. Elton has drifted to the edge of the party and has been
abandoned:
After tea, Mr. and Mrs. Weston and Mr. Elton sat down with Mr.
Woodhouse to cards. The remaining five were left to their own powers,
and Emma doubted their getting on very well ; for Mr. Knightley seemed
little disposed for conversation ; Mrs. Elton was wanting notice, which
nobody was inclined to pay …. (Emma, 311)
Nonetheless, it is towards the socially deserving that Emma directs

most of her culinary charity. We have already heard of her donation of
meat to the Bates household, and her father’s detailed account of how it is
best to be used. And soon after the beginning of the tale, we reach an
archetypal happening that denotes the charitable quality of Emma’s
giving:
Though now the middle of December, there had yet been no weather to
prevent the young ladies from tolerably regular exercise ; and on the
morrow, Emma had a charitable visit to pay to a poor, sick family, who
lived a little way out of Highbury … They were now approaching the
cottage … Emma was very compassionate; and the distresses of the poor
were sure of relief from her personal attention and kindness, her counsel
and her patience, as from her purse … In the present instance, it was
sickness and poverty together which she came to visit; and after remaining
there as long as she could give comfort or advice, she quitted the cottage.
(Emma, 83, 86-87)
Later in the same chapter, we learn that a youngster from the cottage
has been directed by Emma to take a large pitcher to Hartfield, and to ask
for broth for the family. A similar act of benevolence is revealed later in
the Bates household:
“ … The apples themselves are the very finest sort for baking, beyond a
doubt ; all from Donwell – some of Mr. Knightley’s most liberal supply.
He sends us a sack every year ...” (Emma, 238)
Like many of Austen’s writings, the deep satire and irony is mixed
with serious political and social commentary in Emma. The circulation of
food draws the poor into the moral order, and allows them to believe that
they are not on their own. The Knightley view of the village is that he has
more than enough food, and that the surplus can be reasonably shared.
Emma, of course, has more complicated motivations concerning food; she
does her good works, of course, but she also gives dinner parties where her
role in the social hierarchy is underscored. In an early version of the
welfare state two centuries later, there is a genuine effort by those who
have to pay attention to those who do not, even if this work is a backdrop
to the real action of match-making, worrying about fabrics, and ensuring
that nothing disturbs the social order too much. Lane comments:
To prevent lawlessness and disaffection spreading ... it is necessary,

the novel posits, that the leaders of local communities keep the
mechanisms of giving and sharing in good working order, alive to the real
wants of the population and informed by genuine warmth of heart.
Multiplied throughout England, such local efforts will secure the social
stability which is so desirable, in the novelist’s view, both for individuals
and the nation.
This is the true moral of Emma. (Lane, 165)
Imagining Jane: The Films

We started with Jane Austen’s letters, closest to the ‘actual conditions’
of her own family setting, then reviewed the novels themselves, full of
evocation and imagery. This section goes a step further, a step that often
goes well beyond Jane Austen’s initial arguments, and it leads to an
important methodological point. Jane Austen is so over-read, so many
articles have been written, and now so many films have been made, that
we are challenged in a fundamental sense to decide where the sources of
our information come from. The scholar working in this field needs to pay
close attention to the boundaries between literary imagery, and the
semiotic structure of the films. If we fail to do so, we risk remaking
Austen’s novels so that they become unrecognizable.
48 Chapter Two
The analysis of films in the Austen genre is also complicated on its

own account. There are at least three broad categories of film to consider.
First, there are the films made of the novels. In the case of Pride and
Prejudice, two major films are well-known, and often referred to
interchangeably, as if they constitute a single text.39 But these two films
also have precedents. For each novel, there are commonly several film
versions, along with audiotape compilations. Then, second, there are films
about Jane Austen’s life, some elements of which are close to the facts as
we know them, and some are wholly imagined. Typical of this genre is
the recent ‘Becoming Jane’, which recounts the history of Austen’s
romantic life, and speaks to the issue of family, and the conditions under
which she worked.40 There is a third layering by film, in attempts to talk
about the history of this period in a documentary way to set the context for
her life.41 Together, both in the multiple attempts, and in these three layers
of representation, we face a complicated obstacle to interpretation, not the
least of which resides in the problem of what Austen actually wrote, and
what we have added. This says nothing about the vast armature of literary
and critical interpretation which exists.
Here I focus solely on the best-known films of the novels. And in these
films, food comes to act as a constant companion to social intercourse,
hardly ever absent when people meet to talk. In Emma Thompson’s Sense

39
Pride and Prejudice, directed by Joe Wright, based on the screenplay by
Deborah Moggach, released in the UK on September 16, 2005, and starring Keira
Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen. This is a shorter version than the archetypal
1995 TV serial, which runs to six episodes, and therefore provides much more
detail than a straight-forward film release. Here Jennifer Ehle plays Elizabeth
Bennet, and Colin Firth, Darcy. They cast a ‘long shadow’ over all later versions.
There are other earlier attempts as well. Among these attempts, four stand out.
The 1940 version was not an accurate depiction of the book. This was the Greer
Garson, Lawrence Olivier version, and was directed by Robert Z. Leonard. In
1952, the BBC developed a mini-series, in which Daphne Slater and Peter Cushing
starred. In 1967, the BBC tried again, this time with Celia Bannerman and Lewis
Fiander in the starring roles. Then in 1980, the BBC developed a further mini-
series in five parts. Later versions of the tale arrived in Bridget Jones’ Diary
(2001), and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004).
40
Becoming Jane, (2007), directed by Julian Jarrold, produced by 2 Entertain, and
starring Anne Hathaway as Jane Austen, and James McAvoy as Tom Lefroy. See
also Miss Austen Regrets, BBC and WGBH Boston, 2008, op. cit.
41
See Austen Country; the life and times of Jane Austen, 2002, Delta
Entertainment, UK. This is perhaps one of the poorest films made about the
subject, with a curious commentary, and an ill-judged narrative form.
and Sensibility42, it is impossible not to be struck immediately with the

flood of food in the first scenes of the film, compared to the relative
silence about food in the book. Early on, Marianne speaks to the family
servants prior to their leaving for Barton Cottage; the servants are seated at
dining tables.43 When her brother arrives to start the ‘take-over’, the first
conversation takes place at a lushly laid table, complete with flowers,
silver, ornate crockery, candles, attendant servants and much food. At
breakfast the next day, there is a fully laden table, smaller certainly, and
probably too formal to be historically accurate, but nonetheless the action
of the film focuses on food again. In one of the first scenes in which we
meet Marianne, we find her picking at her food, rather than eating it, as
she sulks at the nature of the insults the family is enduring. Thus begins
her uneven commitment to emaciation, a process by which she expresses
her emotional turmoil at every turn through her refusal to eat.44 Edward
Ferrars arrives to visit the family; the room is strewn with tea-cups. As
Edward starts to become acquainted with the family, the new owner
Fanny, in order to break the connections that are rapidly being made
against her wishes, brings the room to order by the use of one single word
issued as a firm command: “TEA!”.45
In the evening of the same day, teacups and silver are on display in the
living room as the family talk. Then, a further dinner in an elaborate
setting. Soup is served on elegant china; piles of food sit on the well laid
table, sideboards are filled with more things to eat. Servants stand by ready
to help.
And it is not as if this preoccupation with food disappears when the
Dashwoods are consigned to the relative poverty of the country, and to
Barton Cottage. Here Mrs. Jennings invites them for dinner every night,
should they wish, and at one of these visits, we see the familiar ‘pyramids
of fruit’ that were so typical of the way wealthy families displayed their
food and their status simultaneously.46 Glasses of beer are served.
(perhaps Madeira, but is certainly looks like beer) These ‘pyramids’ seem

42
Sense and Sensibility, Columbia Pictures, directed by Ang Lee, 1995, starring
Emma Thompson as Elinor, Kate Winslet as Marianne, Alan Rickman as Colonel
Brandon, and Hugh Grant as Edward Ferrars. Emma Thompson wrote the
screenplay, with considerable help from Jane Austen.
43
Scene 3/28.
44
Scene 3/28.
45
Scene 3/28.
46
Scene 8/28. This was very much a ‘French’ disease, as Amy Trubek makes clear
in her account of how 5,000 French chefs arrived in England at this time. See the
last section of this paper for a fuller account.
50 Chapter Two
untouchable; they appear not to have had their shape altered at all by
human hands; they might as well be made of plastic for all the use they
get. When Colonel Brandon first visits, a picnic is set out on the lawn, and
a buffet table is placed to one side. Again, Elinor and Mrs. Jennings
converse, and they do it outside, but still we have white table cloths, a
huge piece of meat (apparently a turkey) brought by a liveried servant.
Later skittles are played, and tea is served. Desserts are again displayed in
pyramidal form.47
When the Dashwoods retire to the privacy of Barton Cottage, Elinor
and her mother are talking loosely of the possibility that Edward Ferrars
has formed an attachment. Elinor, who does not chose to allow herself to
believe it because it may prove too painful, says dismissively:
I think we should be foolish to assume that there would be no obstacles in
marrying a woman of no rank who cannot afford to buy sugar. (S&S Film,
10/28)48
After a scene in which Willoughby’s silhouette is drawn by Marianne,

we are taken into the kitchen, where the ever-practical Elinor is arguing
with her mother about food.
“Surely you’re not going to deny us beef, as well as sugar?”(Mrs.

Dashwood. )
“There is nothing under a pound. We have to economize.” (Elinor.)
“Do you want us to starve?” (Mrs. Dashwood)
“No. Just not to eat beef.” (Elinor) (Scene 13/28)49
The theme of ubiquitous food continues when Colonel Brandon

proposes a picnic at his house. Though he soon quits the scene on
mysterious business, the guests remain behind to enjoy the lush offerings
of food and company, and to make fun of him of him in his absence.
Willoughby is especially tart. There is tea with Mrs. Jennings;50 as the
Dashwoods sit with her in her living room, she proposes a visit to her
London house, to which the family members acquiesce with varying
degrees of enthusiasm, and as soon as the trip is made, and their new
destination reached, Mrs. Jennings calls for tea. “Tea, Pidgeon, Tea!” she

47
Scene 9/28.
48
There is no direct parallel of this phrase in the book, and it appears to have come
from the witty pen of Emma Thompson, in the form of her screenplay.
49
Again, this is more Emma Thompson than Jane Austen, but a witty phrase
indeed, and close to Austen’s own interests in managing the household budget.
50
Scene 16/28.
commands her butler as they come through the door from the carriage, and
the world is set in order again.51
Then comes the pivotal moment of the book, the Ball, at which
Willoughby ‘cuts’ Marianne so roughly and so completely, and the rupture
between them is sealed. There are ices, but otherwise there is very little
food shown at this otherwise lush occasion. Not a teacup, not a plate, no
wine, not a single glass of beer. One imagines this element of the
evening’s entertainment required a separate room, but the film shows
nothing of it. From that moment on, the great emaciation begins, and
Marianne eats less and less. In the morning, Marianne and the family are
shown eating a toast and tea breakfast at a formal table when a note arrives
for Marianne. It is more than our heroine can endure in company, and she
rushes from the room. Willoughby has now consigned to paper what was
implicit in his behaviour the night before. In her tears, Mrs. Jennings
comes to offer what comfort she may. ‘I will go look something out to
tempt her. Does she care for olives?’ she asks.52
Later that day, it appears, the Ferrars family, with Fanny at the helm,
gather at a formal afternoon tea to gloat over Marianne’s demise, and
reassure themselves that the social order has not been disturbed in any way
by their sulky relative. Contentedly reminding themselves that money
won the day again, they sip their tea and eat their scones off the finest
china.53
And it is at this point that food almost disappears entirely from the
landscape. Having been flooded with nourishment in multiple settings,
and in every house we enter, we are reduced now to an occasional sight of
a teacup, or a bowl of gruel. Marianne’s aversion to food plays a part, of
course, but circumstances are unusual as well. On the way to the double
wedding, however, we must pass through Marianne’s second saving from
the rain, this time by Brandon, and her serious illness, during which, of
course, she refuses the gruel that is offered as part of the cure.54
Tea, and only tea, lasts to the end. As with two other occasions earlier
in the film, tea is sought out again to put things right. When the
Dashwood party finally reach the Palmer residence on their way home
from London to Barton Cottage, they are exhausted, and in need of a
restorative. Mrs. Palmer knows what to say as the new guests tumble out

51
Pidgeon is her London butler. Scene 16/28.
52
Scene 19/28.
53
Scene 19/28.
54
Scene 24/28.
52 Chapter Two
of the carriage that brings them there. ‘Mrs. Dashwood, come and have
some tea’.55 Thus begins the great recovery, from illness and misery, both.
Pride and Prejudice56 starts with a similar flourish of culinary excess.
Here, as with many of the scenes in Sense and Sensibility, those evocations
that the novel only implies are here given full expression. Thus at the
country dance when Darcy is presented in all his arrogance, tables are
placed at the edge of the room, and crockery, food, plates and glasses are
all set out. This is a modest spread, with a large number of people and a
small display of food. But people are drinking beer, and eating bits and
pieces. Mr. Hurst, whose vulgarity is largely implicit in the book, is
presented in his full glory here, to guzzle beer in the background. Mrs.
Bennet is seen tucking into a large plate of food. There is a brief
contrasting scene outside, where a group of working people are making
fun of the ‘toffs’, and beer is being drunk, but it’s a very brief moment.
Most of the action is inside.57
At Netherfield, when the Bingley party return home, they are able to
develop their critique of the evening, full of rustic pleasures to which they
have been subjugated, over wine drunk from fine glasses, and tea from
bone china. The detachment, space and lack of pleasure contrasts
strikingly with the noise, the bustle and the lack of space at the dance they
have just left. Pyramids of fruit remain untouched on the sideboard. Mr.
Hurst is snoring, and apparently in a diabetic coma. As in Sense and
Sensibility, the film is front-loaded with food. An occasion at the Lucas’s
requires wine to be drunk freely,58 and, as with the dance, there are some
modest side-tables filled with food. Breakfast at the Bennets is formal.
White table-cloths support tea, scones and jam, but meat and heavier food
appears also to be laid out. This is very much the rural breakfast, rather
than the ascetic offerings that are supposed to be the coming fashion
among leading families.59 Predictably, dinner at the Bingleys is extremely
grand. Many servants in livery attend the heavily-laden table that provides
flowers, the best crockery, the heaviest silver, and several fine wines as
accompaniments to the evening. And breakfast at Netherfield is also quite
formal. There are beautiful, pink, velvet seats (wooden, embroidered seats
are routine at the Bennets), and servants are there in numbers even at

55
Scene 24/28
56
Pride and Prejudice, 1995 TV serial, BBC, London, in six episodes. Adapted by
Andrew Davies, starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, directed by Simon Langton
and produce by Sue Birtwistle, with additional funding from the A and E network.
57
Scene 2/19.
58
Scene 3/19.
59
Scene 4/19
breakfast. A huge pork pie takes center stage, and Mr. Hurst, never one
for talking too much, fills his plate very high with it. The ladies drink tea
and eat toast. Darcy hardly eats at all, as exactly befits his station at the
top of the social pyramid. As Elizabeth Bennet enters the room, Mr.
Hurst, the ‘Great Engorger of Hertfordshire’60 does not look up from his
food, but continues shovelling. In contrast, both Mr. Bingley and Mr.
Darcy are all attention, and each bows formally to acknowledge her arrival
at the meal, following this up with thoughtful questions about her sister’s
health. At a later breakfast, Hurst is seen eating with almost violent
energy, while his female relatives sip at tea, and nibble the edges of
toast.61
The flood of food continues through a formal dinner given for Mr.
Collins on the occasion of his arrival at the Bennets’, at which a major
Stilton presides, during a ball at Netherfield, where so much food is
provided that Mrs. Bennet is able to talk and eat simultaneously all
evening. She eats like a woman possessed, a rare occurrence indeed for a
woman in an Austen setting, but then she is desperate.62 The evening is
also memorable for Mr. Collins’ chaotic dancing that puts the fear of God,
in more ways than one, into his chosen partners and others close by.63
And tea; there is always tea. In a beautifully acted scene, Charlotte
Lucas and Elizabeth Bennet sip from good china, and discuss Charlotte’s
strategic marriage to the mad cavorter as a sensible decision.64 Charlotte
is one of the most unsentimental analysts of the social order, and she see it
for what it is far better than most. She brings a laser-like view to the
swirling of emotions that various pre-marital encounters rouse up:
I’m not romantic, you know. I never was. I ask only a comfortable home,
and considering Mr. Collins’ character and situation in life, I am
convinced that my chance of happiness with him is as fair as most people
can boast on entering the married state. (Pride and Prejudice, 1995 Film,
Volume 1: Scene 13/19)
She sees marriage in a practical sense first and foremost, and this
straightforward materialism is a very significant theme throughout Austen’s

60
At country fairs, eating contests were common. The ‘Great Eater of Hampshire’
might be touted as able to eat three pigs in an afternoon. People would pay to
come to watch someone engorge vast quantities of food. The tradition is, of
course, still alive in contemporary time.
61
Scene 6/19.
62
Scene 10/19.
63
The brilliant David Bamber plays this role with great gusto.
64
Scene 13/19.
54 Chapter Two
works, though it is not what we focus on the first time around, and often
not the second. But this structural logic comes clearly into play through
Charlotte’s character when she expresses the view without adornment, and
explains to Elizabeth, who is for once out-thought, why her own marriage
makes sense. In the meantime, her hopelessly limited husband fiddles
around in the background. And the drinking of tea, at a small, ornate
table, and out of respectable china, provides the setting for this pivotal
conversation.65
We are next invited to enjoy another example of Mr. Collins living up

to his reputation, in the act of eating itself.66 At his own breakfast table, he
is shown stuffing his mouth full of food, so full that he can neither breathe
properly, nor make any effort to speak. The table is loaded with food, his
knife and fork wave upwards towards the ceiling; as usual the women pick
at toast and tea. He grunts and makes noises that he might have learned
from a pig-sty. Elizabeth and Charlotte have a conversation to which he is
witness. He can only chew and grunt while this is occurring. And we are
not spared further sightings of food, the first at the Inn as Elizabeth travels
home to escape from Mr. Collins’ gulpings, and to see her family.
Halfway there, she meets up with two of her sisters who have come to
meet them, and they enjoy a robust country meal around a wooden table,
replete with large plates of meat, vegetables, salad and pork. At home,
huge breakfasts, and what appears to be beer, remain part of the morning
family ritual, and as before, this is a relatively formal affairs with a white
tablecloth; a traditional country breakfast.67 The Militia take their leave
over tea, beer and sherry.68 And when Lizzy takes her tour with her aunt
and uncle, they enjoy a contented dinner in a private room at an Inn. This
event might be described as ‘small formal’. The private room comes
equipped with a helpful servant, several dishes of meat and vegetables,
along with red wine, all served in excellent china and glassware. An
evening at Pemberley displays only tea, wine, and small plates of food,
perhaps ‘sweets’. The breakfasts continue almost until the end of the film.

65
The gender balance is completed at this moment in the film in one particular
sense here. If Mr. Collins is one of the stupidest men in England, according to
Elizabeth Bennet, Mr. Bennet is ready to aver to his wife that they have two of the
silliest girls in the nation. Both these explanations are provided over the meal
table, where much of the major conversation of the film takes place.
66
Pride and Prejudice (Film) 1995, Volume 2: Scene 2/19.
67
Op. Cit., 2/19.
68
Op. Cit., 3/19.
Dissipation and drink are, of course, natural partners, and so it is that

we see Wickham in his debauchery on several occasions.69 The first scene
appears to be in lodgings when the hapless couple are about to be
discovered by Darcy. The condition apparently becomes permanent,
because one of the last scenes of the film shows Wickham still drinking
with his ‘silly’ wife,70 conspicuously shunned by the rest of the family,
who are celebrating the double wedding of Jane and Elizabeth. What’s
also interesting is the bifurcated way the Bennet parents deal with the
tragedy of their wayward daughter through food. Once he’s got over his
short-lived guilt about the matter, Mr. Bennet retreats, as ever, to his
study, there to drink his red wine and hide in a book, while his wife, who
remains in a permanent fever, keeps court upstairs with tea and toast to
accompany her long list of complaints.71
There are also several unusual scenes related to food towards the
conclusion of the film. In Chapter Fifteen,72 Bingley returns to his large
house, and we see a queue of servants carting huge baskets of food into the
cellar of the house. It’s one of the very rare times we see food outside the
dining-room or the ballroom. In the same chapter, we see Elizabeth and
Jane in what appears to be a storage room adjacent to their kitchen,
engaged in tying up herbs and lavender to dry. Clearly they are not
cooking; rather, they are drying plants from the garden to scent the house,
and to flavour the food. And soon afterwards, as Darcy and Elizabeth
finally set things straight between themselves,73 the backdrop is a pile of
grain sacks on a cart. Usually, we rarely see anything actually being
grown, cultivated or collected to eat, even though much of the activity of
the novel occurs deep in the countryside, where all the food originates.
Most of the productive process is entirely hidden from us.
Rank, discernment and social difference are endlessly rehearsed and
judged through food. Darcy makes his sharp judgments about the Bennet
family in part because he witnesses Mrs. Bennet in a series of excessive
feedings. The number of servants in attendance, the quality of the silver,
the china or the serving dishes, the sophistication of the food, and the
delicacy with which food is eaten are all quotidian indicators of social
categories and their memberships. All these details are inferred in the

69
See Op. Cit., 11/19; and also the last chapter of the movie, Volume 2, 18/19. He
drinks alone and in a chair, with just his wife looking on. The drinking has lost its
larger social character, is now merely a matter of solace.
70
Mr. Bennet’s term for his daughter, now advanced to matrimony.
71
Volume 2: 14/19.
72
Volume 2: 15/19.
73
Volume 2: 17/19
56 Chapter Two
novels, but they are there for everyone to see in the films. There is, in
short, a high degree of performativity74 involved in eating and the rituals
that surround it in Austen’s work. It never happens by chance, but rather
is a product of a long process of education, sufficient income, the
development of familiarity with the contemporary social customs in which
meaning resides, what is done and what is not, as we might say. None of
this matters at one level, and it clearly doesn’t matter to Darcy in one
sense, since his wealth puts him above cursory judgments. As Mr. Bennet
comments early in the film, Mr. Darcy is no more unpleasant that any
other wealthy man used to getting his own way. But even Darcy must pay
close attention to social custom if he is to go beyond his small social
circle. And for the rest of the community, these matters are part of the
struggle for social recognition and social deference on which their
livelihoods depend.
The Dark Hand of History

1. The French Invasion. There is much going on in the background
while our Austen characters eat well or poorly, and drink too much or too
little. This is a revolutionary age. Austen was born in the year the
American Revolution started to come to a head. At the same time, France
was engaged in a series of social upheavals, and England was struggling
with Napoleon. The old mode of production had run its course. Most
central to the culinary world was the advent of the French Revolution, and
the flight of chefs from France. As the lickspittles of the hated aristocracy,
French chefs were as despised as their masters, and their lives were in
jeopardy. Certainly, job prospects had dwindled for them with the
diminution of the aristocracy itself. As a result, a huge influx of new
culinary talent arrived on English shores, and transformed the way the
English ate. In particular, over the next generation, they upturned what
counted as good food, good manners and good culinary taste. Amy
Trubek75 estimates that 5,000 chefs left French shores during the French
revolutionary period, and most poured into England. They became cooks
to the court, and to the leading families of the day, and not only did they
cook differently, but they changed the social logic around food. Food
itself became an autonomous source of distinction, another field in which
to rise or fall. But they also developed a level of sophistication in the

74
I use this term in Judith Butler’s sense.
75
Amy Trubek, Haute Cuisine: how the French Invented the Culinary Profession,
University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2000
preparation and presentation of food that had been largely lacking in

English social life. Much despised by the English aristocracy as decadent
and lacking in ‘moral fiber’, the French nonetheless were grudgingly
admired for their cultural astuteness, and especially for their cuisine,
which soon set the standard for the English palette, at least among those
that could afford to eat well, and who cared about food.
2. The Social Revolution in England itself could also not be ignored.

Austen lived her life on the margins of the landed aristocracy. Her father
was a clergyman, and two brothers were admirals. A third was a banker
who went bankrupt, and a fourth owned large landholdings. In her novels,
Austen shows a clear ambivalence towards the land and those who own it,
apparently valuing those who have a benevolent touch towards others that
depended on them. But she was also very harsh in depicting the cruelty of
selfish landowners, and made great fun at the expense of the foppish and
wasteful Sir Walter Elliot, one of the most absurd of her entourage of
absurd characters. In contrast, she seemed to admire and celebrate the
Navy, idealized perhaps most clearly in the character of Captain
Wentworth, a self-made man of character and wealth who her heroine
reveres and marries. This ambiguity about the future accurately depicts
the shifting political landscape. Self-made men were coming into their
own. The Industrial Revolution was now in full swing. Railways were
about to sweep the country; the Enclosure Laws76 were forcing rural
workers off the land to become the industrial proletariat in the new mode
of production. These changes were so extensive, and they penetrated so
deeply into English country life they could hardly be ignored. The Tories,
famously led by William Pitt the Younger77, were being assailed by the
Whigs under Mr. Fox, who brayed and prattled at the absurdity of the old
order. Things were on the move, and Jane Austen saw something she
liked about the new régime, even as she lived among members of the old
order.
So, I want to insist that Austen is not only a paramount commentator
on the most subtle of subtle social cues and their meaning, but that her life
can not be entirely separated from some of the most pressing social
conditions of the time, as some commentators have claimed. She
undertook this analysis through a private lens, certainly, but she did it.

76
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Penguin, London,
New Edition, 1991. He comments
( p.217): “In agriculture the years between 1760 and 1820 are the years of
wholesale enclosure in which, in village after village, common rights are lost".
77
He was a ‘New Tory’, and had been a Whig.
58 Chapter Two
Persuasion is all about the Navy, the absurdity of some elements of the
aristocracy, and the utter decency of some self made men like Captain
Wentworth, especially if that rise in the social structure was achieved in
the service of her beloved England. She understood the massive changes
in the very mode of production itself, as the landed gentry started to lose
control over the economy and the political system, and new Whiggish
tendencies, and later socialist tendencies, started to gain traction. She
could hardly have been ignorant of these changes, with her brother
Edward, and indeed her own livelihood, and that of her sister and mother,
tied up with control of his estates, and his struggle to maintain those
estates.
3. Food Practices and Dominance. Most interestingly, her accounts

tell us that food practices were part of the repertoire of dominance, an
element in the complex stratagem of manners that underscored hierarchy
and privilege, not just as a backdrop to many important conversations and
exchanges, but also a weapon in itself, a weapon that is always concealed
and rarely discussed, hidden as part of the elaborate system of social
difference of the time.
4. Materialism. We should avoid a simple materialist explanation that

explains these events, the social structures they reflect, and the privilege
and dominance they display simply as a product of history produced in
some mechanical fashion. Indeed, one of the great joys of reading Austen
is that she opens up new dimensions of social life for our analysis, and
make subtle those explanations that are simple and wrong. It is precisely
in her delicacy of understanding, her irony, and in her extraordinary
awareness of social cues that we find the power of her work. Yet a
materialist culture is also at play here, and it cannot be ignored. Neither
did Jane Austen ignore it. Some of her characters are rational maximizers
of a kind that the 21st century would recognize as their own. But we can
go well beyond the merely greedy and self interested to remind ourselves
of Charlotte Lucas and her clear thinking. Of course, the hope it that all of
us marry for love and for passion, as Elizabeth and Marianne insist, but
everyone knows that a good income doesn’t hurt. And the Austen
heroines all understand, in a very sophisticated way, what is at stake in the
social world they inhabit, and especially in the matter of marriage.
5. Epistemology. There’s also a false epistemological assumption

about the social imaginary78 that’s easy to make when we examine food in
these texts. It concerns the levels of knowledge that we’re facing here.
We could believe we start with the unyielding, ‘hard’ world of facts in the
Austen letters, where the narrator sets out her story in unalloyed fashion.
Nothing comes between the writer and the reader, and the Austen life is
openly displayed. The novels, partly imaginary by their very nature, but
still decidedly connected to actual events, come next and provide a middle
ground in which both the hard facts and the social imagination are
interwoven. The films create further levels of the social imaginary, and
the factual world is left even further behind. And we place this all in the
incontrovertible necessity of history, of Georgian England and its social
conditions.
But nothing could be farther from the truth. The letters are clearly
representations of parts of Jane Austen’s life; they could hardly be more.
They may point to the ‘truth’, some of it, but they are hardly offering the
full and factual truth in its entirety. And we know many letters were
destroyed. The novels follow the intellectual pathways of their times, and
reside in a form of literary convention that we little understand.79 Not only
do they form a broad field of imagination for us to consider, but her
writing endlessly interrogates these conventions, draws unseen parallels to
other forms of imagination, without ever forgetting that a structural power
still persists beyond imagination. The films are semiotically overloaded, to
be sure, with a cascade of images to choose from, and here feelings and
senses are flooded. Dialogue is rewritten, scenes redrawn, old plots
upturned. Now we are at a second level of the social imaginary, a
reinvention of the first act of imagination that Austen’s novels provide.
So, we face the twin problems of conventionalism80 and realism at
each level of analysis.81 And this means we must deal with two resulting
issues. The first is that we must be clear what we are talking about, even
if, in the end, this becomes a largely insurmountable problem. The novels
bleed into the films, and it’s hard to tell them apart. The ‘Jane Austen’ we
write about is a hybrid formed from the three or four media is which she

78
This is Charles Taylor’s term.
79
See Marilyn Butler’s extraordinary introduction to Northanger Abbey, in the
Penguin edition, cited elsewhere.
80
The notion that our sense of the factual world is always conditioned by
assumptions.
81
The idea that a separate world exists independent of consciousness. I am
thinking especially of Roy Bhaskar’s realism here. See The Realist Theory of
Science, (1975)
60 Chapter Two
now appears. Many of the ideas, the dialogue attributed to her, the things
she is alleged to have thought, and the ‘facts’ she wrote about are simply
not attributable to her work, and just aren’t there in the pages of the
novels. Yet we think they are because we’ve been moving between
various layers of this social imaginary. And this leads us to a second
conclusion, which is really a reminder. This ‘bleeding’ between genres
reminds us also how the fictive world of her heroines is blended with
social history, with her own experience and with the literature of her day,
so that the social world she manages to describe is equally multi-valenced,
which is where much of its richness lies.
6. Austen and Symbolic Capital. Austen’s novels provide an exquisite

account of the fight to the death over social hierarchy. Austen understood,
like almost no-one else, what was at stake here, and how the rules of the
game played out. In her novels, and in her own life, she gave subtle
witness to the consequences of success and failure in the social realm. She
knew what these matters meant in the course of a human life. A future,
and especially a feminine future, might utterly depend on caprice,
happenstance, a chance meeting, a comment poorly formed, a meal badly
presented. Accident and reason bled together in this world. Social
occasions, and the food that fueled these occasions, were the backdrop for
these incidents. And from these apparently small, private, intensely
domestic incidents came large consequences – lives of luxury or despair,
of material comfort or relentless struggle. Much was at stake in these
apparently ‘trivial games’, as people offered each other cups of tea, and
worried about the proper way to cut cucumber sandwiches.
7. The Apparently Trivial and the World of Dominance. So, these

social environments and their endless details were significant not because
of any intrinsic value residing in these activities, but because people chose
to invest them with importance, because, following tradition, hierarchy,
and most essentially, the direction of those who had power over them –
royalty, landowners, the state – they created a social field in which people
struggled mightily to succeed, to survive, and to create distinction, that
‘finest’ of social qualities that puts some people above the rest, and assures
them of domination over others.82

82
P. Bourdieu, Distinction, Harvard University Press, 1984, Boston,
Massachusetts. In Distinction, Bourdieu elaborates on Weber’s original notion of
status to construct a theory of symbolic struggle. See also his Forms of Capital:
English version published 1986 in J.G. Richardson's Handbook for Theory and
Research for the Sociology of Education, pp. 241–258.
CHAPTER THREE
PAVLOVA PARADISE:
ARCADIA IN NEW ZEALAND
CHELEEN ANN-CATHERINE MAHAR
I begin with a story:

In 1980, I left my hometown of San Francisco to accompany my husband
to a small town in rural New Zealand so that he could take up his first
academic job. When we first arrived, it was made clear to this newcomer
woman that the measure of a home cook lay in the quality of her Pavlova.
Moreover, the measure of the value of guests was whether or not the
hostess baked a Pavlova for them. To welcome us to our new home in
New Zealand, the wife of my husband’s department chair had us over to
their house for dinner – it was a meal that very much typified New
Zealand cooking, and the gendered manner of meals. It was a meal of
consecration and initiation. Our status was being honored. The steak was
barbecued by the husband. The sauce for the steak was called ‘gazpacho’,
which in my culinary tradition was a cold soup1, but clearly in this new
country, it had been re-invented as a steak sauce. The dessert was a
Pavlova -- our hostess was known for her perfect Pavlovas, and we were
honored by her gift.
The Pavlova is a large, rather grandiose and theatrical dessert

constructed from vast mountains of white meringue, whipped cream and
local fruits. The Pavlova forms an impressive centerpiece for the dinner
table at the dessert stage of the meal. While both Australia and New
Zealand claim this iconic dessert as their own, until recently it has been a
centerpiece of New Zealand cooking, particularly in rural, Pakeha or
(British-European), New Zealand. This dinner, I believe, represented
important initiatory manifestations of social and symbolic capital of the
sort that always punctuate social occasions: first, there was implied a
1
Gazpacho is generally recognized as a cold Spanish tomato-based raw vegetable
soup, although nowadays there are other versions, some of them without tomatoes.
62 Chapter Three
general welcome to New Zealand and to the university, and the nature of
this welcome was a New Zealand dinner. And then there was the honor of
being afforded a version of the national dessert, as an introduction to what,
at the time, stood for haute New Zealand cookery; a superb piece of
culinary symbolic capital – though our hosts would not have put it this
way.
My larger focus in this essay is national identity, and, more
specifically, the role of food culture in national identity formation in New
Zealand. This line of inquiry immediately places women, culinary
practices, and the domestic space, at the center of attention. Food and
food rituals can be used as a way into an understanding of the divided
sense of identity that one finds in Pakeha2 New Zealand. It is my
argument that culinary practices are a way in which Pakeha New
Zealanders expressed their connection to ‘home’ in Great Britain and, as
well, began to assert their own nationality as separate from other British
colonies, and from Britain itself. This broad view of identity is manifested
in very concrete ways through culinary practices, such as the task of
creating the ‘perfect Pavlova’, among many other examples.
The question of national identity is a highly nuanced issue, which
shifts from questions of British or New Zealand nationalism to feelings of
nostalgia, and ambivalence with regard to Britain, to the difficulties of
geographical and personal transformations in New Zealand, which was
once a long journey from Britain. I track this culinary discourse by
drawing on four major sources of information: First, I use important
elements of New Zealand’s social history; second, I examine New Zealand
domestic culinary history; third, I review key elements of New Zealand
fictional work to provide evidence of culinary and domestic practices; and
finally, fourth, I use material from a large-scale study of rural women that
I conducted between 1980 and 1992. Together, these sources provide a
rich foundation for arguments about identity formation.
2
A Maori term widely used in New Zealand/Aotearoa to depict white New
Zealanders. While there is not a definitive definition of the term, nor a particular
date in which the term became commonplace, we do know that it is a Maori term
used to denote non-Maori New Zealanders. In this case, Europeans. Jodie
Ranford, (Auckland College of Education), in the Department of Labour
publication, 1985) argues that the term, before 1815, meant ‘white person’. Later
it was applied to all fair-skinned people in New Zealand. By 1960 it was a term
for a person in New Zealand of predominantly European Ancestry. (Ausubel,
1960). However in her research, Ranford argues that the term Pakeha denotes the
historical origin of settlers and does not identify an ethnic group.
Pavlova Paradise: Arcadia in New Zealand 63
The Origins of Arcadia3.
Figure 1: An early European image of New Zealand. A Waterfall in Dusky Bay,

April 1773, Oil on canvas, National Maritime Museum, London, William Hodges.
This is the kind of image that helped Europeans to construct their vision of the
New Zealand Arcadia.
English writers, painters, businessmen, politicians and newly arrived

immigrants viewed New Zealand within a nineteenth-century Arcadian
tradition, which characterized the country as a place of abundant
resources, and with a population that exemplified the hard-working,
moderate and moral life of nineteenth century values.4 To be an effective
commercial enterprise, it needed to be sold, and sold it was, as an idealized
version of English rural life, very different in its dreamlike, mythological
character, but very similar in that it offered, at least potentially, the most
perfect version of rural wealth and comfort that was possible to imagine.
3
Early British literature about New Zealand (1840-1909) characterized the country
as an Arcadia, set in opposition to the social problems of Victorian Britain. See
Miles Fairburn The Ideal Society and Its Enemies: the Foundations of Modern New
Zealand Society, 1850-1900 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1989), p. 29.
4
See Miles Fairburn, The Ideal Society and Its Enemies: the Foundations of
Modern New Zealand Society, 1850 – 1900 (Auckland: Auckland University Press,
1989) p. 29 and Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel
and Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
64 Chapter Three
The way this Arcadian vision worked out in practice, is, as might have
been anticipated, much more mundane, and much less surprising. This
vision, combined with the material interests of farmers, land speculators
and government, created a landscape, both ideologically and materially,
within three powerful fields of social forces, each of which expressed
nineteenth-century bourgeois British culture: the field of the aesthetic
gaze, which includes painting and literature; the field of economic and
political structures; and the field of social relations within new colonial
communities which dotted the country from the mid-1800s. These three
fields of social activity all come together in visions of the rural landscape
in New Zealand, at once a pastoral landscape, worthy of capturing by
painting and placing in a frame, but at the same time a site of potential
wealth and production, a place to locate farms, workers, industry, houses
and cottages – in fact, a space into which a whole English landscape could
be transplanted.
Figure 2: A View of Wenderholme, Auckland, 1880 by Arthur Sharpe, collection

of Fletcher Holdings.
European colonists created a second-order landscape embodied in a

system of production and reproduction. Historical and contemporary rural
communities in New Zealand were created as a social space in which to

produce agricultural wealth, to sustain growth in newly developed towns,
and to provide the basis, (materially and symbolically) for the
transformation of social classes from their British antecedents. Colonial
New Zealand continues to provide a foundation for contemporary New
Zealand culture in the domestic setting with regard to food rituals,
foodways and women’s work.
Historically in New Zealand, women have been placed at the center of
the family and the community with regard to social capital, a sense of
community well being, the practice of good works in village life, and the
creation and maintenance of family reputation.5 As well, the New Zealand
government since the late 1800s self-consciously encouraged the vigorous
creation of home and hearth in order to establish a framework within
which the growth of the Pakeha population and the work force can take
place. This vision, combined with the material interests of farmers, land
speculators and government created an imaginary landscape at the center
of the ‘new country’s identity’, a landscape which fully expressed
idealized nineteenth-century bourgeois British culture. Within this
imagined identity, the field of aesthetic sensibility is one of the most
important social fields, as depicted in the landscape painting and the
literature of the time, and the space of culinary practice, along with many
other daily cultural logics, also played its part in working out a living
national identity.
The complicated nature of New Zealand identity and its positionality is
clear from a review of literary works written in New Zealand by early
settlers, as in the case of Lady Broom, (1904) who was an immigrant from
Britain, and it becomes clear also in a selection of stories from Katherine
Mansfield, from Prelude, At the Bay and The Garden Party. But this
debate about Pakeha identity is not merely a nineteenth century concern,
and I have included commentary from a relatively new novel by Linda
Burgess, Between Friends: A Novel to provide a foundation for the more
contemporary debate of the 1980s, when the question of national identity
for Pakeha New Zealanders was still central to public discourse. In these
memoirs, stories and novel, mealtimes, and food, while not a central
concern, do furnish us with some indication of change in social mores as
they relate to food hospitality. They also indicate for us the changing
sensibility of identity from British to New Zealander and how food
practices dominate women’s lives.
5
‘On the Moral Economy of Country Life, in Journal of Rural Studies, volume 7
number 4 p.363-72 1991, Cheleen Ann-Catherine Mahar.
66 Chapter Three
Food Culture and National Identity

In reviewing the work of well-known New Zealand women writers, the
issue of food preparation and cookery, as well as food rituals in general, is
remarkable by their absence. I believe this silence indicates that the
structuring of food practices (the taken-for-granted fact that tea, lunch or
dinner would be structured in a particular way, using certain ingredients,
such as tea with milk, scones, bread, large meat roasts) was assumed and
elided. Since women have traditionally spent much of their effort in such
practices, this is rather surprising. So it is important to underscore that a
certain style of food and eating was so taken for granted as part of the
cultural doxic knowledge, that we can argue that this reflects important
elements of the cultural habits and dispositions of New Zealand identity.
The most obvious writing in New Zealand about food and cooking, were
in the popular press, in radio programs and in locally produced
cookbooks.6 These forms of cultural activity were most easily to be found
in the highly popular magazine Women’s Weekly and in the widely-heard
radio broadcasts by a personality known as Aunt Daisy, who is discussed
later in this essay.7
The question of national identity, and especially Pakeha New Zealand
identity, is one that has taken center stage in the New Zealand narrative for
decades. It is assumed in the popular press that the Maori communities are
a separate and self-conscious ethnic population, with clearly distinct
language, elaborate rituals, separate territorial claims, and a well-defined
history of cultural and behavioral practice. None of this can be said for
white New Zealand. As late as 1986, white New Zealanders continued to
mull over their so-called culture – or, rather, whether or not Pakeha New
Zealanders had a culture at all. They asked, “If the Pakeha now is not
European, English, or Scots, is there yet a New Zealand culture?’8 (McGill
1986, p. 27).
An investigation of the food culture of New Zealand makes clear that it
is inextricably bound to several fields of production and social relations, to
class and family dispositions. Indeed the entire economic system of white
6
I have not included a thorough analysis of cookbooks in this review. Interested
readers might investigate A Distant Feast: The Origins of New Zealand’s Cuisine
by Tony Simpson, Godwit Press, 2008 for more information on this issue. As
most white settlers to New Zealand came from the British Isles, the question arises
first as to whether white New Zealanders are still fundamentally ‘British’, and
what this quality might mean 12,000 miles from ‘home base’.
7
Basham, Maud Ruby, “Aunt Daisy”, MBE. (1879 – 1963).
8
David McGill in So Pakehas have a Culture, in NZ Listener, April 19, 1986.
settlers rested on the importation of new agricultural procedures, new

animals (beef stock, dairy, and sheep)9, along with an associated new set
of social relations of agricultural work, based on the social logic of rural
England. As well, the importation of social customs was also part of the
settler plan, and part of this broad social practice involved foodways and
rituals. Implicit in this social logic of domestic life was a model for the
work of women in households.
Pakeha New Zealand was largely populated, not by the British
bourgeoisie, but by working people, who aspired to a life of land
ownership not available to them in Britain, and to a replica of British
country life transported to a new land. Traditional British country life was
based upon the manor, the centrality of family land, and the lives of those
who work on the land for the family. There are also close connections to
the local village by the manorial family, and the good works that elite
women volunteer to the village and local church (Anglican or
Presbyterian). Much of this volunteering and other women’s work centers
upon food and food rituals, such as the preparation of afternoon tea, and
the cooking of scones, as well as volunteer work for local village festivals.
Elements of such British social systems have been duplicated (though of
course, not exactly), in town after town, across many rural areas in New
Zealand.
Agricultural life is structured by competing groups of people whose
identity is situated through relationships between specific forms of social
capital. Land, homes, gardens, livestock, agricultural and horticultural
production, wealth, schooling, marriage alliances, even dress, foodways
and food rituals can be defined as manifestations of types of social
capitals. For the aspiring middle-class ‘townie’ immigrant, or even a
member of a landed family who did not stand to inherit land in the ‘old
country’, the ownership of land, or a patch of land to call their own was
critical and central to the realization of the Arcadian myth, which once
described New Zealand to possible immigrants.
9
There were no mammals in New Zealand prior to white settlement.
68 Chapter Three
Figure 3: From Jock Phillips, A Man’s Country? The Image of the Pakeha Male: A
History (Auckland: Penguin, 1987).
Looking back over more recent history, the political scientist Austen
Mitchell briefly summarizes the major qualities of national identity in his
humorous 1972 book The Half-Gallon, Quarter-Acre Pavlova Paradise –
referring, of course, to New Zealand10. Much his identity discourse is
connected to food. The half-gallon refers to the way beer was normally
sold in a half-gallon glass bottle. Beer was clearly the domain of
workingmen and their meeting place, the local pub. A national vote in
1949 set opening hours for pubs from 10 am to 6 pm, a move which,
according to historian Jock Phillips11, was a way the government could
intervene to ensure that the worker (male) returned to his family and
remained a family man, at home for dinner. Here we can perhaps begin to
perceive a slight contradiction: drinking a good deal of beer after work,
and before returning home to dinner like a good family man did not
perhaps accurately depict the behavior of a model bourgeois husband, but
rather the management of working men, and the closest they could come
to Arcadia in that time in New Zealand history. The male ideal was
always – perhaps still is – associated with drink, having mates, playing
sport, and being a creature who needed the civilizing influence of women.
The ‘Quarter-Acre’ in Mitchell’s title refers to the fact that each
suburban house generally came with a quarter-acre section of land, where
the family would grow vegetables and fruit – which was then bottled by
women for the household. Such self-reliance is another characteristic that
New Zealand historians tell us was a critical goal of British immigrants to
New Zealand – having known real poverty in Britain, (and in NZ as well,
through this fact was not allowed to invade the Arcadian vision), the new
arrivals wanted to do better. Finally, Mitchell reminds us that the
contemporary Arcadia of New Zealand was gendered, and involved the
construction of the iconic national dish, the famous Pavlova
The Origin of the Pavlova: a step towards identity?

