Beef, greens and potatoes: What's wrong with the "homely trinity"?

For supper tonight we had "Beef Pot Roast" à la The Joy of Cooking, served with mashed potatoes and swiss chard.  Cooking the roast was an all-afternoon project, well-seasoned with apprehension.  My pot roasts usually turn out tough and dry, so I gave up buying roasts a long time ago.  But for some reason the grocery store was selling round roasts for the price of ground beef this week, too good a deal to pass up.  I knew that if the roast turned out there would be at least two very happy people at my table.  Wonder of wonders, it did turn out!  And the whole table was happy...about the beef, anyway.

The moment I decided to serve swiss chard with the beef & potatoes, as I visualized the brown-white-green on the plate, it struck me that we'd be eating the despised second course from Virginia Woolf's dinner at Fernham College:  "Next came beef with its attendant greens and potatoes..."  And, thinking with taste fully engaged (the roast smelled lovely), I could savor more acutely than otherwise the irony that Woolf's idea of a plain, dull dinner was my idea of a special, comfortable dinner.

So I had to ask myself:  What has transformed Woolf's "homely trinity" into our rare indulgence?  It's not the ingredients themselves:  we're both eating beef, greens and potatoes.  Is it changed cultural connotations?  Changes in the foods themselves?  Different cooking methods?  Maybe a bit of all three.

On the cultural front, I can't help wondering if Virginia Woolf was being a snob about the potatoes and greens (maybe the beef, too, if she preferred partridge).  Both potatoes and greens, I've been learning, are historically associated with the poorest people.  In the early modern period, greens were the diet of those who couldn't afford anything else.  As David Gentilcore explains in Pomodoro!, salad was what starving Italians ate, foraged from outside their back door.  When salad appeared on elite tables in the 16th C, it was meant to stimulate, not satisfy, the appetite.  Potatoes apparently shared rather similar connotations in 19th C Britain, being associated with the poor papist Irish.  Michael Pollan describes British distaste for this underground food of poverty to excellent effect in the final section of his book The Botany of Desire (2002).  Boiled potatoes also figured in the "appalling diet" of George Orwell's Wigan miners in 1937, I noticed - which sits oddly with Michael Pollan's observation that just potatoes and milk can provide a nutritionally adequate diet.

I suspect changed cultural connotations might be the biggest factor in our altered appreciation of the "homely trinity," but there are some practical differences to consider as well.  It's the same food, and yet it's not.  Presumably the beef I bought at the grocery store yesterday is a far cry from "the rumps of cattle in a muddy market" that Virginia Woolf could imagine in 1928, now that we grow cattle just to eat them.  I suppose even our potatoes and swiss chard are different from the "sprouts curled and yellowed at the edge" that Woolf's "women with string bags" bargained for on Monday mornings.  Michael Pollan has fairly convinced me of that, though he and Virginia Woolf seem to disagree over the relative quality of 1920s market sprouts (great grandmother's food, you know...).

As for how the food was cooked, I would think Virginia Woolf could tell the difference between poor cooking and poor food. Still, changes in cooking methods might also account for her dislike of beef, potatoes and greens.  If the beef was tough and stringy, if it wasn't bathed in glossy gravy like ours was; if the potatoes were overcooked and gummy (it happened once when I was a kid - a pot of mashed potatoes that didn't turn out - they were terrible!); if the greens were bitter, as swiss chard from my garden sometimes is, or cooked to a mush, or poorly washed...well, all those things would make the "the homely trinity" pretty disgusting and, yes, genius-annihilating.

This blog post may not be the fancy fiction that Virginia Woolf required sole, wine and partridges to compose, but it's been great fun to think creatively, on a supper of beef, greens and potatoes, about how tastes have changed.

George Orwell on Why Food Matters

'What's the most important thing in the world?' ...'Food!'

Wigan Pier (photo by Dave Green)

This convenient quote comes from George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), a book about the terrible living conditions of unemployed coal miners in northern England in the 1930s.  Orwell's work is half investigative journalism (apparently the adjective 'creative' also applies), half social critique.  The first half of the book, the creative-investigative part, contains several memorable depictions of awful food.  Thirteen years after I read the book for a British history class, I still remember the tinned milk and the filthy boarding house.  The book also comes to mind when I read Virginia Woolf's Room of One's Own - I think because both Orwell and Woolf paint such powerful pictures of how physical misery paralyzes human endeavor (whether literary genius or simple work ethic).

