Cooking to Write

On the indelible link fastening together these two pursuits.

There are some writers who love to describe food and others for whom it is a bore. So they omit to do so altogether. Naturally, one surmises that their characters must eat to sustain themselves—perhaps some fructified manna ladled out once a day, rustled up from on high. Or maybe, as an afterthought, the author remembers to detail an errant slice of pizza midway through the novel, in an otherwise slow and trickling chapter.

Whereas some writers include food in their works with all the proper relish due to something which, firstly, humans cannot do with out, and secondly, is the stuff of such sense-enchanting pleasure.

Children’s books were often galleries of food, even when they didn’t contain illustrations—like Enid Blyton’s laden wicker baskets with well-stuffed sandwiches and the perennial ‘lashings of ginger beer’. Anne Shirley of L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables is always clamouring after some form of cake, or ruining some form of soup, or wishing after lemonade.

But more fearsome tomes of adult literature can preoccupy themselves with food too, when the writer wishes this. In Edmund Spenser’s mammoth, 1,500 page epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590; 1596), he decides to take the reader to the allegorical castle of ‘Temperance’. The poem mainly recalls the exploits of varyingly stupid knights, as they swagger around at feasts and jousting tourneys, or canter around on horseback and slay dragons—all the while being seduced by various nymphs, fairies, and pagan goddesses. But the visit to the castle of Temperance reverberates as a lull in the book, a change of pace, a catching of breath. Never one to waste even a word, however, Spenser uses the castle of Temperance to describe how a man should look after himself, so as to perform at his best physically, morally, and intellectually. In the great bowels of the castle, in the kitchen there is a steward named ‘Diet’, and another servant named ‘Appetite’, and a cook named ‘Concoction’, alongside his overworked commis chef: ‘Digestion’. These latter figures especially are accustomed to a noxious, basement world of grime and ‘scum’, but they work in ‘goodly order’ and with ‘great workmanship’. These menfolk help regulate not only the dietary habits of the castle’s inhabitants, but the moral habits, too. The castle belongs to the princess Alma, who herself is the very vision of modesty and ‘Shamefastnesse’, and living with her are several old ‘honorable sages’, who give Alma shrewd advice on ‘how to gouerne [govern] well’, and are generally filled with ‘sharpe foresight, and working wit, / That neuer idle was, ne once could rest a whit.’ The castle of Temperance is a place of industry and learning. This begins in the kitchen. Immediately after the sojourn to the castle, Spenser beckons his reader to stay and listen to a tale, a fantastical ‘chronicle of Briton kings’—an entirely made up history of England! Giants are slain. Beasts are toppled. Heroes are made. England comes to be.

Food makes virtue and virtue makes moral actors, and moral actors beget strong nations. It all ends in heroism and accomplishment, triumph. This is not so obscure an idea. Today, when we write about food—or inversely read others’ writing about food (whether through a recipe blog, or lifted from a superbly produced cookbook)… the needle of our moral compass fidgets and spasms.

One thinks of books like Dr. Mark Hyman’s seductively titled Young Forever, a book claiming to inform you how to eat for longevity. Or chef Jamie Oliver’s matter-of-fact Eat Yourself Healthy. Or Dr. Chris van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People, an exposé of our food system—how food is manufactured, marketed, and meddled with so as to make it as appealing to the consumer (that’s us) as possible, even to the detriment of their weight and health. Now, I don’t think all doctors or nutritionists writing books are charlatans, even as there is in-fighting raging on within the subgenre. For example, Dr. Joshua Wolrich, in counter-rebellion, wrote a book in response to what he viewed as the misinformation and fearmongering of these other, forenamed dietary advice books. He named it, with a pinprick of polemic, Food Isn’t Medicine. And that was precisely what he argued.

One step back, there are writers who are less bothered about making a scientific claim for the food they love to cook and want us to love to cook too—but whom nonetheless angle their recipes as healthy. Here, one thinks of writers like Emily English, Joe Wicks, Ella Mills (who you might know better as ‘Deliciously Ella’), Melissa Hemsley, Sadia Badiei (‘Pick Up Limes’), and Amelia Freer. I hasten to add—these are just the published bestsellers!

None of this is new.

In sixteenth century England, writers were also troubled with people’s diets, and believed in making apparent the connection between eating well and moderately with good health—and with virtue—then as now.

