The Curious Appetite of Elizabeth Robins Pennell
Throughout the nineteenth century, a rigid divide separated women's and men's food writing. Women wrote domestic cookbooks that codified the tastes of middle-class housewives and detailed the production of dishes. Men wrote cookbooks for professional chefs or contributed to a growing body of gastronomic literature, a genre of writing concerned with nourishing and articulating the pleasures of the table. Into this divide stepped the art critic Elizabeth Robins Pennell. Hired in the 1890s to write a "cookery column" for London's Pall Mall Gazette, Pennell chose instead to write about the art of eating, embracing the sensually grounded languages of aestheticism and gastronomy. By depicting her column as an artistic medium and showcasing the link between an educated palate and creative expression, Pennell shifted her own position from art critic to literary artist of the appetites, a move that initiated the figuration of female pleasure in English-language food writing.
To accomplish this goal, Pennell used lyrical descriptions to elevate recipe writing and cookery to an aesthetic endeavor, relying heavily on her expertise as an art critic and on gastronomic literature. This essay will explore Pennell's figuration of gastronomy as a performing art and trace the literary inspiration that fueled Pennell's gastronomic writings. In so doing, it will dwell at times on the difficulties Pennell encountered imaging herself as a "greedy woman" within a literary tradition that defined the female as a cook or servant or as an innocent beauty, undefiled by bodily appetites. Pennell's attempt to transform the cooking woman into a gourmand, thereby shifting her from producer to consumer of pleasures, was a complicated and not always successful task. Nevertheless, it pioneered a territorial expansion of women's food writing into the public realm of gastronomy, previously the sole preserve of men.
The Rise of Gastronomic Discourse
In its depiction of eating as an art form, Pennell's cookery column participates in the aesthetic discourse of gastronomy that developed in post-Revolutionary France. As Pennell herself writes in the introduction to My Cookery Books, a work devoted to describing the 1000-volume library she amassed: "The new writers, of whom Grimod de la Reynière was the first great master, brought about such a revolution in not only style, but the very attitude of writers on cookery."[1] Pennell includes Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and Alexandre Dumas among the masters of this literary and culinary revolution. She would draw considerable inspiration from each of these authors when fashioning her cookery column for the Pall Mall Gazette.
In "A Cultural Field in the Making: Gastronomy in 19th-Century France," Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson lays out the development of a French national cuisine following the Revolution. It was after the fall of the ancien régime that "the culinary arts moved into public space and acquired a public consciousness."[2] As former chefs of the aristocracy shifted into the public realm to open restaurants, they spread gastronomy to the wider public. These chefs congregated in Paris, where the population doubled from 1800 to 1850, and the number of restaurants rose to 3000 by the 1820s (up from around 100 in the 1790s).[3] As gastronomy flourished in the public space, so too did the discourse on taste. While restaurants institutionalized gastronomy within the public sphere, gastronomic literature created the structure needed to form a cultural field, providing the "textual discourse that continually (re)negotiates the systemic tension between production and consumption.... Culinary culture and the restaurant world take us to food; the gastronomic field points us toward other cultural fields and particularly toward the arts."[4]
Gastronomic literature sprang to life in 1803 with the publication of Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière’s Almanach des Gourmands. Published annually for eight years, the Almanach pioneered food criticism as we know it today, containing restaurant reviews, critiques of prepared foods and their purveyors, as well as reflections and directives on the art of eating. By 1803, Grimod had lived such an eccentric and flamboyant life that the Almanach would become "one of the great literary and publishing successes of its day."[5] Grimod had a flair for the dramatic, hosting a series of theatrical dinners so outlandish that people flocked to his home hoping to catch a glimpse of the entertainment. On one occasion, he invited twenty-two guests to a "burial and supper" at his palatial family estate on the Champs Elysées. The guests dined at a table transformed to resemble a coffin. By dessert, three-hundred onlookers had been admitted to watch the spectacle unfold. As one food historian succinctly surmises: "The coffin reminded all present that progress toward death, like digestion, is democratic" and the spectacle itself made a mockery of "aristocratic pretension."[6]
In addition to hosting macabre, satiric dinners, Grimod caroused and dined about Paris with leading actresses and served as a theater reviewer for several Republican journals. Grimod's extravagant lifestyle and withering, parodic wit fueled his celebrity. It also enraged the French state, which often found itself at the receiving end of Grimod's biting satire. In 1798, the administration was so outraged by Grimod's political criticism that it shut down his theater magazine, Le Censeur dramatique. Not one to be silenced, Grimod channeled his considerable energy into creating a new literary genre, transforming the drama review into food criticism to evoke "a world where restaurateurs and pastry chefs were the equivalent of theater entrepreneurs and playwrights."[7]
The Almanach was addressed, in large part, to the nouveau riche created by the redistribution of wealth in post-revolutionary France. Writing to educate the growing body of wealthy in France, many of whom journeyed to Paris to dine at its ever-expanding number of restaurants, Grimod wrote eloquently about gastronomy as an art form and helped establish a language of dining criticism. Thirteen years after the final volume of Grimod's Almanach was published, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's Physiology of Taste (1825) provided a less eccentric, more reflective disquisition on gastronomy. Whereas Grimod dined at an aristocratic height and wrote in a bold, satiric style, Brillat-Savarin broached gastronomy from a decidedly middle-class perspective, imbuing his writing with a philosophic bent. His Physiology, which owes a tremendous debt to Grimod, added a unique depth to gastronomy, articulating its capacity to impart spiritual wisdom, poetic inspiration, and social enlightenment.[8] According to Brillat-Savarin, “gastronomical knowledge is necessary to every man, because it tends to add to the sum of his predestined pleasure.”[9]It nourishes “an especial well-being” within the individual, sating, the hungers of “both soul and body.”[10] Such pleasures not only create a sense of well-being, they likewise stimulate the intellect and the imagination. Brillat-Savarin repeatedly aligned gastronomy with creativity to state that when a true gourmand experiences a “well-savored meal,” “his spirit grows more perceptive, his imagination flowers.”[11] Like Grimod before him, Brillat-Savarin also infused the gourmand with cosmopolitan sophistication and wit, portraying him as a man-at-home-in-the-world who enjoys an appetite for international flavors and has the knowledge needed to savor dishes from around the world.