All these concerns - bad food, social conscience, humanity's future - connect to more recent work on modern global food issues, such as Michael Pollan's books or Professor Brownell's food psychology lectures at Yale.  Yet even though I can quote Orwell saying, eighty years ago, that food is the most important thing in the world, I have a strong suspicion that his underlying logic for why food matters is quite distant from our 21st-century obsession with food.  The two big clues, for me, that Orwell was thinking something quite different from, for example, Michael Pollan, are a) Orwell's obsession with British racial qualities - this is his stated reason for worrying about unemployed coal-miners subsisting on fake tinned food; and b) the fact that none of the food in the book is appetizing - i.e., food itself isn't Orwell's point.  My working thesis is that food is still merely a tool for Orwell, as it is for Virginia Woolf, whereas for us it has become an end in itself.

Orwell uses food to excellent effect.  The first chapter of Road to Wigan Pier, describing the Brookers' boarding house where he first stays in Wigan, is a nauseous tour-de-force setting the sensory tone for the rest of the book.  Orwell deliberately mingles filth and food to accentuate the squalor of the place and its inmates.  No one in the house eats well, but the ones who can't afford the "board" half of room-and-board are the lucky ones.  They eat their own bacon and "bread-and-marg" out of their suitcases, or "packets of fish and chips" bought from somewhere outside.  (Orwell seems to consider this pretty poor eating - but, as with Woolf's food, my sense of taste isn't helping me much.)  The boarding house menu is more varied, but "uniformly disgusting":  it is "pale," stale, formless (boiled potatoes, rice pudding, tinned "steak pudding"...whatever that is) - and filthy.  Orwell finally lets go when the two ends of the eating process meet:  "On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave." (p. 17)

This chapter sets the book's sensory tone (smells, tastes, colours and textures), but its moral tone doesn't match the remainder of Part I.  Orwell openly blames the boarding house proprietors for its condition, perhaps because they are making a living on it.  When he comes to describe similar living conditions among the unemployed miners, however, he is at pains to show that they have no real choice in the matter.  Bad eating is a critical part of his case, because here he admits there is an element of choice at play:

"[T]he English palate, especially the working-class palate, now rejects good food almost automatically. The number of people who prefer tinned peas and tinned fish to real peas and real fish must be increasing every year, and plenty of people who could afford real milk in their tea would much sooner have tinned milk - even that dreadful tinned milk which is made of sugar and cornflour and has UNFIT FOR BABIES on the tin in huge letters." (p. 99)

Besides fake tinned food, the "appalling diet" of the unemployed miner's household consists of "white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potatoes." (p. 95)  Orwell argues that the low-class preference for fake food is symptomatic, and symbolic, of the chronically unemployed miners' lack of hope.  It may be mathematically possible for these families to eat a healthier diet, but it is psychologically unlikely:

"[T]he peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. ...When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty.' There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. ...White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don't nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated..."  (p. 95-96)

These anxieties sound familiar, but why is Orwell worried?  Here is his explanation of what makes food the most important thing in the world:

     "When I was a small boy at school a lecturer used to come once a term and deliver excellent lectures on famous battles of the past, such as Blenheim, Austerlitz, etc. He was fond of quoting Napoleon's maxim 'An army marches on its stomach,' and at the end of his lecture he would suddenly turn to us and demand, 'What's the most important thing in the world?' We were expected to shout 'Food!' and if we did not do so he was disappointed.
     "Obviously he was right in a way. A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion. The Great War, for instance, could never have happened if tinned food had not been invented. And the history of the past four hundred years in England would have been immensely different if it had not been for the introduction of root-crops and various other vegetables at the end of the Middle Ages, and a little later the introduction of non-alcoholic drinks (tea, coffee, cocoa) and also of distilled liquors to which the beer-drinking English were not accustomed. Yet it is curious how seldom the all-importance of food is recognised. You see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops, but none to cooks or bacon-curers or market-gardeners...
     "So perhaps the really important thing about the unemployed, the really basic thing if you look to the future, is the diet they are living on." (p. 91-92)

For Orwell, food matters because it shapes bones, fuels wars, and determines national character.  Whether or not one accepts the racial logic (my question is, how does it differ from modern genetics?), Orwell's food is firmly anchored in history.  No ahistorical evolutionary food chain here.  Even the attraction of cheap sweets is explained in social, not evolutionary terms.

