On Easy Narratives
Finding stories in the cracks.
“This is a book for the servantless American cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, time schedules, children’s meals, the parent-chauffeur-den-mother syndrome, or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat.”
The oft-cited first line of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child and Simone Beck really does have it all, doesn’t it? The cookbook was first published in 1961, and Child would go on to host The French Chef on PBS beginning in 1963 and become a household name. In much of the narrativization of food in the United States, this is the moment when Americans woke up to the possibilities of so-called “good food,” prepared from scratch with intention, skill, and a lack of concern for, as the book puts it, “waistlines, time schedules, children’s meals,” etc.
Such a narrativization has been hard to shake in food media: Nearly every woman who, in Child’s wake, has introduced the U.S. middle class to a quote-unquote “new” cuisine has been referred to as “The Julia Child of….” Mayukh Sen, in his book Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America, writes of her: “Julia Child’s origin story has been told so often, through so many media, that her life’s plot points have congealed into an American myth.”
This is part of a lecture I wrote called “What Is Food Media?”
I taught this as an introduction to my recent BU gastronomy class, “The Food Essay.”
The narrativization also leaves out much from before the publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking: There’s, of course, James Beard himself, who published Hors D'Oeuvre and Canapés in 1940, a collection of his catering recipes. This was one year before the founding of Gourmet magazine and ten years before the phrase “food writer” would first appear in the pages of the New York Times. He would go on to have a live cooking show on NBC in the mid-1940s and founded the James Beard Cooking School in 1955.
But to say whether it was Child or Beard changed food in the U.S. is to miss the point: There was no one person who magically got on TV and turned every American into a gourmand; this still has not occurred, and food remains a popular but niche concern in terms of care for sourcing, technique, and culinary culture. The truth, though, is that a long-standing movement had been in place that began to flourish after Repeal Day, marking the end of Prohibition in 1933. Historian David Strauss chronicles the origins, ideals, and arguments of the gourmands of this movement in his book Setting the Table for Julia Child: Gourmet Dining in America, 1934–1961.
It’s a common problem of food media to settle into an easy, pat narrative; create individual stars; and to forget a history that might be a little more nuanced, a bit more shapeless and in need of telling. I’d argue the stories we can write when we dive into the cracks of these worn-out tales are far more compelling.
The essay is a form that will allow us into said narrative cracks. Why is that?