Beginning with Grimod, the term gourmand was used to designate an individual well practiced and well educated in the art of eating. Over the course of the nineteenth century another term was coined to designate the author of gastronomic literature—the gastronome. According to sociologist Stephen Mennell, the gastronome "not only cultivates his own ‘refined taste for the pleasures of the table’ but also, by writing about it, helps to cultivate other people’s too. The gastronome is more than a gourmet—he is also a theorist and a propagandist about culinary taste."[12] Nineteenth-century gastronomic literature, as it developed in France—and eventually England and the United States—worked to create a readership of cultivated palates and to codify gastronomy as art. The genre, which was written for and by men, defined the gourmand as an artist with a cultivated, cosmopolitan, and nuanced palate. He was, above all, a connoisseur of taste, keenly attuned to the aesthetic pleasures of gastronomy, pleasures that nourish poetic expression.
Finding Her Muse
By the time Pennell began to write her column, the fusion of restaurants with theater fueled and was fueled by urban, cosmopolitan appetites. Sprung from the Enlightenment and its debate on the aesthetics of taste, gastronomic discourse and the appetites it defined were first articulated and codified by Grimod, whose food criticism would set the stage for the coming century. The founding works of Grimod and Brillat-Savarin would launch a distinct literary genre, which flourished alongside and in conjunction with theaters and restaurants, the latter of which "emerge[d] as the dedicated space of food theatre."[13] Gastronomic discourse, drama, and restaurants nourished one another to such an extent that by the fin de siècle gastronomy itself would become a protagonist on stage, where elaborate dinners were often scripted as forms of cultural and political critique. As drama scholar Laurence Senelick explains:
the proliferation of stage meals reflected the rise of dining out, or the public performance of gastronomy. The development of a complex cuisine, based on well-provisioned markets and the affluence of money and leisure, were dependent on the growth of cities. So was the evolution of the restaurant and, for that matter, the permanent playhouse. Urban culture nurtured phantasms of luxury and sensual pleasure.[14]
Asked to write a fin-de-siècle cookery column, Pennell dove into this thriving sensual realm, fashioning her aesthetic after the playful, witty language of both literary aesthetes and gastronomes.
Although she wrote the column for a London newspaper, Pennell was born in Philadelphia, where she became a notable author with the publication of The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1884. That same year Pennell moved to England with her husband, the artist Joseph Pennell. She soon established herself as a cosmopolitan journalist and art critic who traveled Europe by bicycle and regularly attended Parisian art exhibits. She was likewise steeped in the London art world; she and her husband hosted a weekly salon at their Charing Cross flat, entertaining such renowned aesthetes as Oscar Wilde, Violet Hunt, Aubrey Beardsley, and Max Beerbohm. Given her experience as an art critic and her role within the aesthetic movement, her columns are steeped in allusions to works of art and artists. In addition to a wide array of painters, poets abound, including Virgil and Ovid, Dante and Milton, Théophile Gautier and Heinrich Heine. Pennell likewise enfolded the words and recipes of French professional chefs such as Carême, Giles Rose, and Jules Gouffé into her columns, and drew on the epigrams, recipes, and meditations of Brillat-Savarin for inspiration. Because Pennell wrote during a time when theater and dining intermingled both on and off the stage, her columns reference dramatists ranging from Shakespeare to Ibsen and from Balzac to Wagner. She even includes a dish named for the American performer Loie Fuller, whose innovative modern dance inspired the likes of Toulouse-Lautrec and Rodin.
