Iconic Food Writers Toppled Off Their Pedestals

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/books/review/gourmands-way-justin-spring-julia-child.html

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THE GOURMANDS’ WAY Six Americans in Paris and the Birth of a New Gastronomy By Justin Spring Illustrated. 433 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.

Justin Spring should sue his publisher. Never has a lively book been burdened with such a ponderous title; it’s hard to believe that a writer as fine as Spring actually dreamed this one up on his own.

What should it be called? Had the publishers wanted to keep the Proust allusion they might have chosen something along the order of “In Search of Lost Meals.” Better still, they could simply have come right out and called it “A Revisionist View of All Your Favorite Food Writers.”

Spring sets out to prove that the six writers he chronicles — Julia Child, M. F. K. Fisher, Alexis Lichine, A. J. Liebling, Richard Olney and Alice B. Toklas — were responsible for making “the age-old French dialogue surrounding food, wine and the table” part of the American dialogue. I’m not convinced he’s done that, but he has achieved something much more interesting: offered us an entirely new perspective on a group of people we thought we knew.

As it turns out, we did not. Here is a Julia Child we’ve never seen before, a woman with a “sugar-coated barbed tongue.” Julia’s legions of fans, who have imagined her scrimping away in Paris on her husband’s civil-servant salary, will be surprised to learn that she landed in France with a substantial inherited fortune. (Spring helpfully puts the estimate in today’s dollars at somewhere around $12 million.)

Most American cooks know that Child joined forces with Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck (whom she called “La Super-Française”) to write “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” That Beck was an inspired cook is established fact, but Spring points out that she was also a snob of the first order. “For a private dinner,” he quotes Beck saying, “the point is to bring together people who are intellectually compatible, on the same social rung, and who share the same way of life and religion.”

If it’s something of a shock to hear an icon speak these words, the portrait Spring paints of M. F. K. Fisher is even more dismaying. He describes the woman many (myself included) revere as our greatest food writer as the author of “the most error-ridden book on French cooking ever brought out by a major American publisher.” He has little regard for her as a translator or writer, adding that she was also not much of a cook. In Spring’s view, Fisher was a liar and an alcoholic. He ultimately dismisses her, in Richard Olney’s words, as “sweet” but “essentially empty-headed,” a woman with “no palate” who wrote “trash.” It’s a devastating portrait. Mary Frances was one of my mentors, and I read through this section shouting “no, no, no!”

Olney is quite a different case. The one time I met him he seemed like an unpleasant grump, but Spring offers nothing but praise: “He was not selling himself as cooking instructor, cultural anthropologist or connoisseur of fine dining. He had no interest in celebrity either.” Spring offers an appealing portrait of an intellectual man who lived on nothing, cooked like an angel and welcomed all comers to his bohemian ménage, gathering the likes of James Baldwin and Sybille Bedford for delicious food, excellent conversation and the grand wines that were among his few indulgences. If Spring’s book does nothing else, it will turn many readers into Olney acolytes.

Spring also has kind words for A. J. Liebling, author of “one of the most delightful accounts ever written of one American gourmand’s love for Paris.” But for Liebling, it was all downhill after D-Day, and Spring’s account of his final days — ill, riddled with debt and killing himself with food — is unutterably sad.

Spring chose to focus on postwar France, but for many of the writers he chronicles those years were difficult. His Alice B. Toklas is a sad old woman, alone, impoverished and so hungry she writes recipes for an American magazine in order to gain access to the cheap food at the embassy commissary. Despite the success of her cookbook (due, at least in part, to that famous fudge recipe), Toklas made little money, and he portrays her joining forces with the journalist Poppy Cannon to produce a disastrous second cookbook. For Cannon, Spring has nothing but contempt. “Like much of what she wrote or says,” he notes at one point, “these words cannot be taken at face value.”

The major players of the postwar food world walk through this book and few are spared. James Beard is a “celebrity-driven businessman, one who had far more income-generating possibilities open to him than mere authorship.” Michael Field is “an ambitious New York-based cooking instructor and author.” Nora Ephron is “bitchy, gossipy and devious.”

All this sounds very dishy, but I don’t believe that was Spring’s intention. He is, at heart, an obsessed biographer who seems to have left no diary unopened, no letter unread, no manuscript unscrutinized. And he’s scathing about the many sloppy writers who preceded him, gleefully recounting the errors he has unearthed.

Writing a group portrait, Spring notes, freed him from “the biographer’s duty of isolating and praising the accomplishments of a single individual.” Indeed. Yet in the end his book leaves you both wistful and hungry. Spring clearly appreciates both fine writing and fine food, and his subjects inhabited a France where the dollar was strong, the food fantastic and good conversation valued. Spring may have removed your rose-colored glasses, but even his unromantic vision leaves you wishing you had been there.