‘Many People beside my self have found benefit by the Observations following, which consists in a Right ordering the Dyet, and in a certain Moderation of our Meat and Drink; such a moderation I mean, as brings Strength and Vigour both to Mind and Body..’¹ So writes Thomas Tryon, a bigmouth who felt that an overly opulent diet (meat and sauce and fruit—believe me when I say that there is nothing early modern health writers hated more than people eating sauces and fruits!) was both profligately expensive and, furthermore, a cause of ill health. Tryon was just one amongst many, a militant band of wellness influencers four centuries before the term was coined.

However, there is a world of food writing which trifles not with health nor, indeed, with virtue.

There are people whose organising philosophy in food and in life is just as the writer Virginia Woolf put it: ‘One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.’

There is breed of people who have shorn food of its status as a signaller of health and of dietary discipline, who are deeply obsessed with food and with writing.

Journalist and chef and maestra of aesthetics (those both visual and textual), Nigella Lawson unsurprisingly studied English Literature at university. She later became the resident food writer for Vogue magazine—for many, the tailor’s measuring yardstick of sophistication. When I was younger, I remember revelling in the minute, writerly details of her recipes—she would have me arranged my prepared meatballs ‘in concentric circles’!

The love of lyric and wit and feeling, whilst it perforce moves many people to bear their heart and to write, also engenders the need in many of the same people to feed and to cook. Writers and cooks are simpatico. You have to anticipate how things will feel. If I add a dash more salt and a lick more fat, what will this achieve for the end result of the meal? Conversely, if I break my protagonist’s heart, and deny them a happy ever after with their love, what will this change for my novel?

Writers and cooks must pay an exquisite amount of attention to the world. Our world is replete with a certain kind of information, encoded so as only to be discovered through the senses. For who would know without having eaten it, the soft salt of the taste of feta, or the perfect sweetness of a pink lady apple? Who would know where lips rightfully go until having kissed? What sunburn feels like until being scorched and baked through?

There is an extent to which experience is a guessing game. Empathy is informed by our own past experiences and also our ability to draw upon said past experiences and repurpose them in new contexts. This is why our ability to empathise well improves as we age. (Little children can be empathetic, of course. But they build the muscle beautifully with time. Your four-year-old might see you involuntarily cry and think to bring you their favourite stuffed animal. This is lovely, because it’s their favourite thing in the world, next to you, and ice cream. But your best friend, knowing you were glum, might think to take you out for dinner and surprise you with flowers, and actually know what to say when you nestle your head on their shoulder. They are more able to extrapolate from an abstract idea of sadness your specific experience of it.)

Moreover, we do often get better at knowing what something will feel like—even without having experienced it yet, as we grow up. We get better at imagining what a food will taste like before having ever eaten it. Writing sharpens your ability to imagine what certain events will do for a plot, for a community, for a character. Cooking hones your ability to prophesy what tiny alterations will impact the cohesion of a vision. And both, aside from your improved ability to make predictions, invite you to drink more deeply of the material world. From there you can decide whether or not you wish to float up to the metaphysical.

In these heady days of the Internet, those charitable souls who upload their recipes for all of us kitchen plebeians to use are often ridiculed for how long and tediously descriptive their recipes can be. Before we even reach the quantities of ingredients needed, we have been transported to so-and-so’s Appalachian grandmother’s homestead. Or perhaps to a bustling restaurant in a shadowy corner of Ho Chi Minh. These writers try to connect with us as we sift through their words, whilst we are preoccupied with whether or not we have all the right cupboard staples for a pasta dish. But there are some of us with more than a degree of patience for well-written, well-imagined recipes. Sometimes, yes, we do want to be taken on a whistle-stop tour of southern Italy before we get into the steps for making gnocchi—provided the writing is good, and sensuous, and inviting.

This is before we even investigate the recent explosion in writing on and about hospitality. The tenets of friendliness which make someone a twinkling conversationalist, it turns out, also makes one a terrifically engaging writer, which is perhaps unsurprising. (You didn’t ask, but my present favourite hospitality writers are Olly Rowe and Liturgy in the Home with Maria…)

Food writers are brethren with travel writers.