Pennell was one of several anonymous female aesthetes who contributed to the column "Wares of Autolycus," which featured prominent women writers, each of whom was assigned a designated topic. While Pennell wrote a cookery column, Alice Meynell wrote literary criticism, Rosamund Marriott Watson wrote on interior design, and "George Fleming" (Constance Fletcher) wrote on fashion. In The Forgotten Female Aesthetes, literary scholar Talia Schaffer places the column within the aesthetic movement to argue that
the Autolycus writers dignified women's domestic life by rewriting it in the newest artistic vocabularies and literary forms. Fleming, Pennell, Meynell, and Marriott Watson employed historical allusions, archaic language, epigrams, and daringly sensual references to their physical pleasure in the clothing and food they recommended.[15]
Although Pennell was assigned what was meant to be a domestic "cookery column," she took hold of the opportunity to stake her place within the male-authored tradition of gastronomic literature, turning away from the practical instruction offered by the domestic cookbook to embrace the pleasures of eating. Pennell's playful, ornate essays were popular enough that her columns were gathered and published in book form, first as Feasts of Autolycus in England in 1896 and five years later in the United States as The Delights of Delicate Eating: The Diary of a Greedy Woman.[16]
Pennell's stylistic embrace of aesthetic pleasure and rejection of practicality required her to differentiate herself from the recipe writer and domestic cook—both roles traditionally aligned with women. Instead, her column focuses on the pleasures of dining and on the aesthetic composition of dishes and meals as art rather than on the kitchen labor of the domestic cookbook. Within the introduction to Delights, for example, Pennell singles out one of the most popular domestic cookbooks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Hannah Glasse's Art of Cookery Made Plain and Simple (1747), noting that it achieved fame not so much for its “merit” as for “its extreme rarity in the first edition.”[17] Despite such disparagement, Pennell quoted frequently from The Art of Cookery. In a column on "The Simple Sole," for example, Pennell draws attention to the laborious, at times, gruesome language of practical instruction, incorporating a lengthy passage from Glasse's recipe for fricassee "Soals White." Whereas Glasse commands her readers to “gut your soals very clean, [and] cut off their heads… then carefully cut the flesh from the bones and fins on both sides…. take the heads and bones, then put them in a saucepan,” Pennell urges her readers to travel to Marseilles and stroll along the quays in the early morning, where they will find:
In sunlight and in shadow are piled high the sea’s sweetest, choicest fruits; mussels in their sombre purple shells; lobsters, rich and brown; fish, scarlet and gold and green. Lemons, freshly plucked from near gardens, are scattered among the fragrant pile, and here and there trail long sprays of salt, pungent seaweed.... The feeling of Bouillabaisse is everywhere, and tender anticipation illumines the faces of passers-by.[18]
Pennell refuses to cook in her own "cookery column." Instead, she relies on Glasse to perform the linguistic drudgery for her, to describe the laborious details of gutting and beheading a sole. Scholars have remarked on Pennell's refusal to provide a reproducible recipe. For Talia Schaffer, it amounts to a "coy" maneuver, in which Pennell "withholds" the necessary information from her reader.[19] Jamie Horrocks uses far stronger wording to state that Pennell "aborts the majority of the recipes included in Delights."[20] This essay argues that Pennell's repeated occlusion of practical recipe instruction can also be understood as a gesture of liberation. By "withholding" or "aborting" the recipe instruction, Pennell frees herself from the unsavory materiality of food, from the labor of cooking, and from what she calls the "rule and measure" of recipe writing.[21] Thus liberated, Pennell is free to participate in the gastronomic field.
Unlike the domestic cook whose kitchen labor Pennell carefully elided from her columns (with the notable exception of Hannah Glasse), the literary masters of gastronomy feature regularly in Pennell's prose. In an essay on "The Incomparable Onion," Pennell taunts her readers with a few lines of a recipe for Sauce Soubise pulled verbatim from Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery. Then she halts mid-sentence to query: "But why go on with elaborate directions? Why describe the exact quantity of flour, the size of the potato, the proportions of milk and cream to be added? .... In telling or the reading these matters seem not above the intelligence of a little child."[22] After silencing the regimented language of a straightforward recipe, Pennell calls on the celebrated author Alexandre Dumas for inspiration. Notably, she inserts him into her text, imagining him preparing Sauce Soubise before turning to Brillat-Savarin to sketch what she calls his "unrivalled omelette" made with tuna, roe, and shallots.[23] Shutting the book on an encyclopedia of cookery and turning to Brillat-Savarin and Dumas, Pennell overtly juxtaposes domestic cooking and recipe writing, which require no more "intelligence" than that "of a little child," with the luxury and creativity of gastronomy and gastronomic literature. Pennell again refuses to provide clear practical directives, underscoring that her "recipes" are meant to inspire her readers' imaginations, enabling them to feast on her words.
As Shishko points out in this same volume, the women who read Pennell’s column were unlikely to head straight to the kitchen to cook from her words. In fact, the unpracticed cook would be hard-pressed to make a dish from her columns. Rather, Pennell’s writing was intended to inspire her readers to see a dish on the mind’s palate. Since the early nineteenth century, gastronomes have argued that the capacity to write so vividly about a dish that readers can envision it in their minds' eye and can taste its ideal essence on their minds' palate is itself a form of artistry. In depicting the pleasures of eating as nourishment for literary inspiration, gastronomes seek “the poetic transformation of food into discourse.”[24] Scholar Denise Gigante situates the express goals of gastronomic literature within a broader historical context to argue that it functions as "an expansion of the eighteenth-century discourse of aesthetic taste, a cultural field opening onto the material pleasures of the appetite."[25] The gastronome fixes these pleasures in language.
