Alice McLean

The Matriarch of California Cuisine

In the 1970s, many of the political and social ideals that took root in the 60s began to materialize in California cuisine. The social activism fermenting in California was tempered with French attitudes toward the table to create the California flair for showcasing local ingredients, simply prepared to emphasize natural flavors. By using locally grown and produced ingredients in their kitchens, restaurants like Chez Panisse and Greens not only encouraged the small farmer and forged relationships between the grower and the consumer, but they also helped to educate Californians about the homegrown products and flavors of their state. In so doing, they materialized the essence of the California table at its best—simply prepared dishes composed of local ingredients, a devotion to the pleasures of good food, and a deep respect for the connections these pleasures spark. While California soil has long produced an abundance of luscious fruits and vegetables that need little or no coaxing to taste their best, their natural flavors were drained for decades by the popular treatment of food as a thrice-daily necessity and of pleasure in eating as a wasteful indulgence. The prevalence of this attitude, common among the American middle classes from the late-nineteenth century, only began to lessen during the late 60s when moral restraints were slowly lifted off physical pleasure. Given that our culture so closely associates women with food and food with sex, it is no coincidence that an increased enjoyment of food emerged alongside women’s sexual liberation. And it is also no coincidence that two cities at the forefront of the cultural rebellion, Berkeley and San Francisco, would house Chez Panisse and Greens and that these restaurants would be conceived by women. While the cultural rebellion against the repression of physical pleasure did not gain full force until the 1970s, it was given a public voice decades earlier in the prose of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, whose devotion to the pleasures of the table marked her as a radical in the American food writing tradition. Born in 1908 and raised in a household where her grandmother’s ‘despotic bowels’ governed the dinner table, Fisher was well-versed in the debilitating aspects of denial and control by the time she was an adolescent. Following a code of “late Victorian asceticism,” which was typical among the American middle class, Fisher’s grandmother preached the denial of the body and of bodily pleasure, equating moral and intellectual strength with physical abnegation. Raised in a household dominated by this attitude until her grandmother’s death in 1920, Fisher found herself irrepressibly drawn to food that fell beyond the bounds of her grandmother’s culinary dictum: ‘Take what God has created and eat it humbly and without sinful pleasure.’” (11). That the woman whom W.H. Auden called the “best prose writer in the United States” chose food as the guiding metaphor for her life and her writing is no coincidence given that she grew up in California, where she learned first-hand the pleasures of savoring fresh fruits and vegetables straight from the garden. She recalls how she and her siblings would roam the neighborhood [eating] almost anything that we could put in our mouths without being burned or stung, and [swallowing[ everything that our bodies would not reject. It was a good education for my palate. … [W]e had beautiful orchard and citrus fruits, and artichokes, and asparagus and every kind of vegetable that would grow above the ground…. Peaches, apricots, plums, mirabelles, prunes, the guavas and dates, strange little things called roselles. (Among Friends 246-47) While Fisher delighted in eating dates scraped straight off the sidewalk or biting into the delicate flesh of saucer peaches, she spent decades trying to understand why these outdoor treasures suffered so miserably when brought indoors. Why, she asked were their flavors drowned in a pot of boiling water before their sodden remains were buried in a pasty white sauce? She began to write, in part, driven by the need to ease the tension between her desire for fruits and vegetables respectfully treated and their thrice-daily humiliation at her family’s dining table. Decades later, Fisher would begin to understand that the tenor of the table talk and the flavor of the dishes were governed by a puritanical repression of the body and its pleasures—a repression especially aimed at women and children. At the age of sixty-three, Fisher recalls her childhood meals: in a period when all food was boiled for hours, whatever it was boiled in was thrown out as being either too rich (meats) or trashy (vegetables). We ate turnips and potatoes a lot….We seldom ate cabbage: it did not agree with [Grandmother], and small wonder, since it was always cooked according to her mid-Victorian recipes and would have made an elephant heave and hiccup. We ate carrots, always in a ‘white sauce’ in little dishes by our plates….