Let us now consider the Pavlova more fully. The Pavlova is a
meringue creation, crusty on the outside, with soft marshmallow on the
inside, covered with whipped cream, and finally garnished with fruit, such
as strawberries, passion fruit or kiwi fruit. Its origin has become a source
10
See Austin Mitchell, 1972, Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd., Christchurch: New
Zealand.
11
See A Man’s Country? Jock Phillips, 1987, Penguin Books, Auckland: New
Zealand.
70 Chapter Three
of nationalistic dispute between Australia and New Zealand. One might

ask why anyone actually cares about the origin of a dessert?12
In the continuing search for identity, and its historical competition with
Australia, a specialty dessert became an important part of the New Zealand
narrative. And indeed, it seems that the Pavlova was created first in New
Zealand. The original recipe for the Pavlova is to be found, according to
the librarians in the New Zealand National Library, in Terrace Tested
Recipes, collected by the women of the Terrace Congregational Church
(Wellington, New Zealand 1927). In 1927, the Pavlova was a collection
of three dozen little meringues, instead of one large cake – so we might
conclude that the Australian chef, (Bert Sachse), in his recipe of 1934-35,
improved on the original Pavlova dessert, giving it the larger size, a size
that now dominates a dinner table. The origin of the dessert in both
countries was an attempt to honor the great ballet dancer, Anna Pavlova,
who traveled to the Antipodes during these years. The dessert was
supposed to reflect the ballerina’s lightness and whiteness.13
Food Culture in Action (mostly British): New Zealand Food,

Cooking and Women’s Work
The case of the practice of English teatime is a good example of the
importation of an essential cultural ritual of daily life. Morning and
afternoon teas not only provided the veneer of civilization necessary for
the maintenance of a semblance of ‘Englishness’ for elite and middle-class
families, but it also provided a parallel social logic for working men - the
12
We might find an answer to this question and to the earlier question of 1986
‘Does Pakeha New Zealand have a culture?’ in the work of Anthony Trollope, who
wrote the following in his work Australia and New Zealand, in 1873:
“It may be well to notice here that as Auckland considers herself to be the
cream of New Zealand, so does New Zealand consider herself to be the
cream of the British Empire. The pretention is made in, I think, every
British colony that I visited…But in New Zealand the assurance is
altogether of a different nature. The New Zealander among John Bulls is
the most John Bullish. He admits the supremacy of England to every place
in the world, only he is more English than any Englishmen at home…It is a
land happy in its climate;--very happy in its promises.”
Trollope ends by saying that in one specific way does New Zealand surpass all
other colonies, and that is in its fondness of getting drunk! In A History of New
Zealand by Keith Sinclair, 1959, Penguin Books: Middlesex: UK.
13
See Martin Richardson, April 22, 1993. New Zealand Food in New Zealand
Guide Book, NZ.com. Richardson is an economics professor at Georgetown
University.
smoko or the tea break for farm workers and shepherds, all of them living
together in the back-blocks of a rural hinterland far from their British
home. Morning tea and smoko were also a way of connecting self, class
position and the economy through the use of English-based agricultural
products, as opposed to using local Maori and Polynesian foodstuffs. As
suggested by other writers, the historical derivation of the relationship
between rural elite women, and working and middle-class women is
modeled on British cultural armature.14 A duplication of British manorial
life is obviously impossible, but I suggest that on the basis of ideological
structures, women in rural areas until quite recently have tried to create a
New Zealand version of English county life. For these women, food,
whether for community events, family events or the mid-day meal for their
husband’s farm hands, has played a significant role in the formation of
rural, personal dispositions, and national identity. In their essay ‘Older
New Zealand women doing the work of Christmas: a recipe for identity
formation’ (Wright-St. Clair, et. al, 2005),15 we see more details of this
domestic practice.
First, the authors argue that the women interviewed found an important
part of their identity in the lived social practice as a homemaker and
hostess at Christmas. This identity could readily be traced back to their
mothers, aunts and grandmothers, who were all English. Second, while
food needed to be in abundance, the women involved were also expected
to uphold the New Zealand tradition of being thrifty, practical and modest,
modesty being part of the homemakers’ etiquette. Third, while women
took pride in their ability to serve a traditional meal, they were ambivalent
about the work itself. In New Zealand, Christmas falls in summer, which
is usually very warm. As well, there is a great degree of tension with
regard to production, timing and the general labor involved in creating the
meal itself. Thus the women’s feelings towards their work involved a
mixture of pride and irritation.
Fourth, with regard to identity, the women reported that ‘Christmas
time we get a little bit nostalgic, and we tend to harp back to what we have
know before, hence the turkey, etc., because it is rather a sentimental
time…” (340). Families adapt old food traditions, so that they suit the
environment better, so while old traditions are honored, changes do occur.
In their study, the authors argue that “… Christmas meals are constructed
14
See A Distant Feast: The Origins of New Zealand’s Cuisine by Tony Simpson,
1999, Godwit Press, Auckland: New Zealand
15
They provide information from an ethnographic study of 16 women who were
65 years and older. The interviews took the form of focus groups and the
conversation centered upon the Christmas meal.
72 Chapter Three
through preparing and sharing the foods that stem from, and connect
family to, their cultural heritage. For many older New Zealanders, British
ancestry is expressed through the foods…of Christmas.” (339).
In her book, Colonial Memories, (1909) Lady Broom16 writes about
her life on a New Zealand sheep station called Broomielaw.
Even in those early days, the new-comer was struck by the familiar air of
everything: and, so far as my own experience goes, New Zealand is
certainly the most English colony I have seen. It never seems to have
attracted the heterogeneous races of which the population of other colonies
is so largely composed …. But New Zealand has always been beautifully
and distinctly English, and the grand Imperial idea has here fallen on
congenial soil and taken deep root”. (Broom, 1909; pg.2)
The first six months of my New Zealand life was spent in Christchurch,
waiting for the little wooden house to be cut out and sent up-country to our
sheep-station in the Malvern Hills. How absurdly primitive it all was, and
yet how one delighted in it! I well remember the “happy thought – when
the question arose of the size of drawing and dining rooms – of spreading
our carpets out on the grass…”. ( 3)
She goes on to write of the difficulties of laying down English lawn –

because of the winds – and of finding the seeds for English flowers. But
her kitchen garden grew potatoes, strawberries and green peas “huge in
size and abundant in quantity.”
Lady Broom also writes about social relationships, and of the difficulty
of finding home help, as the young girls found the country to be very
lonely, as they had all come from English factories, and they had no idea
about how to run a kitchen. So, she and the head shepherd would bake
bread, make meat pies, and roast joints to make the meals. She reports
that British cooking was difficult to reproduce, and that she had to learn
respect and “patience for the knowledge to produce the simple things of
16
Mary Anne Steward was an English woman who married George Barker in
1852, and became Lady Barker after he was knighted. Together they went to New
Zealand. Then she was widowed in 1861, and returned to England. While back to
the U.K., she married a New Zealand sheep farmer, Frederick Napier Broome, and
returned with him a second time to New Zealand. He was also knighted, so her
name changed to Lady Broom. It was from their station Broomielaw that she wrote
her Station Life in New Zealand. See also Colonial Memories, Ballantyne Press
1904. I believe the disparaging way that Lady Broom writes about class and race
is reflected in many other memoirs and letters by the wealthier immigrants to New
Zealand in the last half of the 19th century.
our daily life” (11). Swaggers17 were given good meals of tea, mutton and
bread, and she graced them with the title ‘empire builders’. Lady Broom
also referred to the primitive hour that they took dinner, far before 8 p.m.,
which was the usual time dinner was taken in good houses in England.
From these few excerpts, we can begin to understand how difficult it
was to recreate the social logic of England in practice – even for the most
dedicated upper-class English woman, and we can now begin to
understand the obstacles that they faced to create homes that came even
close to the English model, with drawing rooms, dining rooms and the
like. To meet that task, wealthy families imported everything, from panes
of glass, to wood for framing, along with furniture, crockery, tablecloths
and napkins, kitchen pots and pans, curtains, wallpapers, paint, carpets,
bathroom piping and fittings, along with servants, horses, Music and Latin
teachers – in short, a whole culture, or at least as much of it as they could.
And among this paraphernalia, cookbooks were brought along with design
plans for the New Zealand kitchen. However, they had none of the food
supplies they enjoyed in England. While English foods were available,
only the rich could afford to ‘eat English’ every day. And most ordinary
people could only eat what they could find locally. Nor could most people
import an entire way of life holus-bolus. This was simply beyond them
both economically and culturally. Thus even at the beginning of the
nation of New Zealand (not the Maori nation of Aotearoa), the class
distinctions and thus identity of white New Zealanders were distinct
although in many ways similar.
As we see, the new citizens tried to duplicate English eating habits in
the meat, tea and cakes that they consumed. But in addition, like all
country folk, they also hunted: wild boar and birds, as well as fishing for
various species, and catching eels to make pies for themselves and their
workers.
17
The term ‘Swagger’ meant ‘tramps’ that were taken on as casual laborers on
many farms.
74 Chapter Three
History, Food and Literature: The Culinary Imaginary

in Katherine Mansfield.18
Katherine Mansfield’s stories At The Bay, The Garden Party19, and
Prelude 20 are, in part, biographical, and offer us instances of morning and
afternoon teas, as well as the moment of preparation of food for a garden
party, and the female environment in which such events were planned and
carried out.21 I mention these particular examples as they illuminate the
Englishness of middle-class life in New Zealand in the way the foods were
created. As well, the surroundings, as described by Mansfield, are
evocative of British country life. These foods also continue to be the
foundation for rural New Zealand teas, lunches and dinners. They are
‘what is polite’ and expected. They are freshly created from the kitchen,
and they constitute rural community cuisine. These foods are clearly part
of Pakeha social identity. In fact, they constitute the domestic heart of
New Zealand. However, Mansfield’s depictions of New Zealand life,
domesticity and women’s experiences are not presented without a great
deal of ambivalence and contradiction. Home, as the rituals of meals and
food determine it, is often thought to be defined by positive associations
and, as mentioned above, by keeping traditions. Such positive
associations are strictly problematic for Mansfield. Thus, even in her short
stories, which are ostensibly about the small domestic duties and
relationships which make up a home or a community, or even a family,
there is embedded within them a sense of estrangement, which I believe is
intrinsic to the unease that New Zealanders continue to express in their
concern with Pakeha identity. One of these ‘estrangements’ is a sense of
estrangement from ‘Home’.
18
Claire Tomalin, in her biography of Katherine Mansfield also writes about the
New Zealand fixation on identity. She writes about Mansfield’s parents “…both
were children of men and women who had, for one reason or another, found that
they were not wanted, or could not make their way in England. In the nineteenth
century, New Zealand was, for many, a colony of Australia as much as Australia
was a colony of England; it was the very last place, the furthest you could go, and
the end of the line. Perhaps for that very reason the people (‘the most provincial
on earth’, according to Beatrice Webb in the 1890s) yearned towards ‘Home’
12,000 miles away, all the more, trying to overlay the alien landscapes, plants,
feasts and seasons with whatever could lend an illusion of what many had never
seen.” p. 7-8. Katherine Mansfield, A Secret Life, 1988, Knopf: New York.
19
The Garden Party, 1922, op. cit.
20
Prelude
21
See The Garden Party, 1922, The Modern Library: New York
In her book Writing the Meal, Diane McGee (2002) writes “ …

geographical mobility at the turn of the century would have contributed
significantly to the sense of homelessness in this period.” (McGee 2002;
pg. 84). In fact Mansfield left New Zealand, and lived in exile, away from
her family home in New Zealand, though never having felt at home
anywhere. Such a feeling of distance from ‘Home in England’, and the
sense of nostalgia one finds in discussions of tradition of British culinary
practices in New Zealand, both suggest that the notion of exile is central to
the understanding of Pakeha New Zealand identity. As McGee suggests:
In Mansfield’s fiction, the shifting quality of personal and social identity is
frequently associated with a change in the relationship to the home. In
particular, the treatment of dining and of food itself expresses both this
loss of tradition, and the search for a new way of being, especially for
women. Loss or rejection of food habits, customs and rituals may signal
various other losses as well.” (84)
Mansfield’s characterization of women both in the home and outside

(wife, mother, worker, community matron) reflects alienation and tension.
Notice Mansfield’s characterization of family relationships, women’s
illnesses and their overall association with meals. Mealtime is not simply
a moment of pleasure, sociability and intimacy, but also of loss, and a lack
of familiarity and understanding between family members. Mealtimes
signify a weakness in the social fabric. Embedded in food production and
food rituals both in contemporary New Zealand and in Mansfield’s stories,
therefore, is a meditation on what it means to be a woman, the tension
women feel as they are bound to their homes and families, and, as well for
Mansfield, a connection between food, eating and loneliness. ( 87)
In the stories about the Burnell family in At The Bay, and Prelude, the
family is never celebrated as a centre of social life. The first story is about
the family moving, and having to leave their two young daughters behind
with a neighbor. This is due to the fact that the cart could only carry the
‘important pieces’, (according to their mother Linda) and thus there was
no room for the children. In the following piece the family is in isolation,
even though the members of the household are working to make a home.
The sense of the space of the home is uneasy and awkward, with Mrs.
Burnell, (Linda), always sitting away by herself in her own room, away
from the table, and otherwise not engaged with her children, or with the
basic tasks involved in making a home. In both stories, meals and
mealtimes are, as McGee points out, askew. (101)
76 Chapter Three
In the story At The Bay 22, the day begins for the women when Stanley
finally leaves for work in the morning. The liberating effect of men out of
the house, of a relaxed atmosphere with no one ‘in charge’, and all
allowed to go their own way, is very clear:
“Good-bye, Stanley,” called Beryl, sweetly and gaily. It was easy enough
to say good-bye! And there she stood; idle, shading her eyes with her
hand. The worst of it was, Stanley had to shout good-bye too for the sake
of appearances. Then he saw her turn and give a little skip and run back to
the house. She was glad to be rid of him! Yes, she was thankful. Into the
living room she ran and called “He’s gone!” Linda cried from her room:
“Beryl! Has Stanley gone?” Old Mrs. Fairfield appeared, carrying the boy
in his little flannel coatee.
“Gone?”
“Gone!”
Oh, the relief, the difference it made to have the man out of the house.
Their very voices were changed as they called to one another; they
sounded warm and loving as if they shared a secret … There was no man
to disturb them; the whole perfect day was theirs.” (Mansfield, 1931, p. 11-
12).
In the story Prelude 23, Mansfield invites us to enter the world of

middle-class New Zealand culinary habits by showing us something
completely British. She writes:
Up in the house, in the warm tidy kitchen, Alice, the servant girl, was
getting the afternoon tea. She was ‘dressed’. She had on a black stuff
dress that smelt under the arms, a white apron like a large sheet of paper,
and a lace bow pinned on to her hair with two jetty pins. Also her
comfortable carpet slippers were changed for a pair of black leather ones
that pinched her corn on her little toe something dreadful…It was warm in
the kitchen…Alice was making water-cress sandwiches. She had a lump
of butter on the table, a barracuda loaf, and the cresses tumbled in a white
cloth …
“Oh Alice”, said Miss Beryl. “There’s one extra to see, so heat a plate of
yesterday’s scones please. And put on the Victoria sandwich as well as the
coffee cake, and don’t forget to put little doyleys under the plates, will
you? You didn’t yesterday, you know, and the tea looked ugly and
common. And, Alice, don’t put that dreadful old pink and green cosy on
the afternoon teapot again. That is only for the mornings. Really, I think it
22
Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party, 1931. The Modern Library: New York.
23
From The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, 2006, Wordsworth Classics,
Wordsworth Editions: Hertfordshire, UK.
ought to be kept for the kitchen – it’s so shabby, and quite smelly. Put on
the Japanese one. You quite understand, don’t you?” (Mansfield 2006, p.
33-34).
And again in another scene, we are at dinner, a typical situation for

Mansfield’s stories, which are consistently written around food and eating,
but which indicate, rather than sociability, the voids in people’s
relationships, and a lack of emotional nourishment. Food is never a
symbolic capital to be yearned for, never something to be enjoyed. Instead
food can be dangerous territory, something to be controlled and, using
food, a means to assert control and possession. The following quote places
Stanley in full control over those who had prepared the meal, thus
expressing male power in the household. In this sense the food is a way to
express his identity, symbolic power and position in the family.
The white duck did not look as if it had ever had a head when Alice placed
it in front of Stanley Burnell that night. It lay, in beautifully basted
resignation, on a blue dish – its legs tied together with a piece of string and
a wreath of little balls of stuffing round it.
Burnell ran his eye along the edge of the carving knife. He prided himself
very much upon his carving, upon making a first-class job of it. He hated
seeing a woman carve; they were always too slow, and they never seemed
to care what the meat looked like afterwards. Now he did; he took real
pride in cutting delicate shaves of cold beef, little wads of mutton, just the
right thickness, and in dividing a chicken or a duck with nice precision. “Is
this the first of the home products?” he asked, knowing perfectly well that
it was. (36)
Diane McGee argues that such attention to detail, and the fact that
women rarely eat is “…in keeping with their minimal pleasure and
minimal expectations. Moreover, the fact that very small details about
food or changes in diet are so terribly important in their lives, and carry
such subtle nuances of meaning for them shows the tenuousness of their
accommodation with life, the fine line between joy and despair”. (McGee,
2002; 90) Thus again we find a sense of alienation and oppression, with
husband Stanley back in charge.
However all is not isolation and depression in the Mansfield New
Zealand stories about family and hearth. Linda Burnell’s mother, Mrs.
Fairfield, loves the kitchen, enjoys serving people with nourishment and
encourages warm company. Linda Burnell’s sister Beryl organizes teas
for a neighbor, and at this tea, the children make friends. It may be that
this nurturing side of women’s work is there to balance Linda Burnell’s
78 Chapter Three
sense of isolation, and the desperation she feels, which is reflected in her
refusal to eat most food, and certainly to reject most of her husband’s gifts
of food to her.
And this detail too is important, as it not only reflects New Zealand
society, middle-class and bourgeois, but it comes straight out of British
life: the responsibility of the more fortunate, (in this instance of Laura and
her mother Mrs. Sheridan in The Garden Party 24 to share with those ‘less
fortunate,’ as it is politely phrased, in reference to a family whose father
had suddenly been killed:
“Suddenly she, looked up. There on the table were all those sandwiches,
cakes, puffs, all uneaten, all going to be wasted. “I know,” she said.
“Let’s makeup a basket. Let’s send that poor creature some of this
perfectly good food. At any rate, it will be the greatest treat for the
children. Don’t you agree? “ (Mansfield 1931, p. 77).
Contemporary Rural Women and British Foodways:

the Ethnography of Rural Women
The social practice of overt social responsibility and thus the collection
of symbolic capital in the community still continues to be particularly
connected to the elite women of rural communities. The women I worked
with in the 1980s and 1990s in a small rural community have commonly
been tied to their individual farming communities for up to four
generations. They practice the same acts of generosity, and articulate a
seigniorial sense of duty to the community. Responsibility to their
families, to their land and their communities has, in the past, demanded of
them a sense of destiny and duty which views ‘self-sacrifice’ as being
socially and psychologically constitutive of the position of wealthy
inheritors. These families have actually created their Arcadia from the
work of their immigrant forebears. Now that they live a model of British
county life, community obligations for them are part of their volunteering
duties, which are usually coupled together with food in some way. They
routinely organize teas, luncheons and community meetings, which
include the offering of tea and biscuits. They help with the support of the
local hospital, including not only funding, but also food for patients,
exchanges of homemade jams and bottled fruit, and the provision of
scones and other baked goods. As well, from their farms, meat products of
lamb and beef are gifted out to farm workers’ families and others in need,
including the hospital and some elderly residents of the community.
24
Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party. 1931. The Modern Library: New York.
At home on their farms, most rural New Zealand women, as it was

with Lady Broom, are still expected to cook for their husbands, for guests,
and, as well, the shearers, farm hands and other laborers who work for
their husbands. This means that during particular seasons, women produce
morning tea (fresh baked scones and muffins), jam, butter and tea for
working teams of men and women. Then they deliver a main meal,
(lunch) of meat and vegetables – and more tea to the whole team. For the
afternoon break, they serve the leftovers of the lunch meal, along with tea.
Finally, of course, they prepare for their own family’s meal at dinnertime.
Thus, the provision of service through food, and the rituals associated with
particular meals, becomes a centerpiece to women’s daily lives. And, like
the Mansfield stories, women here often feel isolated and less than
fulfilled. The sensibility from the Mansfield New Zealand stories can still
be said to characterize contemporary women, particularly those who live
in the rural outposts of the country.
As one rural woman remarked to me in the early 1990s:
…it is definitely something that ladies do. I mean, ladies here bottle, they
bake things, they sew…you have to bake things when you go to
someone’s house. You are asked to ‘take a plate’. And this is why I
thought ‘what am I going to do today? Make some sandwiches?’ And you
really have to try and do things reasonably well…Today we’ve got a bring
and buy ladies’ lunch.
Or another, when I asked if she worked much on the farm itself: “No,
but cooking, oh yes, cooking for haymaking and shearers. Yes, I did a lot
of cooking. I had a single man, I’d forgotten about that. There were more
men to feed in years before. The single man lived in the shearers’
quarters…And the Christmas party – we try and feel what it is like to have
Christmas in England.” Thus, even as recent as the 1990s some Pakeha
New Zealanders, born in New Zealand, look back in history to England, to
their ethnic roots, to a dream world, a dream identity that they have never,
in real life, experienced. And, they express this world and this identity
through food.
Talking and Writing about Food in the 20th Century

Cooking and providing food are one of those taken-for-granted duties
that women do – a ‘Just Job’, as one woman expressed to me, as in the
phrase ‘will you just make morning tea for…’. As mentioned before,
writing specifically about food and the social relations of food ways does
not appear very often in New Zealand literature as a topic – but it is found
80 Chapter Three
in texts such as the Women’s Weekly, in the (now historical) Aunt Daisy
radio broadcasts, and in local cookbooks. The domestic space is one
which is ideologically structured. It is one of supposed comfort - home
and hearth – but the ideal is often unfulfilled 25. Domestic education,
provided by the government educational system, became important in the
1920s and 1930s, as the shortage of servants forced middle class women to
fend for themselves. Middle class women deplored the shortage of
domestic servants, but they had no choice but to roll up their sleeves.
High school home economics, and degrees in home economics at
university helped them prepare. Plunket Society26 feminists tried to
improve educational opportunities for women, while others in the Labour
Party raised the status and conditions of domestic workers. In 1917,
domestic education was mandated for girls, though not implemented
aggressively.
An important part of the developing ideological structure of domesticity
were the radio programs and writings of Maud Ruby Basham (1879-1963),
popularly known as Aunt Daisy, in her day a cult figure with a very wide
following. During the Depression and later, her solo half-hour radio
program became indispensable listening, providing information and advice
on all matters domestic, from 1933 to 1963. In her program Aunt Daisy
mixed Anglican principles, advertisements, recipes, and home hints. She
has been described as a singer, radio broadcaster and personality, as well
as a writer. She published twelve Aunt Daisy recipe and handy hint
books, as well as an annual scrapbook! After her death one listener
wrote:27
Aunt Daisy used to make Marmite sound like caviar, and I still use it.
Isn’t it amazing what an impact she had? There isn’t a star in the world
that could leave such a mark on the everyday culture of a whole nation.
Marmite may seem trivial, but somehow relates back to her presence on
the airwaves for all those years, for all those isolated housewives and
mothers especially in the rural areas. And so for their children.
25
See Jock Phillips A Man’s Country? 1987, Penguin Books, Auckland: New
Zealand, and see Breadwinning: New Zealand Women and the State, by Melanie
Nolan, 2000, Canterbury University Press: Christchurch, New Zealand.
26
The Royal New Zealand Plunket Society is an organization, which was formed
in 1907 in order to support mothers and baby health and welfare. There are
Plunket centers in most New Zealand towns.
27
See The Book of New Zealand Women – Ko Kui Ma Te Kauppa, Charlotte
MacDonald et. al ed., 1996, Bridget Williams Books: Wellington.
By the late 1980s, domestic food culture in New Zealand had

broadened to include new cooking techniques and foods, as well as new
ways to process food. In her book Between Friends,28 Linda Burgess
traces changes in food habits from the 1960s to the 1980s while following
the lives of her main characters as they grew up. She begins with a story of
college friends in the 1960s as they prepare what they served as a proper
dinner in the restaurant/hotel where they worked:
Sunday, they take turns in pairs to cook a midday roast. Jill gets a bit sick
of always having to do something with cold meat on a Monday, but is
soon turning out Shepherd’s Pies and lamb curries that could have come
from her own mother’s kitchen.” (Burgess 1994, p. 35).
And restaurants of the day were duplicating the ‘roast and vegetables’
motif, which was always a staple of British food, duplicated in New
Zealand. Again, this is an example of the doxic knowledge of food and
foodways that were expected and understood.
At night, (at the restaurant), Tessa carries silver serving dishes heaped with
roast potatoes, mashed potatoes, cauliflower, carrots, pumpkin, and peas.
The Criterion is known for its Table. Or so Mavis says. At lunch, the
service is less than formal. You can still have the roast, but Bert serves
everything on to the plate in the kitchen. You get mashed potatoes, and the
roast potatoes (two if you’re a gent). Sometimes the cold meat is made
into an exotic curry. This comes with rice, also exotic, and mashed
potatoes. No roast potatoes, though. Roast potatoes and curry don’t go.”
(54)
By the end of the 1980s the dinner party described in Burgess’ book
reflects how foodways have changed dramatically with regard to the
evening meal, and what is expected for guests. Instead of one meat and
two vegetables, guests are served the following:
Tess has spent one of her hours since leaving work putting together a plate
of hors d’oeuvres so beautiful she wants to photograph it. On one of
Sally’s large fine platters she has assembled fat black olives, salami rolled
around feta cheese, slices of red pepper, rounds of black bread topped with
cream cheese, slices of red smoked salmon, dried figs, smoked almonds
and chunks of brie.” (135)
28
Linda Burgess, Between Friends, 1994, Otago University Press, Dunedin: New
Zealand.
82 Chapter Three
In this latter portrayal, we begin to see the emergence of a wider cuisine,

with the influence of Italian and French elements appearing, marking the
passing of the traditional meat and multiple vegetables combination from
their mothers’ kitchens. The seemingly endless reproduction of English
foodways is finally coming to an end as being the only possibility of a
good meal. Changes are on the way, and thus is a change of identity as it is
conceived by Pakeha New Zealanders. What readers will notice, looking
at any current New Zealand cookbook, is the wide array of Maori, Asian
and European foods that are included.
Conclusion
The analysis I have set out makes it quite clear that for Pakeha New
Zealanders, one can argue that food culture is closely linked to the
formation of their early national identity as British, as well as to the
contemporary movement of national identity away from its British
foundations to something more distinct. While the broad image of an
Arcadian paradise might have drawn white settlers to New Zealand, it did
not provide much in the way of a plan for everyday life once they arrived.
Once they arrived, New Zealanders had to fall back on their British
cultural armature that they were familiar with, of which food and cooking
constituted central elements. The food that the majority of its (European)
inhabitants ate, and the food rituals and symbolic meaning of the food has
now undergone a profound change. Because of Colonial and racist
thinking, using Maori foods and cooking techniques were not seriously
considered until recently, when New Zealand cuisine began to include
cross-cultural aspects from many food traditions. Contemporary
mainstream meals include Maori food, and the wide use of local
agricultural products, such as a variety of domestic shellfish, birds, and
root vegetables. Today new recipes combine with those familiar products
introduced by the British settlers - beef, sheep, deer, rabbit, English
vegetables, tea, and sugar. Additionally new foodways as well as food
production reflect a multi-cultural New Zealand that includes East and
South Asian cuisine as well as the food traditions of some South American
countries, the Middle East and Europe.
New Zealand, as part of the globalized food economy, has an
abundance of globalized corporate food outlets such as McDonald’s. Such
globalization does not always sit well with citizens and government alike.
At the moment New Zealand is waging a battle against food from
countries that produce genetically modified products and which have
lower food standards. Added to that burden, of protecting citizens and
agriculture, the regulations of international food and trade agreements

make it extremely difficult for a primary-producing nation such as New
Zealand to be treated fairly by the club of rich industrial nations, (Simpson
2008 p.257). It may be that in the context of international trade disputes
and within a consciously growing multi-cultural society, in which different
foodways become commonplace, New Zealanders has become itself.
The countryside of New Zealand is a worked-over land – once
completely cleared of timber and burned over much of its area, with
imported seeds, fertilizer, trees, birds, and flowers, all from Britain, taking
the place of local vegetation. The story of New Zealand food is closely
embedded in these changes – and has changed itself. What has not
changed – given my ethnographic work – is the place food rituals play in
daily life – morning tea and smoko; and the volunteer labor that women
give to their communities in the forms of activities as well as particular
British based foods. These rural rituals still persist very strongly in rural
communities, though the picture in the cities is more complex.
And Aunt Daisy? Certainly not forgotten! Even in 2007 women were
talking on-line about her relish and chutney recipes and trading
suggestions. Nowadays one of her few remaining cookbooks – rare and
sought after – fetches upwards of eighty dollars.
However, like the changing New Zealand Pakeha identity, women’s
place, foodways and the domestic space, filled as they are with layers of
symbolic capital and meaning, have a fragmentary quality about them.
This was certainly born out in my research into a rural New Zealand
farming village. What I mean by this is that identity in Pakeha New
Zealand, especially as it touches women’s work, food and food culture
hangs uncertainly between British sensibilities and identity, and the
emerging sensibilities of new immigrant cultures, and the new
employment and educational worlds now open to women. New Zealand
may no longer be a colony, but it still remains a member of the
Commonwealth nominally under the control of the British Queen. A sense
of what it means to be a white New Zealander is not yet fully determined,
even if some signs of a growing autonomy from Britain are becoming
clear in national foodways, cooking and food production. Such cultural
instances have emerged and been transformed in parallel with changes in
identity and thus inform us of the social and symbolic capitals which are
critical to the domestic space. It is clear that food and food rituals
continue to be a window onto an understanding of the divided sense of
identity of Pakeha New Zealand.
In Mansfield’s story Prelude, the young girl Kezia looks through the
stained glass of the dining-room window. She sees a fragmented world, in
84 Chapter Three
different colors and pieces, depending on the pane of glass through which
she looks. Perhaps this is the vision that, in examining foodways and food
rituals in the domestic space, is most apt in describing the uncertain and
evolving nature of Pakeha identity, in which culinary practice plays such a
central role.
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Burgess, Linda Between Friends: A Novel. 1994, University of Otago
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Fairburn, Miles The Ideal Society and its Enemies: the Foundations of
Modern New Zealand Society, 1850 – 1900. 1989, Auckland:
Auckland University Press.
MacDonald, Charlotte et. al. The Book of New Zealand Women – Ko Kui
Ma Te Kauppa. 1996, Bridget Williams Books: Wellington.
Mahar, Cheleen Ann-Catherine ‘On the Moral Economy of Country Life’.
1991, in Journal of Rural Studies, Vol. 7, number 4 p. 363-372.
Mansfield, Katherine The Garden Party. 1922, The Modern Library:
New York.
—. ‘Prelude’. 2008, in The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield.
Wordsworth Editions, Hertfordshire: UK.
McGill, David ‘So Pakehas have a Culture’. 1986, in New Zealand
Listener, April 19, 1986.
Mitchell, Austin, The Half-Gallon Quarter-Acre Pavlova Paradise. 1972,
Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd., Christchurch: New Zealand.
Nolan, Melanie Breadwinning: New Zealand Women and the State. 2000,
Canaterbury University Press: Christchurch, New Zealand.
Phillips, Jock A Man’s Country? The Image of the Pakeha Male: A
History. 1987, Penguin: Auckland.
Ranford, Jodie Department of Labour publication, 1985.
Richardson, Martin Food in New Zealand Guide Book, NZ.com. 1993
Simpson, Tony A Distant Feast: The Origins of New Zealand’s Cuisine.
2008, Godwit Press: New Zealand.
Sinclair, Keith A History of New Zealand. 1959, Penguin Books:
Middlesex: UK.
Terrace Congregational Church Terrace Tested Recipes. 1927, Wellington:

New Zealand.
Thomas, Nicholas Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and
Government. 1994, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Tomalin, Claire Katherine Mansfield, A Secret Life. 1988, Knopf: New
York
Trollope, Anthony Australia and New Zealand. 1873
Wright St. Clair V., and Hocking, C. ‘Older New Zealand Women Doing
the Work of Christmas: a recipe for identity formation. 2005, in
Sociological Review, 53 (2) 332-350.
FOOD AS METAPHOR IN CONTEMPORARY
GERMAN WRITING
CHAPTER FOUR
FROZEN FOODS AND FROZEN

STATES OF BEING:
THE GDR ON ICE IN ANNETT GRÖSCHNER’S
NOVEL “MOSKAUER EIS”1
MARTINA CASPARI
„Im Prinzip konnte man alles einfrieren, Muttermilch, Tote, Erbsen,

Bohnen, Spargel, die ganze DDR-Landwirtschaft, Fleischwirtschaft,
Marmor, Stahl und Eisen, Akten, überhaupt hätte man die ganze ehemalige
DDR mit einer Kühlzelle überbauen und konservieren können. Aber dass
ein Mensch in seiner eigenen Kühltruhe einfror und sich ohne Zuführung
äußerer Energie gefrierlagerte, das hatte ich noch nie gehört.“ (Moskauer
Eis, 29)2
Culinary practice is deeply rooted in a society’s understanding of itself,

its political make-up, its core beliefs – and that which it suppresses. That is
certainly true for the German Democratic Republic which was torn by two
1
An earlier version of this article was published in German under the title “Im
Wartezustand frischgehalten: Annett Gröschners Debütroman ‚Moskauer Eis’
versucht ein neues Sprechen über die DDR, die Wende und das Leben danach” in
Weimarer Beiträge 2 (2004): 301-307. The present article is a thoroughly modified
version thereof and of a talk delivered at the annual conference of the PAMLA
(Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association) at Scripps College on
November 9, 2003.
All English quotes from Moskauer Eis as well as other English quotes from
German secondary sources in this article are my translations, M.C.
2
“In principle, everything could be frozen: mother’s milk, corpses, peas, beans,
asparagus, the entire GDR agriculture, meat production, marble, steel, files,
actually, one could have covered the entire GDR with a cooling aggregate and thus
could have preserved it. But that a human-being would freeze in his own freezer
and kept himself frozen without any external energy, that I had never heard of
before” (Moskauer Eis, 29).
Frozen Foods and Frozen States of Being 89
contradictory impulses, being in constant competition with the much more

affluent West (in particular, of course, with West Germany) and having to
deal with an economy of scarcity at the same time. Since it is hardly
possible to bridge the gap between affluence and scarcity especially when
it comes to food items, the system created grotesque ersatz (substitute)
products in lieu of what was or seemed gourmet food in the West. This
competition mixed with the attempt to create a utopian new society
determined the relation people had toward food throughout the existence
of the GDR and beyond. Food became the central symbol of well-being,
affluence, luxury, while its creation became an ever more artificial
endeavor undertaken by the most ingenious minds of the GDR (bringing in
some of the otherwise abandoned notion of fantasy and creativity). Also,
food became a metaphor for the state of affairs in the GDR and mirrored
different historical attitudes. Everything in the GDR finally became stale
and artificial after the shift from dialectical socialism to scientific
socialism was announced: Supposedly, all contradictions had ceased to
exist, a rather grotesque thought with severe consequences on all
expressions of life, including eating and drinking.
This is the raw material and the basis for Gröschner’s novel Moskauer
Eis3: Food and how it was treated demonstrates how we deal with
ourselves, how we deal with and care for ourselves, for the body, for the
community, and how we relate to joy, pleasure, and indulgence. Gröschner
wraps her novel around food – from A through Z and narrates a (typical?)
GDR family history.
A Frozen State of Being as Meta-Metaphorical

In her novel, Gröschner intertwines aspects of the grotesque, derived
from that dichotomy, with aspects of food preservation (deep-freezing)
which can be read metaphorically for the entire system being in a frozen
state of waiting, of being kept “fresh”, and at the same time being in a
state of immobility; and in a figurative way, a state of rigor mortis. The
process of deep-freezing itself is – from an aesthetical point of view – the
actual opposite of indulgence, joy, going with the flow of life, and
enjoying food in an immediate way. Food and food consumption have
become part of the stale every-day life in a system which is reflected by
the way people produce and consume food. The novel’s chapters each are
introduced with alphabetically ordered food or other freezable items. In a
short paragraph, the freezability of those items is discussed. The entries
3
„Muskovite Ice-Cream“
90 Chapter Four
are direct quotes from an encyclopedia of freezing techniques4. But

Gröschner’s novel still goes beyond this already intricate structure which
demonstrates culinary practices in the GDR, in that she reaches beyond the
system and maintains that after the systemic change, people in Eastern
Germany are still not able to find a “livable” space/place for themselves.
The time prior to the fall of the wall, the time of change during the fall of
the wall, and finally the time of the re-unified Germany are spanned
between the letters A and Z of the aforementioned encyclopedia. Thus,
ruptures and caesuras are - if not eliminated - at least smoothed away.
Finally some characters freeze themselves to death, a (culinary) practice
which they previously had only used on food. They therefore go the same
way as the frozen foods they had researched or created for so long. It is
obvious that the practices people use around food must be read
metaphorically: Culinary practice is at the core of self-understanding and
self-interpretation of GDR citizens, and it is not surprising that the banana,
a food item which could not (or only with great difficulty) be obtained in
the GDR became the symbol of re-unification much more than any
political conviction or agenda. Of course, bribing people with bananas was
part of a political agenda of West Germany after the fall of the wall. The
banana stood for everything the economy of scarcity could not offer its
citizens. It stood for everything exotic, hedonistic, for oral gratification,
travel, all of which the citizens of the GDR lacked – and all of which the
West, and more specifically the Christian Democratic Party under the
leadership of Helmut Kohl promised to bring to the new citizens of the
Federal Republic of Germany5. It stood for a “paradise on earth”. Thus,
culinary practice reflects the image the GDR had of itself, a lack of self-
confidence, a strong desire for Western goods (especially food items) and
an obvious dearth of answers in regard to pressing issues and the needs
described.
In choosing certain, rather unobtainable food items for her chapter
titles, Gröschner also alludes to a utopian notion which was implied in the
hope of a better future within the socialist state. It also reflects hierarchies
and remaining power issues between East and West – even after the wall
had finally come down.
4
Dannies, J.H. Lexikon der Kältetechnik. Mühlhausen/Th., 1950. This structure is
discussed further below.
5
The banana, being a tropical fruit, became the metaphor for everything exotic
outside of the GDR. It brought color to the stale every-day life of the socialist state
and the, albeit vague, Freudian reference to phallic (male) pleasure cannot be
ignored in this context.
With love, distance and incredible irony Annett Gröschner depicts the
deterioration and demise of the GDR system. She illustrates the difficulty
and sometimes even impossibility of the so-called “arrival in the West” for
her parents’ and her own generation – despite all efforts on the part of her
main character, Annja Kobe. Gröschner delineates an absurd country
whose most ardent proponents finally went the same route as the frozen
foods they had researched for decades.
The Pact with the Devil: Selling One’s History

for the Strong D-Mark
In perfect literary style and certainly with Goethe´s Faust in mind,
Gröschner opens her novel Moskauer Eis6 with a prologue which takes
place in – of course – an ice-cold study (9). While Faust in the classic
German tragedy sells his soul to the devil, the prologue by the main
character and narrator of the novel, Annja Kobe, relates a pact that does
not entail the selling of one´s soul but rather the selling of the GDR´s
history for the West German D-Mark. The system change is clearly and
from the very beginning marked as one of loss and as one indicating
caesura. The two poles of “before” the Wende7, and “after” the Wende are
those which structure the prologue of this novel – a novel with the
seemingly sole purpose to deconstruct these same poles by narrating a
story criss-crossing through history and personal biographies, by crossing-
out and re-writing GDR history, thus creating a new identity for those who
had sold out everything they “owned” – and sometimes even more. Only
the alphabetic order in which the story is told holds the narrative together.
Thus, Gröschner achieves a new look at the Wende as process rather than
absolute turning-point. Moreover, the novel questions and challenges the
notion that writing a “History of the GDR” or GDR biography is possible
at all. At the same time, Moskauer Eis is an eloquent example of this
possibility, despite all intended doubts which accompany, determine and
subvert this endeavor.
6
Moskauer Eis (Muscovite Ice-Cream) is the name of the type of ice-cream
featured in the novel.
7
The German term “Wende“ means “turn”. It is used to describe the time of
German reunification and has become a solid historical term to mark that period.
92 Chapter Four
Annett Gröschner as the East German Voice

of her Own Generation
Annett Gröschner’s main character Annja Kobe tries to remember and,
thus, re-discuss once again the changes that occurred before and after
1989/1990. Her generation takes a close and frank look at the situation,
spiced with irony and fantastic elements. Of course, such a liberty could
only be taken by younger authors like Gröschner. Older authors such as
Christa Wolf8 who were born years before the creation of the GDR and
who had survived German fascism had a much more difficult time with
this period of system change. Earlier authors had invested much hope into
the new socialist system after 1945, the system of their choice (at least for
many), and had seen a new utopia rise after WWII. Then they had to let go
of everything in which they had believed so ardently for so long, a very
difficult and rather painful process.
Gröschner, however, was born “into” the GDR. Her formative years
took place during the 1970s and 1980s. She had never consciously decided
to live in the GDR, she had not seen a fascist regime fall after a disastrous
war – and she had not opted for socialism as the new and only way of
existence after 1945. Thus, in her novel Moskauer Eis, Gröschner is able
to take a fresh look at her own, her family´s and the regime´s history.
Since the coming down of the wall did not indicate a total rupture for her
as it did to the older generations, she is able to continue her story without
the Wende being the absolute changing-point of her life. That is not to say
that she does not create a “before” and “after”, but disruptions are
intertwined with continuities especially with regard to personal
biographies. This certainly has an effect on the structure of the novel,
which does not deal with caesuras but which has a particular motion of
remembering, criss-crossing through the manifold layers of personal and
public histories before and after the Wende. Thus, the novel demonstrates
what the prologue already alluded to and which unfolds in the course of
the narrative: First, there is the waiting for change, and then a period in
which the GDR people sell out their own history for the strong D-Mark,
8
I am referring particularly to Wolf’s novel „Leibhaftig“, where she describes that
process of letting go as a potentially deathly disease through which the protagonist
suffers – and survives. “Leibhaftig” is a novel of mourning a lost utopia, or trying
to give up hope and believes which have become constitutional of the individual’s
core being. Thus, the mourning process hits the deepest layers of the individual
and creates a crisis which threatens the individual existentially. See also: Caspari,
Martina. “Im Kern die Krise: Schuld, Trauer und Neuanfang in Christa Wolfs
Erzählung “Leibhaftig”. Weimarer Beiträge 1 (2003): 135-139.
followed by a sense of loss – all of this supported by the metaphor of

frozen and non-frozen food items.
The Loss of Identity after the Pact

The waiting continues on. However, now it is a waiting for a way to
maintain or reestablish one’s own history and a sense of identity or a new
constitution thereof. The anticipation of change is now treated with
extreme irony. The people had dreamed of breaking out and of traveling
into “the unknown” (10). But such notions remained just dreams. Their
perception of the motion of life was constructed as a circle, and could
easily be predicted: “Nothing could happen to us, we were safe. “We knew
all steps by heart” (10), Annja Kobe points out.
The Wende changes this situation fundamentally and abruptly, and turns it
completely around, as indicated in the prologue:
“Suddenly, everything seemed open to all sides. The straight way from
birth to death now branches out and becomes multi-directional. It was as if
somebody had put a film projector on fast-forward, as if the earth had
come away from its usual path and was turning around the sun faster. In
one year, we lived ten, maybe thirty years, which left traces in our faces”
(11).
Being used to waiting for change instead of becoming pro-active and act,
the Easterners felt incapable of stopping or influencing that process. When
they are asked to “forget” and erase their own history they do even that
willingly, claims the protagonist:
“Come, throw off your history. And those who always had waited could
not wait yet another minute. They wanted to live as they always had
depicted living. And that meant to own the right currency, real bills, heavy
coins which ruined our old wallets” (11-12).
This “pact with the devil” – the selling out of one’s own history for the D-
Mark – is understood by some as such (the few Cassandras of the time) but
when it finally happens, it is already too late. History is burned in a bonfire
and with it, some of the over-eager people who had supported that very
process:
“There was a big silence above the cities, the prophets said: Storm is going
to come. We exchanged money for our histories, because more we did not
own. They took them and created a big bonfire. We were allowed to light
94 Chapter Four
them up with our lighters. Some over-eager people fell into it and were not
seen anymore….” (12).
Therefore, the prologue summarizes the many-faceted narrative moments

into a metaphor; the devil’s pact and the selling of one’s soul. – In this
Faustian pact, rather than the soul, the GDR sells its history and with it its
identity. At the same time it deconstructs the opposition of pre- and post-
Wende and thus re-conquers a space for a new East German identity. The
Wende novel Moskauer Eis, indeed, is both a pre-Wende and post-Wende
narrative communicating to us, in terms of food products and food
processing, much about the state of affairs and the grotesqueness of living
in the GDR – and, indeed, the grotesqueness of living in the Federal
Republic after 1990 as well.
A Deep-Frozen Father in a Deep-Frozen State