If a gastronome can be defined as an artist, then Pennell’s drive to aestheticize dishes and the meal might be understood to reflect her desire to move beyond the realm of criticism, to become an artist in her own right. Situated within the gastronomic field, her columns participate in a tradition of nineteenth-century writing that aimed to distill the pleasures of gastronomy in a literary art form, one loosely based on the forefathers she cites throughout her essays—Grimod, Brillat-Savarin, and Dumas. In fact, Dumas’ Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine features prominently in the origin story that Pennell often told about her initiation into gastronomy. In this narrative, which appears in several of her autobiographically based books, the poet and literary editor William E. Henley features as a catalyst in her emergence as a gastronome. Tellingly, in her autobiographical narrative Nights: Rome, Venice in the Aesthetic Eighties Pennell embeds this narrative within a description of Henley’s prowess as a literary editor, one who mentored some of the most innovative and talented writers of the nineteenth century. In Pennell’s own words:
The men who would tell you in their day, who will tell you now, of the great debt they owe to Henley, are men of the most varied interests…. Ask … [H. G.] Wells adrift in a world of his own invention; ask [Rudyard] Kipling steeped in the real, or [J. M.] Barrie lost in the Kail-Yard; ask Kenneth Grahame on his Olympian heights or George S. Street deep in his study of the prig—ask any one of these men and a score besides what Henley’s sympathy, Henley’s outstretched hand, meant to him, and some idea of the breadth of his judgment and taste and helpfulness may be had. Why, he could condescend even to me when, in my brave ignorance, I undertook to write that weekly column on Cookery for the Pall-Mall. He it was who gave me Dumas’s Dictionnaire de la Cuisine, the corner-stone of my collection of cookery books.[26]
Aside from paying a fine tribute to Henley, here Pennell embeds several celebrated British novelists within the origin story of her emergence as a gastronome. In so doing, Pennell signals her intention to claim a place alongside those authors who loom so large on her bookshelves—figures such as Dumas, Grimod, and Brillat-Savarin. In the way she crafts this narrative, Pennell likewise foregrounds that she moves easily among artists and that she wishes to learn about cookery from masterful writers, rather than from technical experts.
Throughout her columns, Pennell makes it expressly clear that she drew inspiration from the founding fathers of gastronomic literature and that she was well-steeped in the literary and culinary finesse that differentiates their writing from the practical cookbook. In one instance, she lauds the imagination needed to create aesthetically resonant dishes and the recipes from which to prepare them, noting that in contemplating the "consummate bouillon" Dumas' "mighty mind runs riot. Not even the adventures of the immortal Musketeers stimulated his fancy to wilder flights. His direction, large and lavish as himself, would the economical housewife read with awe and something of terror.”[27] Here Pennell praises the gastronome's ability to concoct dishes “lavish” enough to strike “terror” in the housewife. She charges her own reader to examine Dumas’ words with “reverence” and to “carry out his every suggestion with devotion.”[28]
In addition to its reliance on the founding fathers of gastronomic literature, Pennell's cookery column also draws from seventeenth-century professional chefs, most notably Giles Rose, the royal cook for Charles II, from whom she quotes extensively. Rather than demeaning his prose as she does Glasse's, Pennell lauds the poetic quality of Rose's recipes, calling them "fantastic" "devices" and "pretty fancies."[29] In My Cookery Books, Pennell explains her passion for the seventeenth-century cookbook and her reason for including Rose's recipes in her own columns:
Stateliness and elegance were the order of the day in the seventeenth century. ... And the cookery books are full of ... brocaded language, full of extravagant conceits, full of artificial ornament; a lover writing to his mistress, you would say, rather than a cook or a housewife giving practical directions. After the modern recipe, blunt to the point of brutality; after the “Take so much of this, add so much of that, and boil, roast, fry,” as the dull case may be, each fresh extravagance ... is as enchanting as the crook of Lely's ladies or the Silvio of Herrick's verse. I should not want to try the recipes.... But they were written by artists .... Rose leaves and saffron, musk and ‘amber-greece,’ orange flower and angelica are scattered through them …. The names of the dishes are a joy; … the eggs in moonshine; the conserves of red roses; the possets without end.[30]
Here Pennell outlines her preference for luxurious, lyrical language that exceeds the bounds of necessity. Rose's recipes appeal to Pennell, not because she wishes to reproduce them, but because of the pleasure she derives from the "fresh extravagance" of their prose. As royal chef, Rose wrote about meals staged as elaborate performances to be carefully choreographed from beginning to end, meals that required scores of cooks and butlers, servers and master carvers, and even pantrymen. He approached food as an artistic medium, and his writing showcases a stylistic elegance that reflects the luxurious nature of the meals he prepared.
Pennell prized Rose's recipes, not for their practicality, but for their lyricism and their literary merit. Pennell was so taken with the style of Rose's recipes, in fact, that she quotes several verbatim in one column, including them for the lavish, "brocaded language," the stateliness and elegance of their prose—partridges are variously served with Holy Water, flavored with sweetmeats and sugar plums, sauced with rosewater and wine. Ultimately, Pennell wanted to produce a column that stands in for the material food itself, nourishing her readers with words. She likewise wanted to take part in a tradition of food writers whose stylistic elegance classifies their work as literature to be read for pleasure. Hers is a language of luxury.
Nevertheless, it is a luxury necessarily grounded in the body.
A Greedy Woman
Pennell repeatedly and emphatically turned away from practical instruction in order to embrace the pleasures of gastronomy and the creativity, wit, and stylistic lyricism that nourishes gastronomic discourse. To accomplish this feat, however, Pennell had to jettison the laboring female body from her writing—a messy task, unnecessary for the gastronomes who came before her. Unlike the domestic servants and home cooks who toiled in privacy for little or no pay, many men cooked as professional chefs. As a result, male gastronomes could draw inspiration from a wealth of culinary artists. In turn, chefs had been codifying celebratory dishes, menus, and banquets for centuries, leaving behind an abundance of writing from which the gastronome could create and feed his male appetite.