Travel writers, despite what their genus and literary sport might suggest, are less commonly intrepid backpackers crossing the Andes mountains with nothing but a change of underwear, half a packet of grainy biscuits and a handful of semaphore flags to signal, in extremis, ‘S-O-S’, than they are effete socialites who enjoy nursing a cortado outside a cafe, languishing on a rusted iron chair which had once been painted the colour of terracotta, positioned on a street so steeply inclined that the less hardy of heart suffer attacks of vertigo—in Valletta or Naples or someplace. I recall now with a shifty crescent moon of a grin that in Richard Curtis’s film Notting Hill (1999), the romantic lead—a spineless but quite delicately feeling man— owns a bookshop entirely dedicated to works of travel writing. (One needn’t detail that he is played by Hugh Grant, because as far as I am concerned Mr. Curtis is unable to make a film without Hugh Grant in it.)

Books of travel writing are often physically beautiful ones. We can think of them as paradigmatic coffee table books, glossy and large: it takes two hands to hold them, and maybe requires one’s lap, too, as an anchor, to turn the pages. This is logical enough. High production value (fine photography; textured pages) in a book may compensate for the deficiency of the writer’s skills… since the distinguishing qualifications for becoming a travel writers are dubious. It doesn’t really matter whether one can very well write! Rather, it is of greater importance whether or not one has swanned off abroad and squatted sleazily at one’s friends’ second (and doubtless third) homes. Moreover (less disparagingly to the authors of travel writing), much like with books about delectably sensual things such as food and art, we want specifically to see what the author is banging on about. After all, we might want to go there, mightn’t we? With most other books—like novels—try as we might, we none of us are ever going to be able to scrimp together the money for a trip to Tolkien or George R. R. Martin’s nirvanas of imaginative engineering. Not even our drippingly wealthy billionaires may broach the shimmering fortresses of Rivendell.

English literature has a long history of travel writing. There are medieval tales of crusades surprising Saladin, to Chaucer’s hurdy-gurdy ribaldry as his pilgrims wended southwards to Canterbury. There is Shakespeare’s obsession with Italy, surfacing whenever he wanted to write a tragedy involving more suicide and guttural proclamations of undying love than he knew it was believable to attribute to a pallid English squire. (That, or he was a Catholic sympathiser, or worse, a full-blown Papist himself…) And then in the late sixteenth century, English courtiers in their entrepreneurial droves sailed off to America, and wrote exaggeratively, effusively, about what they saw there—the clement climate, the rolling geography, the ceaseless arability of the soil, in an effort to lure England’s no-good rotters away from the motherland, and encourage them to become farmers abroad. (The Elizabethan Poor Laws were only so utopian in their political imagination.) And by the mid-eighteenth century, cleric and writer Laurence Sterne wrote his extremely campy, hysterical Sentimental Journey, which was a semi-autobiographical jolly through France, all the while abortively wooing the poor mopey Eliza. There was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who bested everyone else’s limpid vacations to western Europe, and took herself all the way off to Byzantium, with her Turkish Embassy Letters. Italy revisited: in the early nineteenth century, the Romantic poets kept flocking off there, and usually promptly dying of lyrical torpor, surrounded by lilies and blood-stained handkerchiefs. Byron died a soldier’s death for Greece, and now there is a Greek town named Vyronas after him. And of course, the British Empire, especially at its peak in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, delivered reams and reams of writing about Asia, penned by scores of civil servants and their wives, most especially the subcontinent—making real for English readers back in the metropole the passage to India, or the tangled silk road. The last vestiges of Empire from the English point of view, before postcolonial writing, were made visible in the works of Lawrence Durrell or Olivia Manning, and their confusingly similarly named Alexandria Quartet and Levant Trilogy, respectively.

And the English have always looked mistily back to other, far-flung lands when grappling with matters of self-comprehension. There was a short-lived national myth in the sixteenth century that the English nation was merely the fallen Troy resurrected: Troynovaunt. Two centuries later, the ever-elusive poet William Blake, in one of his more lucid works of poetry, conscripted himself to the English social cause: to ‘buil[d] Jerusalem / In Englands green & pleasant Land.’ So taken was he with the idea of the English Jerusalem, that he wrote a much more complicated (and much longer) head-scratcher of a poem: Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion. Again, oddly, ‘Albion’ here is another name for England. Don’t get me wrong, I love this poem, but it’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever read. It’s got lots of wriggling allegorical worms in it. (But that’s by the by.)

Nowadays, we can use the screen to effectively recreate travel writing, too. So the television comissar at Channel 4 or the BBC sends Richard E. Grant on his ‘modern Odyssey’, conjecturally retracing Odysseus’s steps, or Michael Palin to Babylon, or Susan Calman on a cruise up by Whitby, or whathaveyou.