In the main body of the text the narrator, Annja Kobe, like Gröschner
born in 1964, finds her father, who is the head of a research institution that
deals with freezing processes, frozen in a 1960 GDR freezer, which
surprisingly is not plugged-in. This constitutes a situation which allows for
only two explanations: Either the father has fallen asleep in a fantastic and
wonderful fashion9 hibernating only to wake up in a better system. One
feels reminded of the fairy-tale The Sleeping Beauty or Trobadora Beatriz
by the GDR author Irmtraud Morgner10. Or, and that is the second possible
explanation, he has committed suicide. Neither explanation can be proven
and both are located in the realm of the irrational, because without
electricity both events remain impossible: “But that a human-being had
deep-frozen himself without any external source of energy, that I had
never ever heard of before” (29). The unheard-of, typical of the novella as
a literary genre, is actually the starting-point for a very complex novel
which itself becomes the space of remembering that which once was.
9
Gröschner is very conscious of literary means. That the montage novel is based
on data and facts and is a result of thorough and detailed research, becomes
obvious in her MDR-feature (MDR being an East German television station) of
1996 in which she analyses the ice-cream production of the GDR. In an interview
with Alexandra Kedves she states: “I am mostly interested in mixing forms of
documents and fiction, literary collages.”
10
Morgner, Irmtraud. Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz nach
Zeugnissen ihrer Spielfrau Laura. Hamburg and Zürich: Luchterhand, 1991: 11.
Trobadora Beatriz also slept for several hundred years hoping for a future time
more suitable for women – in vain, of course.
Thus, the narrator thinks of herself as being a chronicler: “When I am dead

nobody will understand anymore the (hi)story of two refrigeration
engineers whose only handicap it was to have lived on the wrong side”
(94, referring to the main character’s father and grandfather). It remains
open if “the wrong side” means having lived in the GDR or if it refers to
the entire biography of both relatives inclusive of the post-Wende, the time
after 1990, the time after reunification.
The afore-mentioned fantastic element is the one that starts the narrator
off on a journey into her own and her family´s history, a history
determined by the profession of most of the family members: Father and
grandfather had been refrigeration engineers and had spent most of their
professional lives researching freezing processes and optimizing the frozen
food production in the GDR. Freezing processes play a further role in the
text in that they also determine the fate of relatives who are not as
supportive of the system. Thus, an uncle trying to flee the GDR in a truck
compartment for frozen foods freezes to death during the attempt.
Food becomes the essential and constitutive element of the novel -
also in terms of its (alphabetical) structure of freezable foods. Food and
drink first and foremost allow for life. They also allude to a sensual
experience, especially when being freshly harvested and manufactured or
cooked: Throughout the novel, the attempt to keep food a fresh, delicious,
and sensual experience ironically recurs. Both the womanizing grandfather
and his son are trying everything in their power to enhance, improve, and
refine foods in the freezing process – a difficult task as they live in an
economy of extreme scarcity.
The Attempt of Optimizing the Food Production

in a State of Scarcity
Both Annja’s grandfather and father work with foods which were most
frequently unobtainable in the GDR. And it is an economy of scarcity that
is described throughout the novel to a point of ridicule, of satire, saturated
as the novel is with many humorous and rather grotesque reports of life,
not exactly in the fast lane. In fact, the knowledge of Annja’s grandfather
and the genius of Annja’s father (almost in the fantastic realm) are factors
that keep the GDR economy going when materials are scarce. And it is
scarcity which inspires Annja´s father to make ever crazier attempts to
counter-act that very scarceness. In a desperate moment, he even tries to
produce ketchup in a completely artificial way with ingredients that were
never meant to enter a ketchup bottle.
96 Chapter Four
While food products are supposed to stay fresh, freezing them at the
same time means “killing” them to be fresh for future consumption; food
is in a waiting position – a holding pattern, just as the people of the GDR
system, as symbolized by Annja’s father, remain in a deep-frozen state of
being.
The careers of both father and grandfather change suddenly when in
1971 socialism takes a “scientific” turn and the government of the GDR
proclaims the New Economic System of planning and leadership. Science,
it is claimed, will solve all societal problems. Kobe, Annja’s father, now is
relegated to ice-cream researcher and producer and is forced to labor with
ever fewer ingredients. Nonetheless he is still able to develop a new and
eventually very successful type of ice-cream, the so-called Moskauer Eis –
while his father, Annja´s grandfather, tired of restriction and oppression,
finally decides that his ailments do not allow him to work any longer in
and for the system. Annja’s grandfather rather retires, only to die in the
arms of a prostitute – at least finding the physical and emotional pleasure
and joy which is denied the food consumer in the GDR.
Food is not only the constitutive factor of the content of the novel but
also a structural element as it supports the associative nature of memory
and helps to avoid breaks and caesuras. As pointed out in the introduction,
every single chapter in this intricate novel opens with a quote from the
Lexikon der Kältetechnik (Encyclopedia of Freezing Techniques) by J.H.
Dannies, published in 1950. The quotes, arranged in alphabetical order,
cover everything thinkable in terms of what might be frozen, from foods to
fur to corpses. Thus, the entire novel is structured from A-Z alluding to the
Christian Ȑ – ȫ, and certainly to the system of language in general, and
thus finishes with the suggestion of closure, having narrated the “world”11,
encompassing all that there is, having discussed every aspect of life and
history without the idea of a hierarchical structure and disruptions as
depicted in the prologue and then deconstructed in the main body of the
text. Thus, the alphabetically-arranged quotes allow for a tightly-knit net
associatively moving from memory to memory in a non-chronological
fashion. The Wende itself is only explicitly mentioned again somewhere in
11
While the alphabet serves as structure strongly connected to language, „identity
theft“ is carried out through language, too. Annja Kobe, the protagonist, points out
that all the different bus lines became different numbers as well as entire cities and
their streets became renamed, a fact which leads to irritation, disorientation and
insecurity both in the grandmother as well as the grandchild Annja. Thus, all
generations are afflicted, the identity of everybody shaken (see Moskauer Eis,
169).
the middle of the thirty-seventh chapter. Thus, the Wende loses its central
position it has in mainstream historical memory.
The Order of Things

Alphabetically organized food items create a new order. Alphabetical
order also means linguistic order, though also a form of chaos against a set
notion of historical linear development. In this context, food is a metaphor
for the de-construction of common (historical) narration, introducing a
subversive voice and also a subversive discourse.
The novel ends with a chapter opened by a final quote regarding
onions (German: Zwiebeln) – a quote almost out of place considering that
onions have a distinct quality different from all the other entries of the
novel: Onions cannot be frozen. Their position is very important as the
entry indicates or denies closure thanks to its relative position in the text.
The text thus appears as being open-ended. While all the different
memories, arranged without any specific chronology in mind, have been
shown in an almost frozen state in order to remember things as they once
were, the future cannot be deep-frozen. It cannot be captured, and thus be
killed. The onions – figuratively speaking - open up the novel into the
future. The fact that the reader will not find out what happened to Annja
Kobe´s father and to herself is supported by the intentional absence of
closure at the end of Gröschner´s novel and the author´s refusal to come to
distinct explanations or to predict life as it goes on continuously and takes
unexpected turns. The novel, thus, does not introduce any new utopian
notions regarding the future but opens up a space of interesting and
colorful possibilities.
Doing Magic with Food - A Utopian Act

in an Dystopian Place
The alphabetical arrangement of the novel and specifically the entries
given allows for further interpretation. While the novel’s unbridled
narrative is about the system of scarcity in the GDR and a father who
responds to this scarcity with ever new and more fantastic freezable food
products and thus becomes almost a sorcerer, the entries of the novel
chapters speak a different language: The products mentioned indicate
abundance. They all are delicatessen items or goods of high value
associated with luxury, such as caviar (137), lobster (121) and fur (196) –
items difficult or impossible to obtain in the GDR. Even the chapter
entries serve to satirize the GDR system. In that context, the father’s
98 Chapter Four
development of food for cosmonauts in space in a world of scarcity

indeedh is telling. Annja’s father keeps fighting his fight but his line of
work becomes more and more far-fetched and bizarre. The products he
works with certainly suggest delight and a sensual experience, especially
the ice-cream research he finally dedicates himself to. However, he needs
to invent more and more ersatz substances to a point where he tries to
create a number of food items entirely from artificial ingredients. This
absurdity is constitutive of a system that understands absurdity as a sign of
a decadent capitalistic system. The search of her father to find a self-
contained, and unbroken cold chain must be interpreted in this context.
Since the early 1970s, so-called scientific socialism was promoted by
the GDR leadership. The critical notion of dialectical thinking was
eliminated, and a hermetically-closed epistemological system based on
scientific insights which seemed to be objective and unequivocal was
introduced12. The doctrine the state propagated was that all contradictions
had been eliminated. The lack of food/ingredients mirror this state doctrine
ironically: Essential ingredients for the research of Annja’s father become
scarcer and scarcer. And that notion has immediate repercussion for his
career: He is transferred to more and more remote work places until he
ends up producing ice-cream. But that line of research becomes more
difficult to carry out. Even aromatic substances and artificial flavors are
ever harder to obtain. Under those circumstances, the invention and
production of “Moskauer Eis”, a very delicious and popular type of GDR
ice-cream, equals a miracle and demonstrates the sorcerer-like ingenuity of
Annja Kobe’s father (and everybody else living in the GDR).
Metaphorical Notion of the Act of Deep-Freezing

The freezing processes indicate metaphorically the state’s agenda.
Freezing means both: keeping fresh and killing life at the same time. That
Kobe’s father decides after the Wende to deep-freeze himself could
indicate that he finds himself in a state in which he cannot continue to live
and prefers to “hibernate” and/or die. He hates the system of the GDR, and
loves the country and its people at the same time - meanwhile becoming a
functionary who keeps the system going thanks to his ingenuity. Working
in a country which is more and more characterized by scarcity meant a
continuous reduction of space to maneuver and an ever smaller space to
live and work (up to his own body) until there is no space left and he
12
See Eidecker, Martina Elisabeth. Sinnsuche und Trauerarbeit. Funktionen von
Schreiben in Irmtraud Morgners Werk. Hildesheim: Olms, 1998: 40-42.
draws the appropriate conclusions – of course, only after he has taken care
of the orderly winding-up of his institute. And indeed, the post-Wende era
is depicted no less strange and absurd as the GDR could possibly have
been. It is telling that only then he decides to deep-freeze himself when he
feels that there is no space for him left (again) – after reunification.
After watching and analyzing her father’s state for days, Annja Kobe
has not come to any new insights. He is still frozen with a rather relaxed
and happy smile on his face that was only captured once before - in one of
his wedding pictures. She recalls the tedious work, the knowledge of a
man who had dedicated his career to helping a regime and government that
he hated – while he simultaneously loved the GDR as a country. Many
details of Annja´s upbringing in the socialist GDR are recalled. There was
more to her childhood and youth than the Western propaganda of the time
would have wanted us to believe in the West. The GDR always was only
depicted in shades of grey. But human-beings there - as everywhere else -
act, love, and suffer – all “in color”.
The exit and/or death of the father which initializes the search for their
past by the daughter as well as her own whereabouts after she is finally
reported missing, too, remain unexplained. Different from her father,
Annja is determined to try to cope with the continuum and a post-GDR
biography – which, and there cannot be any doubt, is strongly influenced
by her East German upbringing and her “review” of her family’s and her
own past, triggered by finding her father frozen in an un-plugged
refrigerator.
Different Generations are Dealing Differently

with Change
However, the Wende for Annja Kobe at first brings a sudden change as
discussed in the prologue. While even time passed by very slowly in the
GDR, everyone was in a waiting position, waiting for something to come
that never came, running around in circles but, on the other hand, feeling a
great sense of security and predictability. The Wende at first means the
loss of history and, thus, of identity. At the same time, a certain degree of
continuity becomes obvious, too. The waiting after the fall of the wall
continues for something better, maybe a “third way”. In the “freezing” of
food items, keeping them fresh and killing them in a way at the same time,
we find the representation of waiting within the system of the GDR.
Freezing oneself then becomes a way of waiting once again, similar to
Morgner´s Trobadora Beatriz who falls asleep in a Sleeping Beauty-like
fashion hoping to wake up only when the situation between the sexes has
100 Chapter Four
changed (of course, it has not when she awakes after several hundred years
in the 1970s). So too has Annja’s father committed two acts at the same
time: an act of self-preservation as well as self-destruction, or so it is
suggested. However, all of the above refers to Annja Kobe’s father as a
representative of his generation. She herself tries a new start in the
reunited Germany and attempts to create some continuity for herself: In
capitalist fashion and in order to keep up with family tradition, she opens
up her own ice-cream business.
But the reader will not learn of the outcome from Gröschner – lest the
future be somehow endangered in the telling. And the reader will also not
learn about the fate of the narrator who disappears at the end of her own
story after having tried to save the family´s knowledge by opening up her
own ice-cream factory. Her project, a factory specializing in the
production of Moskauer Eis, fails when the German Treuhand, the trust
appointed to regulate ownership issues in Eastern Germany after the fall of
the wall, takes Annja’s business away from her.
The readers of the novel receive the last bits of information about
Annja from a – of course, fictitious - police report which appears attached
to the novel as an appendix, adding to the effect of a collage-narrative. It is
reported that Annja Kobe was pushed out of her apartment by big
investors. She leaves a desperate comment in red ink (or blood13) on the
wall of her apartment after she has received her eviction notice: “This is
the end” (279), most likely a reference to a song by “The Doors”. The
police interview a man who also confirms that Annja Kobe had lately been
in a rather aggressive and oftentimes intoxicated state and that it “was
unfortunately too late for her” (285). Like her father she seems not to see
any space anymore in which she might be able to live. That the police
have not understood anything about the goings-on becomes blatantly
obvious when they announce that they suspect Annja Kobe of having
killed her father.
Reading as the Paradox Act of Deciphering

that Which Cannot be Read
But the novel does not close there and then, and only at the very end it
takes its decisive turn: The police finally find a 400-page manuscript while
raiding Annja Kobe’s apartment. The manuscript is unreadable even
13
This may be an allusion to a (now broken) pact with the devil…
though it is implicitly suggested that it is the novel Moskauer Eis14 which

the reader holds in his or her hands. If, however, the manuscript cannot be
deciphered then we must conclude that the attempt to relate history and
(auto)biographical information must fail in any case - one cannot be
understood or be “read”. If so, then the novel raises questions of a rather
epistemological quality. Can we relate and narrate anything at all? How
would we have to narrate our history?15 GDR history? Our own story?
How can we narrate without self-pity or “ostalgia” (nostalgia for the
East)? How can we be true to our past? Can we “receive” and decipher
what is communicated to us?
But after all, the reader holds the text of “Moskauer Eis” in his/her
hands, which s/he is invited to decode. Thus, the reader is given the chance
to decipher the GDR (hi)story in an act of really actively “reading” the
novel. On the other hand, Moskauer Eis is able to build a monument to the
GDR without criticizing or idealizing the state. It demonstrates
symbolically via frozen foods the difficulty of living in a state of waiting
and of living in a state of loss of personal identity after 1990. In this
process of narrating, the novel recreates itself and, thus, recreates history
and finally serves to endow and maintain a sense of identity.
The identity of the novel, however, its very tone - it turns out - was not
intended by the author. Gröschner claims that she had had a much more
serious tone in mind when she began the writing process. Whatever was
then described by the critics as sarcastic, grotesque, ironic, Dadaistic, and
so forth, came about by just depicting life as it was. Maybe the novel thus
becomes independent of its author, maybe realistic writing always tells the
grotesque truth – not only the grotesque truth of Eastern Germany but also
of contemporary Germany after the Wende.
The novel Moskauer Eis opens up a critical space in order to give a
voice to history and to people long forgotten, a delicious and colorful way
to counteract the selling of a past. Gröschner invents life in literature and
through literature anew, despite the difficulty of finding a space to do so.
And she engages the reader to start his own journey.
Food then, frozen or not, becomes the metaphor for human life and
human fantasy, the ingenuity of creation. It is not surprising that the
identification of Annja Kobe’s father with the food items he researched
reaches a point where he feels the need to deep-freeze himself - to
preserve the self. Though this preservation means his death, it indicates
14
Eva Kaufmann argues that Annja Kobe has not vanished without a trace, since
she certainly has left “traces” with her 440-page novel, the novel Moskauer Eis:
“How much fun it is, to have the novel arrive at itself!”
15
Kramatschek, Claudia in Freitag (October 10, 2000).
102 Chapter Four
that there is indeed no space left for the individual, neither in the East (as it
was during the GDR period) nor in the West after the wall has come down.
The task remains for the reader to create that space by relishing and
digesting “Moskauer Eis”.
Bibliography
Böthig, Peter. „Auf dem Archipel der Kälteingenieure. Die furchtbarste
Provinz, von der DDR hervorgebracht: Annett Gröschners Roman
`Moskauer Eis´ “. Frankfurter Rundschau 6. Dezember 2000.
Caspari, Martina. „Im Kern die Krisis: Schuld, Trauer und Neuanfang in
Christa Wolfs Erzählung ‚Leibhaftig’.“ Weimarer Beiträge 1 (2003):
135-139.
Eidecker, Martina Elisabeth. Sinnsuche und Trauerarbeit. Funktionen von
Schreiben in Irmtraud Morgners Werk. Hildesheim: Olms, 1998.
Gröschner, Annett. Moskauer Eis. Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag,
2002.
—. Eiszeit. Die Speiseeisproduktion der DDR. Feature produced by the
East German public broadcasting station MDR, 1996.
Gröschner, Annett/Felsmann, Barbara. ed. Durchgangszimmer Prenzlauer
Berg. Eine Berliner Künstlersozialgeschichte in Selbstauskünften.
Berlin: Lucas Verlag, 1999.
Hahn, Anne. „Gefrorene Zeit. In ihrem Roman ‚Moskauer Eis’ hat Annett
Gröschner die DDR auf Eis gelegt.“ Scheinschlag. Berliner
Stadtzeitung (2000): 12.
Kedves, Alexandra. „Auf den Straßen Berlins und anderswo. Die
Schriftstellerin Annett Gröschner.“ Neue Zürcher Zeitung 24. März
2003.
Kramatschek, Claudia. „Alles gilt so wie es war. Innenschau der
Privatgeschichte. Annett Gröschners Debüt-Roman ‚Moskauer Eis’.“
Freitag 13.10.2000.
Morgner, Irmtraud. Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz nach
Zeugnissen ihrer Spielfrau Laura. Hamburg and Zürich: Luchterhand,
1991.
Nungeßer, Karin. „Vom Überdauern der Kälte“. Weibblick (2000): 2.
Ott, Karl-Heinz. „Wende-Wirklichkeiten. Annett Gröschner erzählt in
‚Moskauer Eis’ eine Familiensage aus Magdeburg.“ Neue Zürcher
Zeitung 16. November 2000.
Rada, Uwe. „Mit Moskauer Eis zur Milchstraße nach Schöneberg. Einfach
zum Dahinschmelzen: Annett Gröschners unschuldiges Lese- und
Verkostungsevent in einer Schöneberger Eisdiele.“ taz 6.4.2002.
Schneider, Wolfgang. „Vater in der Tiefkühltruhe. Beschneit: Annett

Gröschner holt die DDR aus dem Kälteschlaf.“ Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung 10. März 2001.
Sorrento, Aureliana. „Gefriereiferer und Kälteinstitute.“ taz 9.12.2000.
CHAPTER FIVE
HOW TO COOK A HEDGEHOG:

CEIJA STOJKA AND ROMANI CULTURAL
IDENTITY THROUGH THE CULINARY
LITERARY ARTS
LORELY FRENCH
“The best way to cook a hedgehog is over an open campfire. You lay the
hedgehog—some people coat the entire hedgehog with dirt, mud, or clay
first—in the open fire. It is best not to have strong, high flames, but rather
glowing embers. The hedgehog will turn totally black from cooking. As
soon as he is totally black, remove him from the fire and file off the spines.
You should be able to file off the spines quite easily once he is well
cooked. Then you split him down the stomach—the stomach is the best
place to split him. All the parts of the hedgehog are good and good for
you: the heart, the liver, all the innards. After you split him, peel him
open. Then each person takes a spoon and divides him up, each person
taking a little bit of the meat on the tip of the spoon. When there are many
people in the group, which undoubtedly there will be around a Romani
campfire, each person can receive just a little tasting. There is not much
meat, but even a little bit is healthy for you. And its goodness will make
you pine for more. The hedgehog is very fatty, but this is very healthy,
especially for the lungs and chest. Sometimes we make compresses out of
the fat and lay it on our chests to keep us from getting sick.”
—Ceija Stojka, Interview, 1 June 2008
I sat on a warm June day with my two colleagues from Pacific

University, Cheleen Mahar, Professor of Anthropology, and Roylene
Read, Campus Event Scheduling Coordinator, in Ceija Stojka’s decorated
apartment in Vienna, Austria. Ceija Stojka is a Romani (Gypsy) artist,
How to Cook a Hedgehog 105
writer, educator, and advocate.1 We had come to look through her vast
collection of artwork, as we tried to choose representative works from the
overwhelming number of paintings, graphics, and collages—artworks
portraying her life as a Romni living in Europe from 1939 to the present
day—for the first traveling exhibit of her artworks in the United States.2
Ceija Stojka had greeted us with a hearty, home-cooked meal, beginning
with chicken noodle soup. On the side was a large platter heaped with the
ingredients in which the soup had been cooked: celery, onions, and all the
parts of the whole chicken. After soup came a huge cast-iron skillet filled
with sliced, cooked potatoes and chicken livers that had been fried
together with caraway, salt, and oil. While indulging in this hearty mid-
day dinner our conversation ran the gamut of talking about her life
growing up in Vienna under Nazi persecution; the horrors of Auschwitz,
Ravensbrück, and Bergen-Belsen, where she and family members had
been interned; recent public readings she had done; her health; prejudices
she continued to encounter in the present day; and her family. Still, the
conversation repeatedly returned to food and foodways. At one point,
Ceija, prompted by our interest in hearing more about what she would
classify as traditional Roma food, recited the above recipe for cooking
hedgehog.3
1
Throughout this essay I will use the term “Roma,” which the Roma themselves
use for self-identification, instead of “Gypsy,” unless I am citing from original
sources where “Gypsy” is used. The term “Gypsy” holds pejorative connotations
and is used by outsiders with the assumptions of a false historical origin in Egypt
instead of Northwest India. The adjective is Romani and the language is Romany.
Romni is the female, and Rom is the male. Ceija Stojka often uses the German
word “Zigeuner,” meaning “Gypsy,” which also invokes negative images based on
a long history of stereotypes. She uses it, however, both in an attempt to reclaim
that heritage for herself and the Roma as well as to employ a term that many non-
Roma still recognize more than the designation “Roma.” She also uses the
variations “Romnya” and “Romm.”
2
The exhibit, entitled “Live—Dance—Paint: Works by Romani Artist Ceija
Stojka,” was held at Pacific University Oregon from March 31-April 3, 2009, at
Sonoma State University in California from August 19-October 31, 2009, and at
West Branch Gallery in Stowe, Vermont from November 21, 2009-January 1,
2010. Michaela Grobbel returned later that summer on a grant from Sonoma State
University to select the rest of the artworks.
3
A note about the methodology in gathering this recipe is in order. Ceija Stojka
spoke only German during our visit, and I simultaneously translated for my two
colleagues. I did not tape her on this first visit. Thus, these are not her exact
words here, but rather ones extracted from notes that I took in German and that
Cheleen Mahar took from my simultaneous translations into English. All
translations in this essay are my own. I will include the original German of all the
106 Chapter Five
Seven months later, in January 2009, I returned to Vienna with three

students to organize the artwork for shipping it to the United States and to
collect Ceija Stojka’s personal stories about each piece for display at the
exhibit.4 In the course of interviewing her, I asked her again for her recipe
for cooking the hedgehog so that I could tape it. This time, she went into
much more detail not only about preparing, cooking, and then eating the
hedgehog, but also about the large significance the hedgehog had in
Romani culture. At times these elaborations seemed to anticipate questions
and concerns that people from outside Romani culture might ask. The
hedgehog, for example, is now an endangered species in the German-
speaking countries, and it is illegal to kill or cook them. Comments on
blogs in the internet reveal major concerns and even disgust about the
consumption of an endangered species.5 Ceija Stojka introduced her recipe
for preparing and cooking the hedgehog by first clarifying that the Roma
raised their own hedgehogs and did not get them from the wild. She also
explained that the Roma believed they should eat only two hedgehogs per
year, maximum. In stressing these limitations on quantities, she directly
addressed the question of the hedgehog’s endangered status.6
longer quotes in footnotes to make sure that Ceija Stojka’s words receive due
attention, but also so that the words do not become too distracting for the English-
speaking reader.
4
I am grateful to the Elise Elliott Trust at Pacific University for granting funds for
me and students Kristen Almgren, Jacob Artz, and Maria Walters to conduct these
interviews with Ceija Stojka in Vienna while organizing her artwork for shipping
to the United States.
5
See, for example, the German website/blog “wer-weiss-was,” where someone
asks for a recipe to cook hedgehog for a friend’s birthday party as part of a
tradition whereby they cook unusual kinds of meat each year, such as crocodile,
ostrich, and snake. One blogger asks if the inquiry is serious. Another blogger
responds that one is forbidden to kill or eat hedgehogs in Germany. See
http://www.wer-weiss-was.de/theme96/article888270.html. According to research
on prehistoric cuisine in England, however, recipes for cooking hedgehogs are
actually among the ten oldest recipes in European history (See Stokes).
6
“So, this story is from the Gypsies, Roma in Austria, in Europe. That was a time
when one looked for something edible, whatever that would be, simply something
edible. Then the Roma were traveling, there were also wagons with the children,
older women and then one tried anything there was, like wild rabbit, and deer and
wild pig, and these small, wonderfully sweet hedgehogs. It was allowed to use
only one, maximum two per year. The hedgehog spent time with the Roma and no
one was allowed to use more. When they had three, then they had to let one go,
that is, the third one, or sometimes when there was only a small family, then they
had to let the second one go and eat only one. That was the custom and that was
kept.” (“Also, diese Geschichte ist von den Zigeunern, Romm in Österreich, in
In retrospect, I now interpret each of Ceija Stojka’s acts of recounting

her recipe as a prime example of what Susan Kalchik, in her discussion of
the role of Vietnamese food in the United States, and then Bell and
Valentine, in their chapter on global foodways, identify as a “performance
of ethnic identity.” In the case of Vietnamese immigrants to the U.S.,
Kalchik lists three possible messages that ethnic groups communicate in
such performances: the first is the attempt to maintain difference; the
second is the desire to show a willingness to become part of the culture in
which they now live (which, for the Vietnamese in this context, meant
American/WASP); and the third is a plea to accept pluralism and
hybridity. In any of these cases, according to Bell and Valentine, Kalchik
stresses “that there is a clear distinction to be made between private and
public performance, and in-group or out-group audience” (117). Further,
Kalcik emphasizes “the need to think of ethnic identity as processual and
performative rather than fixed” (Bell and Valentine115-116).
The audience for Ceija Stojka’s first “performance” on that warm June
day was three Americans for whom the idea of eating a hedgehog would
be so foreign, and even, given our own cultural norms, disgusting.
Likewise, her second “performance” for me and the three students in
January, 2009, was also for an audience outside the Romani culture. In
both instances, her “performance” reflects both her need to justify eating
the hedgehog on behalf of the Roma as well as to convince us of its merits,
which included its tastiness, its healthy properties, and its embodiment of
Romani values connected with sharing and community interaction. Each
person receives just a little bit, but that small taste will make you pine for
more. In the second “performance,” she seemed especially aware of her
outside audience and the concerns they would have about eating an
endangered species.
Recognizing performative aspects in Ceija Stojka’s writings is not new.
Michaela Grobbel has cogently examined passages from Ceija Stojka’s first
two autobiographies, Wir leben im Verborgenen: Erinnerungen einer
Europa. Das war eine Zeit, wo man Essbares suchte, sei es, was das ist, einfach
Essbares. Da waren die Romm damals auf der Reise, sind auch Wagen mit den
Kindern, ältere Frauen, und dann hat man ausprobiert, was es eben gibt, so wie
Wildhasen, und Rehe und Wildschwein, und diesen kleinen, wundersüßen Igel. Es
durfte nur ein, maximal zwei im Jahr verwendet werden. Die Igel haben schon
Zeit bei den Romm und keiner durfte mehr verwenden. Wenn sie drei gehabt
haben, mussten sie ihn auslassen, also den dritten, oder manches mal, wenn’s da ‘e
kleine Familie war, mussten sie denn den zweiten auslassen oder nur einen essen.
Das war so Sitte und das wurde eingehalten” Ceija Stojka, Interview, 13 January
2009.)
108 Chapter Five
Rom-Zigeunerin (We Live in Hiding: Memories of a Rom-Gypsy 1988) and

Reisende auf dieser Welt: Aus dem Leben einer Rom-Zigeunerin
(Travelers in this World: From the Life of a Rom-Gypsy 1992) along with
the book Das Brennglas by German Sinti Otto Rosenberg in the context of
analyzing the “relationship between memory, writing, and performance”
(149). Grobbel’s examination of Ceija Stojka’s autobiographies focuses
on the roles that family, music, and language play in expressing awareness
of the “moment of performance in the memory text” (140). In my essay
here I continue to see the moments of performance in Ceija Stojka’s
works, this time in conjunction with the multifaceted purposes that food
and foodways serve. In the ever-increasing body of written texts by
German-speaking Roma that have been appearing in the past thirty years,
the topics of food and foodways assume a prominent position that has yet
to receive scholarly attention. In fact, very few in-depth studies exist on
the role of food in German literary works and autobiographies in general,
much less on ethnic minorities living in the German-speaking countries.7
Analysis in my essay concentrates primarily on published versions of
Ceija Stojka’s oral stories as they appeared in the bilingual collection of
fairytales, stories, and songs by the Lovara entitled Fern von uns im
Traum. . . Märchen, Erzählungen und Lieder der Lovara/Te na dikhas
sunende . . . Lovarenge paramiþi, tertenetura taj gjila (Far Away From Us
In the Dream. . . Fairytales, Narrations, and Songs of the Lovara 2001)
and her three autobiographies, including the two mentioned above, Wir
leben im Verborgenen (We Live In Hiding 1988) and Reisende auf dieser
Welt (Travelers in this World 1992), as well as a third one, Träume, dass
ich lebe?: Befreit aus Bergen-Belsen (Am I Dreaming that I am Alive?:
Liberated from Bergen-Belsen 2005). When relevant, I also draw on the
oral stories that she recounted to me personally, such as the recipe for
cooking the hedgehog.
Ceija Stojka’s inclusion of motifs related to food and foodways in her
works serves three main purposes. First, she attempts to create an ethnic
7
On the forefront of such research has been Heike Henderson with her article on
the role of food in multicultural German literature and her essay on food in
Jeannette Lander’s Überbleibsel, and Gerhard Neumann for his work with Alois
Wierlacher and Rainer Wild, which combines literature and science when
analyzing the intertwining of food and quality of life. For historical studies see
work by Scholliers and the book Festive Culture in Germany and Europe from the
Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century; for anthropological studies see Caglar’s essay.
It is remarkable, however, that collections on food in Europe, such as Food, Drink,
and Identity in Europe, do not include essays on any of the German-speaking
countries.
identity that defines itself as a community in solidarity around foodways.

Second, by stressing that community she dispels myths about food that
have long stereotyped Roma as a group that steals food (and especially
chickens) and eats what the majority of Western culture sees as disgusting,
such as dogs and hedgehogs. Instead, food in her stories appears as a
complex metaphor for emotions and forces in everyday life, which include
love, work, deception, the body, violence, death, sexuality, and gender
roles. Third, food may serve as a source of resistance, whether that
resistance be against very concrete physical persecution or against abstract
stereotypes. In serving each of these three purposes, Ceija Stojka’s stories
rely on performance acts to form a cultural identity. The stories thus have
the potential to go beyond any small, private audience and thereby blur the
boundaries between a private and a public audience.
“This is the Way the Romnja Cook”: Building a Romani

Community through Food and Foodways
By sharing the recipe of cooking the hedgehog, Ceija Stojka is building
a Romani community with shared traditions, in this case culinary ones.
Susan J. Leonardi points out that the etymology of the word “recipe” lies
in the Latin verb recipere, which assumes an exchange with both a giver
and a recipient (340).8 Ceija’s preparation of meals for guests does not
display the kind of “’showing off’ a life-style” that Pierre Bourdieu
observes of French cuisine (79). Stereotypical portrayals of Roma have
tended to depict them as either cheating, base, and barbaric or as naïve,
romanticized, and childlike. These are not characteristics of a culture that
non-Roma have wanted to “show off.” Indeed, rarely have the Roma been
touted as a model culture to the non-Roma world.9 Instead, Ceija’s
generosity in preparing meals ties in with what scholars have observed to
be intrinsic to Roma hospitality. As Ian Hancock enumerates, Roma
always offer guests something to eat. “Not offering something to eat—and
for that matter refusing to accept something offered—is a serious breach
of etiquette, because it suggests that the person slighted in this way is not
8
I thank Heike Henderson for this reference in her essay on food in literature by
the contemporary German writer Jeannette Lander (255).
9
Studies on the stereotypes that have characterized Roma in literature, music, and
film are too numerous to list here. For a general introduction and references to
further reading see Ian Hancock’s book. In the German realm, see in particular
the collection of essays by Wilhelm Solms and Daniel Strauß and the book by
Claudia Breger on images in literature. For a thorough sociological study on
“Anti-Gypsyism” in Europe see Gernot Haupt’s book.
110 Chapter Five
clean” (81). In addition to this custom and belief behind Roma hospitality
that binds Romani culture, there are also particular recipes and foods that
characterize Roma cuisine. The hedgehog is just one recipe that Ceija
Stojka was happy to share. Her autobiographies and stories are replete
with other foods and recipes.
In a short essay entitled “So kochten die Romnja/Kadej kiravenas e
Romna” (“This is the Way the Romnja Cook”), Ceija Stojka confirms the
importance of food for the Romani culture and community: “One can
assert that there was not a single Romni who did not talk about food”
(281).10 When the men gathered together after doing business at the
market, they first talked about their business, whether it was their horses or
rugs, about the goods they had brought with them to sell, and about the
purchases they had made. But then soon after discussing business they
always asked each other what they had eaten. In this context, they would
also ask each other what each of their wives had cooked. Implicit in their
curiosity was also a rivalry between who had married the best cook, and
hence the best woman.
Ceija Stojka refers often to special foods that characterize Roma as a
group, “in a Gypsy manner,” as when in this story she states:
And their food is Roma-food, it is still the food that the Roma love: the
yellow string beans, for example, and they add potatoes to them, in a
Gypsy manner, they add a big chicken, tomatoes, then dill and garlic goes
into the drippings. Into the drippings they add garlic, and a little red
pepper, a little vinegar. While it all cooks very slowly. And then they
braise it all together” (281).11
She asserts that the Roma do not need much to make their meals. It is
not the ingredients that characterize Roma cuisine, but rather the
preparation, which involves the whole community. When her family lived
in Vienna before the Nazi times, the men would go and look for old wood.
Although she uses the verb “to steal” to characterize their actions, she
makes it clear that they would go where no Gaže, or non-Roma were
living, to old barracks and old houses so as to clarify that what they “stole”
was old, cast-off wood anyway whose potential for reuse was
10
“Es gab nicht eine Romni, kann man sagen, die nicht über das Essen sprach.”
11
“Und ihr Essen ist Roma-Essen, es ist noch das Essen, das die Romnja lieben:
die gelben Fisolen zum Beispiel, und sie geben Kartoffeln hinein, auf Zigeunerart,
ein großes Huhn geben sie hinein, Tomaten, dann Dille und Knoblauch der kommt
auch in die Einbrenn. In die Einbrenn geben sie also Knoblauch, und ein wenig
Paprika, ein wenig Essig. Währenddessen kocht es schön langsam. Und dann
brennen sie es ein bißchen ein.”
questionable. The women would go tell fortunes and ask for poppy seeds,
butter, and everything they needed. Then they would go to the farmer and
“get two, three chickens” (“und holte zwei, drei Hühner”) (281).
Important about her description of acquiring wood and food here is the
fact that the Roma were not stealing these goods, as is often the stereotype,
but rather obtaining them though legitimate ways. The whole community
is involved in gathering, preparing, cooking, and eating the meal, as she
explains:
She cooked the noodle soup and added turnips, pepper, and saffron. And
the smell from this soup spread across the whole area. Yet another
kneaded the flatbread with cracklings, and the third plucked the chickens.
They cooked the chickens in a hundred different ways, with a kind of
Hungarian stew, with tomatoes, with cream, roasted, also breaded, with
small noodle dumplings, with entrails. They made seven, eight different
soups, fish soups, pea soups, cabbage soups, potato soups, then there were
also children among us who love potato soup. Everything what God has
given us on earth. (281-83)12
As if to stress the importance of sharing food to the Romani community,

Ceija Stojka then states that she has just canned some salad that she will
bring for the listener to try: “. . . I also just preserved a big jar of salad,
wait, I will bring you some to try! (“auch ich habe gerade ein großes Glas
Salat hineingestellt, warte, ich bringe es dir zum Kosten!”) (283).
Ceija Stojka’s memories about her community and family and their
customs and culture frequently center on food. She talks about going into
the forest with her aunt Gejža to collect yellow flowers. These flowers
were often used in making the so-called “Zigeunertee,” or “Gypsy-tea.”
She describes how they would dry the flowers, and when they were
traveling they would bundle them together in a cloth. The tea would be
red when they made it, and they would add lemon peel, a couple drops of
lemon, and an apple.
Along with finding certain foods, the Roma also learned about the
medicinal purposes of natural ingredients. When the children were sick
12
“Sie kochte Nudelsuppe und gab rote Rüben, Pfeffer und Safran. Und der
Geruch dieser Suppe verbreitete sich über den ganzen Platz! Eine andere wieder
knetete das Fladenbrot mit Grammeln, und die dritte tranchierte die Hühner. Die
Hühner kochten sie auf hundert Arten, mit Letscho, mit Tomaten, mit Rahm,
gebraten, auch paniert, mit kleinen Nockerln, mit Fleckern. Suppen: Sie machten
sieben, acht verschiedene Suppen, Fischsuppen, Erbsensuppen, Krautsuppen,
Kartoffelsuppe, denn es gibt auch bei uns Kinder, die Kartoffelsuppe lieben. Alles
was Gott auf die Erde gegeben hat!”
112 Chapter Five
her mother or grandmother would take the drippings of animal fat, or the
Schmalz, and make a compress and warm the children with it. And when
someone had a wound, then her grandmother would say “Take and chew
this bread!” Ceija would chew the bread and the grandmother would chew
an onion, then they would mix both together and put it on the wound.
Their grandmother lived with them, and Ceija learned numerous
recipes and healing remedies from her—how to go mushroom hunting and
hunting for the honey agaric species of mushrooms (called “Hallimasche”
in German). Honey agaric grew in nut trees and could get as big as a
wagon wheel, a half a meter. They could be brown, red, yellow, every
color. Her grandmother would lay them in a special red pot made from
clay with three openings. Then she would cook Russian tea with the
mushrooms. The children would drink a drop of the tea mixture and stay
healthy. But no one besides the grandmother was allowed to touch the
tea. Ceija claims never to have been immunized and never to have had
any of the usual children’s diseases. She attributes her healthiness to
drinking her grandmother’s tea every day.
One story about such remedies would most likely seem very strange to
the non-Roma listener. In this story, Ceija talks about her grandfather’s
underpants, “his wide underpants, which underneath had red bands sewn
onto them.” She calls these “wide Gypsy-underpants” (“weite Zigeuner-
Unterhosen”) (287). There was no Rom who did not have them, Ceija
maintains, and no Romni would could not sew them for her man in order
to show how well she could sew. But these underpants also served a
function with food: “And when my grandmother cast off an old pair of
underpants, she then cut the leg of them up the middle and opened them up
to a cloth. And then she cooked them in tea two, three times. Then she
laid them on top of the clay pot and fastened them there. And nobody,
nobody was allowed to reach inside” (287).13 There were times, however,
when Ceija and her little brother Ossi watched where their grandmother
put the pot. She shoved the pot under her apron and set it down behind the
wagon. The fact that the children found out where the tea was hidden was
a major break in etiquette: the grandmother was the keeper of the tea and
its whereabouts was supposed to remain secret. The children constantly
pleaded for some tea, but then she refused and said they only should
receive the tea when they were sick. As when recounting the recipe of the
13
“Und wenn meine Großmutter eine alte Unterhose ablegte, dann schnitt sie die
Hosenbeine in der Mitte ab und kochte den Stofflappen aus. Und dann kochte sie
ihn im Tee zwei, drei Mal aus. Danach legte sie ihn auf den Tontopf und band ihn
zu. Und niemand, niemand durfte dort hingreifen.”
hedgehog, Ceija implies here that the food that non-Roma might find
disgusting is actually prized by the Roma for its flavor and health benefits.
Major elements in Ceija’s performances are her descriptions of the
ways in which recipes and instructions for the usage of certain kinds of
food become transmitted. She often stresses that much of the knowledge
surrounding food and foodways is passed down orally from one generation
to the next, but even then, quite secretly and surreptitiously. Ceija talks
with the recorder of her stories about this method of passing down recipes:
“But where did my grandmother get this understanding from? Where did
she know it from? She never told any other woman, no one. Kathi knew
it, and she gave me a piece of the mushroom and I also set it in the pot.
But you can also make this—better yet, I will make it for you, and you can
come pick it up and drink it in the morning” (289).14 Although the
information has been secret, Ceija still offers to give the listener some of
the mushroom so that he can continue to grow his own. He just needs to
add tea and sugar so that the mixture continues to replenish itself. She
does, however, beg that he keep this secret: “But you are not allowed to
tell anyone about this! That you reveal it to anyone!” ( “Aber es ist nicht
erlaubt, daß du es irgendjemandem erzählst! Daß du es nicht verrätst!)
(289). The irony of this vow of secrecy is that the story is now published,
and a wider audience is now privy to the information. Ceija seems to
recognize this irony, as well as the need to let others in on the secrets
because the older generation is dying off, as she adds in the end: “But
nowadays you can reveal the secret because there are hardly any people
today who know about the old traditions” (289).15
In recounting her recipes—from the hedgehog to her grandmother’s
“Gypsy tea”—Ceija is actively bringing together what David Sutton
enumerates as “themes of embodiment, habit memory, socialization,
tradition and modernity, historical consciousness, the senses and memory
around the collection, cooking and eating of food” (15). Her memories
and her everyday stories are both constructing and maintaining a
community. Many of her statements signal that that community is loosing
or has already lost many of its traditions, and especially those that have
been transmitted orally through the generations. To quote David Sutton,
14
Aber woher nahm meine Großmutter in jenen Jahren dieses Verständnis?
Woher kannte meine Großmutter das? Sie erzählte es keiner Frau, niemandem.
Kathi weiß es, und sie hat mir etwas von ihrem Pilz gegeben und auch ich habe ihn
angesetzt. Auch du kannst ihn machen—besser, ich werde ihn dir machen, und du
kannst ihn dir holen und am Morgen trinken.”
15
“Aber heutzutage kann man es verraten, denn es gibt kaum mehr Menschen, die
etwas über die alten Bräuche wissen.”
114 Chapter Five
examining recipe transmission assumes: “a more active view of processes

of enculturation, which is at the same time a key site for the transmission
of certain types of memories and histories, both textual and embodied, that
may challenge more official sources of knowledge concerning the past”
(18). In this way, Ceija’s reliance on food and foodways becomes a
significant alternative form of cultural transmission.16
“These are such Gypsy stories:” Food and Foodways