Pennell inherited this wealth of male-authored literature and its disquisitions on male appetite, an inheritance both material and symbolic. On the material level, Pennell collected a vast library of culinary and gastronomic literature. On the figurative level, she incorporated male-authored culinary and gastronomic discourse into her column. Hannah Glasse's Art of Cookery stands out as the lone female-authored text featured in Delights. In keeping with the ambivalent prose of aestheticism, Pennell would variously challenge the "merit" of Glasse's Art of Cookery, draw directly from its recipes, and praise Glasse as "ingenious." In sharp contrast, Pennell showed no such ambivalence toward Rose, Dumas, Brillat-Savarin, or Grimod, each of whom wrote about the culinary and gastronomic arts in a stylistically lyrical way. These men were able to do so, in large part, because they were not bound by the domestic tradition and its practical, messy, everyday chores.
With a few notable exceptions, including Brillat-Savarin's Physiology, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century gastronomic writing excluded and demeaned women. Grimod, for example, famously held at least one dinner party where women were used as dinner napkins—more specifically their hair was used to wipe the soiled fingers of Grimod's guests. As French philosopher and literary critic Roland Barthes explains with his usual perspicacity:
in the vast mythology men have elaborated around the feminine ideal, food is systematically neglected; we commonly see woman in a state of love or of innocence; we never see her eating: hers is a glorious body, purified of any need. Mythologically, food is men's business; woman takes part in it only as a cook or as a servant; she is the one who prepares or serves but does not eat.[31]
Throughout her columns, Pennell grapples with how to give voice to woman's appetite within a mythology that casts her as cook or servant. She ultimately refuses either role, figuring herself as "a greedy woman."
In the introduction to the essays collected in Delights of Delicate Eating, Pennell acknowledges that "the great interest of the following papers lies in the fact that they are written by a woman—a greedy woman."[32] With these words, Pennell claims the right to showcase her own hungers—for food, for public voice, and for recognition as an artist. The essays themselves, however, bear witness to the conflict between the ideal woman, the laboring female, and the self-professed "greedy woman." Within the first essay collected in Delights, the conflict becomes manifest as Pennell juxtaposes the suffragette and the housewife, posing a set of tongue-in-cheek rhetorical queries:
Why clamour for the suffrage, why labour for the redemption of brutal man, why wear, with noisy advertisement, ribbons white or blue, when three times a day there is a work of art, easily within her reach to be created? All his life a Velasquez devoted to his pictures, a Shakespeare to his plays, a Wagner to his operas: why should not the woman of genius spend hers in designing exquisite dinners, inventing original breakfasts, and be respected for the nobility of her self-appointed task? For in the planning of the perfect meal there is art; and, after all, is not art the one real, the one important thing in life?[33]
Here Pennell defines gastronomy as an art comparable to painting and to the performing arts and strikes a playful, parodic tone, which characterizes much of her gastronomic writing. This passage also underscores a conflict that runs throughout Delights. On one hand, Pennell works to portray meals as art and to showcase gastronomic writing—specifically her own—as among the literary arts. On the other hand, she inherits a rigidly gendered food writing tradition, one in which women authored practical, regimented recipes for the home cook and men authored recipes for the professional kitchen or philosophical, aesthetically oriented essays and books. Women's food writing aimed toward functionality and men's aimed toward art.
Without a tradition of women's food writing steeped in the sensual pleasures of gastronomy, Pennell slides, at times, into difficult territory as she works to fashion a distinctively female voice within gastronomic literature. By picturing suffragettes as "clamour[ing]" "noisy," "labour[ing]" bodies, Pennell attempts to sidestep two of the contemporary stereotypes of women—politically vociferous New Women, on one hand, and laboring kitchen drudges on the other. Despite such sidestepping and tongue-in-cheek delivery, this passage underscores the freighted task Pennell shouldered as she strove to depict woman as simultaneously beautiful, imaginative, and intelligent in the act of eating. Because of this difficulty, Pennell "thrived on ambiguous, slippery language" (Schaffer 16). Duality and contradiction likewise characterize her gastronomic writing. At times, it celebrates female appetite and brings the appetitive woman to life in lavish, elegant prose. At other times, it reduces women to tasty dishes (albeit, parodically) and denigrates domestic cooks and cookbooks. Because of this conflict, the self-proclaimed "greedy woman," often uses language that obscures her innovative appetite. As scholar Talia Schaffer explains in her analysis of Delights, Pennell uses "aestheticism to compensate for the fear of being greedy" and it is this fear "of a female body out of control...that haunts this text" (124).