But travel writing still exists on paper. And it still connotes the stuff of upper middle class society, the subtle tastes of their civil consumption. In many ways, if it ever had any of it, travel writing has lost its rugged sexuality—its jouissance. There is nothing in it which D. H. Lawrence, say, would recognise as wholly human, in his belief in embodied existence, as we term it somewhat flatly within the academe.

Travel writing is the truest, most culturally mediated place of contact between the English—at least the well-bred sort—and the continent. Why? The Englishman gets to look, and not ever have to touch. See, and not taste. He is not an altogether indifferent creature (stiff upper lip be damned!), but he is a biologically fearful one. It makes him afraid of writing an everlasting legal Constitution or of overthrowing his royal family for longer than a puny Interregnum of eleven years.

The Englishman of the twenty-first century has nowhere to go. The imperialist in him has been (if not shot point-blank) neutered.

The Englishman peers eschatologically at the villas of Provence, with his own sort of francophone Orientalism hotboxing his view like an out-of-date spectacle prescription. France, for him, is where he will either come to die—or come just before he begins to die as a last eudaimonic hurrah, before his family finally wash their hands of him and relegate him to a nursing home, smelling rankly of ammonia and TCP.

The Englishman invests himself, through the pages of a book of travel writing, into the world offered by the continent. It is crucial to the English mythos that Doggerland was drowned. Doggerland is the primitively sonorous (de-dum-duh, it drums syllabically, audibly Anglo-Saxon) name we have for a land-mass which once existed, but is no more. Doggerland connected the southeastern coast of England with the northwestern phalange of the continent, of France and Benelux. Now instead we have a watery ravine: the sea of the English Channel. We can read as much or as little as we like into the fact that England is separated from the rest of the continent it purports to belong to (and to who else could we be palmed off?). In earnest we can try to avoid being geographical determinists about the whole matter, but the fact of the matter is that the Channel makes a difference. It marks England’s original excommunication from Europe.

Yes, the Englishman cups his hand over his squinting blue eyes and looks out over the coast at the shoals of market-fresh sardines, his appetite piqued by the idea of these slithering in frothy garlic butter, even as his stomach somersaults—what if they don’t cook them properly; I’m sure I’ll get food poisoning—ah, better not, then. It is a truth more and more acknowledged that, in Britain, we catch an awful lot of beautiful fish and seafood—and then sell it all off to the continent. Langoustines. The very word, to me, encapsulates the English learnt abhorrence of our own culture (what’s left of it), cooking, and history!

Still sighing and wistful, the Englishman toys with wearing semi-rumpled off-colour white linen shirts, the boxes of cigarettes—better and more sublime for the sheer reason that they were bought in Milan, stuffing his feet into boating shoes.

My talented friend littlewitch wrote a piece about England, in which she excerpted from the American writer (in this instance, travel writer) Bill Bryson’s work, Notes From A Small Island (1995). As an aside, Bryson contemplates the sweets and desserts of England (decidedly lacklustre, he opines) and what they reveal about the English character:

‘…the British are so easy to please. It is the most extraordinary thing. They actually like their pleasures small. That is why, I suppose, so many of their treats – teacakes, scones, crumpets, rock cakes, rich tea biscuits, fruit Shrewsburys – are so cautiously flavourful. [...] Offer them something genuinely tempting – a slice of gateau or a choice of chocolate from a box – and they will nearly always hesitate and begin to worry that it’s unwarranted and excessive, as if any pleasure beyond a very modest threshold is vaguely unseemly.’

My favourite food writer is Diana Henry. The food she writes about making is really good—ie. she’s not fobbing you off with old rubbish. But it’s the words for me, always. Like Scheherazade she took you zipping around to all these different far-flung locales, peeking in, but never forgetting that readers too get hungry. She includes the most important part of the recipe (no, not something trite as love)—which is of course a whetted appetite. I can truly flip to any page in her astounding How To Eat A Peach and read you her description of food. You will want to eat it immediately.

But it is written with a classic sense of British (Henry is Northern Irish) self-deprecation. She rues how tricky it was (cultural blinkers) to learn to host a satisfying lunch for her friends. For she’d always either be over-exerting herself, or end up spending too much time couped up in the kitchen to do more than exchange pleasantries with any of her esteemed guests. ‘…it’s difficult, if it isn’t part of your birthright - by which I mean you’re not French or Italian - to present food just at that perfectly pitched level of casualness.’