as Metaphors in Ceija Stojka’s Stories
Ceija Stojka is an accomplished storyteller, and not only of
autobiographical stories. Her repertoire includes fairytales and legends
that almost always entail Romani characters. Some of these tales are
published in the bilingual collection of Lovara tales (in Romany and
German) entitled Fern von uns im Traum (Far Away From Us in the
Dream), which are transcribed from oral recordings by the editors. In
almost every story, food and foodways serve as metaphors for cultural
expectations and human emotions. There are too many stories to analyze
all of them here; therefore, I have chosen some representative ones.
Because readers here might be unfamiliar with the stories, it is also
necessary to describe more plot details than is usually the case.
In “The Four Brothers and the Disloyal Wife” (“Die vier Brüder und
die untreue Frau”) the rich Roma brothers live on Neusiedler Lake in
Austria. One brother says that they can all be happy that they have good
women in their lives, including their sisters, mothers, and children. The
brothers proceed to compare their wives based on the women’s abilities to
gather and prepare food. The second boasts that his wife was already in the
village at five o’clock that morning and brought back three chickens. The
first says that his wife was in the village at three o’clock and brought back
milk, eggs, and all the necessities. The third says that his wife is
somewhat more tender and sickly, but very dear, and he loves her very
much. The fourth says that his wife is really the Queen above all, but he
gives no details about her culinary skills. The husbands then decide to
hide in a hollow tree to observe the wives and find out which one really is
the best.
16
See Anne Goldman’s essay “’I Yam What I Yam’: Cooking, Culture, and
Colonialism” for further insights on the relationship between foodways and
cultural transmission. Publishing recipes and stories about foodways also insures
permanence of cultural traditions, as Lynn Bloom emphasizes in her essay
“Writing and Cooking, Cooking and Writing.”
The women each go to the tree and pray, the one asking for God to
give her husband back his strength, the next asking Holy Mary to help her
become pregnant, and the third also asking for an unspecified wish, but
she is assured that she will receive what she wants. Then they all go into
the town and stick three, four chickens into their bags. But the older one,
the fourth wife, does not go to town. Instead, she goes to the tree and asks
Holy Mary to make her husband blind so that she can go to her lover who
is awaiting her in another village. The Rom husband hiding in the tree
hears what his wife says.
All the women go into the village and then return to cook. The
description reads like many of the other menus that Ceija characterizes as
“Roma/Gypsy” cuisine: “They made a huge fire so that the sparks flew.
The wind blew, the women cooked, and the whole place smelled like
roasted chickens, entrails, strudel dough, cabbage, salad and soup, . . . (63-
5).17 They serve the food to their husbands who enjoy themselves as they
eat and recite a detailed list of what they are eating.
But the oldest woman, the fourth wife, cooks the largest chickens, one
white and one black, finely plucked and prepared, accompanied by squash
and rice. She prepares the dinner exactly as God had instructed in the tree;
the description again reads like a recipe: “Go to the village, take the largest
chickens that they give you, and cook the most delicious soup. Give him
what you can, the best squash, cabbage, and entrails. Cook the finest for
him! The innards: you have to make them with eggs, fry them with liver,
it is best that way. Before that you have to give him a little chicken soup
in a cup with saffron” (65-67).18 When the husband sees the magnificent
meal she has prepared he describes the presents he has brought home for
her: red silk and a silk shawl and gold earrings. He also suggests that after
he has eaten they can all sit down for coffee, and he can show her
everything. He also invites the in-laws to come over and visit.
As we have seen in Ceija’s autobiographical stories, here, too, serving
and eating the food become community-building events accompanied by
family visits and gift giving. Ceija paints a picture of an idyllic
atmosphere: the girls singing in the meadow, the in-laws arriving, and
17
“Sie machten ein großes Feuer, daß die Funken sprühten. Der Wind wehte, die
Frauen kochten, und der ganze Platz roch nach gebratenen Hühnern, Fleckerln,
Strudelteig, Kraut, Salat und Suppen, . . .”
18
“Geh ins Dorf, nimm die größten Hühner, die sie dir geben, und koche die
leckerste Suppe. Gib ihm, was du kannst, den besten Kürbis, Kraut und Fleckerln.
Das Feinste koche ihm! Die Innereien: mit Eiern mußt du sie ihm machen, mit
Leber mußt du sie ihm braten, so ist es am besten. Vorher mußt du ihm noch ein
wenig Hühnersuppe mit Safran in die Tasse gießen!”
116 Chapter Five
everyone enjoying the delicious dinner the wife has prepared. She keeps
giving the husband something to eat, and he slurps the soup down. She
gives him two spoonfuls of cabbage. Then she gives him the livers that
she has reserved especially for him, remarking that she has not even given
the children these. He eats and eats until he is so full that he cannot eat
any more. But then he realizes that he cannot see any more. She acts as if
she is surprised, but he continues to lament that he cannot see.
She pretends that she is crying by rubbing spit on her eyes. Her
husband tells her not to cry; he is already old. Meanwhile, her lover is
waiting behind her; she has sent him a letter saying that her husband has
gone blind and will not live much longer. She sets the pot in front of
husband and her lover and tells the lover to scrape out the pot. The
husband asks who is there, and she says that it is the poor Gažo, or non-
Roma, who always grooms and cleans his horses. She says she wanted to
give this Gažo the rest of what was in the pot, and he is eating it. But the
husband says to himself that he will get back at her.
That night the husband grabs the wife and ties her by braids to the tree.
There are so many mosquitoes that day. The rest of the Roma troupe
moves on, but he stays there and lets the mosquitoes eat her up. He tells
her that because she has deceived him and wanted to kill him and wanted
to bring him and the children down because of this misery he is going to
let the bees eat her up. Then he gets into his wagon and leaves. The story
ends by saying that he still lives today. What thus begins as a story about
good food and continues with descriptions of delicious meals turns then
into a horrible devouring of the deceptive wife by insects. In the context of
food production, nature has the grace to endow humans with good
nourishment, but it also holds the power to destroy those who deceive.
Ceija explains that her paternal grandmother had told her this story.
As with the recipes that Ceija states are handed down from one generation
to the next, so, too, are these stories of good and evil, and of loyalty and
disloyalty, all part of Romani cultural heritage. The grandmother often
came to their house because Ceija’s mother did not want to let her children
wander around and sleep elsewhere. Ceija and her sister Kathi listened to
these stories when they stayed with their mother and the old women.
Mitzi, Ceija’s other sister, however, did not listen. She was too modern
and went to the cinema. Their father was in Dachau, and every second or
third day they all had to hide. As Ceija stresses, “Until my grandmother
was arrested somewhere on the street, she would tell stories over and over
again” (69).19
There are obvious lessons to be learned from each of Ceija’s stories,
including the importance of marital fidelity, honesty, and hard work.
These messages, as in the previous story about the four brothers and the
disloyal wife, are frequently conveyed through descriptions of food and
foodways. Animal and nature motifs are prevalent in many of the stories
as well, and the hedgehog often holds a prominent role. The story “The
Hedgehog and His Wife” (“Der Igel und seine Frau/O borzo taj leski
romni”) begins with a Rom sitting down on a big meadow by the water. It
is hot. And somewhere else there lies a hedgehog. The hedgehog assumes
human characteristics and become a metaphor for the Rom sitting on the
meadow. The hedgehog calls to his wife “Hulbica, go to the village and
get me something to eat, bread or whatever you want, anything!” The
hedgehog is dressed in a tuxedo and red patent-leather shoes, a green tie,
and a small hat.” Hulbica is wearing a “Gypsy” skirt. Hulbica runs and
comes directly to the “Gypsies”, who are eating chickens and drinking
(71). Hulbica feels she should go take the food and bring it back to her
husband. But where does she end up? In the tent with lots of good
champagne! She drinks up and then begins dancing. Meanwhile, her
husband wonders where she is. He has not eaten for three days.
Eventually she comes home, high heel in her hand. Her husband
wonders where she has been. She says she has been here and there, found
some stuff, but then lost it on the way home. He says it does not matter.
But then he tells her that he is going up the mountain and that she should
stand below by the water to indicate where he should jump into the water.
He will begin running down the mountain, he instructs, and when he
reaches the rock, she should jump to the side and let him jump into the
water. He goes up the hill, and she waits by the water. Soon he is running
down, yelling, “I’m coming now, I’m coming.” But then she steps
backwards to indicate that the water is further back and thereby to make
him fall into the water as far as possible. As soon as the hedgehog sees
what she has done, he grabs her and pushes her in. Thus she falls in.
The wife in the story has obviously neglected her spousal duties, first
by not attending to her husband’s culinary needs, and second, by deceiving
him. Ceija tells the moral of the story at the end:
These are such Gypsy stories that were told so that the wife watched out
how she treated her husband. That is what these stories are about. They
19
“Bis meine Großmutter irgendwo auf der Straße verhaftet wurde, erzählte die
Alte immer und immer wieder.”
118 Chapter Five
were always passed on from one person to another. That was really nice at
one time. Before the war many old Roma with us still told these stories
and passed them on. Until we lost our families, until they were killed. It is
great that these two, three people who remain still know them in this
modern, computer world” (73)20
Again, Ceija’s performance includes this message on the importance of

passing down the Romani stories and the threat that time presents to the
Roma culture as the older generations of storytellers begins to pass away.
Expectations for marital duties, however, do not only apply to the wife
in the tales. The story “Why the Rom Remained With His Wife”
(“Warum der Rom bei seiner Frau blieb/ Sostar ašilas o Rom kapeski
romni”) tells of a Romani couple, a man and a woman, who has seven
children. Again, food preparation forms a major part of their everyday life,
as Ceija describes: “They traveled, set up camp and cooked” (“Sie reisten,
machten halt und kochten”) (11). One day the Rom hears that the King in
the big castle has a beautiful daughter who has never laughed. Whoever
could make the daughter laugh would receive half of the kingdom. When
the Rom decides to see if he could win the prize, his wife asks him where
he is going and scolds him that he cannot just leave her with the children
in the forest. The expectation here is that the man cannot leave his family.
The Rom still takes his old oven and drives away.
The Rom makes his way to the castle. When he arrives, the King is
just sending everyone away. It has been two years, and thus far no one is
successful in making his daughter laugh. The Rom stays there though and
lays some wood in his oven. He begins to dance on top of the oven, then
twirls his moustache, and opens his shirt. His long, black chest hair pokes
out, and he begins to stroke it. He then says “You’ve seen enough, now
I’m going to go home.” But she cries, “No, no, you must stay here.” He
puts a water kettle on top of the oven. The water inside begins to boil, and
he sticks his feet over it and begins to sing and dance. He throws his
clothes off. The princess had never seen such a thing! She tells her father
that the Rom must stay. The King then says that the Rom would receive
half his kingdom, as promised.
20
“Dies sind solche Zigeunergeschichten, die sie nur deshalb erzählten, damit eine
Frau aufpaßte, wie sie mit ihrem Oberhaupt, mit ihrem Mann, umging. Davon
handeln diese Geschichten. Immer wurden sie von einem zum anderen
weitergegeben. Das war einst sehr schön. Vor dem Krieg erzählten noch viele alte
Rom bei uns diese Geschichten und gaben sie weiter. Solange, bis wir unsere
Familien verloren haben, bis sie umgebracht wurden. Es ist großartig, daß diese
zwei, drei Leute, die übriggeblieben sind, noch etwas wissen in dieser modernen
Computerwelt.”
Through boiling the water and taking off his clothes, the man is able to
attract the woman. The “cooking scene” also has a profound effect on the
Romani husband: he soon forgets his wife, children, and home, and his
performance assumes very sexual undertones. The striptease act set up
here around the motif of boiling water is reminiscent of the symbolic
interconnection between food, sex, reproduction, and gender identities
prevalent in many diverse cultures, as analyzed by Carole M. Counihan in
her book The Anthropology of Food and Body.21 Not only the riches have
turned his head around, but also his desire to please the princess. And the
act works, for he princess wants to marry him. He decides to become
King so that he can then somehow help his wife and children, who, he
(and we as readers) presumes, are still waiting for him in the forest.
To that end, the Rom says to the King that he does not want to come
right away to the castle. First, he wants to be put into a barrel so that he
can swim with his lover in water. Then when they come back, they can
get married. The King tells him that the land is his, so he can do what he
wants. And the King throws the two in the barrel into the water.
The next part of the story turns to the actual human needs that
engender the acquiring and production of food. The Rom and the Princess
sit in the barrel, but reality soon prevails: the Princess gets hungry. The
Rom goes ashore and looks for potatoes. He prepares corn for her, but she
is used to finer food. He sits down at the river and catches a trout with
sticks. But the trout convinces him that he is too small and that the Rom
should throw him back in the water. If the Rom does so, then he can wish
for anything he wants. The Rom throws him back, and he wishes for lots
of food for his lover. Then suddenly roasting chickens and all kinds of
delicacies to eat fly overhead. Everything lands on the meadow. The
Rom then builds a house more beautiful than that of his father-in-law.
The couple swims six weeks on the water and eats and sleeps in the
barrel. Then the Rom thinks about his wife. He goes back to the father of
the princess. In his dreams he sees his children and wife who sews shirts
for him and worries about him. Then he says to the King: “You are a great
man. I am now greater than you because I’ve built beautiful houses along
the river. I don’t need your riches or your daughter. She laughs now and
she dances. She should look for another man and be happy.” The King
wants him to stay, so he locks up the castle. In the night, the Rom jumps
over the fence and runs to his wife.
21
See also Counihan’s “Introduction” in Food and Gender: Identity and Power
and Jeremy Iggers, The Garden of Eating: Food, Sex, and the Hunger for Meaning.
120 Chapter Five
The Rom finds his wife living in the forest. The many children cry,
and the poor, miserable woman is hungry. The man returns and asks what
she has cooked. “I have made a bean stew! With semolina and beans in
it.” She has put it out by the coffee. He takes the pan and sits down to eat,
exclaiming how wonderful it is to be home and to eat so well. The wife
then asks in disbelief: “What are you talking about, . . . this miserable
food! Where you have been and where you are now! You left us and took
the princess as a wife!” The husband answers “I didn’t take her, and I
would never take her. Because no one else knows how to make such a
bean soup with cracklings!“ “What cracklings?” the wife asks. The
husband claims the soup was full of cracklings and that is why it tasted so
good. But the narrator comments that it was not cracklings that the
husband ate and enjoyed so much, but rather beetles that had had crawled
into the bean soup. Despite this ironic occurrence, the husband stays with
his wife (17). As in the other stories, marital infidelity has its
consequences.
In Ceija Stojka’s stories, food assumes a myriad of metaphorical
meanings. Food can save some marriages, such as the bean soup that
entices the husband to stay with his wife. But food can also have
deceptive properties, as when the beetles are the real tasty ingredient in the
bean soup, and not the cracklings, as the husband presumes. Food and
drink can entice people away from their duties, such as the hedgehog’s
wife who stays out all night drinking champagne instead of finding and
cooking ingredients for her husband’s dinner. Food can be destructive, as
with the woman who makes her husband blind through food. Food takes
on sexual connotations, as with the Rom who wins the princess through a
striptease act involving boiling water. Foodways portray gender roles in
describing who takes on the tasks of finding, preparing, and serving the
food. Sometimes well-defined gender roles become blurred, however, as
both women and men become the providers and preparers of food,
depending on the circumstances. Such boundary crossings between men’s
and women’s roles further enforce the nature of an entire community that
becomes involved in food gathering, production, and preparation. Cultural
norms become embedded in food, as the expectation is that family
members often eat together, and that the community shares its food with
each other.
“You can imagine how we children ate:”

Resistance through Food and Foodways
Ceija Stojka’s memories of food are not all happy. Her
autobiographies discuss in as much detail as possible the “food” the
inmates consumed in the concentration camps. I place “food” in quotation
marks here for its questionable status as such. This “food” became a
pivotal element in deciding whether an inmate survived or not.
In his introduction to the book In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from
the Women of Terezin, comprised of the recipes from the cookbook that
Mina Pächter, a Jew who lived and died in Terezin, had asked a fellow
prisoner to smuggle out and hand down to her daughter who had emigrated
during the war to Israel and then New York, Michael Berenbaum writes
about the permanent role that hunger played in the ghetto and the
concentration camps. He quotes from Primo Levi, who states that if the
camps had endured any longer, a new language would have been
necessary to describe a reality that no one before had experienced:
We say “hunger,” we say “tiredness,” “fear,” “pain,” we say “winter,” and

they are different things. They are free words created and used by free
men who lived in comfort and suffering in their homes. If the Lagers had
lasted longer, a new, harsh language would have been born; and only this
language could express what it means to toil the whole day in the wind,
with the temperatures below freezing, wearing only a shirt, underpants,
cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body nothing but weakness, hunger,
and knowledge of the end drawing nearer. (qtd. in Berenbaum xv)
Within this harsh landscape, talk of food and foodways helped keep
memories alive and allowed for the victims to imagine a better life outside
the one they were living. The discussions they had about recipes, utensils,
meals, entertaining, family, the kitchen, even if only a few of those stories
reached the outside world in written form, may thus be seen, according to
Berenbaum,
. . . as yet another manifestation of defiance, of a spiritual revolt against the

harshness of given conditions. It is a flight of the imagination back to an
earlier time when food was available, when women had homes and
kitchens and could provide a meal for their children. The fantasy must
have been painful for the authors. Recalling recipes was an act of
discipline that required them to suppress their current hunger and to think
of the ordinary world before the camps—and perhaps to dare to dream of a
world after the camps. (xv-xvi)
122 Chapter Five
Ceija’s autobiographies about her time in the three concentration

camps of Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Bergen-Belsen, contain numerous
stories related to her and her family’s survival based on food or lack
thereof. She describes how everyday in Auschwitz they received a quarter
of a loaf of bread and turnip soup and a couple potatoes with sand.
Ravensbrück proved no different with its few potatoes, turnip soup, and
bread for meals (Wir leben im Verborgenen 42). While in Auschwitz their
mother would keep some of the food for the siblings who would come
back to the barracks later after their work elsewhere in the camp (Wir
leben im Verborgenen 29-30). When in Bergen-Belsen, their mother went
with a group of women to steal potatoes from a group of Russian woman
who were better fed. The few potatoes were shared by many to become
yet another meager meal on the road to survival (Wir leben im
Verborgenen 58). In relating the stories behind her artworks, Ceija
emphasizes the symbol of the tree branch that is on every one of her
paintings. Ceija recalls her mother instructing the children to eat the bark
off the tree to keep them alive, and Ceija credits one particular tree in
Bergen-Belsen for keeping her alive. Tree bark, dirt, and shoe leather:
such was the “food” that Ceija claims kept her, four of her five siblings,
and her mother alive in the concentration camps.
Cara De Silva, in her introduction to In Memory’s Kitchen, notes that
while there were some men who created cookbooks, it was more likely
that more women than men in general were concerned with recipes in the
camps (xxx). This was primarily a function of socialization: at home it
had been mostly women who had cooked. Ceija, too, recognizes her
mother as her main sustainer through the food that she procured and forced
them to eat: “Without her I would hardly have survived” (“Ohne sie hätte
ich kaum überlebt.”). Of course, the mother’s prevalent role in sustaining
the family depends on a number of circumstances, including the father’s
absence after he was deported to Dachau and then killed and the separation
between females and males in concentration camps.
One published story in particular, entitled “Christmas” (“Weihnachten/
Kreþuno”), demonstrates the multifaceted significance that food assumes,
often providing the family with tangible evidence of their survival in the
face of Nazi horrors. The story looks at three particular Christmas
festivities--1942, 1944, and 1995—thus chronicling a part of Romani
history through food, or lack thereof. At Christmas 1942 the Stojka’s
father was in Dachau, and the mother and five children all celebrated at
home in Vienna. Although they did not have much, they decorated a small
tree that their mother brought home with dried apples, painted nuts, and
wrapped sugar cubes. Their mother then went to the non-Roma to tell
their fortunes, for which she received all kinds of food. Again, such
exchange of goods for services proves that the Roma often acquired food
not through illegitimate means such as stealing, which is the common
stereotype, but rather in fair trade for services. Ceija eagerly lists the
mother’s earnings and how she prepared them:
Then she brought home chickens, cracklings, rice, geese, ducks, the Gaži
gave her a big pile of meat drippings. And she made a wonderful meal.
She cooked cabbage, cabbage according to the way the Roma cook it,
made Pogatsche (a type of Hungarian biscuit) and a fine, good soup. Then
she made a cream dish with the young chickens. You can imagine how we
children ate: It just ran down our cheeks. But there were also tears because
my father was gone. Even at that time our mother was with us, and she
held us fast, she looked us in the eye, and we were not scared because we
had a strong mother” (291-93).22
The meal was accompanied by music and festivities. They all began to
sing, “Silent Night, Holy Night,” but in German, not Romany, she stresses,
because the Roma have no words for the song. But then the tree began to
burn. Their mother said that was not right. She predicted that something
bad would happen that year. Indeed, in that year the Nazis deported the
family to Auschwitz.
In her narration about Christmas festivities, Ceija then jumps forward
in her narration to 1944, when she was eleven years old in Auschwitz with
her family. An SS officer came to the barracks and commanded the
children to come with him because, as he stated, the camp commander was
there and wanted to prepare Christmas for the children (295). The
children were brought far away from their mother to another barracks.
There was a tree decorated only with nuts and apples. And on the table
there was nutcake and some sausage. There were 50 children there. Ceija
states that they all had one thought in mind: “How will we bring
something home to mother, into the barracks?” (295).23
22
“Dann brachte sie Hühner nach Hause, Grammeln, Reis, Gänse, Enten, die Gaži
gab ihr noch ein großes Häferl Schmalz. Und sie machte wunderbares Essen. Sie
kochte Kraut, Kraut nach Roma-Art, machte Pogatschen und eine herrliche, gute
Suppe. Dann machte sie ein Rahmgericht von jungen Hühnern. Ihr könnt Euch
denken, wie wir Kinder aßen: Es ist uns über die Wangen nur so heruntergeronnen!
Und doch gab es Tränen, weil mein Vater zugrunde gegangen war. Auch damals
war die Mutter bei uns und hielt uns fest, sie schaute uns in die Augen, und so
fürchteten wir uns nicht, denn wir hatten eine starke Mutter.”
23
“‘Wie werden wir der Mutter irgendetwas nach Hause, in die Baracke bringen
können?’”
124 Chapter Five
While eating in the SS barracks, all the children shoved a little piece of
bread and a piece of sausage under their shirts. And then the kitchen help
brought the children the leftovers from the plates of the SS-men. The
reader can feel the children’s mouths water as Ceija lists what was
available at the feast: “Red apples, plums, dried plums, everything
possible, even sweet and real sugar, things that I had not seen for three
years” (295).24 With all the food stuffed under their shirts, the children all
had such big stomachs that Ceija was afraid the SS would notice. Then
one officer said that they had been so good that they could take the nuts
and apples from the tree. The guard brought them back out into the cold,
back to the barracks, back to the mothers who were overjoyed to see them
return, with or without the sequestered food.
Important to note here is how the entire story had begun with the
mother taking care of the nutritional needs of the children in the Christmas
of 1942. The events then move to having the children taking care of their
mothers’ needs in Auschwitz 1944. Bell and Valentine point out the
concentration of research on adults feeding children (59). Ceija’s story of
a family under nutritional duress reverses that common notion, pointing to
the need for all family members, no matter their age or status, to take care
of one another when necessary.
The narration then moves forward to 1995. One marked difference
between the Christmas meal in Auschwitz and that in 1995 is the
importance of community cooking in the post-war era. The poignancy of
the Christmas story in Auschwitz and process whereby the children
become the providers of food for the mother and older women assume new
dimensions. The later years see the community coming together in ways
that were impossible in the concentration camps. The Nazi horrors become
all the more devastating when one thinks that not only individuals, but also
entire communities and collective structures were completely destroyed.
The community effort of the Christmas celebrations after 1995 takes on
even more meaning and becomes a heightened performative act, whereby
every step in preparing and serving the meal is very important. Every step
becomes a means to restore cultural losses. Ceija tells the following:
And now we write 1995. Today we are celebrating our Christmas as the
Roma once celebrated their Christmases outside on the meadow, when
they were in their wagons. Even then they had everything that they
needed. . . . So, today at my house I am cooking twenty pots: cabbage, rice,
24
“Rote Äpfel, Zwetschken, getrocknete Zwetschken, alles mögliche, sogar
Süßigkeiten und echten Zucker, Dinge, die ich seit drei Jahren nicht gesehen
hatte.”
chicken in creams sauce, Pogatschen (Hungarian biscuits), strudel,

everything possible for what one needs for this occasion, and I am making
everything all by myself. I have a 30-liter pot. I put five chickens into
that, three geese, and lots of pig’s feet. Then I cut my cabbage and make
the dough. Everything by hand, of course. My husband never eats pasta
from the store, he has never eaten such a thing” (297).25
On Christmas Eve, the husband helps the wife with preparations. He

goes shopping and brings back everything, including numerous chickens,
ducks, a half pig, all butchered, accompanied by the innards, eggs,
cabbage. While Ceija cooks the meat and cabbage, her daughters make
the strudel and backed goods. Her husband helps her clean and cut the
vegetables. She does clarify, however, that his assistance is a once-a-year
occurance: “Otherwise he never helps me, only on this day he helps me”
(299).26
When her daughters arrive, the community continues to pitch in,
setting the table, carrying out all the dishes. They all greet each other,
give each other wishes for good health, wealth, beauty, and luck. When
everyone is there and the meal is ready, they all sing and eat: “Then we
begin to sing, to break the Pogatschen, and the soup is served, the
delicious roast and everything else that there is” (301).27 Then they give
each other presents of wine, beer, glasses, etc.
The idea of food as building a community has come full circle, from
before the Nazi times to afterwards. The Nazi efforts to break that
community have failed. Food becomes the main sustainer of life and
community, and in this way, acts as a main element of resistance to a
persecution that threatened to wipe out the entire Roma population.
25
“Und jetzt schreiben wir 1995. Heute feiern wir unsere Weihnachten so, wie
einst die Rom ihre Weihnachten draußen auf der Wiese feierten, als sie in ihren
Wagen waren. Auch damals hatten sie alles, was sie brauchten. . . . Also, bei mir
hier koche ich etwa zwanzig Töpfe: Kraut, Reis, Huhn in Rahm, Pogatschen,
Strudel, alles mögliche, was man für diesen Anlaß braucht, und alles mache ich
ganz allein. Ich habe einen 30-Liter-Topf. Dort gebe ich fünf Hühner, drei Gänse
und vier Stelzen hinein. Dann schneide ich mein Kraut und bereite den Teig.
Alles natürlich mit der Hand. Mein Mann ißt niemals Teigwaren aus dem
Geschäft, noch nie hat er sowas gegessen”.
26
“Und zu Hause hilft der Mann das Wurzelwerk zu putzen, die Paradeiser, das
Kraut zu schneiden und alles zu reinigen. Sonst hilft er mir nie, nur an diesem
großen Tag hilft er. . . .”
27
“Dann beginnt man zu singen, die Pogatschen zu brechen, das Kraut und die
Suppen werden serviert, die köstlichen Braten und was es sonst noch alles gibt.”
126 Chapter Five
“Roma-food, in a Gypsy manner:” Concluding Remarks

As Bell and Valentine aver, food “articulates several meanings of
home” (68). The ideal home becomes a haven for physical security and
emotional stability. For families such as the Stojka one, whose culture is
rooted in travel, food becomes a means to welcome others and each other
into their home and community. But for an ethnic group such as the Roma,
whose history is rooted in persecution, food becomes a sustainer of life for
individuals and for the entire people. Ceija Stojka’s stories thus heighten
the significance of food and foodways. Cuisine and culinary arts in her
stories assume qualities that support Susan Kalchik’s observations on the
“performance of ethnic identity.” In identifying a “Gypsy manner” in
which the food is prepared and the special “Roma” meals, such as the
hedgehog and “Gypsy-tea” that uses “Gypsy-underwear,” Ceija
emphasizes important differences that distinguish Roma from non-Roma.
While those differences may seem strange to the non-Roma, Ceija’s
performances place their meaning and beneficial qualities in perspective.
In addition, the differences do not rely on the usual stereotypes that have
degraded the Roma for centuries. For example, receiving ingredients in
exchange for services rendered demonstrates a culture based on exchange
and not, as commonly believed, on stealing. In this manner, Ceija
implicitly pleads for acceptance of diversity and understanding of the
cultural metaphors and historical backgrounds out of which Roma cuisine
has developed. One can conclude that without her stories, a major part of
Roma culture, community, and history would be lost.
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CHAPTER SIX
“DO THEY FEED YOU PROPERLY UP HERE?”

TOWARDS A GASTROSOPHIC INTERPRETATION
OF THOMAS MANN’S THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
SIMONA MOTI
Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain is widely considered to be

one of the most influential works of twentieth century German literature,
comparable to James Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
as classics of high modernist fiction. The narrative opens in 1907 when the
protagonist, Hans Castorp, an upper-middle class young German engineer,
undertakes a journey to visit his cousin who is seeking treatment for
tuberculosis at the International Sanatorium Berghof in Davos, high in the
Swiss Alps. Intending to stay only for three weeks, once he is diagnosed
with the disease himself, he remains for seven years. During this time, he
undergoes a remarkable education mainly by speaking and listening to a
variety of characters, who constitute a cross section of decadent pre-war
European society. The novel ends with the outbreak of the war when
Castorp leaves to fight on the side of Germany, and his imminent death on
the battlefield is suggested. Since its original publication in 1924, the
novel has been subject to a variety of critical assessments: a panoramic
view of pre-war European civilization and its discontents that led to the
destruction of World War I, a philosophical novel addressing questions of
personal attitudes to life, education, health, illness, sexuality and mortality,
a modernist novel about the subjective perception of the passage of time.
In his diary entry on March 12th 1920, Mann noted that the novel was
his most sensual narrative, and the extensive and copious references to
food and eating throughout the novel certainly contribute greatly to its
sensuality. Upon his arrival in the sanatorium, Castorp asks his cousin: “I
assume we’ll be eating soon? I think I’m getting hungry. Do they feed you
“Do they feed you properly up here?” 131
properly up here?” (10)1. And eat indeed they did. The eating experience
plays an integral part in the thematic structure of the novel, and the
sumptuous meals in the dining hall constitute one of the most important
social and symbolic rituals in the rarefied air of the sanatorium world. The
frequency and the opulence of the meals are striking, as the patients dine
with excruciating regularity no less than five times a day:
The dinner was as splendidly prepared as it was lavish. Including the
nourishing soup, it consisted of no fewer than six courses. The fish was
followed by a superb roast with vegetables, which was followed by a
salad, then roast fowl, a dumpling dessert […], and, finally, cheese and
fruit (74).
This opulent menu is served on week-days, whereas on Sundays it turns

into a true “gala banquet, prepared by a trained European chef in the
sanatorium’s deluxe hotel kitchen” (187).
The five prodigious meals comply with Castorp’s “carnivorous sense
of social self-esteem” (Köhler 1996, 90):
Hans Castorp ate heartily, though his appetite did not turn out quite so
stout as he had thought. But he always ate a good deal, out of pure self-
respect, even when he was not hungry (13).
Food, both in terms of quantity and quality, not only satisfies hunger as an
expression of bodily need, but defines social standing and confers self-
esteem. Mann who was known to enjoy good home cooking himself
(Baskakov), was an accurate chronicler of upper-middle class dining
habits in many of his novels. The defining qualities of nineteenth and early
twentieth century upper middle class cuisine were heaviness and opulence.
While growing up in the upper-middle class household of his uncle and
guardian in Hamburg, Castorp was well provided for: “the table, morning
and evening, was richly laden with cold meats, with crabs and salmon, eel
and smoked breast of goose, with tomato ketchup for the roast beef” (29).
In German culinary history, meat has been a master food, and excessive
meat eaters are presented in literature as people, usually men, in positions
of social power and dominance (Wierlacher 1993, 281). For the so-called
“third breakfast” after school, the boy enjoyed a glass of porter. The notion
of the “third breakfast” is lost in the English translation which reads that
Castorp had “a nice daily glass of porter, to be drunk with his snack when
he returned from school” (28). The second breakfast, however, was
1
All page numbers in the text refer to The Magic Mountain, translated from
German by John E. Woods. New York: Knopf, 1995.
132 Chapter Six
customary in upper middle class families in Northern Germany where

Mann and his protagonist grew up. The first breakfast consisted usually of
porridge, and after the first part of the working day was over, the second
breakfast or the “fork lunch” followed. As the name indicates, a fork was
necessary for its completion, because it tended to be a more elaborate and
rather opulent meal and often included a bottle of red wine (Schönfeld
1995, 26). The fact that Castorp even enjoys third breakfast speaks both
for his social status as well as for his culinary predisposition. The eating
experience in childhood plays a significant role in identity construction,
and Castorp’s identity is largely defined by hedonism: “he liked good
living, and […] clung to the grosser pleasures of life as a greedy suckling
to its mother’s breast” (30).
And yet, he is perplexed by the gargantuan quantities devoured by
most of the sanatorium patients who “ate with the appetite of lions” (74).
What is the significance of this excessive intake of food beyond the
physiological-medical aspect, because this is, after all, a sanatorium for the
treatment of tuberculosis? Eating has an organic basis but it is always
inextricably embedded in culture, which turns every instance of food
intake into both a nutritive and a cultural act. The novel is spiced up with
copious depictions of food and eating, and the decisive step towards a
gastrosophic interpretation is to view the eating events as multilayered
cultural phenomena that structure the narrative. Taking a cue from
Neumann (2005), who develops the thesis that meals are the site where a
culture negotiates its values and meanings, a fact that is well mediated by
literature, I look at the socio-cultural and symbolic significance of the
eating habits and events in Mann’s novel in their capacity to reflect the
ethos of the sanatorium with its seductive mystique of illness, and the
decadent mentality of pre-World War I Europe for which the social milieu
of the sanatorium functions as a microcosm. I trace how the semiotic field
of food and eating unfolds to encompass various forms of cultural
experience, such as the perception of health and disease, mortality and
vitality, history and war.
In several of his novels, Mann critiques the culinary excess of late
nineteenth and early twentieth century upper-middle class. Nietzsche’s
writings reflect a similar critical attitude vis-à-vis the culinary excesses of
the well-to-do of his time. Nietzsche was the philosopher of food and
cuisine par excellence (Klass 2008, 53). Perhaps no other philosopher of
the nineteenth century dwells so thoroughly on the themes of diet and
digestion which develop into the subtext for a history of thought,
cognition, and morality bringing about a true physiological turn in
philosophy. In Daybreak, he issues his verdict on the bad dietary habits of

the wealthy:
To the devil with the meals people make nowadays in hotels just as much
as where the wealthy classes of society live! Even when eminent scholars
foregather, they load their table in the same way as the banker loads his: in
the principle of ‘much too much’ and lots of different things – from which
it follows that the food is prepared with a view to its effectiveness rather
than its genuine effect, and stimulating drinks are needed to help banish
the heaviness of brain and stomach which results. […] what, then, is the
purpose of these meals? – They are representatives! Representative of
what, in the name of all saints? Of rank? – No, of money: we no longer
possess rank! We are individuals! But money is power, fame, dignity,
precedence, influence; the amount of money a man has determines his
moral prejudices! No one wants to hide it under a bushel, but no one wants
to lay it on the table either; consequently money needs a representative
which can be laid on the table: and hence the meals they eat! (Nietzsche
1997, 122-3)
In the wake of Nietzsche, who was not only Mann’s “intellectual

compass” (Vaget 2008, 9) but his culinary guide as well, Mann critiques
“the epochal hyperphagia” (Wierlacher 1987, 52) of the late nineteenth
century. Several of his characters suffer from digestive problems as a
consequence of bad, i.e. excessive, eating habits. Incidentally, it is a bad
habit that the author himself indulged in: realizing that the stomach was
his physiological locus minoris resistentiae, he admonished himself that it
would be wise not to gorge on food during periods of intense work, but
admitted that, from lack of hygienic discipline, he did it nevertheless
(Mann 1965, 789). In his fiction, the motifs of eating, showy
gormandizing, and unhealthy diets are employed as a signal of the decline
of patrician families. Referring to Mann’s first novel, The Buddenbrooks,
Wierlacher remarks that the culinary motif signals, accelerates, and sums
up the decline of a social class (Wierlacher 1987, 53). In The Magic
Mountain, the elaborate meals, the excessive consumption of food,
especially the heavy abundant courses of meat, and the compulsive
consumption of chocolate contribute significantly to the portrayal of the
sociopathological panorama of pre-World War I Europe, as it is
metaphorically reflected in the social milieu of the sanatorium. Before the
discovery of streptomycin in 1943, the treatment of tuberculosis consisted
mainly in often long term sanatorium care, rest cure, and occasional
surgical intervention, and the sanatoria were dependent on a steady stream
of wealthy European patients willing to spend money and time in these
often luxurious institutions (Herwig 2008, 250). The elaborate meals and
134 Chapter Six
eating habits reflect Mann’s twofold critique: on the one hand, the critique
of the institutional shortcomings of the sanatorium with its “hothouse
atmosphere” (Herwig 2008, 253) and the detrimental effects it had on the
patients’ attitude toward their own sickness; on the other hand, the critique
of the privileged elite that has chosen to take refuge from the tumultuous
social and political pre-war transformations in a seemingly permanent
vacation in these remote institutions.
Apart from the social critique, Mann ascribes symbolic significance to
this economy of gastronomic excess. In the psychological profile of
tubercular patients, eating functions as a ritual that overcompensates the
threatening presence of disease and death. In the face of death claiming
patient after patient, the diseased react with a desperate intake of food.
Food is perceived as an elixir of life and eating as bio-prophylaxis. Amidst
this incessant eating, however, death is always a looming presence: while
the dead bodies are being taken away when nobody is able to notice,
usually during mealtimes, the living seem obsessed to preserve and
maximize life through an unrestrained intake of food. However, there are
more symbolic layers involved in this attempt of rendering death invisible
while eating. The meals consist mainly of heavy courses of meat, which is
essentially the flesh of dead animals. So, while the dead bodies are being
removed furtively, the patients are confronted with the ‘view’ of death five
times a day on their very platters, in an intricate dynamics of the
simultaneous absence and presence of death. Moreover, while they strive
to ‘eat life,’ by gorging on meat, by incorporating and assimilating it to
their own bodies, in an intimate union between food and eater, as Canetti
(1984, 210) claims of any eating act, they ‘eat death.’ The carnivorous
aggression of these meals ultimately amounts to a constant return of the
repressed. The culinary code is thus entwined with the problem of disease
and death in a model that approaches food in view of the edge between life
and death.
Appetite, a key concept for culinary hermeneutics, is frequently
invoked in the narrative. The appetite of the patients is immense:
Each item was offered twice – and not without good effect. People filled
their plates at all seven tables – they ate with the appetite of lions here in
these vaulted spaces. Theirs was a hot hunger that it would have been a joy
to observe, if its effect had not at the same time seemed somehow eerie,
even repulsive (74).
Castorp, no light eater to start with, falls into step with the other patients
and, as we are told repeatedly, “ate a great deal, attacking the sumptuous
Berghof meals – a roast beef course followed by a roast goose course –
with an immense appetite not at all uncommon here” (267). Even upon
being diagnosed with tuberculosis and confined to bed, “the full six-course
Berghof dinner in all its splendor, with nothing missing” (187) is being
served to the bedridden in their room and Castorp banquets in this supine
position “like the tailor’s son who dined from a magic table” (187), as in
the well-known German fairy tale.
The collective “hot hunger,” however, is dismissed by the narrator as
“eerie, even repulsive.” This voracious appetite is simultaneously culinary,
as the almost hedonistic detailed descriptions of food attest, and morbid,
far from what is called a ‘healthy appetite.’ Instead it is one that is fiercely
and desperately committed to keeping disease and death at bay. Sensuality
and the macabre, gustatory pleasure and disgust form a binomial whose
terms both attract and repel each other. The tension between eating as a
gustatory experience and the intake of food for physiological-medical
reasons is subtly alluded to by Director Behrens, the master theoretician of
the ailing body, when he wishes Castorp and his cousin, Joachim, before
dinner to “savor your taking of nourishment.” The allusion is lost on
Castorp who comments with his usual benign pedantry:
‘Savor your taking of nourishment!’ – what sort of gibberish is that? You
can say ‘enjoy your meal,’ or even ‘bon appétit’ has a nice ring to it when
you’re sitting down to your daily bread. But ‘taking of nourishment’ is
basic physiology, and to tell someone to ‘savor’ it is pure sarcasm (172).
The insertion of Castorp’s reaction bears an ironic undertone, because

paradoxically, savor his nourishment is exactly what he does, as the
hedonist who, to his glass of the therapeutic “evening milk” which was
brought to each of the guests’ rooms at nine o’clock, adds a shot of cognac
to make it more “palatable” (267).
The sensual climate of the novel is brought about by the focus on the
human body, a diseased, failing body, in its material, social, and symbolic
dimension and its relationship to food. The main stage for the eating
scenes is the dining hall with its luxurious ambient, where the topics of
food intake and disease are most acutely localized not least because the
dining hall is the site of exposed exacerbated ailing corporeality. The
lavish meals are frequently interrupted by incidents of violent coughing
and choking of patients who, after creating a stir among the others, are
forced to leave the dining hall to catch their breaths. In the context where
all talk about death has been willfully banned from the table conversation,
these incidents constitute breaches through which advancing disease
forcefully makes its presence manifest as a harbinger of death. During the
course of a meal, a patient by the name of Dr. Blumenkohl experiences
136 Chapter Six
such difficulty breathing that he is forced to leave the room, but upon his
return goes on eating “a great deal” and takes “a second helping from each
course” (76). Another “horrible incident” (294) that makes an impression
on young Castorp is described in the chapter with the telling name “Danse
Macabre” and involves a teacher named Popov who turns out to be an
epileptic, and right in the middle of a meal has a violent fit “falling to the
floor with that demonic, inhuman shriek […] and lay there next to his
chair, flailing arms and legs about in the most ghastly writhings” (294),
sending everybody into a hysterical frenzy. What makes matters worse is
that it happens during the fish course and there was the danger that he
might choke on a bone. And since the other patients had been taken by
surprise during chewing and swallowing, choking attacks were common.
He too, recovers after a short time and returns to finish his midday meal,
from the point of view of a horrified Castorp, “as if he had never carried
on like a crazy drunkard gone berserk” (295).
Mann’s writings frequently run against the grain of good taste, against
Voltaire’s normative ‘bon gout’ (Köhler 1996, 11). In several of his
novels, lush meals are followed or interrupted by manifestations of
disgust, an aspect barely touched in haute-bourgeois culture and its pre-
modern aesthetics. Choking and difficulties swallowing are motifs
frequently employed by Mann to illustrate general debility (Köhler 1996,
115), and, in the case of The Magic Mountain, to foreshadow death. A
case in point is the demise of Joachim, Castorp’s cousin, of cancer of the
larynx. The onset of his disease is signaled by a troubled intake of food. It
happens for the first time during dinner when he “choked on something, so
violently he could hardly get his breath” (517). He too leaves the dining
hall to finish coughing, and upon returning ten minutes later, rejoins his
tablemates in “disposing of the rich, heavy meal” (517). This first incident,
however, imparts an “ominous expression” (517) to his eyes, that leaves
no room for illusions. As the illness progresses, his meals are especially
prepared for him since he cannot eat the regular menu for fear of choking,
and he is served soups, stews, and porridges which soon are replaced by a
liquid diet only. He dies as an emaciated anorectic. In the end, Joachim’s
heart causes his face to swell, giving it a strained look, and the swelling is
worst around the lips, and the inside of his mouth is dry or numbed which
makes it difficult for him to speak. The mouth is the interface of the
devouring body, the site of food intake, but also a wide open gate to the
interior of the ailing body, and as such the site where disease becomes
manifest on the outside through coughing, choking, troubled swallowing,
oral impediment, all sinister harbingers of death, in a complex mechanics
of incorporation and expropriation of life. The mouth is also involved in
another ritualized activity of the patients, namely taking their temperatures

orally: “You do know, don’t you, how we do things up here,” Head Nurse
Mylendonk instructs Castorp when he is supposed to do it for the first
time, “we put it under our pretty tongue, for seven minutes, four times a
day, and keep our lips nicely tucked around it” (165), while Director
Behrens jovially recommends to “stick the old mercury cigar in your
mouth” (45). Like eating, taking their temperatures has also become a
compulsive behavior, indeed many suffer from what Herwig calls
“Thermometromanie,” the urge constantly to check one’s temperature
(Herwig 2008, 254). Throughout the novel, Mann does not spare the
reader most macabre details of disease, indeed, he seems to display as
much appetite for physical details of the ailing body, for a true poetics of
decomposition, as for the depiction of exquisite meals. On his first day in
the sanatorium, Castorp hears the first tubercular cough of a moribund,
which sounds inhuman to him, “a cough unlike any that Hans Castorp had
ever heard […] – devoid of any zest for life or love, which didn’t come in
spasms, but sounded as if someone were stirring feebly in a terrible mush
of decomposing organic material” (12), and it seems to him that “[i]t’s as
if you were looking right down inside and could see it all – the mucus and
the slime …” (12).
The culinary metaphor set up by Mann’s narrative is highly
ambivalent: food both as life-preserving sustenance but also an apathy-
inducing substance that severs patients from real life and real death. The
frequency and regularity of the meals permeate each day with the eternal
return of the identical. Time, therefore, comes to a standstill. Food
functions as an inducer of what philosophers and theologians have called
nunc stans, i.e. eternity as permanent present. The patients seem to have
lost all sense of passing time: “… soon they all sat at their several tables as
though they had never risen” (74), and to quote Mann’s extended
metaphor, they “devoured” (265) time in the dining hall. Castorp, who
originally had planned to stay for three weeks, leaves the sanatorium only
after seven years. Once he is diagnosed as a tubercular, he too succumbs to
the sanatorium ethos and is absorbed into its narcosis: “They bring you
your midday broth as they brought it yesterday and will bring it tomorrow
[…] Time is merely a dimensionless present in which they eternally bring
you your soup” (184). Cognition and the perception of time as constitutive
elements of subjectivity are situated in an intimate relationship with the act
of eating. The rapid succession of meals leaves no time for personal
history, and the sensuality of collective eating compensates for the loss of
individual history. The ambivalence of the culinary metaphor locates food
in between the extreme poles of life preserving sustenance and apathy
138 Chapter Six
inducing poison, i.e. on the borderline between life and death. This stasis
on Mann’s magic mountain is reminiscent of the land of the Lotus-Eaters
in Homer’s Book Nine of the Odyssey: the blissful sinking into a
vegetative state of forgetfulness – no memories, no temporal articulation,
complete retreat from history. Only with difficulty does Odysseus manage
to rescue some of his companions from their lotus-induced lethargy and
pull them back into historical reality. Much like the Lotus-Eaters, Castorp
and his fellow patients are “lost to life” (198) and to the world, having
severed their practical and emotional connections to what they call “the
flat land,” namely to a goal-oriented, active life2.
The culinary metaphor of food both as sustenance and a narcotic is
entwined with the psychology of the tuberculosis patient. In his essay “The
‘Magic Mountain Malady,’” Herwig discusses the negative influence that
tuberculosis can have on patients’ psyches leading to spiritual
degeneration, loss of personal values, and pathological slothfulness. He
concludes that Mann’s novel places the blame both on the institutional
shortcomings of the sanatorium institution and “on the patients
themselves, whose egocentricity and willful seeking of pleasure and
distraction or, alternatively, whose indifference and fatalistic self-
abandonment contribute much to their decline” (Herwig 2008, 253). The
motifs of food and eating thus constitute an integral part of Mann’s
critique of the decadence of pre-World War I Europe, as it is reflected in
the sanatorium world, in which questionable medical-institutional
practices and individual culpability of the patients lead to a paralysis of the
will to recover and resume a meaningful active life.
The sanatorium with its ethos of sickness functions as metaphor for the
decadence of prewar European society (among the wealthy elite which
populates the sanatorium are Russian aristocrats, German bourgeoisie, and
English gentility). Especially the last five subchapters carry the most
historical content, not by direct reference but rather through the socio-
2
In the 1982 West German film adaptation of the novel by Hans Geissendörfer,
the timeless world of the sanatorium dominated by habit and a regime of bodily
obsession is rendered effectively by several cinematic means. The aesthetic of
colors – in most eating scenes, the dining hall is bathed in a white, cold, unreal
light, which, along with the muted colors (grays, beige, brown) of the patients’
clothes – conveys a frozen, atemporal atmosphere in which humans move about
like shadows. The sequence of synchronized repetitive mechanical movements of
the patients sitting at the tables in the dining hall (picking up their coffee cups,
taking a sip, putting the cups down, spreading butter on toast, sipping coffee again,
putting down the cup again, picking up the knifes, spreading honey, etc.) appears
like a hypnotic collective choreography. Finally, there are the long traveling shots
of the empty dining tables laid for the next meal, awaiting the perpetual diners.
psychological framing of tuberculosis in analogy with the European

