What She Ate

Cooking, eating, feeding others, resisting or ignoring food—it all runs deep, so deep that we may not even notice the way it helps to define us. Food constitutes a natural vantage point on the history of the personal.

Food, after all, happens every day; it’s intimately associated with all our appetites and thoroughly entangled with the myriad social and economic conditions that press upon a life. Whether or not we spend time in a kitchen, whether or not we even care what’s on the plate, we have a relationship with food that’s launched when we’re born and lasts until we die

What rescued me, and possibly us, was the fact that we had no refrigerator. Every day I had to restock our supply of butter, milk, and fresh produce, which meant that every day I had to go to the bazaar. These excursions into unmediated India could be nerve-racking—I had to speak Hindi in the bazaar, as well as dodge the cows and monkeys—but open-air food markets are powerful places. They can break down your resistance like a smile and a wave from a baby. The arrays of fresh produce were modest in this one, for it was a small bazaar, and its practicality appealed to me. No towering displays, just a scattering of the very local fruits and vegetables brought in that morning. The women selling produce sat alongside their eggplants and tomatoes and cauliflowers, listening impassively as I stumbled through my request, and always tossed a big bright chili into the bag as a lagniappe. The spices were the most aromatic I had ever used, the yogurt tasted better than any I had ever eaten, and over time this delicious bounty edged its way into my imagination. I stopped making the pallid soups and salads that had become my tormented specialty and started to cook real food.

Cautiously, I made a vegetable curry; even more cautiously, a pot of chickpeas for which I had to soak the dried beans—something I thought happened only in communes in Vermont, but there I was doing it. And perfectly! I was elated by my success. The recipes came from the Time-Life Cooking of India, which I had packed in a rare moment of optimism, and Time-Life was very good at writing recipes that worked. That’s what I wanted, something that worked—not necessarily authentic, just something that didn’t pick too many fights with India. I never tried the tricky ones, not the homemade cheese or the deep-fried breads or the syrupy, pretzel-shaped sweets called jalebis. I didn’t want to fail. It was as if India, marriage, and I were wobbling into the future on a unicycle, and I had no wish to threaten our precarious sense of balance.

Perhaps you’re familiar with the way culinary memoirs often devote a few pages to the author’s lifelong obsession with food. She’ll explain how she grew up with a discerning palate, a wondrous instinct for inventing recipes, a sense of joyful adventure at the very thought of a meal to be prepared. Well, my obsession was marked by none of those helpful attributes; I don’t have them even now. When I was obsessed—a feverish few months that began shortly after I got married—the pleasures of cooking were not only absent, they were inconceivable. Cooking for fun? Why not gravedigging for fun? I flailed away in the kitchen day after day for reasons entirely unrelated to dinner. I was trying to be married, that was all, and I didn’t know any other way to go about it.

s an observer of British foodways, Barbara might have been hailed as an early practitioner of culinary fiction—that is, if she hadn’t been so incapable of taking serious gastronomy seriously. It was impossible for her to pour streams of lavish prose over a meal, and she was far more interested in what the food was saying than in what she herself could say about the food. She did read The Good Food Guide on occasion (it appears on a reading list she kept in 1970), and once, inviting a friend to lunch, she offered to take him to a restaurant she had found in the Guide—namely, her own home. “

Her favorite place to watch human behavior was a restaurant, for there she could sit quietly in the background while people interacted with food. Each glimpse of the intimate relationship between the person and the plate cried out to her. Cafeterias, tea shops, cafés, pubs, dining cars, a park at noon—anywhere people were eating was fertile ground. To be in the presence of food—appetizing, appalling, it hardly mattered—was to start creating

After the war she set up a home in London with her sister, Hilary, and took a job as an editor at the International African Institute, which published scholarly monographs and a journal of anthropology. The institute would inspire some of the most hilarious moments in her novels, but she was working there chiefly to pay the bills; and once she was settled in the flat, she turned her attention to what mattered most. She wanted to write, and she wanted to call herself a writer, and she wanted to feel as though “writer” were her proper and permanent identity.

Barbara was a culinary historian’s dream. She started keeping diaries soon after she arrived at Oxford as a student in 1931 and continued writing in them for the rest of her life, mentioning food all the while

Barbara took it for granted that a comfortable English life would have fine, fragrant cooking in it. Here, in her very first novel, she was already deep into a radical retelling of the state of the British table

But the truth is, you never just eat. No matter how hungry you are, it’s never just food