And yet for all this view for practicality, Diana Henry still thorough imbues (as though dangling a bouquet garni) her writing with feeling and body. Take this: ‘…pan con tomate leaves me wiping oil from my face. Eating it is visceral in a way that feels very Spanish to me. It’s about greed, hunger, oil-smeared skin.’ By the end of the recipe book, you’ve eaten duck gizzards with her in the Dordogne, while the eccentric restauranteur bashed out some jazz on his grand piano. You’ve also watched, pained, an impoverished old woman gum her way through a pound of oranges, and learnt to become an adult in taste at a bar in Chelsea, sampling one’s first oysters. (A rite of passage I have not yet undergone.)

Indeed, all of what I am saying here compounds itself with murkier intrigue when we consider hunger as an animus for a writer. Hunger is, potentially, a great wellspring for she who would be a writer. In fact, I would argue that hunger drives two species of writer—and any inter-pollination between the two: the food writer and the romance writer.

What would Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre be without hunger, say?

I’ve argued before that we writers have a predilection to write both only about sadness, and from a place of sadness—you can read said essay from long ago here. Even if it seems we are writing about something else, we are ultimately being maudlin, and value most our creativity when we want something very badly but mayn’t have it (like a beloved, who does not reciprocate our feelings). This amounts to something like logic: in the not having, we synthesise a parallel, pictured having, by writing a love song or an elegiac, romantic novel. Or, if that is not what we are doing, then we are converting the energy of our despair into something proactive: making art.

Writers need hunger, but I think controversially that they also need food. Writers need sadness and sufferance, I’m afraid, but they also need happiness and joy. All things are sluiced together in a kind of emotional hotpot, and used as fuel for our greatest and most enduring literature.

In recent months, there has been a renewal of interest in where we drowsy English landlubbers came from, and who we’ve been. Chef and baker Annie Mae Herring has led the revolution with her infinitely popular series recreating the ‘lost’ or ‘endangered’ recipes of the British Isles—food that our grandparents might’ve loved and lived off, but which we latter-born moderns might never even have heard of. Cosmopolitanism is a brilliant thing, but I realised that I was spending all of my time in the kitchen riffing on variations of pasta. Delicious though this might be, I am not a whit Italian, and there are genuinely millions of bona fide Italians doing the job much better than I, making the real deal (which I never shall), whilst in the meantime the recipes of my own people—the English and the Irish—I left unmade, untried. Pasta ain’t falling out of favour any time soon.

When I was about eight or nine, I used to force my mum to watch cooking shows with me. My three favourites were Lorraine Pascale, Nigella Lawson, and Delia Smith. Now, I didn’t mind Jamie Oliver so much, but he was really one of my mum’s boyfriends so it was out of my own goodwill that I let him be broadcast. I tolerated the Hairy Bikers (God rest Dave Myers’s soul) and found Mary Berry delightful, but back then I did not appreciate the wisdom and sound foundations of her—to my tastes—slightly staid, old-fashioned and very English cooking (which was not a good thing). My mum spent my girlhood being exceptionally patient with me and so we would watch these elegant chefs prance around their kitchens (although, in the case of Rachel Khoo’s famously poky Paris kitchen, there was maybe not so much prancing) of an evening, whilst she sipped wine languorously, and I, sitting upright and attentively, drank milk out of a wine glass. She was the precursor to Ainsley du Rose.

Some children also become similarly interested in the kitchen, and they end up on something impressive like Junior MasterChef or Junior Bake-Off, and have pint-sized meltdowns about the structural integrity of their pavlovas or the rendering of their beef chuck. I was an idle child, however, and preferred the idea of producing these fabulous dinners. But this is not the case anymore, and at twenty-three, most evenings I can be found in my own tiny kitchen, attacking some new recipe or idea with both gumption and gusto, if not always with success.

All this is to say: if you know a writer or if you are a writer, I think you stand to benefit from cooking a really delicious meal, and eating lots of it.

Thank you for reading, as ever.

Still Life by Kenne Gregoire (Swiss; 2023)

1. Tryon, Thomas, 1634-1703. The Way to Save Wealth Shewing how a Man may Live Plentifully for Two-Pence a Day. London: 1695. http://proxy.mul.missouri.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/books/way-save-wealth-shewing-how-man-may-live/docview/2240908956/se-2.