It's really quite interesting how Orwell's worries in 1937 do, and yet don't, map onto 21st C global health worries.  Orwell's idea of a healthier diet is familiar-looking:  get away from tinned food, eat brown bread, eat more fruits & vegetables and drink water.  "Nutritionism" is notably absent from his vocabulary, but he notes the lack of color (pale, grey, black) in food as a sign of dietary deficiency.  Yet Orwell's underlying concern is British racial (and moral) degeneration, which suddenly jerks us back to the 1930s.  The reason why the unemployed prefer empty-calorie foods is portrayed differently, too.  From Orwell's perspective, eating healthy is simply unattractive.  It isn't "tasty."  The documentary Food, Inc. (2008), on the other hand, makes it clear that the problem today is not just taste and habit, but cost and availability.  The empty-calorie diet is not only easier and tastier, it is cheaper.  Healthy eating can be financially impossible.  (Prof. Brownell makes the same point in his Lecture 8, discussing the irony of obesity in slums.)  The point is that government spending on health education isn't enough to change a population's eating habits - and Orwell already realized that.

Luncheon at Oxbridge, Dinner at Fernham

Newnham College

Speaking of essays about food that take you somewhere, Virginia Woolf's famous depiction of luncheon at "Oxbridge" followed by dinner at "Fernham" is a fine sample of the genre.  Like Simon Schama's food essays, this first chapter of Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) is a treat to read, regardless of the fact that I can't taste the food.  The meals are a small but central part of Woolf's complaint that men have had centuries of protective luxury in which to study (Oxford & Cambridge), while women's colleges (Fernham is based on Girton & Newnham Colleges, where Woolf gave the lectures that became her book) are new, underfunded, and barely adequate for study - therefore inimical to mental inspiration.

It is a shame to lift the meal descriptions out of their full, intricate context.  I am not sure their brilliance will survive the attempt, but I shall try.  Here is the Oxbridge luncheon:

"It is a curious fact that novelists have a way of making us believe that luncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for something very wise that was done. But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten. It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a glass of wine. Here, however, I shall take the liberty to defy that convention and to tell you that the lunch on this occasion began with soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream, save that it was branded here and there with brown spots like the spots on the flanks of a doe. After that came the partridges, but if this suggests a couple of bald, brown birds on a plate you are mistaken. The partridges, many and various, came with all their retinue of sauces and salads, the sharp and the sweet, each in its order; their potatoes, thin as coins but not so hard; their sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but more succulent. And no sooner had the roast and its retinue been done with than the silent serving-man...set before us, wreathed in napkins, a confection which rose all sugar from the waves.  To call it pudding and so relate it to rice and tapioca would be an insult. Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson; had been emptied; had been filled. And thus by degrees was lit, halfway down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, ...the...profound, subtle and subterranean glow, which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse."

Girton College, from an old postcard

Here is the Fernham dinner, several pages later:

"Here was my soup. Dinner was being served in the great dining-hall. ...It was a plain gravy soup. There was nothing to stir the fancy in that. One could have seen through the transparent liquid any pattern that there might have been on the plate itself. But there was no pattern. The plate was plain. Next came beef with its attendant greens and potatoes - a homely trinity, suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddy market, and sprouts curled and yellowed at the edge, and bargaining and cheapening, and women with string bags on Monday morning. There was no reason to complain of human nature's daily food, seeing that the supply was sufficient and coal-miners doubtless were sitting down to less. Prunes and custard followed. And if any one complains that prunes, even when mitigated by custard, are an uncharitable vegetable (fruit they are not), stringy as a miser's heart and exuding a fluid such as might run in misers' veins who have denied themselves wine and warmth for eighty years and yet not given to the poor, he should reflect that there are people whose charity embraces even the prune. Biscuits and cheese came next, and here the water-jug was liberally passed round, for it is the nature of biscuits to be dry, and these were biscuits to the core. That was all. The meal was over. Everybody scraped their chairs back; the swing-doors swung violently to and fro; soon the hall was emptied of every sign of food and made ready no doubt for breakfast next morning. ...conversation for a moment flagged. The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together,...a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes."