prewar collective state of mind. For example, one of the greatest dangers
to the tubercular patients’ psyches is idleness and lack of a meaningful
occupation which causes them to lose interest in work and a productive
life, and the corresponding states of mind are irritability and apathy
(Herwig 2008, 254). The first of the five last subchapters of the novel
entitled “The Great Stupor” describes the somber atmosphere of the
sanatorium world as the narrative approaches the ominous year of 1914.
To Castorp it seems that the whole world has come to a “dead standstill”
(618), that it is entrapped in an “eerie and skewed state” (625), as if in the
grip of an evil terror-instilling demon called “the Great Stupor.” The
inhabitants of the sanatorium are seized by an acute petulance, a nameless
impatience in which certain ridiculous activities degenerate into fads that
are maniacally followed by everybody, until replaced by the next one.
Among such “epidemics” are taking photographs, collecting stamps,
drawing complex geometrical patterns with closed eyes, studying and
conversing in Esperanto during meals, playing a parlor game called “Did
you ever see the Devil with a nightcap on?”, and consuming ludicrous
amounts of chocolate:
Everybody had brown lips, and the most delicious productions of the
Berghof kitchens were greeted by lethargic, carping gourmets, who had
already stuffed and ruined their stomachs with Milka nougats, chocolat à
la crème d’amandes, Marquis napolitains, and little “cat’s tongues”
sprinkled with gold (620).
Chocolate, often termed a “baroque” food item (Onfray 1995, 156), is

a notorious stimulant and aphrodisiac. In his book La raison gourmande.
Philosophie du gout, Michel Onfray playfully speculates that, had
Dionysus ignored alcohol, his trade mark food would have been chocolate.
The consumption of chocolate has been culturally associated with rites of
passage and border-line experiences such as sexuality and death (Onfray
1005, 159). In the subchapter “The Great Stupor,” chocolate features in its
quality as a stimulant that induces a state of diffuse irritability that is
bound to have a negative outcome. Like a barometer indicating the
emotional state immediately preceding World War I, the chocolate mania
along with the other meaningless “epidemics” that haunt the sanatorium
world, metaphorically embody the general pre-war decadence and
irritability of a purposeless society and reflect the latent conflicts that led
up to the destruction of World War I.
Chocolate recurs in the novel in relation to two characters in the grip of
the dark seductive force of death. One of these is the peripheral figure of
140 Chapter Six
Herr Albin who, knowing that he is incurable, has renounced all contact
with the flatland below, and publicly threatens to shoot himself in order to
put an end to his suffering. In his view, the doctor himself is hardly at
pains any longer to pretend that there was any hope of recovery for him.
He compares his condition to being in high school when it was clear that
you would not move up to the next form and nobody asked you any more
questions, you did not have to do any more work, you no longer counted
and could laugh at the whole thing. Castorp is moved by this comparison
because he recalls the feeling when he himself was stuck in his sophomore
year: “the somewhat ignominious, but humorously and pleasantly untidy
state of affairs that he had enjoyed in the last quarter, once he had given up
even trying and was able to laugh at the whole thing” (79). Invariably after
threatening to shoot himself and confessing that he had indeed given up
the running, Herr Albin abruptly changes the subject to chocolate:
Would you like some chocolate? Please, help yourselves. No, you won’t
exhaust my supply – I’ve got scads of chocolate up in my room. I have
eight boxes of assorted fudges, five bars of Gala-Peter, and four pounds of
Lindt nougats. The ladies of the sanatorium had them delivered to me
while I was down with pneumonia (78).
In the context of Herr Albin’s dissolute nihilism, this enumeration of

chocolate brands is strange and rather morbid. When trying to put himself
in Herr Albin’s shoes, Castorp shudders at the “sense of dissolute
sweetness” (79) which overcomes him at the thought of being relieved of
the burden of life, at the thought of finally being “free of all the pressures
honor brings” so that one could “endlessly enjoy the unbounded
advantages of disgrace” (79). The reference to freedom is significant
because “Castorp’s empathy with Albin is symptomatic of his growing
feeling that the regime of sickness that reigns on the magic mountain can
provide the basis for a sense of personal liberation unattainable in the
‘normal’ world beyond the sanatorium” (Travers 2008, 35). In the end we
are not told whether Herr Albin commits suicide or not, but his intention
foreshadows several other suicides that do occur in the novel. He returns
as a shadowy figure in subsequent pages, always passing around “a large
flowered box of chocolates from which the others ate” (109), reinforcing
leitmotif-like the connection between chocolate and the mystique of illness
as a force that liberates from the constraints of social life.
On the magic mountain Castorp’s education is completed, primarily
through speaking and listening to antithetical teachers, who each come
with their own culinary foibles and programs. The most significant are
Lodovico Settembrini, Italian liberal-democratic rational humanist, and his
antagonist, Naphta, a radical reactionary, a Jewish Jesuit nihilist-Marxist

who opposes democracy, looks back to medieval religious synthesis, and
laments the European falling from faith. Settembrini, standing for
Renaissance, Enlightenment, and progress, is a radical opponent of the
varieties of darkness, intellectual and moral, or in his words, of all
mystical guazzabuglio. Naphta, apostle of the Counter-Reformation,
negates the humanism of Settembrini, espouses a philosophy compounded
of medieval scholasticism and late Romanticism, and advocates
totalitarianism and terrorism. Their fierce verbal duels, during which they
fight pedagogically for Castorp’s soul “like God and the Devil struggling
over a man in the Middle Ages” (468), reach their crux when Naphta
challenges Settembrini to a duel with pistols. Settembrini fires into the air,
and the furious Naphta kills himself with a single shot to the head. Herr
Albin’s intention thus foreshadows the actual suicide of Naphta. Herr
Albin and Naphta also share a seductive philosophy of sickness and death
that leaves a mark on Castorp, the first one’s rudimentary and Naphta’s
brilliantly eloquent. And interestingly enough, another connecting element
between them is chocolate in excess. At some point, Castorp mentally
admonishes Naphta as an “improper Jesuit” (457), referring to the
complexity and contradictory nature of his character, which has driven
many interpreters to despair (Wysling 1990, 408). On the one hand, he
claims piety and unflagging ascetic discipline as a means of mortifying the
senses as his guiding principles. On the other hand, his lifestyle is
incongruent with his pious exhortations. The fact that Naphta is a Jesuit is
disclosed by Settembrini only towards the end of the narrative, and this is
no coincidence, since the role of the Jesuit-motif is to reveal the
contradictory nature of this character (Gloystein 2001, 35). The members
of the Jesuit order must take an oath of poverty, piety and obedience.
Whether Naphta complies with this oath is questionable. Castorp has his
doubts, and this is partly what his admonishment alludes to. He has a
penchant for elegant surroundings, employs a liveried servant, wears
expensive clothing, and indulges in exquisite food. The reader gets to
know this side of Naphta, when Castorp and Settembrini visit him in his
apartment (he does not live in the sanatorium), which seems fabulously
elegant, draped in excessive red silk and baroquely furnished, which
Castorp later refers to as the “little hole with all that silk” (402):
“All the beautiful furniture,” Hans Castorp went on, remembering, “the
pietà of the fourteenth century, the Venetian chandelier, the little footman
in livery, and as much chocolate layer cake as you could eat” (401) .
142 Chapter Six
Apart from extravagant conversation, Naphta offers his guests

refreshments which consist of “a properly served tea” (387), and a
chocolate layer cake. The German word is “Schokoladebaumkuchen”
which translates literally as “Chocolate Tree Cake,” and it is known as the
king of cakes because its labor-intensive mode of preparation distinguishes
it from all other cakes. It has a tall decorative structure and gets its name
from the many thin rings that form as layer upon layer of cake is baked.
During the nineteenth century, in wealthy households it was a matter of
good taste to serve chocolate layer cake on special occasions, at
Christmas, wedding or baptism celebrations, as it was the quintessential
festive cake (Krauß 1999, 194 and Schönfeld 1995, 162). It would not
have been the customary choice for the afternoon tea, when more modest
cakes were preferred. The fact that Naphta serves this exquisite cake at tea
foregrounds it as an eccentric choice. With its aura of decadence, “each
narrow, curving slice of which was nicely veined with chocolate” (388), it
symbolically highlights the contradictory nature of Naphta’s persona,
since on the sensual level, it portrays Naphta as a gourmet, which
contradicts his principles of asceticism and mortification of the senses; on
the spiritual level, it is symbolic of Naphta’s lust and voluptuousness.
Settembrini calls Naphta a “voluptuary” (403) and postulates lust as the
realm of death because death “loosens and delivers: it loosens morality, it
delivers from discipline and self-control, it liberates for lust” (404).
Naphta’s lust is an expression of his death-mysticism, which contradicts
his principle of piety and calls once more into question the ‘orthodoxy’ of
his Jesuitism. The additive chain of association that I have constructed in
relation to Naphta is: chocolate layer cake – sensual indulgence –
‘improper Jesuitism’ – lust – deliverance from discipline and self-control –
deliverance ultimately from life – death. Once more, between the starting
and end points of this associative chain – chocolate and death, both
seductive forces to be reckoned with – there is a symbolic proximity. It is
hard to imagine that, had the dinner taken place at Settembini’s, he would
have served chocolate layer cake. It is more likely that, as an advocate of
health, life, and progress, he is one of the “pack of Rousseauian prophets –
regenerators, vegetarians, fresh-air freaks, sunbath apostles, and so forth”
(456) who are the target of Naphta’s condemnatory polemics and ridicule.
Moreover, Settembrini is against all things that seduce, that ignite
emotions and the irrational, which is the reason why he harbors a
“political” distaste for music, considering it a dangerous opiate. Chocolate
with its Dionysian quality would probably be met with the same
opprobrium.
Castorp’s last great pedagogue who has the most vital influence on
him, and the last character featuring in this gastronomic hermeneutics is
the elderly Mynheer Pieter Peeperkorn, a rich Dutch owner of colonial
coffee plantations in Java. His majestic though inarticulate, charismatic
and irrational personality is introduced in the novel at the eleventh hour to
counterbalance the intellectual, “hyperarticulate mentors” (565)
Settembrini and Naphta. Peeperkorn’s philosophy, with its insistence on
the primacy of experience, with his huge bodily appetites comes
paradoxically close to that held by life-denying Naphta, because it pursues
pleasure to the point of intensity where the self loses all sense of
individuality and moral identity (Travers 2008, 41). In the end, like
Naphta, this life-affirming character confronts his own impotence and
commits suicide. In order to render the overwhelming effect of this
striking personality, Mann resorted to the mythical figures of Dionysus,
the embodiment of the awe and exuberance of existence, and Christ, the
symbol of life that goes through death. Both Dionysus and Christ, the
laughing face of the pagan god and the pain-distorted face of Ecce Homo,
merge in themselves the concepts of life and death (Neumann 2002, 100).
And so does Peeperkorn: underneath his impressive corporeality and
compulsive cult of vitality, he is a death-bound character from the very
moment he arrives on the magic mountain because he suffers from chronic
malign tropical fever.
This formidable character of gargantuan appetites comes with a
culinary philosophy of his own. The “classic gifts of life” which he so
frequently espouses in grandiloquent terms consist almost entirely in
eating and drinking (Travers 2008, 41). One evening, he assembles twelve
guests at an improvised supper that allows for a two-fold reading: a
parodic travesty of the Last Supper and a Dionysian bacchanalia. The
banquet takes place late into the night, outside the sanatorium’s regular,
institutionalized meals which sets it apart as an “exterritorial” meal. As
Neumann argues, during the nineteenth century, cultural conflict can be
read in the change of the structure of meals, i.e. the oscillation between
regular, ritualized and irregular, exterritorial meals (Neumann 2005, 196).
This supper provides the tablemates with an experience that is different
from the regular one they have as sanatorium patients. Peeperkorn urges
his guests to an exalted celebration of intense feeling which is achieved
mainly through the consumption of enormous quantities of food and
alcohol:
One must eat, eat properly, in order to give life’s demands their due, he
informed them, and then ordered refreshments for everyone: a selection of
meats and cold cuts, tongue, goose breast, and roast beef, sausages and
144 Chapter Six
ham – plates piled with delicacies and garnished with little balls of butter,
radishes, and parsley until they resembled showy flowerbeds (554).
This initial “eucharist” consists in a collation of meat. But Peeperkorn

rapidly dismisses it with a reaction of irrational anger as “gimcrackery”
(554). His true “eucharist” consists in “a fine good omelette aux fines
herbes” (554) for everyone of his guests, “so that they might all give life’s
demands their due” (554). From Peeperkorn’s alcohol induced incoherent
speech, one surmises that a dish of eggs is simple, grand, and holy because
it “comes directly from the hand of God” (555). The collation of cold
meats is similar to the heavy courses of meat typical of the Berghof menu,
and in Peeperkorn’s view, symbolically connotes eating dead matter,
whereas a warm dish of eggs stands for life. According to Jean Chevalier,
figures of Dionysus holding an egg have been found in graves as a sign
and promise of a return to life (Chevalier 1996, 337-41). Traditional
symbolism links the egg with the creation of the world, but also with
rebirth, resurrection, and immortality. According to Peeperkorn, this
omelet of life, along wine and pure grain spirits, which he regards as
simple, natural, holy gifts are the only things able to elicit that exalted
feeling of mystical union with life. Feeling, he insists, is what awakens life
from its slumber, and life in turn “wants to be awakened, roused to
drunken nuptials with divine feeling” (594). Peeperkorn represents the
fictional embodiment of the cult of vitality with its emphasis on the
priority of feeling and the undistorted fullness of lived experience which
appeared in response to Nietzsche’s Lebensphilosophie during 1890-1914
when it began its triumphant advance in Europe. Nietzsche, more than any
philosopher of his era, gave the word “life” a new ring that was both
mysterious and seductive (Safranski 2001, 318-9). The narrator, however,
treats Peeperkorn’s intention to transfigure his banquet from a sensual into
a ritualistic eating experience with fine irony, since it is apparent that his
proclamation of simplicity as a means of superior “intoxication” is
ultimately a false simplicity, since the meal serves the purpose of a
pompous staging of himself as a towering personality over others
(Wierlacher 1987, 74).
The huge quantities of wine and other spirits that Peeperkorn pours
from his horn of plenty also transmute this Last Supper into a Dionysian
Bacchanalia. He is an alcoholic with an overindulgence in Dutch gin,
which he fondly refers to as “bread,” “but not baked bread […], distilled
[…] bread of God, clear as crystal […]” (543). Apart from the “bread”
with which he “regales” his heart at each meal, including the first
breakfast, he drinks one or two bottles of red wine at every main meal. The
last order at this Bacchanalia is again excessive:
He ordered coffee after the champagne, double mochas, which were once
again served with “bread,” or sweet liqueurs – apricot brandy, chartreuse,
crème de vanille, and maraschino – for the ladies. Later there was pickled
herring and beer, and finally tea, including a Chinese chamomile, for
anyone who had drunk enough champagne or liqueurs and did not wish to
return to more serious wine, as had Mynheer (561).
If wine and spirits are gifts of God, smoking tobacco and drugs,
according to Peeperkorn, are “one of those over-refined pleasures, the
cultivation of which meant robbing the simpler gifts of life of their
majesty” (555). However, his unusual erudition in the field of
pharmacology and toxicology proves that he is an expert as far as
stimulants are concerned. His eulogy of quinine both as “a therapeutic
poison” (569), “a true regaling cordial, a splendid drink that invigorated,
stimulated, and quickened the system” (568), and an intoxicating drug,
throws his previous exhortations into a questionable light. Like Naphta,
Peeperkorn proves to be finally ‘improper’, meaning untrue to his own
dogma, and yet again, the inconsistency of his character can be
circumscribed with the help of food, albeit a specific category of food.
Stimulants and drugs, pertain to a particular culinary category, namely that
of substances which challenge the food taboo by transgression (Neumann
1993, 356). They are situated on the borderline between medicine and
poison, between the extreme poles of life-enhancing and life-threatening
substances. This dual quality of food is exemplified by Peeperkorn in his
erudite exposition about snake venoms: as animal products, they are
nothing but complex proteins, but they have deadly effects if introduced
into the bloodstream “simply because we were not used to equating
protein and poison” (568). He concludes that “the world of substances was
such that they all concealed both life and death simultaneously, all were
both therapeutic and poisonous” (568), and “a substance considered an
agent of life could, under certain circumstances, […] kill” (568). This is
consistent with the perception of food served in the dining hall of
sanatorium Berghof, on the borderline between elixir of life and poisonous
narcotic. In this respect, “Peeperkorn” is a telling name: on the one hand,
he brings the “spice” of life and has a vitalizing effervescent effect on the
moribund society of the sanatorium; on the other hand, he needs to
accelerate the metabolism of his own rapidly failing body with stimulants,
most of them liquid, huge quantities of alcohol, coffee, and quinine. In the
end, his “defeat of feeling in the face of life” (556), which for him
represents a “cosmic catastrophe” (615), an unpardonable inadequacy
because it renders him unable to live up to his own “theology” of man as
“nothing but the organ through which God consummates his marriage with
146 Chapter Six
awakened and intoxicated life” (549), leaves him no choice but to commit
suicide. He does so by injecting himself subcutaneously with cobra
venom.
In order to clarify his thoughts regarding all that he has learned from
his pedagogues, to put some distance between him and their teachings and
claim his own autonomous position, during the second winter of his stay,
Castorp escapes into the mountains for a skiing expedition. His solitary
escapade, however, takes him to the very brink of death, since he gets lost
in a blizzard and almost freezes to death. In his near-death dizziness while
lying in the snow, he has a vision that eventually pulls him back to life.
What he is really undertaking is a metaphorical journey within to confront
his fascination with death, with the seductive philosophy of sickness and
death embodied by the ethos of the sanatorium and given an intellectual
footing by the theories of Naphta (Travers 2008, 38-9). In his vision he
sees a community of people, “children of the sun” who live in mutual
respect and reverence. Behind this scene, in an ancient temple, two hags
are dismembering a child. The sun-people live in full knowledge of the
horror going on in the temple behind, in a deliberate collective choice to
assert and create what they value in defiance of what the temple holds
(Beddow 2002, 148). The vision reveals to Castorp that a dignified,
civilized society is only made possible through the bloody sacrifice of the
witches, that death is a great power but that, through a deliberate ethical
choice, “man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts” (487). The
two dimensions – humane ethics that is able to transgress the threat of
horrid human nature – are once more defined and anchored by antinomic
incidents of eating. The harmonious community of the sun-people revolves
around the most nurturing human act, a young mother who sits nursing her
child and to whom the others pay homage, whereas at the center of the
grisly temple scene lies the transgression of the ultimate food taboo,
cannibalism: the two half-naked witches are dismembering and devouring
a child, “the brittle bones cracking in their mouths, blood dripping from
their vile lips” (485). In this epiphany that marks Castorp’s humanistic
maturity, eating acts again oscillate between the most life enhancing, i.e.
nursing, and most horrendous, i.e. cannibalism.
The numerous eating events that contribute greatly to the sensuality of
the novel play an integral part in the depiction sanatorium ethos with its
regime of illness, which in turn mirrors the socio-pathological panorama
of prewar Europe. The culinary code is entwined with the problem of
disease and death in a model that approaches food ambivalently as life-
enhancing nourishment and apathy inducing narcotic. As such, food and
eating are inextricably bound with Mann’s critique of the medical-
institutional practices of the sanatorium and the psychology of tubercular

patients, both of which are leading to a paralysis of the will to recover and
resume a meaningful life. Chocolate, the Dionysian food culturally
associated with borderline experiences, is involved in the symbolic
analysis of the causes that led to World War I, being associated with
prewar irritability and latent conflict. Chocolate also recurs leitmotif-like,
in relation to characters such as Herr Albin and Naphta as a constituting
element in circumscribing their “philosophies,” i.e. Albin’s mystique of
illness and Naphta’s death mysticism, both seductive for the inherent idea
of illness and death as forces that liberate and deliver from the constraints
of social life. Through the figure of Peeperkorn and his penchant for
stimulants, the leitmotif of food as ambivalently poised in between
medicine and poison is reinforced in the end. The most extreme human
eating acts of nursing and cannibalism are also an integral part in
conveying the epiphany that marks Castorp’s humanistic maturation in
which he asserts the primacy of life on the basis of his knowledge and
experience of death.
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LOVE, FEASTING AND THE SYMBOLIC
POWER OF FOOD IN FRENCH WRITING
CHAPTER SEVEN
FOOD AS BATTLEGROUND
IN MEDIEVAL FRENCH EPICS
ANDREW COWELL
Widespread in medieval French literature are scenes involving the

procurement, preparation and consumption of food and drink. The
distribution of these scenes is certainly not equal across the various genres,
however. Medieval French romances, with their attention to the details of
courtly life, tend to include more extensive scenes of dining and
hospitality, with more extensive descriptions of the fare, just as they tend
to provide more details about clothing, decor, and manners (Bruckner
1980). The fabliaux–short, comic tales in verse–are rife with scenes
including food and drink, most of them involving peasants, bourgeois
characters, priests or clerks, rather than the noble characters typically
featured in the romances (Gordon 2007). A genre which ranks relatively
low on overall the scale of interest in food and drink is the chanson de
geste–epic texts dating primarily from the eleventh through thirteenth
centuries. These texts tend to focus on battle and the social processes and
maneuvering surrounding conflict, negotiation, and conflict resolution.
Thus detailed scenes concerning food and drink are especially interesting
in the chansons de geste–not just because of their rarity, but also because
of what they can tell us about alimentary practices, both in the texts and in
the larger world of the warrior aristocracy. Moreover, the treatment of food
and alimentary themes in different genres tends to be different as well: in
the romance, scenes on this theme often focus on aspects of social
solidarity; in the fabliaux, food is intimately involved with either
commercial activity by peasants and bourgeois merchants, or with
sexuality. In the epic chansons de gestes, however, food and alimentary
scenes are much more likely to focus on conflict: food as battleground.
Food as Battleground in Medieval French Epics 153
This will be the subject of this chapter.

In this article, I will examine scenes of eating, drinking and feasting, as
well as references to these practices by characters in texts, in a number of
chansons de geste. The significance of alimentary consumption could of
course vary widely from context to context in medieval France and French
art and literature, just as today.1 Generally speaking, scenes in Old French
literature engage with the kinds of issues that often occur around food and
drink: class identity and differences, symbolic meanings attached to
specific food and drink items, and tensions between hospitality and
solidarity on the one hand and individual status-building and conspicuous
display on the other.2 The latter of these themes is especially important,
and in general, I argue that food scenes in medieval French epics tend to be
oriented more towards conflict and tension than solidarity. But these
general themes are also inflected in quite specific ways, which reflect the
changing social conditions and tensions of the early High Middle Ages; in
particular, the increasingly tenuous position of the warrior aristocracy vis-
a-vis other groups such as the Church, the upper nobility and royal courts,
and the urban bourgeoisie (see Dunbabin 2000). Thus, in earlier epics,
food and drink scenes often focus on intra-class conflict and individual
identity formation, whereas in later epics, the focus shifts to inter-class
conflict and class-based identity formation.
It is impossible to understand the group and individual identity of the
warrior aristocracy without grasping the meaning of the general concept of
honor and the more abstract, guiding principle of “integrity.” The term
“honor,” for this time and place, broadly corresponds with the usage of the
term in Mediterranean Studies: a public, social evaluation of an
individual’s status within the social group in question, based on adherence
to a socially-accepted code of values (Peristiany 1966; Peristiany and Pitt-
Rivers 1992). The values in question included bravery, loyalty to allies and
superiors, protection of inferiors, hospitality and generosity, and
vengeance of perceived slights to honor. The term “integrity” is more
abstract, and refers to the idealized, maximal social status and maximal
degree of honor: a situation in which the individual would be completely
free of social obligations to superiors, owing nothing, having no debts, able
to give freely, supported only by a circle of dependents, and demonstrating
complete self-mastery over external temptations (commercial, sexual,
1
See Henisch 1976, Menjot 1984, and Bitsch et al 1987 for wide surveys of both
historical and literary sources.
2
See Mintz and Du Bois 2002 for a general overview of the literature on these
themes.
154 Chapter Seven
monetary or material), which could be seen as forms of “dependency”

(Cowell 2007:21-25, 48-51). Whereas honor was a measure of individual
stature, integrity was an abstract ideal against which honor could be
calculated.
Integrity was not uncommonly expressed in terms of alimentary themes
in medieval times. One famous example is Charlemagne’s capitulary “De
villis,” in which he suggests that the ideal lord should be as completely
economically independent as possible, producing all necessities on his own
estate (Boretius, 1883). The text lists, for example, dozens of different
herbs and spices which should be expected in the lord’s kitchen garden. In
such a social context, elaborate aristocratic feasts would feature not just
largely quantities of food, but great diversity as well, thereby advertising
the range of products which the lord and his dependents were able to grow,
gather, or obtain by hunting, falconry and so forth. This capitulary is
expressive of a more general ideal of avoiding commercial interaction and
exchange–of avoiding the market, as a place of shame (see Duby
1973:68,125). Anthropologist Paul Dresch notes that this is a key aspect of
honor among some Middle Eastern societies (1998:126-127).
As seen above however, integrity was not just a socio-economic quality,

but also an ethical and psychological one. And in medieval epics, one’s
self-mastery, inner-directed willfulness, and single-minded devotion to an
oath is often expressed in relation to food and drink–in particular, in the
ability to resist it, and by extension, to resist all bodily distractions and
temptations. In Raoul of Cambrai, a knight is urged to eat, but replies that
“I can’t even begin to” (v. 1749) due to a desire for vengeance. On another
occasion, a knight answers a challenge by swearing “You’ll not [live to]
see the month of February, even if it means that I’ll never taste meat and
drink again” (v. 4967-8). In Aliscans, the hero William of Orange must
leave his wife and home to fulfill a duty in France. To show his loyalty to
his wife, he promises, “I shall not eat meat nor taste pepper,/ I shall not
drink wine nor any spiced drink/ from a wooden cup or a golden goblet,/...I
shall not eat kneaded hearth-cakes,/ only coarse bread that is made from
the chaff;/...My lips will not touch any other mouth/ until they have kissed
and tasted yours/ in this palace, where the hallway is paved” (v. 1991-
2003). In The Coronation of Louis, William of Orange is seeking to defend
Rome and the Pope against the Saracens. He promises that if he is not
victorious, he will never eat again (v. 668-9). Moreover, the text underlines
William’s restraint and self-mastery in comparison to the Saracens’
unrestrained appetites and pleasure in eating: he accuses Mohammed of
having “abused our [i.e. the original Christian] faith with drinking and
pleasures crude” (v. 850-1). Even his own traveling companions are
viewed with pity by William when they eat and drink food brought by
peasants, while he fasts all night, having promised to not eat until he
succeeds in conquering a fief for himself:
There on a heath they dismounted to rest

and ate the food that was brought them by peasants.
When the noble knights had dined and drunk well,
some fell asleep, they were all exhausted.
William watched them with pity as they slept.
He called for his armor, he would not rest. (v. 2087-92)
In a different context, massive eating can be understood not as a

violation of the principle of integrity, but rather as an expression of it. A
key aspect of medieval aristocratic conspicuous consumption was to
advertize socio-economic integrity. Within the larger world of gift-giving,
one of the fundamental elements of the act of giving at the time was the
spontaneity of the gift, and in the most extreme examples, the pure gratuity
of the gift, given for no clear reason whatsoever (Cowell 2007:37-39;
Tabuteau 1988: 21-2, 27). This spontaneity and gratuity advertised the
ability to give without limit and consideration, and thus was an important
sign of integrity. Similarly, the ability to not only serve but also eat huge
and even gluttonous quantities of food could serve similar purposes, as
part of more general acts of conspicuous consumption–a consumption
which ultimately showed disdain for money, for the materials in question
as objects of value in and of themselves, and for the social processes and
relations required to obtain the items.
A variant of this theme occurs in the Gargantuan appetite of Rainoart, a
comic character in the epics La Chanson de Guillaume and Aliscans.
Rainoart signals his complete independence from the society around him
by his massive eating and drinking (Aliscans v. 3100-4800). Rainoart
“finds himself a tub/ filled with newly fermented wine./ He takes a pot and
dips it in,/ puts it to his lips and pours it down; / in a single gulp he’s drunk
the whole vat/ that holds easily a full hogshead” (v. 3682-7). Note his
scorn of the niceties of manner normally surrounding such consumption
(he has also just been rebuked for not eating in the refectory like normal
men (3669-3670)).
Interestingly, in the same text, and immediately preceding the
introduction of Rainoart, William says to one female character:
156 Chapter Seven
Your word is certainly not to be heard.

Since you enjoy your meat and your pepper
And drink your wine from a golden cup,
Wine with honey, or mixed with spices,
You eat hearth-cakes kneaded four times over,
Since you hold your covered goblet
Near the fire, alongside the chimney,
Until you are warmed and roasted
And enflamed and set afire with lust
By the gluttony which consumes you; (v. 2775-2784)
Here, eating and drinking are clearly linked to desire for external
commodities (“gluttony” and “lust”), and thus to a loss of integrity–the
words closely echo William’s own oath to his wife cited above, where he
promises not to do all the things he accuses his enemy here of doing. Note
also the contrast with Rainoart’s “devil may care” consumption: William’s
criticism focuses as much on the specific manner of consumption (the wine
is in golden cups, drunk from the privileged spot next to the fire) as on the
item consumed, and suggests not only gluttony, but a general love of
comfort, material wealth, and display for the sake of others. The
suggestion here is that proper conspicuous consumption really involves a
scorn of the things consumed , or at least the abandoning of all restraint
and care for the items themselves, in an expression of integrity. Rainoart,
despite his massive consumption, is not accused of gluttony, while the
woman is, despite her relatively dainty eating; gluttony lies not in the
amount consumed, but in the attitude of the consumer towards the food and
drink, which is finally an expression of a psychological and ethical stance
and identity in the world. This interpretation is reinforced when Rainoart,
after getting massively drunk at a feast, insists that the minstrels be
properly paid. While the other Franks are depicted as usurious skin-flints,
he is shown as generous in giving as well as in taking, and equally
unconcerned with costs and calculation in both cases (4579f-bb).
The preceding examples illustrate the contextual variability of the
meaning of eating and drinking, including the potentially contradictory
significations which may seem to arise if context is ignored. On the one
hand, the lord’s giving of a feast (and, one assumes, his joining in the
consumption) expresses his socio-economic integrity. On the other hand,
the same lord can scorn eating and drinking of anything other than the
most basic necessities–or even anything at all–in order to symbolically
underline his ethico-psychological integrity. In the former case, the feast
advertises power, and mastery over the resources of food acquisition and
preparation, and the focus is on the lord; the feasters may be seen as
dependent, this is only a secondary meaning. In the latter case, feasters are
much more clearly the focus, and are always seen as weak and dependent,
lacking self-mastery and integrity in relation to food itself as material
product, while the lord demonstrates mastery over his body and will.
Both cases should also be distinguished from the roles of feasting in
other medieval genres. Studies of hospitality and feasting in the romance
(Bruckner 1980) have traditionally focused on the practices as examples of
traditional gift-giving. They focus on the solidarity involved in feasting
among nobles, and the ritual bonds created by hospitality. Certainly the
texts of the romances themselves typically focus on this theme. Moreover,
it is far from absent in epic texts.3 But the notion of integrity, which is so
important in the chansons de geste and in understanding the motivations of
the epic hero, suggests that feast-giving–like many other acts of giving in
chansons de geste–can be as much or more about aggressivity and self-
aggrandizement as about ritual solidarity. Certainly the more extensive
scenes in the genre which are focused specifically on feasting–as opposed
to the many more numerous passing mentions–reinforce this idea. Giving a
feast often involves “heterogeneration.”4
Of course, the meanings of foods and consumption need not be so
clear-cut and univalent as in some of the above examples. Medieval
authors were imminently aware of this fact. Raoul of Cambrai recounts the
revolt of Raoul and his relatives against King Louis and allied families
over a case of a disputed inheritance of land. The text recounts events
having a historical basis in the tenth century, though the existing text likely
dates from the twelfth century. Raoul and his relatives are ferocious in
pursuit of their claims, rejecting all attempts at compromise–a
characteristic which is at times admirable due to the bravery and single-
mindedness involved, but at times presented as being outside the bounds of
responsible social behavior. Eventually, with Raoul already dead, King
Louis convokes his barons for a feast at Pentecost (laisses 221, 222),
including the two warring parties. His seneschal announces to the gathering
that anyone who provokes a disturbance will be beheaded (laisse 223).
Clearly, Louis intends the feast as a moment of solidarity and national
unity–or, from another perspective, as a moment where he will impose his
will and his personal solution to the conflict, in a setting which will force
acquiescence from both sides out of respect for the occasion. The
3
See Girart de Roussillon pp. 16-17, 131-132, 218; Raoul of Cambrai v. 5200ff;
Aliscans v. 8000ff.
4
See Weiner 1992, especially the introduction, for a key study of gift-giving and
heterogeneration.
158 Chapter Seven
seneschal makes the disastrous mistake, however, of placing the members

of the two sides right next to each other at the same table (laisse 224).
Twice, the most impulsive of Raoul’s relatives, his uncle Guerri, is
tempted to attack the enemy. The first time, his nephew begs him to
maintain “measure” and to avoid the dishonor that would come from the
act (223). The second time, he reminds his uncle that the dinner does not
cost him a penny (224). The first remark appeals to a general sense of
solidarity cultivated at feasts, of the type often promoted in romances, and
of the type that Louis likely wishes to reign at this gathering, especially
given the religious context of Pentecost. The second remark, however,
invokes more specifically a duty of submission owed by the guest to the
host, who by providing the gift of food places the guest in a position of
dependency and obligation. This remark thus imposes a more personal and
more powerful ethical encumbrance, and at the same time references the
alternative reading of the situation, in which Louis seeks to impose his own
solution to the conflict upon those present: he acts with a steal hand,
cloaked in a velvet glove.
Once the meal is served, Guerri is brought the very best cut of the
venison (224)–another gesture which can be read either as a marker of
extreme solidarity and honor for him, or as a repressive gesture placing
him under maximal obligation to accept the peace of the moment. His
response is to grab the meat and bones and hit his enemy Bernier over the
head with it, drawing blood, and provoking a general brawl, in which
Guerri ends up wielding a pole and his nephew Gautier grabs one of the
table knives for defense.
On one level of course, the scene is quite hilarious. Note however that
it is the attacker and his allies who all end up using bizarre weapons, while
those defending themselves run for their swords or at least clubs. In turning
the food and utensils of the feast to weapons, Guerri and family are clearly
mocked, and depicted as violating the rules of hospitality. This mockery
retrospectively reinforces a reading of the feast as a moment of solidarity,
followed by solidarity violated.
When the offending parties are separated and brought before the king,
however, Guerri defends himself by noting that in the seating, he was
forced to face the enemy who had already killed Raoul, his nephew.
Furthermore, Raoul was Louis’ own nephew as well. Thus Guerri suggests
first that the seating at the table was an affront to his honor, mocking his
failure, as of this point, to avenge his dead nephew. In other words, he
presents at alternative reading of the situation, in which Louis imposes not
only encumbrance but actual dishonor on Guerri through his heavy-handed
attempts at imposing an artificial settlement and solidarity. His use of

Louis’ venison is thus an act of resistance to what he perceives not as
hospitality, but as aggression.
By noting the relation of Raoul to Louis, he goes further and suggests
that the very presence of Bernier at the feast should be seen as an affront to
Louis, who rather than taking vengeance, fetes the killer of his nephew–a
point amplified by Gautier in laisse 226. For Guerri, the larger strategic
situation of dishonor and vengeance trumps the tactical attempt by Louis to
use solidarity and reciprocity to resolve the conflict. The feast is a fraud,
and thus the local symbols of ritual bonding–fine cuts of meat, table
utensils–are appropriately used by Guerri and family to imply the true
nature of the feast as aggression on Louis’ part, and to invoke the reality of
the larger situation of continuing conflict; or at the least, one could say that
Guerri reads the feast in the context of the larger on-going struggle outside
the bounded moment, whereas Louis views the feast as a ritual which can
transcend the external context and resolve it, rather than simply expressing
and re-enacting it. Louis responds in laisse 226 by specifically invoking
the customs of hospitality, ignoring the problem of Bernier’s presence by
stating that once he is in fact present, he must be respected as a guest:
ritual trumps exterior-oriented readings. The consistent parallels
throughout the scene serve to underline the two competing ways of reading
the meaning of the situation, and Guerri’s use of the venison as a weapon
can be seen as an effective form of symbolic manipulation which responds
to those potential readings.
The situation rapidly evolves, as Guerri and Bernier end up challenging
each other to ritual combat over the larger question of the inheritance and
Raoul’s death; Louis effectively loses control of the situation, and the
narrower question of hospitality rules is dropped as the two engage in
(inconclusive) combat. The interruption of the feast in this way clearly
signals the failure of Louis’ tactical, ritual-based strategy and the triumph
of a reading of the feast as social microcosm of conflict.
After the combat leaves all involved weak and in bed, the mother of
Raoul arrives, and in a gesture that echoes the earlier scene, grabs a pole
and tries to attack Bernier as he lays in bed. The scene again smacks of
ridicule, both due to the instrument and the attacker, and points to the
excess of the entire family. Bernier (who was raised by Raoul’s own
family) tries to make peace by saying to her “you raised me, I can’t deny it,
and you gave me food and drink” (v. 5070-1). He goes on to add, “you can
take your vengeance if you want” (v. 5074). Here, in the conclusion of the
scene, food and drink are again invoked as emblems of solidarity – but
160 Chapter Seven
true, non-coercive solidarity in this case. The offer of vengeance is refused

as being too ignoble, but Bernier’s enemies nevertheless promise future
vengeance. More symbolically, they refuse the verbal invocation of food–
and settlement–offered to them by Bernier. Unlike in the previous case
however, where the offer could be read as aggressive, this generous offer is
seen by all as a true compromise, and the family of Raoul is roundly
condemned by all for their continued, uncompromising pursuit of their
case. Faced with this, they finally cede, and afterwards they all go and sit
down together at the table to eat (243)–in a true gesture of reciprocity and
solidarity (which however the king himself then interrupts, since the accord
does not suit his desires).
This passage offers as good an introduction as any to the dynamics and
ambivalencies of ceremonial eating and drinking among the warrior
aristocracy. Feasting not only worked differently from context to context,
but the exact meanings of the feast could also be multiple and open to
contestation in any given context. Creative manipulation of food and
utensils can be understood as a performance which invokes competing or
alternative interpretations of a situation, opening the setting to increased
complexity and potential renegotiation. And close attention to carefully
arranged parallelism in literary texts can help us better understand the
ongoing feast/performance and its connections to broader issues of honor
and integrity.
In the remainder of this article, I would like to look at an epic text
which offers a particularly rich perspective on all aspects of the alimentary
cycle–not just eating, but also the mechanisms for obtaining food in the
first place. The text in question is William in the Monastery, a part of the
epic cycle devoted to William of Orange, and dating probably from the
later twelfth century. The narrative is particularly interesting in that it
illustrates a confrontation of different alimentary economies and
ideologies–that of the warrior aristocracy on the one hand, and those of the
monastery and the merchant on the other. It captures a key moment of
transition in the High Middle Ages where the world of Raoul of Cambrai
and feasting as gift meets two competing discourses: food as an element of
commerce, and food as part of the moral world of the Church.
The text immediately establishes its liminal nature, portraying the
warrior aristocracy not only confronting alternate alimentary discourses,
but symbolically threatened by its decline as these new discourses rise to
prominence: William has spent all his life as a warrior hero, but in his old
age, upon the death of his wife, he will give up fighting and retire to a
monastery. He offers a series of gifts to smooth his passage into the
monastery, as was typical of wealthy nobles. But immediately his

alimentary regime comes into conflict with that of the monks. While they
eat relatively abstemiously, he continues to eat prodigiously:
The other monks are quite jealous of him,

they tell each other: "This was a real folly!
Our abbot committed a great outrage
when he received this man in our abbey.
An appetite like his I've never seen;
if we have a loaf and a half to eat,
he has three, he is never satisfied.
Curses on such a monk in an abbey! (v. 188-95)
His gargantuan consumption can clearly be read as a continuation of the

conspicuous consumption characteristic of aristocratic meals; it also
reflects his expectation of the continued validity of a gift economy, in
which his generous entry gifts to the monastery will be reciprocated by
generous meals.
The monks, however, are presented as being simultaneously oriented
toward religion and towards narrow-minded profit. When his wife dies,
leaving many gifts to the local churches, the text notes slyly and
ambiguously that “all the clergy is summoned by William/ but they come
there of their own desire.” (v. 43-4). The text also notes that William can
neither read nor write (v.130-40): this can be taken as a backhanded slap at
the monks’ avidity, since there was increasing pressure in the twelfth
century not to accept such unqualified nobles into monasteries.5 It should
come as no surprise then that the monks seem to interpret William’s entry
gifts not as true gifts, requiring reciprocal countergifts, but simply as a
one-time payment–a buying of his way into the monastery. Once in, they
believe he should then eat like everyone else. Instead, his huge appetite
virtually drives the monks to starvation (v.184-208).
Seeking a way to get rid of him, the monks come up with the scheme of
sending him on a dangerous journey to acquire food for the monastery.
They ask whether he can do this properly, and he replies:
"God," says William, "I've never heard such words!

