Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s aphorism “Tell me what you eat and I shall tell you what you are” is one of the most overused cliches in food culture, appearing everywhere from the opening sequence of Iron Chef to T-shirts and coffee mugs. But to the culinary historian Laura Shapiro, learning what someone ate is just the beginning of unlocking his or her identity.
Naturally, after spending so much time with people, even people who are dead, you tend to feel close to them (as Shapiro, a former alt-weekly journalist, points out, dead people never hang up on you). You want to refer to them informally, by their first names, as Shapiro does. Some, it’s obvious, were more congenial companions than others. Shapiro appears to feel the strongest kinship with Pym, who took notes at restaurants on what other people ate and filled her novels with meticulously described meals. “Tea plays so many symbolic roles,” Shapiro writes, “that another writer would have had to create a whole slew of walk-on characters to say what Barbara says with a cup.”
The most poignant food story belongs to Roosevelt. At times it’s also nearly as funny as Gurley Brown’s. This is largely because of Henrietta Nesbitt, the inexperienced and, as it turned out, inept Hyde Park neighbor Roosevelt hired to be the White House housekeeper and who tortured FDR and various guests for a dozen years with overcooked meat and watery prune pudding. Other biographers, such as Blanche Wiesen Cook, have proposed that Roosevelt herself was indifferent to food and that Mrs. Nesbitt was her ongoing revenge against FDR, for both his 1918 affair that destroyed her entire sense of identity and, later, for forcing her to assume the role of First Lady. Shapiro sees it an entirely different way.
By Laura Shapiro (Viking)