I'm in no position to critique the respective menus, since I barely recognize most of the entrées.  (This was [admittedly British] food of my great-grandmother's era, by the way!)  It is the ambiance as much as the menu that Woolf dislikes.  The "silent serving man" at Oxbridge contrasts with the crowded dining hall and scraping chairs at Fernham.  At Oxbridge the meal lasts as long as the diners wish, while at Fernham it ends on a schedule.  The most curious thing about the two meals is Woolf's insistence that good eating is necessary to good thinking.  George Orwell says something similar in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).  Do we think this anymore, in our age of overabundance?  I associate good eating with feeling sleepy...  Good thinking goes with coffee and a muffin!

Personally, I think Woolf was too picky about the food at Fernham, but I'm not complaining about A Room of One's Own.  Like an impressionist painting, it may disintegrate upon close examination but it is a highly effective whole.  The food is fictional; Woolf is using it to capture the long history of women's exclusion from academic leisure.

Simon Schama's Food Essays

Books about food history need issues, and books about food issues need history.  It looks simple, but my intellectual stroll from tomato history to modern food debates suggests to me that food history and food issues have critical antipathies.  History is understandably careful about agendas, while careful history would unduly complicate investigative journalism.  Productive food history probably doesn't shoot from the hip, the way a best-seller needs to do to survive.  Good food history, I propose, takes time and a variety of ingredients to successfully meld the unfamiliar past with current issues.  I learned this from Simon Schama's essay about beef stew.

Simon Schama is a historian who likes to cook - and write about it, as his six essays on "Cooking and Eating" testify in Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: Writing on Politics, Ice Cream, Churchill, and My Mother (2010).  I read most of the 48 essays in the book over the past month, over half of them with great enjoyment.  The ice cream was a disappointment, and the politics were hard to follow, but Churchill and "my Mother" were excellent.  They lived in the same era - Schama was born in 1945 - and Schama uses both to reflect on how we are not what our parents were.  It's an appropriate reflection for someone who came of age in the 60s and 70s.  I'm not part of Schama's generation, but I feel the cultural tension that seems to pivot on WWII as an elephant in the room in almost any historical analysis.  Schama made the elephant more visible to me, simply by writing enthusiastically (and well) about his own experiences amidst the enormous variety of his historical and cultural expertise.  His ability to place himself squarely in his material is remarkable.  Whether using Churchill's wartime oratory to plead for "eloquence at the service of truth" (p. 156; obviously Schama's own goal), or describing his mother's antagonistic relationship with food and the kitchen as a backdrop for his own luxuriating in the experience of cooking, he somehow manages to be himself without apology and yet draw the reader into, not precise imitation, but active conviction.

To be honest, I didn't like the food or the lifestyle Schama described.  But the essays didn't need that kind of agreement to work.  Instead, I watched in fascination what Schama was doing with his food memories, his cooking experiences, and his wide-ranging historical expertise.  The memories weren't the same in each essay.  I got a bit annoyed when his mother's "Friday Night Memorial Chicken" roasted with "one solitary clove of garlic" entombed in the cavity reappeared in another essay, containing two cloves of garlic.  I know, I know, there would have been many Friday Night Memorial Chickens, and garlic cloves vary in size, so probably both memories are "true."  But the point is that the food memory is doing something more in Schama's essay than recreating the exact dish on the table.  The solitary garlic clove represents an aspect of his mother's personality, and gives depth to his own reaction in the opposite direction.  Thinking with Schama, good food essays are like scenery paintings, where we see something we wouldn't on-site.

So food history works best when it takes us somewhere?  That's doing more than describing past facts and connecting them to a current issue.  In my favourite of Schama's food essays, "Simmer of Love," he defends the value of taking a long time to cook something - namely, beef stew.  The title derives from his central story, about cooking stew with his girlfriend during a Provencal thunderstorm in the summer of 1972, but the essay is laced with relevant reminiscences from all over history and literature.  The essay pinpoints quite beautifully how modern efficiency robs us of old economies; how our [great?]-great-grandmothers' food was better than the sum of its parts, how our cooking ought to be part of our life instead of an interruption to it.  If you hear echoes of Michael Pollan here, Schama doesn't mind; he mentions Pollan's work specifically in another essay.  But I like Schama's rendition of this advice so much better than In Defense of Food.  And it actually got me out of my chair and cooking something.  Not beef stew, but a new gluten-free bread recipe that had been intimidating me.  It turned out!  And now there is a little more on my table, filling the hole left by sudden gluten intolerance.