I have never been involved with trading,
selling or buying any kind of goods." (v. 308-310)
5
The position of the monasteries in relation to the increasing wealth and profit-
oriented economy of twelfth-century France is examined in Little 1978.
162 Chapter Seven
In fact, medieval economic historians have shown that the warrior

aristocracy must have been quite intimately involved with buying goods for
themselves and their estates, though it was extremely rare for them to do so
in person, as William is asked to do in this case; a mark of one’s status was
the degree to which one personally escaped involvement with these kinds
of transactions. William of Orange’s dismay in this passage thus reflects at
least in part a sense of insult to his high social standing–a standing which
his great entry gift to the monastery was no doubt meant to underline and
maintain. Lords give gifts, underlings buy things, he essentially says.
Modes of exchange are supposed to correspond to social rank.6
Yet, especially if one has read other early French epics, one cannot
help feeling that William “doth protest too much,” for two reasons. First,
the warrior aristocracy was by this time in the late twelfth century
intimately involved with administering lands and benefices on the basis of
money, rent, wages, tolls and so forth (Duby 1973). Thus his shock and
dismay have an anachronistic, comic sense when the social context is
considered. But secondly, when the literary context is considered, the
remarks are striking due to the explicit nature of the resistance to monetary
commerce. Although encounters with merchants do occur briefly in the
Charroi de Nimes, no other early epics of any of the three traditional
cycles feature such a clear-cut oppositional moment as this. William in the
Monastery is in fact the latest of the “core” epics of the William of Orange
Cycle, and thus likely the one most clearly aware of the increasing
commercialization of aristocratic life (see Baldwin 2000:99ff). The clear-
cut, explicit opposition of sale and gift reflects a growing awareness on the
part of William’s class of the issues at stake in gift-giving versus buying
and selling, and the presence of a scene of food procurement of this sort in
an epic is itself already powerfully indicative of changing times and of the
threat to the discourse of “integrity” which such buying and selling could
pose.
The episode in the Monastery is therefore part of a more general
elaboration of explicit models of “the gift” which characterized the late
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as well as of explicit representations of the
opposition of gifts and commerce. This development resulted in epics such
6
Constance Bouchard’s study on monastic-aristocratic relations (1987) suggests
that during the twelfth century, monastic hierarchies tended to closely reflect the
aristocratic hierarchies from which monastic leaders originated. In the thirteenth
century, however, a more egalitarian system began to evolve, where monastic
leaders arose from lower social orders. This scene perhaps reflects a tension
between these two tendencies as well.
as Les Enfances Vivien and Hervis de Metz, in which an aristocrat is raised

by a bourgeois merchant, only to fail miserably at commerce due to a
tendency to give things away with abandon and to spend lavishly on
conspicuous consumption, before finally returning to his rightful social
place. The culture of gift-giving is now presented as a feature of the
aristocratic class specifically, and at the level of genetics–it is “in the
blood.” Medieval romances also explicitly offer models of the gift as an
inherent element of the aristocratic class,7 and specifically ideological texts
such as Le Roman des Eles closely associate gift-giving–and feasting–with
another social institution which was used as a marker of aristocratic
membership–chivalry.8 The explicit linking of gift-giving to the class of
the nobility in the context of carefully elaborated scenes of class
confrontation is a key development that is essentially absent from earlier
medieval texts, whether chronicles such as those documenting the career of
William the Conqueror or early epics such as The Song of Roland.
After William expresses his dismay over being asked to engage in
commerce, he goes on to express his particular outrage that, as a monk, he
cannot defend himself with blood-drawing weapons if someone should try
to rob him of the money which he must use for his purchases. William’s
concern with having to buy and sell and his concern about bodily self-
defense are intimately connected. In the passage above, he is clearly upset
about the possibility of being robbed. The abbot, who hopes to rid himself
of William to due his excessive appetites, has told him of his trip to
market:
"But one thing I don't want you to forget:

one may not stray into another chapter.
You must go by the forest of Baaucler.
where there are robbers who must be feared,
who live entirely by stealing and by theft.
No man passes them without losing his robes,
not even clerks or priests or tonsured monks.
....
Sir William, you must be very careful
not to allow yourself, sir, to fight back." (v. 297-307)
To this, William replies, "...if any thieves try to rob me, I'll see that they
7
See for example John Baldwin’s analysis of aristocratic life in medieval France
from 1190-1230 (Baldwin 2000).
8
In the English translation (Busby 1983), see pp. 162-165 in particular, and also
168.
164 Chapter Seven
die a miserable death" (v. 311-312). After being warned against violence,
William then goes on to ask, in a series of following laisses, "By God, sir
abbot, if they want my horse?" (v. 318); "If they take my gloves?" (v. 330);
"If they take my boots?" (v. 337); to which the abbot says that he must not
resist. He only draws that line at William's underwear(!):
Indeed, says the abbot, that would be bad;

a thing like that ought to displease you.
Protect your drawers if you can work some harm,
and flesh and bone you may stand against them. (v. 347-50)
Count William, when he hears the decision

of his lord abbot, can only rejoice
that he is permitted to fight for his pants. (v. 359-361)
William, a modest soul at heart, is greatly relieved, adding that "I'd be too
ashamed to take off my pants" (v. 356).
The modesty of William (and the abbot) aside, William's worries about
his underwear actually get at the essence of the passage. It is finally the
thing which is least valuable monetarily (one presumes) whose potential
loss seems to trouble William most. In fact, he barely mentions the money
he will be carrying, before moving directly to the items of personal
clothing which are crucial to his identity as a knight. Even these items are
listed in inverse financial order, beginning with his battle horse and
moving eventually to his pants before getting down to true basics. It is
finally shame, not financial loss, which is his chief concern. While that
shame is, in part, of a directly prurient nature, this scene is more
fundamentally a comic play on the more general form of shame that is
intimately tied to William's sense of honor. This honor is expressed
symbolically both in William's accoutrements, and in his willingness and
ability to guard these items against all comers, and especially takers. The
money, in this regard, becomes simply another symbol of William's honor
and reputation, and its loss would be essentially a symbolic loss to that
honor, as would his clothing. Money per se, and possessions too, in the
final analysis, are of little material importance to William. They function
more as symbolic extensions of his own body, and it is the symbolic
integrity of his body and reputation which worry him the most. The
underwear of course conceals the particular part of his body that carries his
“seed,” and thus from one perspective the essence of his identity.
William’s pants, and what lies within, become the focus of anxieties about
aristocratic honor and identity–a problem which is always vexing William
in the cycle. William is after all called “short-nosed” (due to an enemy’s

swordplay), so the fact that his worries about personal identity and
integrity center on his breeches seems all the more appropriate.
This scene thus reveals William’s efforts to continue to focus primarily
on issues of individual identity and its symbolic expression. Though money
is mentioned in the scene, it is no more than one symbolic item among
many, and the threat to his identity is not the money, but an inability to
defend his symbolic integrity.
The symbolic status of things becomes even clearer later in the epic,
when William arrives at the market. Venturing down to the sea to buy fish:
He takes his chest and opens it quickly,

but it annoys him to count out coins
so he throws them about by the handful.
One tells another: "Here's a good cleric.
....
he doesn't care how the grain is sold
as long as his stomach is satisfied."
Count William will not argue with them,
he has no wish to dispute the peasants.
That night he finds himself very good lodging,
eats several of the fish for his supper.
He doesn't forget to have good wine, either-
he does not intend to bring back any coins. (v. 417-31)
In part, this scene recalls one which occurs in The Coronation of Louis, in
which William was promised that he would never have to eat fish if he
succeeded in saving Rome (v. 387-90). In relation to that scene, this one
underlines the injustices that William has suffered as an individual at the
hands of those around him. But this scene also clearly invokes issues of
class, and the aristocratic scorn for the peasant and merchant. It also recalls
other scenes in the later epic corpus where the customary "largesse" of the
noble knight, in the context of a market scene, takes on comic implications
of spendthriftness and even embezzlement. Wiliam makes one think of
Don Quixote in his “old-fashioned” values and his depiction as being out
of time and out of place. He is after all an old, “retired” knight now, living
out his days in the monastery. But as with the previous scene, the comic
reduction of a classic epic virtue–largesse in this case, public honor in the
prior one – to a source of amusement really gets at the deeper essence of
the scene. Largesse–the fundamental virtue of a gift economy–is all about
neglecting material goods and paying no attention to monetary value. In
other words, it is about maintaining the symbolic status of the object, as a
166 Chapter Seven
secondary expression of the honor and integrity of the individual, rather

than allowing the object to become an independent object of desire, which
might define the individual rather than being defined by him.
In such a system, to begin to count is to begin to undermine the system.
And money is of course the pre-eminent means of counting. More
abstractly, to begin to think about the specific monetary value of an object
is to begin to think about that object itself. Rather than being purely
symbolic–a representative of abstract moral values such as largesse or
honor, or of the personal bonds established by some particular gift
exchange–the object takes on use values and exchange values once one
calculates its monetary value on the market. It becomes a "thing in itself."
But William refuses to recognize such general, impersonal value.
Throwing out money by the handful, he ironically turns it into another
symbol–of largesse, of his scorn for calculation–and denies it any
representational value as a sign of price or value. Yet here, unlike the
preceding scene, the theme of money and commerce as the specific threat
to William’s symbolic integrity seems to come to the forefront.9
This fact is borne out by an additional element of the scene. William’s
tossing of the money to the merchants represents a classic antagonistic gift.
It is almost certainly unrequitable–and it thus serves to underline the
permanent, unbridgeable distinction between aristocrat and lowly
merchant. William thus reaffirms the integrity of his social as well as
personal identity, through the symbolic, violent manipulation of
personalized, morally weighted objects whose independent, material status
he is at pains to explicitly refuse. Yet the symbolic violence is directed
against a merchant–a member of another class, and an opponent of so little
“value” that there is no honor to be had here in the giving or taking. As a
general rule, in fact, honor societies consider engagement with excessively
“lowly” opponents as a form of dishonor for the more high-status
individual (Bourdieu 1966, Jamous 1992, Abou-Zaid 1966:246). Here, in
one sense, the throwing of the money represents such a refusal to engage,
but on the specifically literary level, the text engages with just such an
opponent, and suggests the ideological and economic reality of such
engagement in the world of the time.10
9
See Godbout 1998:115-6 on the threat of “objectification” by means of money to
the economy of gift cultures.
10
A similar scene occurs in the Charroi de Nimes, when William must deal with
Sarracen merchants, and again, William does not calculate, "as long as his stomach
is satisfied” (v. 1104-5). But in that case, the exchange is cross-cultural, and as we
have already seen, the Saracens are often characterized in the William cycle as
The feast in general in the chanson de geste evokes simultaneously the

virtues of violent taking and of generous giving–the virtues of the gift
economy and the warrior aristocracy. The food can be seen as the product
of more-or-less violent taking–either through the battle analogue of
hunting, or through the institutionalized, more-or-less violent exploitation
of rural serfs for either taxes and fees or agricultural products (or through
purchasing with seized money). The taking is in fact an analogous to the
booty which one takes in war. Fittingly, one also gives, in sharing out
among the household and followers, as one does after the victorious
conquest. And for the warrior himself, the absorption of the “taken” into
his body is simply the literal enactment of his relation to objects in
general–they are materially “destroyed” and denied independent status,
instead being treated as symbols of conquest and converted into extensions
of his own body. The feast is, for the warrior nobleman, the ritual
enactment of the traditional warrior economy of symbolic taking and
giving.11 Thus Rainoart, in Aliscans, takes lives and consumes food with
equal abandon:
He grabs the monk and draws him close,

then hurls him so violently at a pillar
that both his eyes fly out of his head.
The other monks have taken to flight.
Now Rainoart goes over to the claret
and drinks as much as he likes. (v. 3694-8)
Given the victim and the drink consumed right afterwards–as the
monk’s blood no doubt drains from his broken body–it is at least tempting
to read this scene as a brief parody of the transubstantion which occurs in
the mass: the victim of conquest is literally taken into the body and made
part of it, in order to fuel more conquests–and more generous giving of the
resultant booty. The feast enacts a particular relationship to the objects of
the world more generally, not just food objects.
Yet such scenes can carry a radically different valence as well, in that
avaricious, gluttonous and “non-integral,” so the issue of class and commerce is

secondary to the issue of ethnicity and culture – soon after this scene, William
defeats the Saracens militarily thanks to their having let him into their presence
unawares, when he is himself disguised as a merchant.
11
See Jamous 1992:170 on an analogous case from North African society where in
the context of ceremonies and festivities (which involve feasting) “the term ‘eat’
means pillage and devastation.” See also Reuter 1978:90-91 on medieval feasting
as an aggressive expression of dominance.
168 Chapter Seven
they enact a relationship to the people of the surrounding world as well.

William’s sense of class solidarity as well as personal identity depend on
more or less violent forms of reciprocity in relation to those whom we
could consider “outsiders”–peasants, bourgeois, monks, traitorous nobles,
outlaws, etc. His “exchanges” with these people or groups center on
violent physical confrontation, active taking, or antagonistic giving. In
every case, his personal and class identity depend on diminishing or
destroying the identity or integrity of others. More metaphorically, his
being is based on a form of “consumption” of the being of others.12
William’s confrontation with the monks centers around his agressive and
excessive (to their minds) eating of their provisions. His confrontation with
the merchants centers around the aggressive acquisition and consumption
of food. His encounter with the robbers ends happily because he is able to
turn “flesh and bone” (v. 808)–the haunch of an ass, used as a weapon–
against them. Thus the communal giving and sharing of the feast turns out
to be based not just literally on a violent taking (of game in a hunt), but
figuratively as well: it enacts the relationships of domination and
subsumption engaged in by the aristocracy which allowed the ceremony
itself to occur. Thus a moment of solidarity through consumption (for the
aristocratic class) may be read in a larger, more metaphorical context as a
moment of violence (by the aristocratic class against all other classes)
expressed through consumption.
In the conclusion of William in the Monastery, this is enacted quite
literally in a final feast: William returns from buying the fish to find
himself locked out of the monastery. In a rage, he engages in a mock-epic
battle with the monks: he breaks in, hurls them about, killing several,
chasing others “through the cloister,/ into the kitchen and dormitory!” (v.
772-3). He finally begs forgiveness for any sins he may have committed,
gives all the fish to the remaining monks, and receives the abbot’s blessing
(“we will find other monks in good supply” (v. 796),
Then the abbot had the fish unloaded

and all the monks made their dinner of them.
Those who have died are quickly forgotten.
At a great table sits William the brave
and has as many good wines as he wishes,
all that he can drink. (v. 814-19).
12
See Gregory 1982:77-78 for anthropological perspectives on the role of food as
a display item, and more particularly as a metaphor of human power within gift
economies.
The parody of a true post-battle feast is hard to miss here. Note that the
classes remain clearly divided, with the monks taking the fish (symbolic of
abstention) and more generally the subservient position, while William
returns to conspicuous consumption, his aggressive, consumptive view of
the world glorified.
But in this context, William of Orange is identified as much in terms of
class membership as in terms of individual specificity. In contrast to scenes
in texts like Raoul of Cambrai or The Coronation of Louis or Aliscans, the
aggressive gestures which establish his personal identity turn out to all be
directed towards non-warriors, and thus to be as much or more about class
as about individual identity. Thus in the images of eating and feasting in
the Monastery in particular, consumption invokes traditional aristocratic
symbolic incorporation, but also a new engagement with non-aristocratic
adversaries which could be seen as embodying a new impurity in the
aristocratic identity, which becomes contaminated by its Others. And the
contamination comes precisely through a new-found need to engage these
others, in the “retirement” years of the traditional warrior aristocracy.
Ultimately, William’s need for such aggressive and consumptive
expressions of identity is all the more striking since he is retired: a famous
warrior, well-known to all, and well-feared as well. Yet at every moment
of exchange, his identity seems to be put into question anew, to be re-
validated only by the proper mode of exchange. Such a need for constant
renewal points to the inherent instability of identity of both individual and
class among the warrior aristocracy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
While epics like the Enfances Vivien and Hervis de Metz tried to suggest
later that certain types of exchanges are “in the blood” of the nobility–and
thus tried to offer images of more stable determinants of identity–the
William in the Monastery intimates that the opposite may be true: that
identity resides in the performance of certain types of exchanges, and that
each moment of exchange is a new threat as well as new opportunity for
negotiating questions of individual and class identity that remain
perpetually at issue.13 Obtaining and consuming food are of course among
the most quintessentially social and reciprocal acts of exchange, and thus
in the epic, become quintessential moments for expressing the tensions
which surrounded the changing forms of exchange and sociability more
generally in medieval France.
13
See Perstiany 1966:11 on the tendency of honor-based societies to produce very
unstable forms of individual identity, constantly needing attention and assertion.
170 Chapter Seven
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Le Charroi de Nimes. An English Translation with Notes. 1936. Henri J.

Godin, transl. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Guillaume d’Orange. Four Twelfth Century Epics. Joan Ferrante, transl.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. [Contains Aliscans,
William in the Monastery, The Coronation of Louis, The Taking of
Orange]
Les Enfances Vivien. 1997. Magali Rouquier, ed. Geneva: Droz.
Girart de Roussillon. 1953. Mary Hackett, ed. Paris: A & J. Pickard.
Hervis de Mes: chanson de geste anonyme (début du XIIIème siècle).
1992. Jean-Charles Herbin, ed. Geneva: Droz.
Raoul of Cambrai. 1992. Sarah Kay, ed. and transl. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Le Roman des Eles and L’ordene de chevalerie. 1983. Keith Busby, ed.
and transl. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
The Song of Roland. 1990. Glyn Burgess, trans. London, Penguin Books.
“De villis.” Boretius, Alfred, ed. 1883. In Monumenta Germaniae
Historia, Legum, Sectio II, Capitularia regum francorum, vol. 1
Hannover.
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Abou-Zeid, Ahmed. 1966. “Honour and Shame among the Bedouins.” In
Peristiany 1966:243-60.
Baldwin, John W. 2000. Aristocratic Life in Medieval France: The
Romances of Jean Renaut and Gerbertde Montreuil, 1190-1230.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Bitsch, Imgard, et al. eds. 1987. Essen und Trinken im Mittelater and
Neuzeit: Vortrage eines interdisziplinaren Symposiiums von 10.-13.
Juni 1987. Sigmaringen, Germany: Jan Thorbecke.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1966. “The Sentiment of Honour in Kabyle Society.” In
Peristiany 1966:191-242.
Bruckner, Matilda. 1980. Narrative Invention in Twelfth-Century French
Romance: The Convention of Hospitality, 1160-1200. Lexington, KY:
French Forum.
Cowell, Andrew. 2007. The Medieval Warrior Aristocracy: Gifts,
Violence, Performance and the Sacred. Woodbridge, UK: D.S.
Brewer.
Dresch, Paul. 1998. “Mutual Deception: Totality, Exchange, and Islam in
the Middle East.” In Wendy James and N.J. Allen, eds. Marcel Mauss:
A Centenary Tribute. New York: Berghahn Books:111-33.
Duby, Georges. 1973. Guerriers et paysans VIIe-XIIe siècle: Premier
essor de l’économie européenne. Paris, Gallimard.
Dunbabin, Jean. 2000. France in the Making 843-1180. 2nd ed. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Godbout, Jacques. 1998. The World of the Gift. Donald Winker, transl.
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Gordon, Sarah. 2007. Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature.
West Lafayette, IN: Purdue Univ. Press.
Gregory, C.A. 1982. Gifts and Commodities. London: Academic Press.
Henisch, Bridget Ann. 1976. Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society.
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1992:167-92.
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CHAPTER EIGHT
LE REPAS CONTROVÉ:
THE THREE WITCHES’S MEAL
IN AMADAS ET YDOINE
DENYSE DELCOURT
In the 13th century French romance Amadas et Ydoine, many critically

important scenes occur during meals. 1 That, in itself, is in no way
remarkable. Along with the forest and the battlefield, the table is where the
most significant events in medieval romances take place. As Sarah Gordon
has shown, the numerous repasts and banquets that are offered there are
always more than simple accessories. “Feasts [in medieval romances]”,
she writes, “have many narrative functions, as a milieu of action, conflict,
recapitulation or foreshadowing, and characterization. Meals are a public
occasion for action and narration within narrative structures.”2 The meal I
want to discuss in Amadas et Ydoine is different, however, from the other
meals which punctuate this type of narrative. It is contrové, that is, “made
up, invented or fabricated.” It is not a “real” meal shared by a host and
some knights, for example, but rather the staging of a meal. Given that the
characters who conceive this mise en scène and who perform in it as
“actresses” are witches, the meal that they share can well be considered as
fantastical – to borrow the term used by Banquo to describe the
appearance of the three Weird Sisters in Macbeth. The fact that the witches
in Amadas choose a meal as the most likely setting to achieve their ends is
especially interesting. Considering that the verb controver can also be used
to describe the author’s own artistic creation deserves close examination. I
1
I wish to thank Alexander Price for helping me with the translation of this text,
and Joseph McCreery for improving my style and sharing ideas with me along the
way.
2
Sarah Gordon, Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature. Purdue
University Press, 2007 : 22
The Three Witches’s Meal in Amadas et Ydoine 173
aim to explore the conspicuously enigmatic connections made in this

romance between lying, imagining, the mise en scène of a meal, and
writing.
Ydoine, in love with Amadas, learns one day that she will have to
marry the Count of Nevers. To keep this from happening, she secretly
visits three witches of her acquaintance, who discuss the matter at length,
and come up with a plan of action. The night before the wedding, the
witches magically enter the room that the Count and his people share.
While everyone else sleeps, the Count remains wide awake, too excited at
the prospect of making love to his young, beautiful wife to fall asleep. The
witches put spells on the Count’s companions so that they remain asleep
and on the Count himself so that he is physically paralyzed but still
mentally alert. The scene that they have conceived is intended for him
alone. Having ensured that they will have the one-man audience they
desire—a quite literally “captive” audience—they transform themselves
into beautiful fairies and assume the appearance of the three Fates. To
better establish their identity to him, they discuss among themselves the
great power that they exercise on the lives of men in general and on that of
the Count in particular. Of significance here is the fact that while they are
talking, the three fake Fates together prepare a meal. On a table placed
before the Count’s bed, they spread a large white tablecloth on which they
set three silver cups, three spoons, three ivory-handled knives, three
platters, and three small loaves of bread. Tall and very bright candles are
brought in to illuminate the table. As is often the case in medieval
romances, a detailed description of the meal itself is not provided, but is
evoked in general terms as being composed of “delicate and refined
dishes” and “diverse drinks.”3 Once seated around the table, the three
“Fates” pursue their conversation, concentrating on the terrible fate that
awaits Ydoine and the Count should they consummate their marriage.
The one who plays the Fate called Lachesis reminds her sisters that she
has ordained that Ydoine never know the joys of love, and that she will
always suffer in the company of a man. Lachesis attributes this unhappy
destiny to Ydoine’s parents forgetting to give her a spoon to eat the meal
normally set out for the Fates on the day a child is born. This particular
custom is also evoked in the first known version in of Sleeping Beauty
found in the 14th century Roman de Perceforest, and in Le Jeu de la
3
Amadas et Ydoine, vv. 2121-22. All citations from this text are from Amadas et
Ydoine. Ed. John R. Reinhard. Paris : Champion, 1974. English translations are
mine. On the description of food in medieval romances, see Anita Guereau-Jalabert,
“Aliments symboliques et symbolique de la table dans les romans arthuriens.”
Annales ESC #3 (1992) : 561.
174 Chapter Eight
feuillée.
The one who plays Atropos—the Fate who cuts the thread of life—
affirms that she has been terribly offended by the way the parents of the
Count treated her at the time of his birth. Because they forgot to leave her
a knife, she has condemned him to die in pain within a year of
consummating his marriage. Feigning concern over the harshness of her
sisters’ decrees, the third Fate, Clotho, pretends to wake up the Count to
alert him so that he may forego his impending marriage. Their mission
accomplished, the witches slip away in the same manner they had arrived.
Left by himself, the Count spends the rest of the night - as one can well
imagine - in the worst sort of turmoil.
In this episode, it is clear that the Fates’ dinner plays a significant role.
Not only does this ritual meal constitute the central element of the witches’
mise-en-scène, it is also the main topic of their conversation. That they are
sitting at the table while they recall the two earlier meals and the
catastrophic effects those meals are supposed to have on the Count’s
sexual consummation cannot fail to reinforce their message. The French
critic Louis Marin aptly describes the role played by food in marvelous
tales as being that of a “transsignifier;” that is, of an operator facilitating
“slippages, displacements, and transformations.” 4 What the witches
understand is that food represented in particular settings is almost never
“just” food. The meal they share in the middle of the night is – to quote
Marin again - a “site” and an “apparatus” where the figurative processes of
transsignifiance (metonymy, synecdoche, and metaphor) occur.5 Thus, the
witches’ meal transports the Count of Nevers to the realms of eros and
thanatos which come to signify for him, or activate in him, both a fear of
castration and a fear of dying.6
The perfect setting of the table where they exchange their remarks is
also an important factor. For the Count, who observes the scene, the care
the Fates take with each place setting, overlooking nothing, clearly
contrasts with the fatal negligence attributed to his and Ydoine’s parents.
Moreover, it is important to note that at no moment during the scene is the
Count invited to participate in their conversation, much less share their
meal. Restricting him to the role of spectator is essential, for his exclusion
from the table establishes the unquestionable “veracity” of the remarks
4
Louis Marin, Food for Thought. Trans. Mette Hjort. The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1989: 121.
5
Marin, 124.
6
On this issue, Henri Rey-Flaud, “Freud et la mandragore (La Fée Maglore dans
le Jeu de la Feuillée)” : 1201. In “Et c’est la fin pour quoy sommes ensemble.”
Hommage à Jean Dufournet. Tome III. Paris: Champion, 1993.
that are exchanged there. As long as he imagines that he is witness to an

intimate scene in which the three Fates speak freely while sharing their
dinner, the Count can erroneously believe that he has access to privileged
information that would not otherwise be divulged.
It is difficult not to be struck by the simplicity of this mise-en-scène.
Unlike the Weird Sisters in Macbeth, the witches in Amadas don’t resort to
tricks or stunts to impress the Count. No “boiling caldron,” no “crashes
and thunder,” or supernatural apparitions give their revelations more
weight by wrapping them in an air of magic; only a table covered with a
white tablecloth around which three sisters exchange, supposedly “among
themselves,” food and words. William Calin refers to what the witches use
here to achieve their goals as “the traditionally feminine attributes: an
everyday setting, language and psychology.”7 But so we are not tempted
to believe that the witches in Amadas are unskilled in the magic arts, the
narrator has previously furnish us with a long list of what they are able to
do magically: to fly at night, to raise the dead, to change a man into a wolf,
to provoke earthquakes, to charm wild beasts, and so on (vv.2019-43). For
Francis Dubost, the contrast between the witches’ considerable power and
how little they make use of it in this episode reveals what he calls an
imaginary “deficit” (déficit imaginaire) on the part of the author.8 This
reading, however, fails to acknowledge the fact that the witches’ staging,
simple as it may be, required substantial preparation on their part. We are
told that they have spent several days exchanging ideas (devisent) on the
best way to help Ydoine, and that after reaching agreement, they have
actively prepared for their subterfuge (s’aparellent sans respit) by making
sure they had all the necessary materials and by rehearsing their magic
spells (atournent leur encantement et leur grant apparillement, leurs ars et
leur engins divers).9 The choice of the meal as the best instrument to
persuade the Count is a deliberate choice on the part of the witches. Let us
note also that the choice arouses the admiration of the narrator, who,
addressing his readers, swears that “as long as they live, they will never
hear of a subtler invention (in Old French: fiere controeve) than this in
story, romance, or song” (vv.1996-99).
The reasons why the meal has such power in this episode can certainly
7
William Calin, “Amadas et Ydoine: The Problematic World of an Idyllic
Romance”: 44. In Continuations: Essays on Medieval French Literature and
Language in Honor of John L. Grigsby. Norris J. Lacy and Gloria Torrini-Robin,
eds. Summa Publications, 1989.
8
Francis Dubost, Aspects fantastiques de la literature médiévale (XIIe-XIIIe
siècle). Genève: Slatkine, 1991: 664.
9
Amadas et Ydoine, vv.2056-60.
176 Chapter Eight
be attributed in part to the participants presenting themselves as Fates.

What the witches count on in so doing is the authority that custom
attributes to the three Fates at the birth of an infant. Thus the dinner that
unfolds before the Count is far from being an ordinary one and cannot
correspond to what William Calin called earlier “an everyday setting.”
Associated with the Fates, the table is invested from the start with an
extraordinary power—well exemplified by the belief that the fate of a
child depends on the success of the offered meal. Considering the
etymological root of the word “fate” from the past participle of the Latin
verb “fari,” which means to speak,10 suggests that the language presented
by Calin as being one of the “feminine” tools used by the false Fates to
convince the Count is more than ordinary language. The words the Fates
pronounce around the table are never without consequence, for with a
word they can render a man’s life either agreeable or miserable, or even
bring about his death. For them, speaking is always a performative act.
Let us now consider the time that the witches choose for their spectacle,
the middle of a “totally dark” night (v.2066). In medieval folklore, it is
always at night that the propitiatory meal is left for the Fates. They are
supposed to eat this meal by themselves, seated around the table, while
discussing the future of the newborn. The witches clearly take advantage
of this well-known aspect of the custom to render their performance more
plausible and to impress the Count. Moreover, the particular time of night
they choose also indicates their knowledge of “psychology” evoked earlier
by Calin. The skillful witches know that in the middle of the night, men
are generally most vulnerable. It is thus no accident that demons do their
work more often at night than any other time. Using the etymology of
Hexe, the German word for witch, which means fence or hedge, the
Jungian analyst Mario Jacoby defines witches as being “creatures of the
border region between the human and the demonic – psychologically,
between the realm of consciousness and unconsciousness.”11 Hence, it is
not surprising that the entranced Count (enfantosmé, v. 2153) should find
himself in a troubling twilight zone that the witches know how to exploit
to their advantage (il ne set se il dort ou non, ou se c’est songe u vision).12
10
Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde. On Fairy Tales and their Tellers.
London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994, p.15: “Fatum, literally, that which is
spoken, the past participle of the verb fari, to speak, gives French fée.”
11
Mario Jacoby, “The Witch in Dream, Complexes, and Fairy Tales”: 201. In
Mario Jacoby, Verena Kast, and Ingrid Riedel, Witches, Ogres, and the Devil’s
Daughter. Encounters with Evil in Fairy Tales. Boston & London: Shambala, 1992.
12
Amadas et Ydoine, vv. 2112-13 : “He doesn’t know if he is awake or asleep, or
if it is a dream or a vision.”
As long as they are able to keep him in this confused state of mind, which
makes a grown man feel like a helpless little child – or, enfantosmé, - the
witches increase their chances of deeply affecting his psyche.
The contrast between the very dark night and the color white found in
the objects placed on the table (cf. the white tablecloth, cups, platters,
silverware, and loaves of bread) also plays an important part in the
psychological manipulation of the Count. Like the brightly lit candles
intended by the witches to make the Count believe “without the shadow of
a doubt” that what happened around the table is real,13 the whiteness of
the table is a powerful visual cue meant to greatly influence the Count’s
recollection of the event.
The fact that the night in question precedes the marriage of the Count,
which will produce significant changes in his life, warrants further
consideration. By choosing such a night, the witches make use of another
well-known aspect of the folklore associated with the Fates, wherein they
are believed to be influential not only at birth, but also at any life-changing
time – also called “re-birth”- that men undergo during their lives.14 His
mind troubled by the uncertainties of the future on the one hand and by the
great desire he feels for his wife-to-be on the other, the Count is quite
evidently unable to think clearly. Now more emotional than rational, the
future husband is easy prey to the witches’ manipulation.
Given all this, it may come as a surprise to learn that the witches’ mise-
en-scène, as remarkable as it might be, does not have the desired effect on
the Count. Although deeply troubled, he nonetheless decides to marry
Ydoine the day after. In explanation, the narrator invokes the “great
strength of character” of the Count of Nevers, who, he adds, “believes
neither in dreams nor illusions nor spells nor soothsayers, and who in no
way fears the announcement made to him” (vv.2331-33). It is true that
later on the Count’s actions belie what has been said about him since he
13
Amadas et Ydoine, vv. 2268-71: “Before leaving, the witches put out one of the
candles which brightly illuminated the table for they had wanted the Count to
know without the shadow of a doubt that what they said about him during their
meal was the truth.”
14
On this aspect of the custom, see Daniel Poirion, “Le Rôle de la fée Morgue et
de ses compagnes dans le Jeu de la feuillée.” Bulletin Bibliographique de la
Société Internationale Arthurienne, v.18 (1966), p.130: “Il est important de
remarquer que les fées [dans le Jeu de la feuillée] viennent à un tournant décisif de
la vie d’Adam. Elles viennent en quelque sorte présider à une renaissance du poète
qui veut refaire sa vie selon l’escole et non plus selon le mariage. Ce rôle solennel
des fées est conforme à celui qu’on leur prête soit au début de l’année nouvelle,
soit à la naissance.”
178 Chapter Eight
refuses to make love to his wife out of a “fear of dying” (v.2439). But in
reducing what has just happened to a simple superstition and in
establishing that a “strong” man would not let himself be taken in, it is
clear that the author is attempting to minimize the power attributed both to
the Fates and to the witches who represent them. Thus the custom of the
Fates, which is the basis for the witches’ mise-en-scène is transformed into
a type of old wives’ tale which, by implication, can only affect the weaker
sex.15 In this respect, the author aligns himself with the Church, which, in
the writings of Burchard of Worms especially, characterizes as a “piece of
nonsense” the belief of “certain women” in the power of the Fates, which
Burchard goes on to compare to vulgar “witches.”16 That the witches in
Amadas would imagine they could influence the “strong” man that is the
Count of Nevers with this sort of “nonsense” attests to their naiveté – and
even worse, no doubt, to their feminity. Given that the romance includes
several highly misogynistic passages, this interpretation is by no means
exaggerated.
One might think that with the Count’s marriage the witches’ repas
contrové would cease to play a role in this story. But to do so would be to
overlook the talent attributed to “women” for deceiving and bewitching
men. Since “all” women, as our narrator notes, are capable of practicing
magic17 and using clever tricks – refered to in the text as engins - to get
what they want, it is not surprising that it should be Ydoine who takes over
where the witches left off.18 Indeed, she ends up inventing for her husband
(in Old French controeve, v.7128) a rather remarkable story in which the
witches’ fictitious meal is evoked, this time blasphemously within a vision.
She recounts to him that while she was on a pilgrimage to Rome to try to
find a remedy for the strange malady that has afflicted her since her
15
On this, read the famous passage in the Roman de la rose, vv. 18425-500, in
which Jean de Meun spends more than seventy five lines describing the witches’
wondrous deeds only to dismiss them at the end as “follies” entertained by a bunch
of “crazy old ladies”
16
Quoted in Laurence Harf-Lancner, Les Fées au Moyen Age : 24. Genève :
Staltkine, 1984.
17
Amadas et Ydoine, v. 3586 : “Toutes sevent de l’ingromance” (« They – women-
all know the magic art. ») How engin is used by all women, and especially by
Ydoine, in this romance, see Sara Sturm-Maddox, “Signeur, vous qui l’oevre
savés” Amadas, Ydoine, and the Wiles of Women”: 607-8. In “De Sens Rassis:”
Essays in Honor of Rupert T. Pickens. Amsterdam: Rodpi, 2005.
18
On the many points of similarity between the witches and Ydoine, read the
excellent article written on Amadas by Romaine Wolf-Bonvin, “Amadas, Ydoine et
les faes de la dort-veille”: 603-16. In Magie et Illusion au Moyen Age. Senefiance
no 42. Université de Provence: CUER, 1999.
marriage, Saint Peter appeared to her, accompanied by three beautiful

women whom he presented to her as the Fates. Asked by Saint Peter to tell
Ydoine the whole truth about the origin of her mysterious illness, the Fates
revealed that she and her husband are the victims of a curse, for the
reasons described earlier, and that on the eve of their marriage, the Fates
had visited the Count to warn him against his union with Ydoine. It is the
mention of the Fates’ nocturnal meal that ends up persuading the Count of
the “veracity” of his wifes’s remarks: “My Lady,” he says to her, “I know
very well that you have in no way lied; what you are telling me is not a
pure invention (n’est pas controeve que me distes), for I have had
irrefutable proof of it.” (vv.7253-55). Convinced by this “truth,” the Count
finally consents to the dissolution of his marriage with Ydoine.
It is easy to understand why Ydoine’s performance succeeds while the
witches’one does not entirely. As Laurence Harf-Lancner has shown, by
including the Fates’ meal in the vision sent by Saint Peter, Ydoine cleverly
juxtaposes two realms which normally remain separate during the Middle
Ages: the realm of the fairies and that of the Church. 19 What the
“cunning” Ydoine understands, in effect, is that, sanctioned by Saint Peter,
the custom of the Fates’meal departs from the dubious domain of
superstition or old wives’ tale to enter a more respectable one - that of truth
or the Church. No longer tied to an exclusively “feminine” world, the
Fates’meal can finally be taken seriously by the “strong” man that is the
Count.
In conclusion, a word about the verb controver that one sees associated
in this romance, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively, with the
witches’ mise-en-scène and with Ydoine’s performance. As William Calin
and others have noted, the Amadas poet both admires and condemns the
“inventions” of his female characters. When one considers that the
witches’ controeves (their inventions, that is) and Ydoine’s are essentially
his own (to cite Calin: “After all, he has created them!”)20, and that the
poet uses, moreover, the verb controver to allude to his own poetic activity
(v.1999), that ambivalence makes one wonder. In fact, we are faced here
with one of the most intriguing paradoxes of medieval misogynistic
discourse. To take up Howard Bloch’s point: if it is the case that poets and
women in the Middle Ages do essentially the same thing – that is, talk, lie,
invent – then any medieval writer can only be defined as a woman.21 For
19
Harf-Lancner: 29.
20
Calin, 79. On the use of the verb controver in Amadas, see Sally L. Burch, “The
Lady, the Lords and the Priests: the Making and Unmaking of Marriage in Amadas
et Ydoine,” Reading Medieval Studies, 25 (1999) : 24-26.
21
Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Romantic Love.
180 Chapter Eight
Sara Sturm-Maddox, Amadas et Ydoine is a playful romance in which the

narrator hides behind his female characters’ inventiveness –which also
doubles as his own- in order to better manipulate his audience.22 One can
go further by pointing out how this poet’s choice of a fictitious meal as a
metaphor for writing fiction discloses insights into the actual practice of
his own artistic production. Indeed, the repas contrové required on the part
of the witches the same kind of planning or, to use a more rhetorical term,
ingenium23 necessary for any medieval author. By looking more closely
into such a remarkable metaphor, one is led to a richer, more surprising,
and more complex understanding of the making of medieval fiction itself.
Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991: 56.

22
Sturm-Maddox : 613-16.
23
Douglas Kelly, The Art of Medieval Romance. Madison: The University of
Wisconsin Press, 1991, p. 34: “Ingenium was inborn or natural talent, the capacity,
intelligence and insight necessary to invent a work; it governed the cognitive
faculty called imagination, or the invention of identifiable images.”
CHAPTER NINE
COOKING WITH JULIA (CHILD) IN 1950

FRANCE OR, AN AMERICAN IN PARIS:
A FILM-INFLECTED ESSAY
SYLVIE BLUM-REID
Julia Child discovered (haute) cuisine at the same time as she

discovered France. She fell in love with both. She became famous for her
televised cooking shows which she pioneered in the United States in the
1960s. She is less known for her frank depiction of France that was then
emerging from the war as she witnessed it, and describes in her memoirs,
My Life in France, (2006) co-written with her nephew Mr. Alex
Prud’homme. The book is an endearing epicurean portrait of her passion
for food and France, miles away from her own upbringing and (lack of)
appreciation of food in California. Her writing gives us an invaluable
account of a time when France recovers from the war, and still suffering
from its effects. This essay focuses on the specific traits of French culture
of the late 1940s and 1950s that Julia Child was able to tap into, and
appreciate with her wonderful sense of humor. I focus on some of the
markers of French life (grocery shopping, driving, “la cuisine bourgeoise”
as the expatriate writer and food critic calls it, flâneries and sight-seeing)
that constitute a nostalgic image of France as we no longer know it.
Julia Child, a veritable institution, helped develop and train the
American taste for French cuisine. Her kitchen is reproduced entirely at
the Smithsonian institute. http://americanhistory.si.edu/juliachild/
Ils organisaient des diners Presque monstrueux, de véritables fêtes. …Ils
revenaient de la rue Mouffetard, tous ensemble, les bras chargés de
cageots entiers de melons et de pêches, des paniers remplis de fromages,
des gigots, des volailles, des bourriches d’huîtres en saison, des terrines,
des œufs de poissons, des bouteilles enfin, par casiers entiers, de vin, de
porto, d’eau minérale, de Coca-Cola. » (Perec, Les Choses. Une histoire
des années soixante 51)
182 Chapter Nine
Perec writes that they would hold almost monstrous dinner parties,
veritable feasts.…They would return all together from Rue Mouffetard,
arms laden with edibles, with whole trays of melons and peaches,and
baskets filled with cheeses, legs of lamb, poultry, and panniers of oysters
in season, and dishes of pâté, and fish roes, and, of course, with bottles,
whole stacks of wine, port, mineral water, Coca-Cola. (Perec 54) 1
Julia Child landed in France for the first time in November 1948, after
traveling on board the SS America. Her husband Paul took a job directing
the Visual Presentation Department for the United States Information
Service (USIS) in Paris. His job was “to inform the French people by
graphic means about the aspects of American life that the [United States]
government deems important” (Child 21). Child was a newly wed, and at
thirty-seven years old “still discovering who I was” (Child 67). Julia had
met Paul Child in Ceylon, (Sri Lanka) where both were working for the
OSS and shared an interest in food from Indonesia (Fitch 102). The couple
stayed in France from 1948 until 1954, at which point she and her
husband, Paul, relocated to Germany, and then Sweden before moving
back to North America when he retired.
The three-page description of their first French meal in Rouen at the
restaurant La Couronne upon arriving in France, has an orgasmic quality,
and as such has entered the annals of culinary writing: the rather simple
meal consisted in half a dozen oysters (portugaises), beurre d’Isigny, pain
de Seigle, sole meunière, salade verte and baguette, watered down by a
Pouilly Fumé. Child describes herself as “floating out the door into the
brilliant sunshine…Our first lunch together in France had been an absolute
perfection. It was the most exciting meal in my life” (Child 19). This
lunch signaled her first initiation to French cuisine, and the mixing of food
or cooking and love that spices up most tales. She often returned to the
first meal as a model to reenact. An earlier description of the first meal
commemorates her discovery of both food and France, forever intertwined
in her mind
I'd never been in Europe before, and I'd never seen an ancient cathedral nor
half-timbered houses. I was not only enchanted, I was really in hysterics of
pleasure. And our first meal, oysters on the half shell, then sole meunière.
I'd never had sole before, and I just couldn't get over it, it had that
wonderful firm texture and subtle taste and the crisp, lightly browned
edges and that fresh hot butter sauce. And we had chablis - that was my
first real French wine, and it's really remained my favorite white wine ever
1
Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties and A Man Asleep. Trans. David
Bellos, Boston: David R. Godine, 1990.
Cooking with Julia (Child) in 1950s France 183
since. We ended with an apple tart, the most beautiful, open-faced fresh
apple tart.. 2
Child arrived in a France that was still reeling from the post-WWII
deprivations, in an economy that was trying to reinvent itself. These years
mark the beginning of the Cold war that had started in 1947, to be
accurate, and the resumption of American tourism in France after years at
war.3 It seems that everybody flocked to France in 1948, from students to
intellectuals and writers after a hiatus of several war years, which had
witnessed the departure en masse of expatriates from Paris. The
importance of the tourism industry is not to be underestimated. Janet
Flanner reported that
The tourists are regarded as shiploads of precious material not specified in

the Marshall Plan. Tourist dollars are desperately needed, to an extent that
4
only the finance ministers of Western Europe can calculate (Flanner 86).
However, tensions between America and Europe, and especially

France were at an all time high after the war. Travel and tourism were
slowly recovering but the state of the industry was a serious concern to the
French government. The country was well positioned on the road to
recovery and taste, “the supreme French luxury” had returned (Flanner
82). American films were playing again at the movies and spectators who
had been deprived flocked to them. An American in Paris, the musical
film (Minnelli) opened in 1951 and was a major success of the post war
years.5 The film glorifies the joie de vivre of Paris and remains one of the
optimistic American films of the post-war period with Paris at its center.
The film features an American G.I. who decided to stay in France after the
war. Similarly, Sabrina (Billy Wilder 1954), entertained the idea that a
young American girl had to spend time in France at a culinary school in
Paris in order to become a truly refined woman.6
2
“Where the experts choose to eat,” New York Times. March 13, 1983.
3
Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays. American Tourism in France, Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
4
Janet Flanner (Genêt), Paris Journal 1944-1955, New York: Harvest- Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1988.
5
Vincente Minnelli, An American in Paris, (starring Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron,
Metro Goldwyn-Mayer, 1951)
6
Billy Wilder, Sabrina, (starring Audrey Hepburn, William Holden, Humphrey
Bogart, Paramount Pictures, 1954). Wilder’s film shows a brief segment of Sabrina
at the Paris culinary school, learning how to break eggshells properly and how to
make soufflés. Interestingly, Sydney Pollack’s remake (Sydney Pollack, Sabrina,
184 Chapter Nine
France was plagued by the lack of raw material and essentials such as
food, ranging from coffee to olive oil, and cosmetics (Child 34), and
lodging, which “posed …challenges for French tourism organizers” (Endy
25). According to one of Child’s biographers “it was still a nineteenth-
century country” (Fitch 161).7
In fact, two years after the end of the war, food allowances were even more
essential to attract foreign tourist spending. Everyday living conditions got
worse rather than better after the war as France invested large amounts of
resources in reconstruction. Bread rations for the French in August 1947,
for example, were smaller than at any point during the war itself, and
average purchasing power in 1948 had dropped 30 percent since liberation
in 1944 (Endy 26-27).
If American dollars were able to purchase many luxury and food items,
it was not necessarily the case for French pocket books. Yet a New York
Times review overlooked the shortages and claimed “Food scarcities
hardly trouble them,” [declared the Times}, since the French have ever
been able to prepare delicious meals on practically nothing” (Endy 27). It
was during this era that domestic sciences for women were emphasized at
the Salon des Arts Ménagers (Paris, 1948), at the “Ideal Home exhibition.”
Ms. Monin, a domestic science inspector gave a speech that “illustrated
women’s domestic incompetence and need for education” (Duchen 69).
Paulette Bernège’s De la méthode ménagère (1928) advocated Taylor-
style methods inside one’s home in order to provide a theoretical
framework for the French housewife and was still a best-seller two
decades later.8 At the time, there were few refrigerators, washing machines
(not to mention clothes dryers), and telephones. People would shop on a
daily basis and store food in an ice-box or by the kitchen windows. It is at
this very moment that France entered the age of Americanization:
Automobiles which kept them from staying at home, cocktails, the worry
of spending money instead of saving it …and then the introduction of
starring Julia Ormond, Harrison Ford, Greg Kinnear. New York: Constellation
Entertainment, 1996) transforms the culinary school into an apprenticeship in the
fashion business world of Vogue in Paris – a direct ancestor of the television series,
Ugly Betty. In both cases, the two young American women are transformed and’
beautified.’
7
Noël Riley Fitch, An Appetite for Life. The biography of Julia Child, New York:
Doubleday, 1997.
8
Claire Duchen, Women’s Rights and Women’s Live in France 1944-1968.
London, NY : Routledge, 1994.
electric stoves and the necessity of not cooking too long, in short French
cooking went out and there were very few houses practically none in Paris
where cooking was considered an art (Stein 52).9
This commentary by Gertrude Stein accurately pinpoints the change

occurring in the traditional France that she had been accustomed to since
her arrival in 1948 and signals a movement away from traditional cuisine.
The year 1947 historically seen as the beginning of the cold war meant
a direct involvement into French (and European) affairs by Americans
justified by Harry Truman’s announcement that one had to stall the
communist threat (understood then in Europe). A series of strikes
paralyzed the country. In 1951, Child admitted that cooking was
becoming a challenge because of the strikes, “hardly any buses or metro
running, little electricity, and just a whisper of gas for our stove” (Child
107).10 Many streetlights still relied on gas lanterns and “the dimming
effect was reminiscent of a wartime blackout” (Child 108).
La France vocifère et fait la queue, elle compte nerveusement ses tickets

d’alimentation en cet automne où le froid précoce ajoute le souci du
charbon à celui du pain quotidien. A quoi bon s’être serré la ceinture
depuis la Libération, avoir retroussé ses manches… et tant œuvré pour la
reconstruction du pays pour en revenir à une ration de pain de 200
grammes, plus faible qu’aux pires heures de l’occupation (Jean-Pierre
Rioux 54).11
Child reports that in summer 1949, France experienced the worse

drought, since 1909:
Riverbeds were filled with stones, fields were toasted gold, and the grass
was crunchy to walk on… crops of vegetables were destroyed, grapes
withered on the vine. With almost no water for hydroelectric power, people
began to worry about the price of food in the coming winter. Air-
conditioning was non-existent (Child 53).
Janet Flanner, the New Yorker correspondent, also remarked at length in

several entries of her journal on the economic recovery and progress
sometimes impaired by the drought.
9
Gertrude Stein, Paris France, New York: Liveright, 1970, 1996.
10
Julia Child, with Alex Prud’homme, My Life in France, New York : Alfred
Knopf, 2006.
11
Jean-Pierre Rioux, « Le Monde, daté 8-9 novembre 1987» in Le Monde 2, 16
juin 2007 (54): 53-61.
186 Chapter Nine
It was in 1949 that Child decided to train at L’Ecole des Cordons