This chapter argues that the "greedy woman," however, is not the only figure to haunt Pennell's prose. It is also troubled by the "laboring woman" who lurks just at the edges. In one remarkable instance, Pennell is unable to keep the laboring body at bay, and she splashes onto the page, staining Pennell's prose and marring its aesthetic coherence. The column "Spring Chicken" begins with a parodic, yet sensual reverie in which Pennell compares the tender flesh of poussin to art. Then the tone shifts and disintegrates as the laboring woman enters the scene. Toward the beginning of one passage, Pennell playfully aestheticizes the young chicken with a flamboyant tone, describing it as
innocent and guileless as Bellini's angels, dream-like and strange as Botticelli's. It is the very concentration of spring; as your teeth meet in its tender, yielding flesh, you think, whether you will or no, of violets and primroses, and hedgerows white with may; ... and, for the time being, life is a perfect poem. But—why is there always a but?—your cook has it in her power to ruin the rhythm, to make of melodious lyric the most discordant prose. (138)
Here the laboring cook erupts into the text, ending the playful prose with a "discordant" note. In the next paragraph, the column makes a disorienting and troubling shift as Pennell attempts to rescue (or rewrite) the image of the cook. Turning toward her American heritage, Pennell pays a jarring homage to slave labor:
Fried chicken! To write the word is to be carried back to the sunny South; to see, in the mind's eye, the old, black, fat, smiling mammie, in gorgeous bandana turban, and the little black piccaninnies bringing in relays of hot muffins. Oh, the happy days of long ago! It is easy to give the recipe, but what can it avail unless the mammie goes with it. (139)
Here the mammie and "the little black piccaninnies" serve as phantom laborers. Without them, Pennell cannot provide a recipe for fried chicken because she eschews both the labor it evokes and the labor it requires. To write out concrete direction would also destroy the literary quality of her prose and align her text with the domestic laborer. By withholding the recipe altogether, Pennell refuses to bring the laboring body to life in her column. Her essays may figure the literary master Dumas artfully composing Sauce Soubise, but they refuse to linger on the domestic cook and her everyday labor.
They also refuse to enter the domestic kitchen. As a result, "Spring Chicken" thrice refers its readers to "Mrs. Glasse" for recipe instruction. Freed from such domestic chores, Pennell whisks her readers on a journey through Monte Carlo, Spain, England, and Holland to vicariously sample chicken dishes before ending the essay with a French stew. Pennell sketches the stew in order to pique her reader's appetite rather than to offer practical instruction, stating outright: "Do you not grow hungry as you read? .... As the beautiful mixture is stewing ... thicken the liquor with yolks of eggs and the juice of lemon, and for ever after bless Mrs. Glasse for having initiated you into these ennobling mysteries" (142). Here, once again, Pennell eschews the labor of domestic recipe instruction, passing it off to Hannah Glasse.
Despite the troubling presence of the laboring body and the difficulty Pennell has liberating the greedy woman, Delights deserves praise for its valuable work in the gastronomic field. In urging women to nourish and to feed their hungers, Pennell transformed the practicality and economy of women's food writing into sensual, at times parodic, prose. Pennell thus initiated a tradition of food writing in which women could move beyond their roles as cook and server to embrace the pleasures of gastronomy and to luxuriate in the language it nourishes.
"Playing to the Senses"[34]
In an essay on Brillat-Savarin, the philosopher and literary critic Roland Barthes parses the French gastronome's work to applaud him for putting "food in woman, and in Woman appetite," a monumental gesture in gastronomic literature and one that would largely remain an isolated instance until the arrival of Elizabeth Robins Pennell.[35] Even more importantly for this discussion, Barthes explores Brillat-Savarin's reflections on taste to argue that they articulate "one of the most important formal categories of modernity: that of the sequence of phenomena."[36] As laid out by Brillat-Savarin, the sequence of taste includes direct (flavor at the front of the tongue), complete (flavor passing to the back of the tongue), and reflective (meaning derived from the contemplation of flavor). According to Barthes,
the entire luxury of taste is in this sequence; the submission of the gustative sensation in time actually permits it to develop somewhat in the manner of a narrative, or of a language: temporalized, taste knows surprises and subtleties; there are the perfumes and fragrances, constituted in advance so to speak, like memories.[37]
Within gastronomy, the structure of this narrative is orchestrated by the menu and by the composition, flavors, textures, and sequence of dishes themselves. Within a restaurant, as in a theater, the drama unfolds as a performance, at times strictly controlled and, at others, more freeform.
The restaurant becomes the stage where the performance plays out. In the words of celebrated twenty-first century chefs Ferran Adrià, Heston Blumental, and Thomas Keller: "The act of eating engages all the senses as well as the mind. Preparing and serving food could therefore be the most complex and comprehensive of the performing arts."[38] For the chef as artist, food is approached as an artistic medium aimed at creating an aesthetic experience within the diner. The gastronome must capture the sequential narrative of taste along with its "surprises and subtleties," its "perfumes and fragrances" in such a way that the readers can taste the dishes on their minds' palate. If effective, gastronomic literature piques the reader's appetite and sates it with language, which stirs memories of former eating pleasures. This heady mix of appetite, memory, and language forms the aesthetic core of gastronomic literature, which aims, above all, to animate the imagination. Appetite begets memory which begets the imaginary taste of past pleasures.[39]
Beginning with Grimod's Almanach des Gourmandes, nineteenth-century gastronomic literature worked to define the art of eating, or gastronomy, as one in which the pleasures of the table nourish the imagination, giving flight to language nimble enough to raise embodied pleasures to the intellectual realm. In keeping with Grimod, Brillat-Savarin, and Dumas, Pennell illuminates dining as an art form and the meal as an aesthetically nuanced performance. She serves as the literary scribe of gastronomy, transforming the pleasures of an embodied experience into words. As Pennell describes, meals and the dishes that punctuate them should seek to achieve “that joyful flamboyancy born of the artist’s exuberance in moments of creation.”[40] Her cookery columns work to fix this joyful flamboyance in language.
