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.