Bleus, the top culinary school, where she discovered that her classmates
were composed of eleven American GIs. “nice, earnest, tough, basic men”
(Child 59). She learned the fundamentals (or top sauces) with Chef
Bugnard and had a revelation:
I had always been content to live a butterfly life of fun, with hardly a care
in the world. But at the Cordon Bleu, and in the markets and restaurants of
Paris, I suddenly discovered that cooking was a rich and layered and
endlessly fascinating subject. The best way to describe it is to say that I fell
in love with French food-the tastes, the processes, the history, the endless
variations, the rigorous discipline, the creativity, the wonderful people, the
equipment, the rituals (Child 63).
Apparently, the story of Child’s first French meal described earlier has
been told and retold in several different versions. That ‘lunch in Rouen’12
is eloquently described in Laura Shapiro’s book devoted to Child, “in time
it joined Swann dipping his madeleine, and M.F.K. Fisher drying
tangerines on the radiator, as a classic of culinary nostalgia” (Shapiro
28).13 Besides learning everything about cooking, Child discovered that
shopping for food could be a life-changing experience and was very much
a component of the whole food experience. She worked through the
different sequences in the chain of command implicit in a French
household, which is determined by organizational skills and meal plans
that involve shopping and meal preparation. As well as taking French
language classes and cooking lessons, Child intuitively realized that only
through a close and intimate relationship with the vendor(s) would she
obtain some of the best produce available to the consumer. The same
observation applies to French people to this day. French markets are
“places of conviviality, living poems, ravishing olfactive geographies”
poetically described by Epicurean writer Marie Rouanet in her Petit traité
romanesque de cuisine (Rouanet 28). 14
Child cherished these daily encounters and seemingly banal
conversations that can be found at the marchés and reminisces, “It seemed
that in Paris you could discuss classic literature or architecture or great
music with everyone from the garbage collector to the mayor” (Child 56).
12
“That Lunch in Rouen” is also the title of one of Child’s essays, “That Lunch in
Rouen,” New York Times, “Your Introduction to Europe” Travel Supplement,
October 10, 1993: 12, 14, 16.
13
Laura Shapiro, Julia Child, New York: Penguin, 2007.
14
Marie Rouanet, Petit traité Romanesque de cuisine, Paris : Editions Payot et
Rivages, 1997.
Judith Jones, who became influential in getting Child’s first cookbook

published at Knopf, and was her editor, as well as a culinary writer who
lived in France in 1948, evokes the open-air markets as “a revelation,
bursting with fresh produce“(Jones 37-38).15
Child’s memoirs go behind the scenes of famous culinary books and
unravel the steps taken to become a French cook. In a sequential order
reminiscent of film montage, Child applied herself to learning the process
and helped translate French cuisine to the American homemaker. This
knowledge may have proven challenging as French cooking is based on
experimentation and spontaneity. French food is an essential part of the
fabric of being French, and is a way of life that enables the (French)
person to be firmly grounded in his/her past, according to Roland Barthes’
psycho-sociological essay on food in contemporary France.16
A travers sa nourriture, le Français vit une certaine continuité de la nation:

l’alimentation, par mille détours, lui permet de s’implanter
quotidiennement dans son propre passé, de croire à un certain être
alimentaire de la France (Barthes 84). [through food, the French experience
a certain continuity of the nation: eating, through thousands of ‘detours’
enables him to implant himself daily in his own past,to believe in a certain
alimentary being of France.]
What happens then when the cook is not French but a person who
travels and lives in France for several years? It is mostly through the
observation of rituals that Child adapted and sometimes perfected to the
level of a scientific experiment that a strong picture of France is conjured
up to the reader.
The Child family upon observing that Paris was “wonderfully
walkable” (Child 42) adopted the typical French custom of flânerie; one
notices lengthy passages on their going out, eating, and walking, yet not
necessarily in that order. Montmartre and Les Halles were favorite haunts.
Julia Child would go out to clubs and pass through les Halles at 3 am for
the famously restorative soupe à l’onion, (a famous trajectory for people
who like to party). On her way she would admire the now disappeared
forts des Halles (men working at the market that was used as a distribution
center, at night, located in ‘the belly’ of Paris, where the Forum des Halles
now stands). Years later, her descriptions still vividly capture the life of
15
Judith Jones, The Tenth Muse. My Life in Food, New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2007.
16
Roland Barthes, “Pour une psycho-sociologie de l’alimentation contemporaine,”
Annales. Septembre-Octobre 1961: 977-986.
188 Chapter Nine
everyday Paris and are reminiscent of Brassaï’s photographs of Parisian

nightlife complete with night workers,17
The barrel-chested market workers-unloading crates of fresh watercress

from trucks, stacking freshly cut flowers, and preparing for the day. It was
cold and dark, but the vast marketplace was beautiful under splotches of
yellow electric light. As dawn lightened the edges of the sky, we found
ourselves at Au Pied de Cochon for a traditional bowl of onion soup,
glasses of red wine, and cups of coffee. At five-fifteen, we straggled home
(Child 107).
Her memories of Paris penned in My Life in France are adorned with

Paul Child’s black and white photography documenting the people of the
Belle France, some of the landscapes, and their own intimate life, in an
interesting and sometimes endearing fashion. Unaware that cooking
gourmet meals at home as an experiment and eating out could be taxing,
both Julia Child and her husband experienced health problems related to
what the French call ‘the crise de foie’, or what she called the case of “an
American stomach in Paris” – actually one of her chapters’ sub-headers
(93).
Evidently, French cuisine was just too much for most American digestive
systems. Looking back on the rich gorge of food and drink we’d been
enjoying…Lunch almost every day had consisted of something like sole
meunière, ris de veau à la crème, and half a bottle of wine. Dinner might be
escargots, rognons flambés, and another half-bottle of wine (Child 94).
The 1950s - 1960s witnessed technological progress that transformed

French households when it came to the kitchen, with the arrival of new
appliances such as refrigerators and electric stoves (Marenco 205).18
These transformations are the central focus of Jacques Tati’s film Mon
Oncle (1958), which highlights the arrival of the ultimate French modern
kitchen and household appliances that would in turn become women’s
friends to paraphrase Kristin Ross’s position in her study of post-world
17
I am referring to a combination of Brassaï’s pictures of Paris night-life taken in
the 1930s that appeared in Paris by night, (Paris de nuit, Paris: Arts et Métiers
graphiques, 1933, Paris by Night, Paris: Flammarion, 1987) and the actual shot of
Le fort des Halles (1939) that was published in Brassaï, Modiano. Paris-Tendresse,
Paris: Hoëbeke, 1990.
18
Claudine Marenco, Manières de table, modèles de mœurs. 17eme-20eme siècle,
Cachan : Editions de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan. 1992.
war II France and decolonization.19 Tati mocks the use of modern

gadgetry and laments the loss of the simpler life. 20
The list of menus and detailed descriptions of several courses hark
back to the direction that prevailed in France’s haute cuisine then and in
earlier centuries, which may not be de rigueur nowadays with the
evolution of French society and pressing concerns regarding health, and
nutrition as evidenced by Mireille Guiliano’s book French Women Don’t
Get Fat or Amy B. Trubek’s Haute Cuisine.21 Such `debauchery’ is
evoked in Perec’s sociological novel Les Choses, with the citation that
opens this essay; the novelist followed the evolution of French society
through the 1960s, and scrutinized the way a couple tried to fit in with its
times with the purchase and consumption of objects. Some of Child’s
menus listed in her 1999 food-related memoirs My Life in France are
examples and markers of ‘the cuisine bourgeoise’, which consisted of
heavy cream sauces, and multiple courses that have been analyzed roughly
around the same time that Child lived in France in the fifties by Barthes.
One of the essays collected in Mythologies focuses on the recipes offered
by the French woman’s magazine Elle; in “La Cuisine ornementale”
(“Ornamental Cookery,” Mythologies 128-130), Barthes would demonstrate
the way the woman’s journal presented ‘a dream’ to its popular
readership.22 Of course, the dream is not open to all classes, since Elle’s
cooking is essentially a petit-bourgeois art (Barthes 129), and as such, the
country (peasant) dish is banned from such displays. On the other hand,
Elle privileges sauce or « above all, coatings prepare and support one of
the major developments of genteel cookery : ornamentation (Barthes 78),
« le nappé prépare et supporte l’un des développements majeurs de la
cuisine distinguée : l’ornementation» (Barthes 129). Child proudly
embraced the test of making sauces.
The present essay regarding bourgeois cuisine and the American
appreciation of French food in the persona of Child is haunted by the
peripheral vision of at least two of Jacques Tati’s films Playtime (1967),
19
Jacques Tati, Mon oncle (starring Jacques Tati , Paris: Alter films, 1958).
Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies. Decolonization and the Reordering of
French Culture, Boston: MIT Press, 1995.
20
We will return to Tati later on in the essay.
21
Mireille Guiliano, French Women Don’t Get Fat. The Secret of Eating for
Pleasure, New York: Knopf, 2005. Amy B. Trubek, Haute Cuisine. How the
French Invented the Culinary Profession. Philadelphia: U. Pennsylvania Press,
2000.
22
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Paris: Seuil, 1957: 128-130 and Mythologies,
trans. Jonathan Cape Ltd. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972: 78-80.
190 Chapter Nine
as well as Mon Oncle (1958). Playtime criticizes French modernization

and urban renewal in the post-war era and offers Tati’s personal and
incisive take on the ‘société de consommation.’ 23 Playtime opens with the
arrival of a group of American housewives at the Orly airport; they are
transported throughout the film to some makeshift touristy Paris. The new
city is distant from the real ‘old’ Paris whose fugitive reflections are
merely refracted in windowpanes, never within reach.24 The definitive
center—Paris- has migrated to a suburban location. This parallels the
position of France post-World War II as evinced from world powers and
witnessing the arrival of American tourists, businessmen and GIs. In the
new modern city, the Royal Garden restaurant – a wink to pre-
revolutionary times in its linguistic connotations- has barely been built that
a contingent of tourists and businessmen arrives by the busload and dinner
is served at an incredibly jazzy pace, with the menu consisting in a single
dish and specialty: Turbot à la royale. “The fish is brought to them, but
has to be warmed up, basted in its sauce and seasoned on the mobile grill
that is placed by the diners’ table” (Bellos 271).25
The fish proposes the simulacrum of French bourgeois cuisine as it
used to be down to the ornamentation and nappé (glazing) evoked earlier
by Barthes (Mythologies) that hides the actual fish. One waiter explains to
a couple of clients that it is the specialty of the place “poché au vin
blanc… nappé avec cette crème.”
In hindsight, the restaurant itself is a mere façade of a French
bourgeois restaurant, a shell whose construction is faulty and full of
cracks. Of course, interestingly, the film frustrates the expectations of the
diners and spectators, since food, or the main signature dish never seems
ingested. Instead the dish is demonstrated several times, in front of a
couple: doused with sauce, and sprinkled with salt: “Voilà le nappage…”
comments the waiter once more. Yet, the serving is delayed, and plagued
by constant setbacks as if Tati wanted to postpone the pleasure of savoring
the fish. Michel Chion, one of Tati’s foremost film critics, goes over the
use of gags in the famous restaurant sequence: “The Turbot à la Royale is
ten times seasoned but never served” (Chion 27). The prolonged
restaurant sequence is dense with repetitions of gestures involving
preparatory rituals, carving, and flambéing that are prototypical of culinary
23
Jacques Tati, Playtime (starring Jacques Tati, Barbara Denneck, Paris: Specta
films, 1967).
24
This vision of Paris as seen through windows and standing as a possible
backdrop plays out in Wilder’s film Sabrina.
25
David Bellos, Jacques Tati, London: The Harvill Press, 1999.
Playtime
Playtime
192 Chapter Nine
shows, (especially televised ones) withholding the moment of appreciation:

the tasting that is usually left to one’s imagination.26
The ensuing chaos at the restaurant turns the episode into a Situationist
moment where the tourists will appropriate and transform the episode into
one of the best party times they ever had in France, breaking the façade
and shell of the haute-cuisine haunt.
The pragmatic Julia Child was seriously preoccupied with the
transmission of her knowledge about food and good eating to the average
middle-class American housewife just as she was in her own way an astute
observer and practitioner of the society of consumption; in her opinion,
French cuisine could be scientifically analyzed, and faithfully reproduced
and transplanted away from France to the American housewife’s kitchen.
I imagine her tall figure stepping straight out of a Jacques Tati film and
zooming through Paris with her flash car, a large sky-blue Buick station
wagon in order to stock up at the B.H.V store or the Dehillerin cookware
store.28 Child herself is a character that could very well be cast in films. In
fact, a first biopic came out in 2009.29 Child was instrumental in developing
several cookbooks when no serious book existed in the United States
regarding French cuisine. At first, with the help of two French women and
friends she had met who had already started on the idea; one of them was
Simca (Simone Beck) with whom she would stay friends all their lives and
whom she described as the super-Française:
26
The American influence lingers with the cold drugstore buffet sandwich
alignment next door– a recent American import – found in the same neighborhood
as the Royal Garden and whose greenish neon-lighting evokes Edward Hopper’s
paintings of American city-life at night such as Drugstore (1927) and Night-Hawks
(1942).
28
J. Child writes about her purchases at the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville or B.H.V.
where she purchased a frying pan, dishes and even a kitchen stove for $90…34.
The car is referenced in My Life in France during a road trip: 38.
29
Meryl Streep interprets Julia Child in an adaption based on Julie Powell’s
interpretation and reworking of Julia Child’s recipe book, Julie and Julia: 365
Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, (Little, Brown and Company, 2005)
The film directed and scripted by Nora Ephron was released in 2009.
“Project centers on a frustrated temp secretary who embarks on a yearlong culinary
quest to cook all 524 recipes in Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking."
She chronicles her trials and tribulations in a blog that catches on with the food
crowd.”
<http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117975130.html?categoryid=1237&cs=1>
Simca was a strong girl with a good work ethic. I began to call her La
Super-Française because she so typified a dynamic, self-reliant, bull-
headed kind of Frenchwoman that I admired. Even when sick, she’d equip
her bed like an office, with a telephone, typewriter, piles of books, and
stacks of papers. She’d sit there like a queen, calling out to her visitors,
planning meals, and correcting manuscript pages (Child 172).
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, volume I, consists of the collective

work of three women, and drew its inspiration from the 1950s. Julia Child
claimed her function as a teacher after volume II:
While volume I reflects France in the 1950s and the old traditions of
French cooking, Volume II, like France herself, has stepped into
contemporary life….However, we are teachers; we want people to learn
(Child xii).30
It is important to note that the relationship with food experienced in

North America was somewhat strained and heavily influenced by Anglo-
Saxon customs. Most culinary writers, and by extension travelers, from
Mary Frances K. Fisher, to Julia Child and Judith Jones revisit the
historical and cultural conditions that existed in their countries before their
actual discovery of the taste of food abroad. Based on their writing, one
observes the lack of spices, the avoidance of garlic, and the heavy reliance
on boiled meats as well as the disdain for any comments on food and the
pleasure derived from eating with one’s family. Fresh produce and
essential cookware were hard to find at the supermarkets since the
American housewife was supposed to purchase frozen food, or fast-
cooking ingredients.
So many ingredients I’d come to take for granted couldn’t be found in

American supermarkets: no shallots, no leeks, no fresh herbs; no delicate,
slim haricots verts, seldom fresh mushrooms; big heads of iceberg lettuce
were the prevailing salad green…(Jones 48).
An important cultural trait of the time is that France was, and still is, a
country that claimed its cuisine to be essentially a male prerogative,
disinterested in (the training of) women chefs. It has been extremely hard
for French women chefs to be recognized and integrated into the
30
Julia Child, Simone Beck, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Vol. 2, New
York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1970.
194 Chapter Nine
workplace. Women were mostly shut out from cooking schools and from
cookbook writing (Christopher Petkanas).31 Although, of course, if French
women were and are still given “the monopoly over both the kitchen and
the tasks of interior organization” they are not to be found in the kitchen of
restaurants as chefs or executive chefs.32 Julia would combat this notion
throughout her life. She and her collaborators opened L’Ecole des Trois
Gourmettes, a first of its kind where they would train women how to cook
in their own kitchens. At that time, women in North America were trying
to stay away from the kitchen, as much as possible.
During her stay in Marseilles, where she and Paul had relocated for his
new assignment, Julia discovered and adapted new kinds of dishes and
herbs and inserted them into her recipes; she opened up to popular local
flavor and considered the city to be itself a bouillabaisse of people: a rich
“broth of vigorous, emotional, uninhibited life- a veritable ‘bouillabaisse
of a city” (Child 152). The city enabled her to ‘plunge’ into fish for the
book writing (Child 156-157). She disliked being taken for a foreigner.
Her only critique of the French is that they always seemed to know
everything and assumed that as a foreigner, she did not. For instance, she
became incensed when someone told her that there was no need for
tomatoes for the recipe of the bouillabaisse, “Such dogmatism, founded on
ignorance and expressed with a blast of hot air, irked me. Indeed, because
I had studied up on everything, I usually knew more about a dish than the
French did, which is so often the case with a foreigner” (Child 174).
Child detected some of the early signs of the Americanization of
French tastes. In 1970, after she had become a television celebrity in North
America with her cooking shows airing on Boston Public television, the
French chef decided to do things differently; at that time she was going to
France in the summer to live in the Provençal villa La Pitchoune that they
had built next to Simca’s:
I thought it might be fun to record how French food is actually made and
sold in France- to show the traditional butchers, olive-oileries,
confectioners, triperies, and wine-shops that had been my original
inspiration (Child 273).
31
Christopher Petkanas, “In France, male chefs remain à la mode”, International
Herald Tribune, Wednesday April 28, 1993.<
http://www.iht.com/articles/1993/04/28/cook.php?page=1>
32
Luce Giard, “The Nourishing Arts,” in Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2:
Living and Cooking. Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, Pierre Mayol, edited by Luce
Giard, translated by Timothy J. Tomasik. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1998.
She was interested in shooting a mini-documentary series in 35-mm.

format and adding excerpts into their own televised shows: “I was
convinced that our footage would prove to be an important historical
document” (Child 273).
…mechanization was taking over the food business, even in France, and it
seemed clear to me that many of the artisanal skills we were going to
record-the making of glacéed fruits, the hand-cutting of meat, the
decorative skills of traditional patissiers-would disappear within a
generation or two. Of course, film itself can fade or break. If our little
documentaries survived, they might be one of the few records showing
how food was made almost entirely by human hands rather than by
machines (Child 273-274).
However, practically nothing is left of the footage but Child’s vision

was definitely avant-garde in view of what would take place in French
society. 33 Child was attuned to French culture and knew exactly when
modernization would alter the way things were done. Her never-ending
search to reproduce the ‘goût français’ while in her American kitchen was
probably going to be jeopardized even in France by the French people
themselves who have wanted all along to emulate all things American,
from fast-food to fried chicken to pre-made baguettes and frozen food to
films—all of which indices are largely criticized today. Child wanted to
preserve the artisanal quality of French cuisine.34 The American taste
emulated in post-World War II France was finally taking hold: “The
American model was a kind of mirror in which the French viewed
themselves, or, perhaps, before which they preened” (Richard Kuisel
235).35
One case example given by Julia was to show a real baker at work. In
her show titled “How to Bake French Bread” she thought that “we could
33
This was confirmed by her nephew Alex Prud’homme’s in an email.
34
The one recurring theme of Jean-Paul Coffe's radio show is the appreciation he
demonstrates to the artisans of French cuisine, framers, bakers, chefs and so on. He
does this because these people are the real stars of French culture, and they are
under appreciated in the France of today, a France that is increasingly eating more
fast-food and spending less and less time around the table eating, i.e. not eating
traditional French meals at a traditional French pace.
http://www.americansinfrance.net/Culture/Jean-Pierre_Coffe.cfm
35
Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French. The Dilemma of Americanization,
Berkeley: U. California Press, 1993.
196 Chapter Nine
insert a sequence showing how a real French Boulanger made real

baguettes in a real baker’s oven in Paris“(Child 273). 36
One of the rare preserved French segments “The Whole Fish Story”
appears in one of the French Chef shows (1971).37 In the episode shot in
color, Child demonstrates how to clean, cut and cook certain fish, such as
flounders and trouts. One of the three key segments the producers clipped
shows Child visiting an authentic French supermarket at the outskirts of
Paris (unnamed in the segment). Child is marveling at the beautifully rich
display of fresh fish on a bed of ice. In another segment, she introduces a
female professor from the Ecole des Arts et Métiers Alimentaires, Mme
Pasquier, who skillfully performs cutting, deboning and filleting fish.
Some of the fish varieties include soles. One is reminded how much Child
cherished the sole that she tasted in her first French meal in Normandy.
She explains that even though ‘real’ soles cannot be found in this country
(the USA), flounders can be used as substitutes. Child converses with
Mme Pasquier in French, and translates some of the teacher’s comments.
These three segments document the way fish was arranged and prepared,
either by the housewife or the fish-vendor. At the end of the “Fish Story,”
Child has baked and sautéed two types of fish, and demonstrated to the
American housewife how to eat the dish. There might be even more to the
‘fish story’ for a French person back in 1948, when Julia had her first
tasting, since the population at large, had been entirely deprived of fish
from 1940 to 1948 with the exception of some seaside zones, due to
mines, and war time activities. When fish returned to French plates in
1948, it was mostly through Dutch exports since they had demined their
ports before the French did (Coffe 83).38
While doing research on Child and noticing her statements on the
evolution of French society, which she witnessed over the years, one
wonders what Child thought of the McDonald’s burger chain that started
its European franchise in Holland, and then opened its first restaurant in
Strasbourg, in 1979. In fact, Child embraced McDonald’s and enjoyed
their fries, although she did admit that it was not a healthy meal. Luckily,
Richard Kuisel reminds the readers that the French did “not succumb to
Americanization.” “French kitchens were electrified and McDonald’s sold
36
Incidentally, the commercialization of the Poilâne bread by the fils Poilâne
occurred in 1970 when he took over and started his network of boulangeries
worldwide.
37
I am grateful to Julia Child’s nephew Alex Prud’homme for contributing this
information to me in a personal email answering my question. (2007/04/10).
38
Jean-Pierre Coffe, Au secours le goût, Belfond : Le pré aux clercs, 1992.
hamburgers on the Champs-Elysées, but French cuisine did not disappear”

(Kuisel 232).
Child, disappointingly so, was very removed from the politics of food
and nutrition, and wholeheartedly embraced the genetic engineering of
food toward the end of her life as one of the “greatest discoveries of the
twentieth-century” (Shapiro 162). Yet, her work spawned a new
generation of chefs that came about in the 1970s in North America, who
were politically conscious, health-conscious, and experimental at the same
time. Her writing and presence are still felt among the generations of
women and men who grew up watching her shows and reading her
cookbooks, as they definitely provoked a turn in American cuisine. She
was instrumental in demystifying French cuisine and making it accessible
to the everyday person.
CHAPTER TEN
FOOD, CHARACTER AND WAR IN IRÈNE

NÉMIROVSKY’S SUITE FRANÇAISE
JANN PURDY
More than sixty years after Irène Némirovsky’s death in Auschwitz,

Suite française, a novel set in France during World War II, earned the Prix
Renaudot in 2004 and became a best-seller. The popularity of the novel is
in large part due to the novel’s gripping story and to Némirovsky’s prose
which, written in the heat of the German occupation, conveys the
emotional tumult of that moment in history with level-headed clarity and
rich style. However, most of what is written about Suite française
revolves around its more controversial contexts, including the late
discovery and publication of the novel, the tragic death of the author, and
the perceived anti-Semitism of Némirovsky herself. While these contexts
are important and cannot be separated from our reception of the text, I
propose a reading that attempts to understand Némirovsky’s craft through
an analysis of her use of food as a both a symbolic indicator of the moral
fiber of her characters and as the key to understanding certain strategies
the author used to infuse her novel with impactful impressions of the war.
Before engaging with these textual strategies, however, it is helpful to
consider the contentious and fascinating contexts that have dominated the
critical attention surrounding the novel.
The circumstances of the publication of Suite française are as
captivating as its prose. The manuscript, stored in a suitcase with
Némirovsky’s notebooks, journals, photos and family papers was whisked
away to safety, along with her two young daughters, following the
deportation of the author and her husband to Auschwitz.1 The girls were
1
Némirovsky and her husband were deported nearly 3 months apart: Némirovsky
in July and Michel Epstein in October 1942. Myriam Anissimov describes these
biographical details and the long journey of the novel’s publication in her preface
to Suite française. Irène Némirovsky, Suite française (Paris: Denoël, 2004), 11-30.
Food, Character and War in Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française 199
first hidden in a Catholic boarding school until French police came

looking for them. Next, they were hidden in the cellar at the home of a
local family. Just before being denounced, they fled by train with their
governess to the zone libre or unoccupied territory, all the while ensuring
that the suitcase accompanied them. In the years after the war, the
cherished contents of the valise were left untouched: too painful to read,
too precious to part with, even for safekeeping in L’Institut Mémoire de
l’Édition Contemporaine, a research library for the archives of writers and
publications. It wasn’t until the early 1990’s, when Némirovsky’s
daughters, Denise Epstein and Elisabeth Gille, decided to read the
manuscript before depositing it at the IMEC, that they discovered that the
notebook they thought was a draft of their mother’s short stories was in
fact the manuscript for the novel that many consider to be her most
successful text. Nonetheless, Denise waited more than a decade to submit
the manuscript for publication, because her fatally-ill sister—who was five
years old at the time of her mother’s death--, was writing Le mirador, an
imaginary biography of the mother she could barely remember.2
The long and tenuous route that the manuscript took on its way to
publication mirrors the struggle Némirovsky herself endured to write it.
After leaving a high-class lifestyle and fleeing Paris with thousands of
others, the author found temporary refuge in a rented house in Issy
l’Évêque only a few miles from the zone libre. There, she spent several
months feverishly depicting the vicissitudes of life under the German
occupation of France, including the exodus of Parisians to the outlying
areas, life in a small village occupied by the Germans and the impact of
war on various strata of French society. The amplitude of the novel (the
project was to have five parts, only two of which were completed before
Némirovsky’s deportation) contrasted tragically with the restricted
environment of its production. Paper was scarce, forcing the author to
write in a miniscule hand that could only be read with a magnifying glass.3
Moreover, Némirovsky became increasingly aware that her time was
limited. Notes that accompany the manuscript reveal the author’s growing
sense of her doom. After projecting the number of pages each part would
entail, she contemplates the effect of her arrest on the novel: “In the end, if
the people who have promised to come arrive on 14 July, then that will
2
Elisabeth Gille. Le mirador: mémoires rêvés (Paris : Presse de la Renaissance,
1992).
3
Némirovksy 2004, 29.
200 Chapter Ten
have certain consequences, including at least one, maybe two sections

less.”4 The author was arrested on July 13, 1942.
In addition to this backdrop of arduous struggle and tragic outcomes—
what biographer, Jonathon Weiss, coins as the “Anne Frank type of
urgency” of the novel—,5 several critics point to controversies concerning
what some perceive as the author’s anti-Semitism. Némirovsky
distinguished herself at age twenty-six as a brilliant writer with the
publication of her second novel David Golder in 1929. Her fame and
prestige continued at such a rate that by the end of the 1930s, Némirovsky
had published more than a dozen novels, two of which were made into
movies. However, David Golder and other novels reveal the author’s
distance from her Jewish heritage given the arguably anti-Semitic
portrayal that she gave her Jewish characters. Moreover, she often
published in right-wing, anti-Semitic publications.6 In fact, she attempts to
draw in her favor the distinction between “the undesirable and the
honorable foreigners” in a letter she wrote to the Maréchal Pétain,
president of the Vichy government during the occupation (Weiss, 114).
Moreover, the perception of Némirovsky’s anti-Sémitism is underscored
by the fact that Suite française, a 600-page novel, depicts not a single
Jewish character, while the author herself endured the indignities of
wearing the Jewish star, as well as the laws against Jews being able to
publish, to have a bank account, or to shop for food except between the
hours of 2pm and 3pm. For this reason, among others, many post-war
critics ignored or reviled her novels as collaborationist.7
4
Irene Némirovsky, Suite Française, trans. Sandra Smith (New York: Knopf,
2006), 344. I have opted to quote the original French text and its English
translation only when engaging with the passages concerning food, where the
original text conveys the sensuality that the translation occasionally does not
render completely.
5
Jonathon Weiss, Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2007), xi.
6
Alice Kaplan points out that Némirovsky’s publishing tactics were not
uncommon: “It's worth underlining the fact that Némirovsky wasn't the only
respectable writer who was publishing in Gringoire during the occupation. A
figure as beloved as Colette, who was, at the time, hiding her Jewish husband to
protect him from arrest, also appeared in its literary pages, and her personal
situation was nearly as removed from Gringoire's politics as Némirovsky's. For a
balanced view of Némirovsky’s complicated position regarding anti-Semitism, see
Alice Kaplan, “La Zone Grise,” The Nation, April 21, 2008,
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080421/kaplan.
7
Ruth Franklin discusses the fact that Némirovsky’s work was largely unpublished
after the war. In her article in The New Republic, she echoes some of the bitterness
In view of these unsettling questions that surround Suite française, it

might seem frivolous to explore the topic of food in the novel. One might
question, as Alice Kaplan does, whether we can read the novel beyond the
tragedy of the author’s biography. In her article, “Love in Ruins,” Kaplan
muses: “Are we capable of reading fiction anymore without being told
something poignant, or sensational, or gratifying about the author?
Némirovsky’s novel, by itself, is so good that I’d like to answer yes. But
I’m not sure.”8 And yet, an analysis of the use of food in Suite française, I
will argue here, turns our focus toward what makes this novel so good.
Rich, vibrant descriptions of food and other elements that appeal to the
senses are what impressed me most on the first reading; these sensual
details lend the text a certain authenticity.9 Upon closer view, food
the Jewish community has felt about Némirovsky’s work. Her article, entitled
“Scandale française” (which plays on the original title of the novel) is subtitled,
“The nasty truth about a new literary heroine.” Ruth Franklin, “Scandale
francaise,” The New Republic, January 30, 2008,
http://www.tnr.com/article/books/scandale-fran%C3%A7aise. As a counter
argument, Susan Rubin Suleiman, in her published conversations with Richard J.
Golsan, chides Franklin for her lack of “critical responsibility.” She cites
Némirovsky’s harsh treatment in David Golder of other groups, in addition to
Jews, associated with the financial world. Richard J. Golsan and Susan Rubin
Suleiman, “Suite Française and Les Bienveillantes, Two Literary ‘Exceptions’: A
Conversation,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 12:3 (2008): 321-
330.
8
Alice Kaplan, “Love in the Ruins,” The Nation, May 29, 2008.
9
It may be of no small significance that I discovered the book in 2005 while co-
teaching a travel course to Paris and Burgundy on the culinary culture of France.
After introducing twenty students to French culture by way of eating mouth-
watering cheeses and observing their culinary arts at the Cordon Bleu, I might have
been a tad predisposed to seeing the role of food in anything I read. Moreover,
while in Paris I visited dear friends, Andrea Talmud and Georges Maurel, who 25
years prior had given me lessons in the delights and significance of French cuisine
when I was living in Paris just after graduating college. They were foodies before
the term was invented. On my recent visit with them, they recommended Suite
française, both for its gripping prose and its genuine depiction of the war years.
Georges had just finished writing his own memoirs of his life growing up in a poor
Jewish neighborhood of Paris before the war and the time he spent in hiding during
the Occupation (like Némirovsky’s daughters, Georges too narrowly escaped the
French gendarmes). Georges and his younger sister lost their entire family, save a
few aunts and uncles. Like Denise Epstein (who is about the same age), Georges
had kept his memories packed away until enough time had passed and the urgency
to preserve the memory insisted that he write them in his late 70s. His memories of
202 Chapter Ten
emerges as a major topos for Némirovsky’s attempt to criticize, in the first

half of the novel, various bourgeois and collaborationist reactions to the
war. Moreover, an in-depth look at the use of food might even suggest a
way to read her purposeful avoidance of any mention of Jews or anti-
Jewish laws in her portrayal of the war and the occupation.
Food is an understandable focus during wartime, and one that many
other writers took up in their texts during World War II.10 One would
expect food to become an obsession when it became scarce or rationed,
especially for Jews during the Occupation. Indeed, Némirovsky seems
preoccupied with maintaining the standard of living that she enjoyed
before the war, especially in regards to food. In a letter to her publisher
friend André Sabatier, she invites him to come to her refuge in Issy
l’Evêque and writes, “While I cannot promise you great comfort, I can at
least assure you that you will eat more or less as you did before the
war”(Weiss, 149). According to Weiss, she had contemplated, but decided
against, living in Hendaye, deep in the safer, unoccupied territory of
France near the border with Spain, because, as Némirovsky writes,
“finding food there is, apparently, very difficult”(Weiss, 116). Food is
present even in the last few notes the author wrote to her husband and
daughters. After her arrest, she writes: “For the moment I am at the
police station where I ate black currants and red currants waiting for them
to come and get me…”(Weiss, 156). From the interment camp in France,
she sends a cryptic postcard stating that “There is disorder at the moment
but the food is very good. It even surprised me”(Weiss, 157).11 The
author’s family was accustomed to eating the finest cuisine. Even during
the Occupation, on a trip that Némirovsky’s daughter, Denise, took with
her governess to Paris, they dined on “oysters, filet of beef, cauliflower,
salad, camembert, oranges, coffee…good white wine, red Burgundy,
liqueur and cognac”(Weiss, 151). Indeed, in Suite française, the gorgeous
descriptions of food and the attention to the detail of a meal attest to
Némirovsky’s insider’s knowledge of haute cuisine.
food during the war are significant. On my return trip to the U.S., I brought back
on the plane a copy of Suite française, Georges’s memoirs and the sweet after-taste
of a week-long indulgence in haute cuisine.
10
See Ros Peers, “Virginia Woolf’s Treatment of Food in The Voyage Out and The
Waves,” Virginia Woolf Bulletin 6, Issue 1 (2001): 6-17; and Jo Green Kaiser,
“Feeding the Hungry Heart: Gender, Food and War in the Poetry of Edna St.
Vincent Millay,” Food & Foodways 6, no. 2 (1996): 81-92.
11
As Weiss notes, the letters sent by inmates were inspected and were limited to
propagandistic content.
However, when one examines the copious passages related to food in

the novel, especially in the first half, “Storm in June”, a curious irony is
revealed: the most delectable passages regarding food are associated with
the most despicable characters.12 “Storm in June” follows the fate of
several Parisians—a bourgeois family (the Péricands), an upper-class,
right-wing author and member of the elite French Academy (Gabriel
Corte), a cruel banker (M. Corbin), a middle-class family (the Michauds),
and Charles Langelet, an arrogant collector of fine ceramics. Each of the
31 chapters is, for the most part, devoted to one of these four sets of
characters, whose paths haphazardly cross the others’ during their flight
from the frightening consequences of the German invasion. The few
compassionate characters include a couple of farm girls, Cécile and
Madeleine, Hubert Péricand, the rebellious middle son of the bourgeois
family and the Michauds.13 The vast majority of the novel features
characters who express more anxiety over the material loss they suffer
during the invasion than with any patriotic or humanistic concern. Of
these objectionable personages, Gabriel Corte is perhaps the most
intriguing in that he shares with Némirovsky herself both profession and
social class, and yet he is arguably the least sympathetic character of the
novel.
Corte first appears in the novel seated in his Paris apartment, entranced
by the writing of his latest novel: “Il étendit ses doigts fins dans l’espace
et les fit claquer comme des castagnettes. Florence lui présenta un citron
et il mordit dedans, puis il avala une orange et quelques fraises glacées; il
consommait une quantité prodigieuse de fruits”(51). [He stretched his
delicate fingers in the air and clicked them like castanets. Florence handed
him a lemon, then an orange and some glacé strawberries; he consumed an
enormous amount of fruit(15)]. Corte, like Némirovsky herself, is
accustomed to fine food:
Gabrielle mangeait peu aux repas, mais il avait souvent faim la nuit. Il y
avait un reste de perdreau froid, des pêches et des délicieux petits pâtés au
12
Although the second part of Suite française, “Dolce,” contains important
references to food (especially the role of the kitchen in Lucile’s home as a site of
conversion for opposites), these are not featured as predominantly, nor with the
same contrasting technique as in “Storm in June.”
13
The Michauds are named after the governess hired in Issy L’Eveque for
Némirovsky’s daughters. In a note to the novel, the author writes, “Stress the
Michauds. People who always pay the price and the only ones who are truly
noble. Odd that the majority of the masses, the detestable masses, are made up of
these courages types.”(Némirovksy 2006, 342).
204 Chapter Ten
fromage que Florence allait elle-même commander dans une boutique de

la Rive gauche et une bouteille de Pommery (54).
Gabriel ate little during the day but was often hungry at night. There was
some leftover cold partridge, a few peaches, some delicious little cheeses
(which Florence herself had ordered from a shop on the Left Bank) and a
bottle of Pommery (17).
Partridge, peaches and specialty cheeses mark Corte as part of the upper-
crust society of France and signify the indulgence he can afford during
wartime. Florence, his faithful mistress who admires less his talent than
his money, functions as an appropriate companion given her concern for
appearances and decorum: in their haste to leave Paris, Florence is unable
to fit both Corte’s manuscripts and her make-up bag, so she opts for the
latter.
As Corte and Florence flee the German invasion in the mass exodus
from Paris via a car with a chauffeur and a maid, Corte’s obsession with
food becomes more and more apparent and the descriptions of food
increasingly delicious. At first Corte refused to eat the sandwiches they
had packed for the road, because his appetite had been ruined by the vision
of the masses that he could see from his car window. His refusal might
seem like a gesture of empathy for the suffering of others: “Je ne peux pas
manger….As-tu vu cette vieille et affreuse femme de l’autre côté avec sa
cage d’oiseaux et ses linges trempés de sang?”(92). [I cannot eat….Did
you see that horrible old woman beside us with her birdcage and
bloodstained bandages?](43). However, the passage immediately
following this one leaves no doubt to the elitist origins of his lack of
appetite: while Florence and the servants are eating their sandwiches, he
covers his ears “…pour ne pas entendre le bruit du pain qui craquait entre
les dents des domestiques”(92). […so that he couldn’t hear the crunching
noises the servants made as they bit into the bread.](43). Later in the
novel, as his appetite increases, Corte’s thoughts turn to the sandwiches he
had refused earlier. Here, Némirovsky’s detailed description reveals her
keen sense for fine cuisine: “C’étaient de petites brioches bourrées de
mousse de foie gras, d’autres avec une rondelle de concombre et une
feuille de laitue sur du pain noir qui avaient sans doute un gout agréable,
frais, acide”(119). [There had been some small sweet rolls with foie gras,
black bread garnished with cucumber and lettuce, which would be
deliciously cool and refreshing.](62). The description, especially in the
French version, reads like a gourmet menu or an elaborate recipe; it left at
least this reader salivating for more. When Florence informs him that the
sandwiches are gone, he indulges in the memory of another delicious

meal:
Ce n’était plus de sandwich qu’il rêvait, mais de potages légers et chauds,

de petits pâtés frits dans le beurre qu’il avait mangés un jour à Tours en
revenant de Biarritz…avec une femme…. C’était curieux, il ne se
rappelait plus le nom, la figure de cette femme; seuls étaient demeurés
dans son souvenir ces petits pâtés au beurre qui portaient chacun un
croissant de truffe caché dans la pâte onctueuse et lisse…Puis il songea à la
viande: une grande tranche rouge et saignante de rosbif, avec une coquille
de beurre qui fond doucement sur sa chair tendre, quel délice…(119).
It wasn’t sandwiches he was dreaming of now, but light, warming soup, or

the buttery pâtés he’d once had in Tours. (He had been coming back from
Biarritz with a woman). It was odd, he couldn’t remember her name any
more, or her face; the only thing that stuck in his memory were the smooth,
rich little pâtés, each with a slice of truffle tucked away inside. Then he
started thinking about meat: a great red slab of rare beef, with a curl of
butter melting slowly over its tender flesh. What a delight…(62).14
The unsavory priorities of Corte’s privileged status are exposed in his

selective memory of the past—it is the refinement and delicacies of the
meal rather than the human relationship that is preserved.
Indeed, for Corte the association between food and memory forms in
the opposite direction of what one might expect. When Corte’s
chauffeured car drives past a group of women washing their laundry in the
river, Corte says dreamily, “‘L’endroit doit être poissonneux.’… En
Autriche, deux ans auparavant, auprès d’une rivière rapide et claire comme
celle-ci, il avait mangé des truites au bleu!”(120). [“There must be fish
here”…Two years before, in Austria, he had eaten fresh trout near a small
river as clear and rapid as this one.](62). Here in a kind of reversal of the
effects of the Proustian madeleine--where one bite of the tea-soaked pastry
sends Proust’s narrator into a reverie of flowing memories from his past in
Combray, the scenes Corte sees from his car call forth gastronomic
remembrances. The horrors and misery of the war, even the irony of his
fondness for a meal in Nazi-controlled Austria, fail to touch Corte in his
daydream obsession with food. However, Némirovsky underscores the
14
The English version, « buttery pâtés » is less detailed that « des petits pâtés frits
dans le beurre » [small pâtés sautéed in butter] and « smooth, rich little pâtés, each
with a slice of truffle tucked away inside » does not sound quite as indulgent as
« petites brioches au beurre qui portaient chacun un croissant de truffe caché dans
la pâte onctueuse et lisse » [small buttery brioches, each with a crescent of truffle
hidden in the creamy, smooth crust.]
206 Chapter Ten
grotesque contrast between the mouth-watering details of the Corte’s

memory and the war’s destruction of humanity in the cannibalistic
conclusion to Corte’s description of the trout: “Leur chair, sous la peau de
nacre and d’azur, était rose comme celle d’un petit enfant.”(120) [Their
flesh, beneath the bluish, pearly skin, had been as pink as a small
child’s.(63)] Corte’s regard for the human suffering he witnesses from the
comfort of his car pales in light of his hunger for the finer things in life;
and in this light, those finer things in life take on a horrific hue of
inhumanity. In fact, when Corte arrives in Tours he brushes off Florence’s
concern for a newborn baby whose mother hadn’t eaten in more than a
day; instead he sets out to procure a basket of foie gras and champagne
from a restaurant he remembered having eaten in two years earlier. He
reasons, “…there’s this panic-stricken herd and then there are the sly
devils who have hidden food away in a safe place. We’ve just got to find
them”(63-64). After finding the restaurant and succeeding in getting what
he set out for, Corte walks back to his car with his basket of horded
treasure, assured of his social standing and cleverness. When the basket is
suddenly stolen by the brother of the starving mother, Corte declares,
“C’est un jungle”(123).
In this scene where the proud “civilized” writer faces the laws of the
wartime jungle, food is the line of demarcation between cultured and
uncultured. Indeed, food, and especially fine cuisine, has played a long-
standing role in France as the mark of civilization. French cuisine is as
much a symbol of French culture as the Eiffel tower; however, it is not
only French civilization, but the elite echelon of society that is denoted.
As Amy Trubek observes in her historical and anthropological account of
France’s hegemony in the field of fine cuisine, “…the link between cuisine
and social hierarchy becomes increasingly clear: the gastronome Brillat-
Savarin’s insight ‘Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are’
remains true long past the Revolution. The food produced by chefs was
French haute cuisine, the cookery of the elites.”15 As Trubek traces the
history of fine cuisine from the Middle Ages, where it was limited to the
French courts, to the nineteenth century invention of restaurants, where the
bourgeoisie could live like royalty, haute cuisine is the mark of social
standing: “Haute cuisine became the privilege of all those who can afford
it”(Trubek 41). As part of the upper-class French society, Gabriel Corte is
confident in his shrewdness, as well as in his privileged status, when he
15
Amy Trubek, Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession
(Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 3.
walks away with the basket of foie gras; likewise, he draws disdain for the
jungle-like, uncivilized approach to food as mere low-class sustenance.
Némirovsky, however, turns the relationship of food to civilization or
social class on its head. It is Corte who appears uncivilized--even
cannibalistic--in his approach to food. His obsession with fine cuisine
points to all that is wrong in the disorder of wartime France.16 High-class
civilization appears as its supposed opposite—savagery. Turning our
attention to another character in Suite française, Mme. Péricand, we see
that the bourgeois woman relates to food etiquette in a way that points,
ironically, to her lack of civility. At the beginning of the novel, she
attempts to hold to the strict rituals of mealtime, despite having just
learned of France’s shameful defeat:
Elle se forçait à avaler la nourriture…mais chaque bouchée semblait dure

et fade comme une pierre et s’arrêtait dans sa gorge. Cependant elle
répétait les paroles qui formaient le rituel de chacun de ses diners depuis
trente ans. Elle disait aux enfants: ‘—Ne bois pas avant d’avoir commencé
ton potage. Mon petit, ton couteau…’(44).
She forced herself to swallow her food, but each mouthful seemed as hard
and bland as a stone and stuck in her throat. Nevertheless, she repeated the
phrases that had become ritual at mealtimes for the past thirty years. ‘Don’t
drink before starting your soup,’ she told the children. ‘Darling, your
knife…’(10).
Mme. Péricand’s attention to the details and rituals of haute cuisine seems
a testament to her nurturing-mother role, as she protects her children and
servants from seeing her horror of the war’s events. In a similar passage
she carefully prepares the plate for her invalid father-in-law:
Elle coupait finement le filet de sole de M. Péricand. On faisait à ce

dernier une cuisine bien délicate et compliquée, et Mme. Péricand le
servait toujours elle-même… ‘Je pense, disait-elle à ses amis, que ces
pauvres vieillards infirmes souffrent d’être touchés par les mains des
domestiques…. Mme. Péricand …se hâta de verser sur la chair ivoirine du
16
In Némirovsky’s notes to the novel, she points to this scene as pivotal for the
rest of the novel, had she finished it: « The theft of Corte’s dinner by the
proletarians must have, for the future, a great influence. Normally, Corte should
become extremely pro-Nazi, but I could also if I want, if I need to, do it in such a
way that he says to himself: ‘There’s no point kidding myself ; that’s where the
future lies, the future belongs to this brutal force which stole my food from me.’ »
(Némirovsky 2006, 353). Note that Némirovsky underscores the social castes of
her characters, due to her own family’s history rooted in revolutionary Russia.
208 Chapter Ten
poisson, le beurre frais, fondu parsemé de persil haché, mais ce ne fut que
lorsqu’elle eut ajouté sur le bord de l’assiette une rondelle de citron que le
vieillard recouvra sa sérénité(44-46).
She cut the elderly Monsieur Péricand’s filet of sole into small strips. He
was on a complicated diet that allowed him to eat only the lighter food and
Madame Péricand always served him herself, pouring his water, buttering
his bread…. ‘I don’t think poor elderly invalids can bear to be touched by
servants,’ she would say to her friends.’…Madame Péricand…quickly
poured the parsley butter over the ivory flesh of the fish, but it was only
after she placed a slice of lemon at the side of his plate that the old man
was calm again(10-11).
Again, like Corte, Mme. Péricand’s obsessive concern regarding food

points to the clear lines between social classes, as well as to the
unscrupulousness of the bourgeoisie. Mme. Péricand’s consideration for
her father-in-law’s food could stem from care and affection, yet it turns
out to be a false gesture of charity. She cuts his food, making sure it is
prepared to his very finicky tastes, so that he would not give their
anticipated inheritance to charity: “If he hadn’t enjoyed his meal…he
would…say in a weak but clear voice, ‘I’m going to leave them [the
charity] five million”(10). Moreover, later when the family is fleeing
Paris in the exodus, Mme. Péricand congratulates herself for not having
neglected to bring the family linens; yet, she forgets her father-in-law in a
hotel along the route until it is too late to go back for him (he later dies in
the hotel, but not before dictating his “charitable” will to a local notary).17
In another scene during the exodus, the author describes, with a kind of
sarcasm, Mme. Péricand’s self-satisfaction as she distributes food to
others (other bourgeois families, of course): “She got a feeling of great
satisfaction from seeing herself as possessing such plenty, and, at the same
time, being so charitable.”(46) However, after taking a tour of the town,
Mme. Péricand learns that there is no food to be purchased anywhere and
she returns to her kids to scold them for giving away food: “Christian
charity, the compassion of centuries of civilization, fell from her like
useless ornaments, revealing her bare, arid soul. She needed to feed and
17
M. Péricand revels in this last act before he dies: “…for ten years he had been
nothing more than a pitiful old man who needed someone else to dress him and
wipe his nose, and now suddenly he could reclaim his rightful place! To punish,
reward, disappoint, delight, distribute his worldly goods according to his own
wishes. To control everyone. To influence everyone. To come
first.”(Némirovksy 2006, 115-116) As his daughter-in-law feared, he left 5 million
francs to his charity.
protect her own children. Nothing else mattered any more”(48). Food,
once the mark of one’s cultured class, of civilization, now comes down to
a means of individual survival; it reveals the moral fiber, or lack thereof,
of Corte and Mme. Péricand. Haute cuisine, in all its delicious splendor
under Némirovsky’s pen, leads us to uncover its opposite: a cutting,
impoverished side of French bourgeois culture.
It is precisely this use of inversed relationships that seems to be the key
to understanding the gripping nature of Némirovsky’s novel, as well as its
difficulties. In a long note regarding the construction of “Storm in June”,
the author writes a list of historical images that deserve to be passed on to
posterity:
1) Waiting in queues at dawn.