At its best, Delights fastens onto and captures the seam between inside and outside and dwells on the aesthetic emotions, as Alice B. Toklas so aptly calls them, stirred by the consumption, contemplation, and digestion of an exquisite dish—to reflect on what Barthes terms the "luxury of taste."[41] In these instances, Pennell showcases gastronomy as a performance with the power to trigger an aesthetic response that conjoins the body and the mind in a transformative experience. She articulates the transformative potential of meals and depicts dishes—the carefully composed ingredients themselves—as objects with the power to conduct an aesthetic performance. As an aesthetically inspired dish penetrates and plays with the senses, it liberates a complex mingling of memory, emotion, embodied knowledge, and reflection, each of which contribute to taste. Delights repeatedly underscores the transformative nature of meals and illuminates their capacity to trigger existential memories that bring the past to life as a taste narrative. A simple dish of pasta becomes what Pennell calls "the magic crystal or beryl stone in which may be seen known things, dear to the memory:... [o]live-clad slopes and lonely stone palms; the gleam of sunlit rivers winding with the reeds and the tall, slim poplars; the friendly wayside trattoria."[42] Dining on a simple plate of charcuterie, unleashes
memories of the little German towns and their forgotten hilltops, visited in summers long since gone, of the little German inn.... and the foaming mugs of beer, and the tall, slender goblets of white wine. Before supper is done, you will have travelled leagues upon leagues into the playtime of the past.[43]
Here, the sequence of taste contains the echo and shimmer of memory, which serves as a key protagonist in the narrative of taste, a narrative that folds back in time, enters the imagination, where it eddies, rambles, and may even take flight.
Pennell repeatedly emphasizes that the temporal nature of eating and the sequence of taste are essential components of gastronomy. Dishes "pass" in succession, as "the vague must give way to the decided"; "a brief, gentle interlude" should be followed by a "glorious, unexpected overture."[44] Flavors, like the memories they evoke, swell and fade and "last impressions remain to bear testimony" after the first impressions have been "washed away."[45] A meal's final flavors are like "the ballade's envoy" or the "final sweet or stirring scene as the curtain falls upon the play."[46] In one particular description of an omelette soufflé, Pennell showcases the ephemeral nature of eating and illuminates the role that flavor plays in the construction of the taste narrative. As she describes, the soufflé
must be light as air, all ethereal in substance, a mere nothing to melt in the mouth like a beautiful dream. And yet in the melting it must yield a flavour as soft as the fragrance of flowers and as evanescent. The sensation must be but a passing one that piques the curiosity and soothes the excited palate. A dash of orange-flower water, redolent of the graceful days that are no more, and another of wine from the Andalusian vineyards, and the sensation may be secured.[47]
Here the fleeting flavors act as key players within the taste narrative, and their sequential rhythm structures the aesthetic experience, which can be "secured" in a series of passing sensations. The pleasures arise from the evanescence of flavor; the gastronome's attunement to the temporal nature of eating enables the full "luxury of taste."[48] In turn, the meal itself—the ordering of dishes and the sequence of flavors—becomes a voyage through memory, an aesthetic rapport, an amorous embrace.
Throughout Delights, Pennell lingers on those moments in which the bounty of nature meets the cultured palate and meals become works of art that stir a range of emotions within the diner, emotions that mirror that of an extended seduction. Pennell likens the meal to an amorous encounter, one that variously piques and soothes until it reaches a “stirring, glorious climax.”[49] Hors d’oeuvres “should stimulate, but never satisfy” and “each succeeding course must lead to new ecstasy.” In the end, a meal that has been carefully planned, prepared, and presented should mimic the pattern of seduction, one in which each successive dish animates and plays with the diner’s appetite and, ultimately, evokes a series of aesthetic emotions. If a meal rises to the level of gastronomy, it captures the diner in an aesthetic rapport, one in which the visual composition of dishes, the order in which they are served, the interplay of their flavors and textures, and the table setting itself seemingly transport the diner into another realm, unleashing pleasure, imagination, memory. A meal's capacity to stimulate the intellect by playing with the senses marks the meal as art.
As Pennell clarifies from the outset of her collected essays, she wrote to communicate “the Beauty, the Poetry, that exists in the perfect dish.”[50] She wrote variously of a sandwich “exotic and strange, some charm elusive and mysterious"; an omelet “cloudlike, the loveliness gradually and gracefully disappear[ing], as in a poet’s dream or a painter’s impression”; a bouillabaisse so exquisite that “from one end of the world to the other, you might journey in vain in search of an emotion so sweet as that aroused by the first fragrant fumes of the dish set before you, the first rapturous taste of the sauce-steeped bread, of the strange fish so strangely seasoned.”[51] These passages draw attention to the ephemeral nature of gastronomy and of its accompanying pleasures. They likewise fashion the "elusive," "mysterious" nature of eating pleasures into language.
Through her cookery column, Pennell worked to conceptualize and to communicate the aesthetic emotions of gastronomy, to fashion luxurious prose that rises above material need and practical instruction to "spread the soul in glad poetic flight."[52] This desire to soar above the body, however, left Pennell struggling at times. She struggled because, of all the arts, gastronomy is the most embodied. As scholar Barbara Santich writes: "Gastronomy... is at the confluence of the streams of sensuality and intellect. It implies the meeting of mind and body."[53] In turn, gastronomic literature transforms this confluence of streams into a cohesive narrative, one that dwells on what Barthes calls "the luxury of taste." As Pennell herself acknowledges, gastronomy is at core a practice that must attend to the body and to the mind.
Given the mythological inheritance of women, however, claiming the body and its appetites necessarily requires dealing with the labor and death, the decay and excrement that grounds gastronomy. In fact, most nineteenth-century gastronomic literature deals expressly with digestion and foregrounds death, often in a darkly humorous fashion. Pennell, however, worked hard to jettison the messy ends of eating from her prose. Figuring the "greedy woman" as one who eats but does not serve or cook, however, elides the material contributions women have made to the culinary arts. The cooking woman, nevertheless, refused to be excluded from Pennell's column. Her uncanny appearances within the gastronomic essays of a self-proclaimed greedy woman signify a cultural shift, one in which woman could no longer be contained by the domestic cookbook and in which the domestic cookbook could no longer be elided from gastronomic discourse. With Pennell, both the cooking and the eating woman stepped onto the pages of gastronomy, where they would flourish in the twentieth century, helping shape the literary aesthetic of M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas, and Elizabeth David—women who moved nimbly between the home kitchen and the French restaurant, women who cooked, ate, and wrote with lyricism, wit, and, above all, with voluptuous appetite.
[1] Pennell, My Cookery Books, viii.
[2] Ferguson, "A Cultural Field in the Making," 599.
[3] Ferguson, Accounting for Taste, 87.
[4] Ferguson, "A Cultural Field in the Making," 637.
[5] Spang. Invention of the Restaurant, 152.
[6] Arndt, Culinary Biographies, 190.
[7] Spang, Invention of the Restaurant, 150.
[8] In his study “Grimod de la Reynière’s Almanach des Gourmands,” Michael Garval takes Brillat-Savarin to task for not referencing his debt to Grimod. Garval notes that “all the ideas conveyed by Brillat-Savarin's twenty aphorisms can be found in Grimod’s Almanach, at least in embryonic form and often developed at length” (61).
[9] Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 53.
[10] Brillat-Savarin, 189.
[11] Brillat-Savarin, 189.
[12] Mennell, All Manners of Taste, 267.
[13] Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, "Making Sense of Food in Performance," 75.
[14] Senelick, "Consuming Passions," 45.
[15] Schaffer, Forgotten Female Aesthetes, 47.
[16] The quotations drawn from Pennell's columns are pulled from the American edition of her work, Delights of Delicate Eating, reprinted in 2000 by University of Illinois and introduced by Jacqueline Block Williams.
[17] Pennell, Delights, 7.
[18] Pennell, Delights, "gut your soals ... saucepan" 94; "in sunlight....passers-by" 98–99.
[19] Schaffer, "The Importance of Being Greedy," 120.
[20] Horrocks, Camping, para. 8.
[21] Pennell, Delights, 218.
[22] Pennell, Delights, 164.
[23] Pennell, Delights, 167.
[24] Abramson, "Grimod's Debt to Mercier," 153.
[25] Gigante, Gusto,xviii.
[26] Pennell, Nights, 148–149.
[27] Pennell, Delights, 84.
[28] Pennell, Delights, 84.
[29] Pennell, Delights, 123.
[30] Pennell, My Cookery Books, 10–11.
[31] Barthes, Rustle of Language, 253.
[32] Pennell, Delights, 8.
[33] Pennell, Delights, 12.
[34] This subtitle pays tribute to Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's essay "Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium," in which she writes: "The materiality of food, its dynamic and unstable character, its precarious position between sustenance and garbage, its relationship to the mouth and the rest of the body, particularly the female body, and its importance to community, make food a powerful performance medium" (8).
[35] Barthes, Rustle, 253.
[36] Barthes, Rustle, 250.
[37] Barthes, Rustle, 250–51.
[38] Adrià, Ferran, Thomas Keller, Heston Blumenthal, and Harold McGee. “Statement on the ‘New Cookery’.” The Observer, December 9, 2006. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/dec/10/foodanddrink.obsfoodmonthly.
[39] As Barthes reflects: "When I have an appetite for food, do I not imagine myself eating it? And, in this predictive imagination, is there not the entire memory of previous pleasures? I am the constituted subject of a scene to come, in which I am the only actor" (264).
[40] Pennell, Delights, 32.
[41] Barthes, Rustle, 250.
[42] Pennell, Delights, 181.
[43] Pennell, Delights, 73.
[44] Pennell, Delights, "pass" 20; "the vague ... decided" 56; "a brief ... interlude" 56; "glorious...overture" 53.
[45] Pennell, Delights, 215.
[46] Pennell, Delights, 215.
[47] Pennell, Delights, 55–56.
[48] Barthes, Rustle, 250.
[49] Pennell, Delights, 56.
[50] Pennell, Delights, 8.
[51] Pennell, Delights, "exotic...mysterious" 30; "cloudlike...impression" 37; "from one end...strangely seasoned" 102.
[52] Pennell, Delights,3.
[53] Santich, Looking for Flavour, 173.
Published in Elizabeth Robins Pennell: Critical Essays
To eat is to eschew all prose, to spread the soul in glad poetic flight. —Elizabeth Robins Pennell