2) The arrival of the Germans.
3) The killings and shooting of hostages much less than the profound
indifference of the people.
4) If I want to create something striking, it is not misery I will show
but the prosperity that contrasts with it.
5) ….yes! It must be done by showing contrasts: one word for misery,
ten for egotism, cowardice, closing ranks, crime. Won’t it be
wonderful! But it’s true that it’s this very atmosphere I’m
breathing. It is easy to imagine it: the obsession with food. [my
emphasis]
6) ….Contrasts! Yes, there’s something to that, something that can
be very powerful and very new. Why have I used it so little in
Dolce? It’s perhaps an impression of ironic contrast, to receive the
force of the contrast. The reader has only to see and hear »(343).18
As she writes the list from items 1 to 6, Némirovsky seems to discover the
key to her particular representation of the war. From the “queues at dawn”
(we can imagine they are lines to procure food) to the very example of the
obsession of food as a way to point out the miseries of war, we see that her
intent is to represent wartime deprivation through its opposite--luxury.
With a kind of cinematic chiaroscuro technique (from Némirovsky’s notes
we see that she had written the novel with an eye toward its filmic
version), she emphasizes the dark pain of war with the vibrant
illuminations of “the good life.” In other words, it is the long descriptions
of Gabriel Corte’s egotistical obsession with food that call our attention to
18
The passage in italics here appears in English in Némirovsky’s notes. She spoke
several languages fluently, including English.
210 Chapter Ten
the hungry new mother who is briefly mentioned as a side character; Mme.
Péricand’s civilized attention to the meals for her invalid kin underscores
the feeble foundations for her Christian generosity.
Moreover, the above list for posterity from the author’s notes points to
an explanation of why there are so few sympathetic characters in the
novel. Her resolve to say “one word for misery, ten for egotism…” gives
us a key to understanding the structure—and I would argue, the impact—
of the novel. This technique of contrasts creates an ironic focus on the
noble actors during the war. After several chapters focusing on Corte’s
egoism and Mme. Péricand’s false generosity, we are struck by the brief
portrait of the kind and patient Maurice Michaud: “In spite of the
exhaustion, the hunger, the fear, Maurice Michaud was not really unhappy.
He had a unique way of thinking: he didn’t consider himself that
important; in his own eyes, he was not that rare and irreplaceable creature
most people imagine when they think about themselves.”(49) His calm,
objective viewpoint, despite his hunger, as he and his wife walk from Paris
to Tour (because M. Corbin, the banker, threatened that they would lose
their job if they did not meet him there) contrasts sharply with Corte’s
disdainful, famished outlook from the chauffeured car. Michaud is
spotlighted, despite his brief appearances in the novel.
The juxtaposition of egotism and altruism helps to explain the
predominance of upper-class characters in the novel, but could this same
strategy of contrasts account for the glaring lack of Jewish characters in
Suite française? It seems plausible. It is unlikely Némirovsky omitted
Jews out of a desire to hide her heritage. Although she converted to
Christianity in 1939 and published under a pseudonym after the ban
against Jewish publications was in place, she also registered as a Jew in
Issy-L’Évêque when the law required and later wore the Jewish star when
that law was issued. In other words, she did not try to evade the fate of
Jews, despite her awareness of deportations and concentration camps
(although she did not know they were death camps) (Weiss, 115). She
even knew the date of her own arrest well in advance, but did not try to
leave. Nor does it appear that the omission of Jews is a sign of her anti-
Semitism. As Alice Kaplan explains, Némirovsky grew to regret her
depictions of Jews in her earlier novels: “A year after the February 1934
riots, she wrote in her diary, ‘If there had been Hitler, I would have greatly
toned down David Golder, and I wouldn't have written it in the same
fashion.’ Three years later, her regret turned to horror: ‘How could I write
such a thing?’”(Kaplan, “La Zone Grise”). I would argue that Jews are not
mentioned in Suite française, because the novel is not so much a depiction
of the victims of the war, as it is a clear-eyed, critical portrayal of French,
Christian, bourgeois society—the very society she hoped to gain

acceptance to before the war. In an undated entry to her journal, the
author writes: “My God! What is this country doing to me? Since it is
rejecting me, let us consider it coldly, let us watch as it loses its honour
and its life.… Let us keep a cool head. Let us harden our heart. Let us
wait”(341). The novel is a kind of retribution for rejection the author
endured. “Have no illusions:” she writes in her notes, “this is not for now.
So mustn’t hold back, must strike with a vengeance wherever I
want”(347). Jews do not appear in Suite française, perhaps, because it is
the underbelly of France (ironically the upper-echelon) that the author
hopes to portray in her novel; and for the moment in history in which she
was writing, Jews were excluded from a place in that country’s landscape.
While the interpretation of the role of food in Suite française may
unlock some of the troubling questions surrounding the novelist’s and the
novel’s more controversial contexts, it more importantly sheds light on the
mechanisms behind the literary impact of the writing. In her use of
juxtaposition, Némirovsky uses food to highlight what was lacking in the
war—dignity, compassion and comfort. However, food was not simply a
convenient metaphor with which the author played out the literary
techniques of her depiction of war. I would argue that food is an essential
symbol for the kind of representation to which Némirovsky aspired.
Through food, the author is able to represent—and to preserve for
posterity-- the emotional charge, as well as the historical implications of
the German Occupation by appealing to our senses: to recall her list of
posterity-worthy images, “the reader has only to see and hear.” Eating,
like seeing and hearing, appeals to the senses and serves as a perfect
device for recalling the experience of war.
As David Sutton observes in his chapter entitled “Sensory Memory and
the Construction of ‘Worlds,’” food has a particularly privileged position
in conveying the memory of experiences.19 Sutton argues that food, --in
its liminal position between body and mind, between individual survival
and social symbolism, between personal and cultural identities--, works to
construct “localized cultural wholes that become points of identification
for people displaced by migrations…”(Sutton 77). Although Sutton is
more interested here in the experience of immigrants in a foreign country,
he quotes Proust’s famous madeleine description as an instance of
19
David E Sutton, Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food &
Memory, (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 73-102.
212 Chapter Ten
temporal migration and the effort to recall a whole structure through the
evocation of a sensorial part:
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are
dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more
fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more
faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting,
hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny
and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of
recollection(Proust quoted in Sutton 84).
Like Proust, Némirovsky hoped to re-construct a world separated by time,

rather than space. The author aimed to depict an experience that would
have significance for future readers: “Never forget that the war will be
over and that the entire historical side will fade away. Try to create as
much as possible: things, debates…that will interest people in 1952 or
2052…. Inimitable descriptions but not historical”(351). Toward that aim
of lasting impressions, the author uses an appeal to the senses to convey
the experience of the war. Whereas Proust reaches back to the past through
the description of the tea-soaked madeleine, Némirovsky attempts to
preserve the present with lavish images of foie-gras for future audiences.
Perhaps in the descriptions of Corte’s or Mme Péricand’s meticulous,
civilized meals, the author’s imagined future readers experience a kind of
ironic remembrance of a reviled, uncivilized past. One might say that
readers of Suite française have tasted a bit of what life was like during the
war.
Bibliography
Franklin, Ruth. “Scandale française.” The New Republic. January 30,
2008. http://www.tnr.com/article/books/scandale-fran%C3%A7aise.
Gille, Elisabeth. Le mirador: mémoires rêvés. Paris : Presse de la
Renaissance, 1992.
Golsan, Richard J. and Susan Rubin Suleiman. “Suite Française and Les
Bienveillantes, Two Literary ‘Exceptions’: A Conversation.”
Contemporary French and Francophone Studies. (2008) 12:3: 321-
330.
Green Kaiser, Jo. “Feeding the Hungry Heart: Gender, Food and War in
the Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay.” Food & Foodways 6, no. 2
(1996): 81-92.
Kaplan, Alice. “Love in Ruins.” The Nation, May 29, 2006.
—. La Zone Grise.” The Nation, April 21, 2006.

Naguib, Nefissa. “The Fragile Tale of Egyptian Jewish Cuisine: Food
Memoirs of Claudia Roden and Colette Rossant.” Food & Foodways
14 (2006): 35-53.
Némirovsky, Irène. Suite française. Paris: Denoël, 2004.
—. Suite Française. Translated by Sandra Smith. New York: Knopf,
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Peers, Ros. “Virginia Woolf’s Treatment of Food in The Voyage Out and
The Waves.” Virginia Woolf Bulletin 6, Issue 1, (2001): 6-17.
Renard, Paul. “Irène Némirovsky (1903-1942): Une romancière face à la
tragédie.” Roman 20-50 16, no. 1 (1993) : 165-174.
Sutton, David E. Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food &
Memory. Oxford: Berg, 2001.
Trubek, Amy. Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary
Profession. Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
Weiss, Jonathon. Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2007.
INDEX
Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures
abstinence from food: and chansons 40n29, 52, 53, 54–55; and
de geste, 154–155, 156; and women, 37–40, 40n28, 49, 51
women, 38–40, 40n28, 49, 51, Aunt Daisy (Maud Ruby Basham),
77–78 66, 80, 83
aesthetical point of view, deep- Austen, Cassandra, 31n6, 33, 34
freezing process, 89 Austen, Jane: films of life, 33n10,
aesthetic gaze, field of, and New 48, 48n39, 48n40, 48n41; films
Zealand, 64, 65 of novels, 47–56, 59–60; and
Aliscans: and aggressive gestures, Georgian period, 56–60; letters
169; and appetite, 155–156, of, 27, 28–34, 31n6, 47, 59;
167; and integrity of abstinence, novels of, 27, 35–47, 37n21,
154, 156 37n22, 58, 59–60
Amadas et Ydoine: and folklore Austen, Jane, works of: Emma, 40–
associated with Fates, 173–176, 47, 41n31, 42n33; Juvenilia,
176n10, 177, 178, 179; and 37–38, 37–38n22; Mansfield
ingenium, 180, 180n23; Park, 35; Northanger Abbey,
misogynistic passages of, 178; 40, 41, 59n79; Persuasion, 36,
staging of meal in, 172–177, 58; Pride and Prejudice, 33n11,
177n13, 179, 180; timing of 35, 36, 41, 43; Sense and
meal, 176–177; and verb Sensibility, 28, 36, 38–40,
controver, 172, 179–180; 40n28, 40n29, 43
witches of, 172, 173–177, 178, Austen Country (film), 48n41
178n18 Australia, and Pavlova, 61, 70
An American in Paris (film), 183
Anissimov, Myriam, 198n1 Bailey, Paul, 16
Anna, 7th Duchess of Bedford, 32n8 Baldwin, John, 163n7
Anne (queen of England), 33n9 Balzac, Honoré de, 5
appetite: and chansons de geste, Barker, George, 72n16
155–156, 161, 163, 165, 167, Barthes, Roland, 187, 189, 190
168; and class issues, 35, 36, Basham, Maud Ruby (Aunt Daisy),
36n16; and gender roles, 36–37, 66, 80, 83
43, 53n60; and Mann's The Beck, Simone, 192–193
Magic Mountain, 132, 134–136, Beck, Simone and Julia Child,
143–144; and Némirovsky's Mastering the Art of French
Suite française, 204; and Pride Cooking, 193
and Prejudice (film), 36n16, Becoming Jane (film), 48, 48n39
Cuisine and Symbolic Capital: Food in Film and Literature 215
Bell, David, 107, 124, 126 169; and appetite, 155–156,

Benigni, Roberto, Life Is Beautiful, 161, 163, 165, 167, 168; and
6n9 avoiding the market, 154, 161–
Benjamin, Walter, 8n16 162, 163, 165–166, 166–
Berenbaum, Michael, 121 167n10; and conflict in food
Bernège, Paulette, 184 scenes, 152, 153, 159–160; and
Bertolucci, Bernardo: The Last context of eating and drinking,
Emperor, 3n3; 1900, 3n3 156–157, 160; and feasting,
Black, Maggie, 27n1 157–159, 160, 163, 167,
Bloch, Howard, 179 167n11, 168–169; and food
Bloom, Lynn, 114n16 procurement, 160, 161–162; and
Bouchard, Constance, 162n6 gift economy, 161, 162–163,
Boulud, Daniel, 14, 20–21 165–166, 167, 168n12; and
Bourdieu, Pierre, 27–28, 60n82, 109 integrity, 153–157, 162; and
Brassaï, 188, 188n17 inter-class conflict, 153; and
breakfast: and Austen's letters, 31, intra-class conflict, 153; and
32–33, 33n9, 34; and films of monasteries, 160–161, 161n5,
Austen's novels, 51, 52–53, 54; 162n6; and performance, 160,
history of, 33n9 169; and values of honor, 153–
Bridget Jones' Diary (film), 48n39 154, 158–159, 164–165, 166,
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason 169n13; and warrior aristocracy,
(film), 48n39 152, 153–168
Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme, 206 Charlemagne, 154
British culture: and New Zealand, Charroi de Nimes, 162, 166n10
63n3, 64, 65, 66n6, 67, 71–73, Chesterton, G. K., 38n22
74, 75, 76–77, 78, 81–82, 83. Chevalier, Jean, 144
See also Georgian England Child, Julia: and American taste for
Broom, Lady Mary Anne, 65, 72– French cuisine, 181, 187, 188,
73, 72n16, 79 189, 192–193, 197; cookbooks
Broome, Frederick Napier, 72n16 of, 187, 192, 193; films on life
Bugnard, Max, 186 of, 192n29; and first French
Burchard of Worms, 178 meal in Rouen, 182–183, 186,
Burgess, Linda, Between Friends, 196; and food shortages in
65, 81 France, 184; and French culture,
Butler, Judith, 56n74 181, 195; and French post-war
Butler, Marilyn, 59n79 tourism, 183–184; and genetic
engineering of food, 197; on
Calin, William, 175, 176, 179 Marseilles, 194; and shopping
Canetti, Elias, 134 for food, 186–187, 192, 192n28,
Catholic Church: and Amadas et 196; television cooking shows
Ydoine, 179. See also William in of, 194, 195–196; training at
the Monastery L'Ecole de Cordon Bleu, 186.
La Chanson de Guillaume, and See also My Life in France
appetite, 155 (Child with Alex Prud'homme)
chansons de geste: and alimentary Child, Julia and Simone Beck,
practices, 152, 153, 154, 160– Mastering the Art of French
216 Index
Cooking, 193 translation, 17–18, 22–24; and

Child, Paul, 182, 188, 194 quality, 19–21
China: crepes imported to, 11–14, crepes, history of, 9, 11, 24
16, 17, 20; and re-education in culinary practices: and Austen's
Cultural Revolution, 5–6, 6n9; letters, 27, 28–35, 31n6; in
tea in, 32n8; and work-study Austen's novels, 27, 33n11, 35–
program in France, 15–17 47, 37n21, 37n22, 40n29, 58;
Chion, Michel, 190 and class issues, 27–28, 29, 33–
Christmas meals, and New Zealand 34, 33n9, 66, 67, 70–71, 72,
women, 71–72, 71n15, 79 72n16, 73, 74, 76–77, 78, 80; in
class issues: and appetite, 35, 36, films of Austen's novels, 48–53,
36n16; and Austen's letters, 31, 49n42, 49n46, 54n65, 55;
33; and Austen's novels, 28, 35; French influence in Georgian
and chansons de geste, 153; and period, 56–57; and German
culinary practices, 27–28, 29, Democratic Republic, 88–89,
33–34, 33n9, 66, 67, 70–71, 72, 90; and Pakeha New Zealand
72n16, 73, 74, 76–77, 78, 80; identity, 62, 65, 66–67, 69, 70–
and culinary translation, 24; and 73, 72n16, 74, 76–77, 78, 79,
Mann's The Magic Mountain, 81–84; and performance of
131–132, 134, 136; and ethnic identity, 107, 126; and
Némirovsky's Suite française, Romani cultural identity, 104,
204–209, 207n16, 208n17, 210, 105, 105–106n3, 106, 106n5,
211. See also social hierarchy 106n6, 107, 108–110, 114–118,
Coffe, Jean-Paul, 195n34 120; and social distance, 28, 29,
Commutation Act of 1784, 32n8 34; and social entertaining, 29–
conventionalism, and 31, 34, 60; and social hierarchy,
epistemological assumptions, 59 27, 29, 33–34, 33n9, 54, 55–56,
The Coronation of Louis, 154–155, 58, 73; in United States, 193,
165, 169 194
Counihan, Carole M., 119 culinary redistribution, and social
"La crêperie de Pékin" (The hierarchy, 41, 44–45, 46, 47, 78
Creperie of Beijing) cultural differences: food
(Massonnet): and consumption embodying, 3; humor in, 7; and
of French food, 6–8; and Massonnet's "La crêperie de
consumption of French Pékin," 7–8
literature, 5–6; and culinary cultural relativity, and Massonnet's
translation, 2–3, 18–19, 21, 22, "La crêperie de Pékin," 7, 9
24–25; and cultural translation, cultural translation, literal
4, 8–9; and econoculinary translation in opposition to, 8,
translation, 9–11, 17–18, 19; 8n16
and economic translation, 2–3;
and Great Leader's dying words, Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little
2, 3–4, 13, 22; importation of Chinese Seamstress, 6n9
crepes to China, 11–14, 16, 17, Dannies, J. H., 90n4, 96
20; and linguistic translation, 3– David Golder (Némirovsky), 200,
5, 8–9, 24–25; and political 201n7, 210
Davies, Andrew, 52n56 Moskauer Eis, 89, 96; and

Deng Xiaoping, 2, 14, 15–18, 23, 24 Mann's The Magic Mountain,
Deron, Francis, 17 131–132, 133, 134, 143–145;
De Silva, Cara, 122 and Massonnet's "La crêperie de
dominance: and Austen's novels, 58, Pékin," 6–9; and medieval
60; and chansons de geste, 168; French literature, 152. See also
and feasting, 167n11; and meat abstinence from food; appetite
eaters, 131 France: Americanization of, 184–
Dresch, Paul, 154 185, 194, 195–196, 196n36;
Dubost, Francis, 175 Bourdieu on French cuisine,
109; bourgeois cuisine of, 189,
East Asian cuisine, 82. See also "La 190; and Chinese culture, 15–
crêperie de Pékin" (The 17; and cold war, 183, 185, 190;
Creperie of Beijing) cuisine of, 109, 184–185, 187,
(Massonnet) 188, 189, 190, 192, 193–197,
L'Ecole de Cordon Bleu, 186, 201n9 195n34, 196n36, 201n9, 202,
L'Ecole des Trois Gourmettes, 194 206, 207–209; culinary culture
economic and political structures, of, 201n9; drought of 1949, 185;
field of, and New Zealand, 64, food shortages in, 184, 196,
66–67, 67n9, 71 202, 208, 209; and Georgian
Elle (French woman's magazine), period in England, 56–57;
189 German occupation of, 198,
Emma (Austen): and men's attitude 199, 201–202n9, 204–207;
to food, 42–43; and moral markets of, 186–188; postwar
economy, 40–44, 46–47; satire tourism in, 183–184, 190, 192;
and irony in, 47; and social technological progress in
hierarchy, 41–42, 41n31, 44–46, kitchen, 188–189, 195. See also
47 Child, Julia; medieval French
Enclosure Laws, 57, 57n76 literature
Les Enfances Vivien, 163, 169 Franklin, Ruth, 200–201n7
Ephron, Nora, 192n29 Freud, Sigmund, 90n5
epistemological assumptions, 59–
60, 101 Gao Xingjian, One Man's Bible,
Epstein, Denise, 198–199, 201n9 6n9, 8
Epstein, Michel, 198n1 gazpacho, 61, 61n1
estrangement: and Mansfield, 74, Geissendörfer, Hans, 138n2
75, 77–78; and Pakeha New gender roles: and appetite, 36–37,
Zealand identity, 74–75, 80 43, 53n60; and Georgian period,
Evans, Richard, 15–16, 17 29; and Romani cultural
identity, 110, 120, 122, 125. See
Ferguson, Priscilla, 11, 22 also men; women
Fisher, Mary Frances K., 186, 193 Georgian England: and culinary
Flanner, Janet, 183, 185 practices, 27, 28–29, 34, 35–36;
Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary, and epistemological
5–6, 5n8 assumptions, 59; and French
food consumption: and Gröschner's chefs, 56–57; social revolution
218 Index
in, 57–58; and tea, 31–32, 32n8 Hopper, Edward, 192n26

German Democratic Republic: Hugo, Victor, 5
banana as symbol of
reunification, 90, 90n5; and Industrial Revolution, 57
culinary practices, 88–89, 90; L'Institut Mémoire de l'Édition
demise of system, 91, 92; Contemporaine, 199
Gröschner as voice of, 92–93;
national identity of, 93–94, Jacoby, Mario, 176
96n11, 99, 101; New Economic Jarrold, Julian, 48n40
System, 96; and scarcity, 89, 90, Le Jeu de la feuilée, 173–174
95–99; and scientific socialism, Jones, Judith, 187, 193
89, 92, 96, 98; and Wende, 91, Joyce, James, Ulysses, 130
91n7, 92, 98–99, 101; and West Julie and Julia (film), 192n29
Germany, 89, 90, 91, 94
German literature. See Gröschner, Kalchik, Susan, 107, 126
Annett; Mann, Thomas; Stojka, Kaplan, Alice, 200n6, 201, 210
Ceija Kaufmann, Eva, 101n14
Gille, Elisabeth, 198–199 Kedves, Alexandra, 94n9
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Kohl, Helmut, 90
Faust, 91, 94 Kracqyzk, Gérard, Wasabi, 7
Goldman, Anne, 114n16 Kuisel, Richard, 196–197
Golman, Richard J., 201n7
Gordon, Sarah, 172 Lander, Jeannette, 108n7, 109n8
Great Britain. See British culture; land ownership, and New Zealand,
Georgian England 67, 69
Gringoire, 200n6 Lane, Maggie: on Austen's Emma,
Grobbel, Michaela, 105n2, 107–108 41, 42, 42n33, 47; on Austen's
Gröschner, Annett: as East German novels, 27n1, 34n13, 36–37,
voice, 92–93; and literary 37n20, 37n21
collages, 94n9, 100; and serious Langton, Simon, 52n56
tone, 101. See also Moskauer Lee, Ang, 49n42
Eis (Gröschner) Le Faye, Deidre, 27n1
Guiliano, Mireille, 189 Leonard, Robert Z., 48n39
Gypsy: pejorative connotations of, Leonardi, Susan J., 109
105n1. See also Romani cultural Levi, Primo, 121
identity; Romani people Lewis, Tanya, 34–35
Little, Lester K., 161n5
Hallström, Lasse, Chocolat, 3n3 Liu, Lydia, 8
Hancock, Ian, 109 Li Yuying, 15, 16
Harf-Lancner, Laurence, 179 Lloyd, Martha, 27n1
Henderson, Heike, 108n7, 109n8 Lovering, Jeremy, 33n10
Hervis de Metz, 163, 169 Lybbe Powys, Mrs. Philip, 27n1
Herwig, Malte, 137, 138
Hodges, William, A Waterfall in The Magic Mountain (Mann): and
Dusky Bay, 63 ailing corporeality, 135, 136,
Homer, Odyssey, 138 137; ambivalent culinary
metaphor of, 137–138; and the Bay," 65, 74, 75, 76; "The
appetite, 132, 134–136, 143– Garden Party," 65, 74, 78;
144; and chocolate, 133, 139– "Prelude," 65, 74, 75, 76, 83–84
140, 142, 147; and choking Mansfield Park (Austen), 35
motifs, 135, 136; critical Maori communities: and culinary
assessments of, 130; critique of practices, 82; as ethnic
sanatoriums, 132, 133–134, population, 66, 73
138–139, 138n2, 140, 146–147; Mao Zedong, 5, 14–15, 17
and cult of vitality, 144; and Marin, Louis, 174
decadence of prewar European Massonnet, Phillipe: as director of
society, 130, 132, 138–139, 146; Agence France Presse, 2, 2n2.
and dual quality of food as life- See also "La crêperie de Pékin"
enhancing and life-threatening, (The Creperie of Beijing)
134, 137–138, 145, 146, 147; (Massonnet)
and excessive consumption of materialism: and Austen's novels,
food, 131–132, 133, 134, 143– 53–54, 58, 60; and chansons de
145; and exterritorial meals, geste, 154, 155, 156, 157, 164,
143–144; film adaptation of, 165, 166, 167; and French
138n2; food and eating in, 130– culture, 20; and Mann's The
132; and invisibility of death Magic Mountain, 135, 137; and
while eating, 134, 135; and New Zealand colonists, 64, 65
mouth, 136–137; and passage of Maurel, Georges, 201–202n9
time, 130, 137, 138n2; and McDonald's, 196–197
pedagogy, 140–143, 146; McGee, Diane, 75, 77
physiological-medical reasons medieval French literature: fabliaux,
for eating, 135; socio-cultural 152; and food and drink
and symbolic significance of consumption, 152; and gift
eating habits, 132, 134; and economy, 163; role of feasting
suicide, 140, 141, 143, 146; and in, 157–158, 172; romances,
taking temperatures, 137 152, 157, 158, 163, 172–180.
Mahar, Cheleen, 104, 105n3 See also Amadas et Ydoine;
Mann, Thomas: as chronicler of chansons de geste
dining habits, 131; and culinary Mediterranean Studies, 153
excess, 132, 133; on food and men: attitude to food, 42; and
eating, 130, 133, 136; and Mansfield's stories, 76, 77; and
Nietzsche, 133. See also The moral economy, 36; and New
Magic Mountain (Mann) Zealand, 68, 69, 79
Mann, Thomas, works of, The Le mirador (Gille), 199
Buddenbrooks, 133 Miss Austen Regrets (film), 33n10,
Mansfield, Katherine, 74–78, 48n40
74n18; and culinary practices, Mitchell, Austen, 69
75, 76–77; and estrangement, Moggach, Deborah, 48n39
74, 75, 77–78; and Pakeha New Mon Oncle (film), 188–189, 190
Zealand identity, 74; and role of moral economy, and culinary
men, 76, 77 practice, 27, 36, 40–41
Mansfield, Katherine, works of: "At Moreaux, Axel, 13, 14
220 Index
Morgner, Irmtraud, 94, 94n10, 99– 198–199, 198n1, 200, 210; and
100 Stojka, 105, 121–125
Moskauer Eis (Gröschner): absence Némirovsky, Irène: death in
of closure, 97, 100; and Auschwitz, 198; deportation to
alphabetical order, 96, 97; and Auschwitz, 198–199, 198n1,
culinary practices, 88, 88n2, 89; 200, 210; knowledge of French
and D-Mark, 91, 92–93; and cuisine, 202; perceived anti-
freezing processes, 89, 98–99; Semitism of, 198, 200, 200n6,
and frozen foods, 89–90, 91, 93, 200–201n7, 210
94, 95, 96, 97–98, 99, 101; and Neumann, Gerhard, 108n7, 132, 143
frozen state of being, 89–91, New Zealand: and aesthetic gaze,
94–95, 98–99, 100, 101–102; 64, 65; as Arcadia, 63–64, 63n3,
and ice cream, 89n3, 91n6, 96, 67, 69, 82; and British culture,
98, 100; and identity theft, 63n3, 64, 65, 66n6, 67, 71–73,
96n11; and scarcity, 90, 95–97, 74, 75, 76–77, 78, 81–82, 83;
98; and selling of history, 91, and Christmas meals, 71–72,
93–94, 99, 101; and unreadable 71n15, 79; domestic education
manuscript, 100–101, 101n14; in, 80; early European image of,
and waiting, 89, 92, 93, 96, 99, 63; and economic and political
101; and Wende, 91, 92–93, 94, structures, 64, 66–67, 67n9, 71;
95, 96–99, 101 and European colonists, 64–65,
My Life in France (Child with Alex 66, 67, 69, 70n12, 71–73, 82,
Prud'homme): and American 83; and globalization, 82–83;
taste for French cuisine, 187, and men, 68, 69, 79; and
189; and Simone Beck, 192– Pavlova, 61–62, 69–70; and
193; and Child's car, 192n28; social relations, 64, 66, 67, 79–
and "cuisine bourgeoise," 189; 80; study of rural women, 62,
and French culture, 181, 186, 67, 71–72, 71n15, 78–79, 83;
187–188, 194–196; and French view of Wenderholme,
markets, 186–188; and Auckland, 64. See also Pakeha
Marseilles, 194; and proposed New Zealand identity
documentary of French cuisine, New Zealand National Library, 70
194–195; and shopping for Nietzsche, Friedrich, 132–133, 144
food, 186; and shortages, 185 Ning, Wang, 8
Nixon, Richard, 14
Napoleon I (emperor of the French), Northanger Abbey (Austen):
56 Marilyn Butler on, 59n79; and
national identity of German indifference to food, 40; and
Democratic Republic: and social hierarchy, 41
identity theft, 96n11; and
recreating history, 101; and occidentalism: definition of, 7,
selling history, 93–94, 99, 101 7n11; and Massonnet's "La
national identity of New Zealand. crêperie de Pékin," 7
See Pakeha New Zealand Onfray, Michel, 139
identity orientalism: and culinary
Nazi persecution: and Némirovsky, translation, 21; reversal of, 7
race, and New Zealand, 72, 72n16,

Pächter, Mina, 121 82
Pakeha New Zealand identity: and Ranford, Jodie, 62n2
British culture, 65, 66, 82; and Raoul of Cambrai: aggression in,
culinary practices, 62, 65, 66– 159, 169; feasting in, 157–159,
67, 69, 70–73, 72n16, 74, 76– 160; food and drink as emblems
77, 78, 79, 81–84; and of solidarity, 159–160; and
estrangement, 74–75, 80; and integrity of abstinence, 154
literary works, 65, 66; and Ratatouille (film), 20
Mansfield, 74; and Pavlova, 61, Read, Roylene, 104
62; and term "Pakeha," 62n2 realism: and epistemological
Pavlova: and national identity, 61, assumptions, 59; and
62; origins of, 61, 69–70; and Gröschner's Moskauer Eis, 101
social hierarchy, 61 Regency period, and culinary
Pavlova, Anna, 70 practice, 27
Perec, Georges, Les Choses, 181– resistance, food as source of, 109,
182, 189 121–125
Persuasion (Austen), 36, 58 Roman de la rose, 178n15
Pétain, Maréchal, 200 Roman de Perceforest, 173
Petkanas, Christopher, 194 Le Roman des Eles, 163
Phillips, Jock, A Man's Country? Romani cultural identity: and
The Image of the Pakeha Male, community food preparation,
68, 69 110–111, 115–116, 120, 124–
Pitt, William the Younger, 32n8, 57, 125; and culinary practices, 104,
57n77 105, 105–106n3, 106, 106n5,
Playtime (film), 189–190, 191, 192, 106n6, 107, 108–110, 114–118,
192n26 120; food and foodways as
Plunket Society, 80, 80n26 metaphors for, 114–120, 126;
Poilâne bread, 196n36 food as source of resistance,
Pollack, Sydney, 183–184n6 109, 121–125; and gender roles,
Powell, Julie, 192n29 110, 120, 122, 125; and
Pride and Prejudice (Austen): and hospitality, 109; and medicinal
culinary practice, 33n11, 35, 36; remedies, 111–113; and old
and men's attitude to food, 43; wood, 110–111; and oral
and moral economy, 36, 41 transmission of foodways, 113–
Pride and Prejudice (film): and 114; and secrecy, 113; and
appetite, 36n16, 40n29, 52, 53, special foods, 110, 113, 126
54–55; culinary practice in, 52– Romani people: stereotypes of,
53, 54n65, 55; and drinking, 55, 105n1, 109, 109n9, 111, 123,
55n69; versions of, 48, 48n39 126; and tea, 111, 112–113, 126
Proust, Marcel, 130, 186, 205, 211– Rosenberg, Sinti Otto, 108
212 Ross, Kristin, 188–189
Prud'homme, Alex. See My Life in Rouanet, Marie, 186
France (Child with Alex
Prud'homme) Sabatier, André, 202
222 Index
Sabrina (1954) (film), 183, 183n6, social relations, field of, and New
190n24 Zealand, 64, 66, 67, 79–80
Sabrina (1996) (film), 183–184n6 The Song of Roland, 163
Sachse, Bert, 70 South Asian cuisine, and New
Salon des Arts Ménagers, 184 Zealand culinary practices, 82
Scholliers, Peter, 108n7 Spence, Jonathan, 17
Sense and Sensibility (Austen): and Stein, Gertrude, 185
abstinence from food, 38–40, Steward, Mary Anne, 72n16
40n28; and class issues, 28; and Stojka, Ceija: artwork of, 105,
culinary practice, 40n29; and 105n2, 106, 122;
men's attitude to food, 43; and autobiographies of, 107–108,
moral economy, 36 110, 114, 115, 121, 122; on
Sense and Sensibility (film): concentration camps, 121–125;
abstinence from food, 49, 51; and cultural identity, 108–109;
culinary practice in, 48–51, and Lovara tales, 108, 114; oral
49n42, 49n46, 52 stories of, 108–120, 126;
Shakespeare, William, Macbeth, performance in works of, 107,
172, 175 108, 113, 118, 124, 126; and
Shapiro, Laura, 186 recipe for cooking hedgehog,
Sharpe, Arthur, A View of 104, 105, 105–106n3, 106,
Wenderholme, Auckland, 64 106n5, 107–110, 113, 160n6;
social entertaining: and culinary use of "Zigeuner," 105n1
practices, 29–31, 34, 60; and Stojka, Ceija, stories of:
Pavlova, 61–62 "Christmas," 122–125; "The
social hierarchy: and Austen's Four Brothers and the Disloyal
letters, 31; and Austen's novels, Wife," 114–116, 117, 120; "The
27, 29, 33–34, 33n9, 41, 44–45, Hedgehog and His Wife," 117–
46, 47, 60; and chansons de 118, 120; "Why the Rom
geste, 162, 162n6, 163, 165, remained With His Wife," 118–
166, 168, 169; and culinary 120
practices, 27, 29, 33–34, 33n9, Streep, Meryl, 192n29
54, 55–56, 58, 73; and culinary Sturm-Maddox, Sara, 180
redistribution, 41, 44–45, 46, sugar: and Georgian period, 32,
47, 78; and films of Austen's 32n8, 50; and New Zealand
novels, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55–56; culinary practices, 82
and Mann's The Magic Suite française (Némirovsky): and
Mountain, 131–132; and appetite, 204; and class issues,
Pavlova, 61 204–209, 207n16, 208n17, 210,
social history: and Austen, 28, 60; 211; critical reception of, 198,
of New Zealand, 62 200–201, 200–201n7; egotism
social imaginary, and and altruism juxtaposed in, 210,
epistemological assumptions, 211, 212; food associated with
59–60 characters, 198, 203–210,
social judgments, and culinary 205n14; food as symbolic
practice, 34, 35–36 indicator of moral fiber, 198,
209; and French culture, 210–
211; and German occupation,

199, 202, 203, 204, 209, 211; United States, cuisine of, 193, 194
lack of Jewish characters in,
200, 202, 210, 211; and material Valentine, Gill, 107, 124, 126
loss, 203; and Némirovsky's values of honor, and chansons de
notes on characters, 203n13; geste, 153–154, 158–159, 164–
and Prix Renaudot, 198; 165, 166, 169n13
publication of, 198–199; use of Vietnamese immigrants, and
food in, 201–203, 201–202n9, culinary practices, 107
203n12, 205–206, 211–212; Voltaire, 136
writing of, 199–200
Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 201n7 Weber, Max, 60n82
Sutton, David, 113–114, 211 Weiss, Jonathan, 200, 202, 202n11
swaggers, 73, 73n17 West Germany, and German
symbolic capital: and Austen's Democratic Republic, 89, 90,
novels, 60; and New Zealand 91, 94
culinary practices, 77, 78, 83; Wierlacher, Alois, 108n7
and Pavlova, 61–62 Wild, Rainer, 108n7
Wilder, Billy, 183, 183n6, 190n24
Talmud, Andrea, 201n9 William in the Monastery: and
Tati, Jacques, 188–190, 192 alimentary economies, 160–161;
Taylor, Charles, 59n78 and appetite, 161, 163, 165, 168,
tea: and Austen's letters, 31–32; and 169; and feasting, 168–169; and
breakfast, 33n9; and films of food as element of commerce,
Austen's novels, 49, 50–52, 53, 160, 161–162, 163; and food as
54, 55; history of, 32n8; and moral world of Church, 160;
Mann's The Magic Mountain, and food procurement, 161–162,
142, 145; and New Zealand 163, 165, 168, 169; and gift
culinary practices, 70–71, 73, economy, 161, 162–163, 165–
74, 76–78, 79, 82, 83; and 166, 167; and honor, 164–165,
Romani people, 111, 112–113, 166; and individual identity,
126 164–165, 168, 169; and warrior
Tebben, Maryann, 11 aristocracy, 160–165, 169
Terrace Congregational Church, William of Orange Cycle, 162, 166–
Terrace Tested Recipes, 70 167n10
Thompson, Emma, 49n42, 50n48, Wilson, Kim, 31–32, 33n9
50n49 Wolf, Christa: and East German
Thompson, E. P., 57n76 voice, 92; Leibhaftig, 92n8
Tomalin, Claire, 74n18 women: and abstinence from food,
Trollope, Anthony, 70n12 38–40, 40n28, 49, 51, 77–78;
Trubek, Amy B., 49n46, 56, 189, and Amadas and Ydoine, 178;
206 and appetite, 37–40, 40n28, 49,
Truman, Harry, 185 51; and chansons de geste, 156;
Trusler, John, The Honours of the and French cuisine, 193–194;
Table for the Use of Young and moral economy, 36–38; and
People, 37 New Zealand culinary practices,
224 Index
74, 75, 76–77, 78, 79–80; and women, 62, 67, 71–72, 71n15,
New Zealand social capital, 65, 78–79, 83; and U.S. culinary
83; and Romani culinary practices, 193, 194
practices, 110, 111, 114–118, Women's Weekly, 66, 80
120, 122; and social hierarchy, Wright, Joe, 48n39
60; study of New Zealand rural

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Cuisine and Symbolic Capital

Cuisine and Symbolic Capital:

Cheleen Ann-Catherine Mahar

This book first published 2010

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Copyright © 2010 by Cheleen Ann-Catherine Mahar and contributors

ISBN (10): 1-4438-2219-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2219-0

List of Images ............................................................................................ vii

Culinary Translations of Identity: From Britain to China

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 27

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 61

Food as Metaphor in Contemporary German Writing

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 88

Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 104

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 130

Love, Feasting and the Symbolic Power of Food in French Writing

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 152

Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 172

Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 181

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 198

Figure 1. A Waterfall in dusky Bay, April 1773, by William Hodges.

Figure 2. A View of Wenderholm, Auckland 1880, by Arthur Sharpe,

Figure 3. Poster Emigration to New Zealand. In Phillips, 1987 A Man’s

Figure 4. Playtime (Jacques Tati).

Fiigure 5. Playtime (Jacques Tati).

This collection of interdisciplinary essays examines food as it mediates

Each essay focuses upon a variety of cultures and literary traditions in

Michelle Bloom is Associate Professor of French and Comparative

Marina Caspari, nee Eidecker completed graduate studies at Westfälische

Andrew Cowell is Professor of French and Italian and Linguistics at the

Denyse Delcourt is a writer and a medievalist. She is the author of two

Lorely French is Distinguished University Professor and Professor of

Fulbright Commission. She is presently co-editor of Pacific Coast

Cheleen Ann-Catherine Mahar is Professor of Anthropology and Chair

Simona Moti is a PhD candidate in the German Department at the

Jann Purdy earned her doctorate from the University of California,

Chris Wilkes is Professor of Sociology and Vice-Provost for Research at

In Phillipe Massonnet’s humorous 2003 story “La crêperie de Pékin”

translation involved in importing French crepes to China entails

To Translate or Not to Translate

them pictographically. He thus keeps the text in French rather than

Ling serves as Chen’s “interprète,” [translator] for instance, in order to ask

Consuming Literature and Food

It would be inaccurate to say that the French version of Madame Bovary

Chen’s self-consciousness as narrator allows him to acknowledge the

baguette. Chen’s commentary is contingent upon the concepts of cultural

Chen’s humor lies in his description of his physical movements,

mâcher moins bruyamment qu’en Chine, pour respecter le code de la

Cultural and Culinary Translations

present there. Understanding the Other (language and culture) requires

Massonnet expresses Chen’s economic indigestion when the protagonist

Importing Crepes: Sanlitun, Beijing, China

customers. For renowned chef Daniel Boulud of the eponymous New

Deng Xiaoping and/in France: “Il faut prendre

meeting with the anonymous Grand Dirigeant (165). Massonnet’s Great

In France, Deng studied, worked in factories and engaged in (communist)

architecture. Nor is there anything in the record – the archives of French

Evans continues by specifying that other “worker-students” did engage in

influence on the Chinese, detracts from the cross-cultural project.29

China's astonishing economic development, and to the steering of China

Deng’s French experiences offer a historical explanation for “Le Grand

– or in any case declaring them openly. However, the need to import