[T]he flatter a thing tasted, the better it was for you, … And the better it was for you, ,,, the more you should suffer to eat it (To Begin Again, 53-54) The overcooked vegetables, pasty white sauces, and a general disdain for the physical pleasures of eating, which ruined many of Fisher’s childhood meals, haunted the middle-class American table well into the 1960s. Fisher grew up to rebel wholeheartedly against the repression of her palate. This rebellion led her to France at the age of twenty. In France, Fisher learned the true difference in flavor between food prepared as a sheer necessity and food treated as an artful medium through which pleasure can be captured and conveyed. For example, in her own home, potatoes “were mashed, baked, boiled, and when Grandmother was away, fixed in a casserole with cream sauce.... It was shameful, I always felt, and stupid too, to reduce a potentially important food to such a menial position...and to take time everyday to cook it, doggedly, with perfunctory compulsion” (51). Because Fisher equates the treatment of food with the treatment of the self, reducing potatoes to a “menial position” is “shameful” because it likewise reduces the people who prepare and eat the potato to a “menial” stature. Rebelling against her grandmother who treated food with “perfunctory compulsion” and dined “humbly and without sinful pleasure,” Fisher insisted on treating food as a source of intellectual and physical fulfillment. In so doing, she raises the body and food and the home cook from their menial and shameful position into one of honor. While the potato’s treatment as “shameful” and its position as “menial” belie a pleasureless conception of food and cooking as well as a pleasureless conception of life, Fisher encountered quite a different attitude upon her arrival in France, where her husband, Al, worked for his doctorate at the University of Dijon. As newlyweds just arrived in Paris, Fisher and her husband are on their way to settle in Dijon when they encounter a potato soufflé in what marks “one of the fine moments” of Fisher’s life. (51) She describes the event: I forget now what we ate, except for a kind of soufflé of potatoes. It was hot, light, with a brown crust, and probably chives and grated Parmesan cheese were somewhere in it. But the great thing about it was that is was served alone, in a course all by itself. I felt a secret justification swell in me, a pride such as I’ve seldom known since, because all my life, it seemed, I had been wondering rebelliously about potatoes.... I almost resented them, in fact...or rather, the monotonous disinterest with which they were always treated. I felt that they could be good, if they were cooked respectfully.... And now, here in the sunny courtyard of the first really French restaurant I had ever been in, I saw my theory proved. It was a fine moment. (51) Fisher’s remarkable pride at witnessing the potato artfully prepared comes from the knowledge that even the most fundamental components of life can and should be treated with care and imagination. At the age of twenty, Fisher comprehends that transforming the everyday potato into an extraordinary soufflé is not only a culinary art but also an artful approach to life; respect for the food one takes into the body is equivalent to respect for oneself. A large part of Fisher’s gastronomical growth came from watching the French gather, prepare, and eat “natural products, nurtured by man” (Cooking of Provincial France 30). By letting the land inform their regional specialties, the French nurture a form of cooking that reflects the climate and geography of their province. So the cuisine of Normandy “has evolved during the centuries, based on jewel-like apples and cream from the little pink cows” and the Bretons eat vegetables that “taste of the ocean in Brittany, for seaweeds gathered along the beaches at low tide are used for fertilizer in the farm gardens” (Cooking 14-15). Fisher’s relationship to cooking and the home kitchen were transformed by the French market. While living in Provence, she found herself often passing the evening thinking of what [she] must buy the next day, and load into the baskets, and then sort and store and serve forth in the order of Nature itself: first freshness, then flavour and ripeness, and then decay. And always there were the needs of the people who must live from Nature, and learn to do so to the best of all their powers….It was a good way to live. (Measure 318) While California first taught Fisher to taste the natural order of freshness, flavor, ripeness, then decay, France taught her how to bring this natural order into the kitchen. She also learned to prize the intellectual and physical pleasures of eating dishes that capture the essence of this natural progression. Upon her return the States, Fisher no longer ate the “basically midwestern cuisine” she was fed as a child in Whittier, California. Rather, she imported the French emphasis on regional ingredients prepared to taste of themselves back to California. So whether living in Hemet, St. Helena, or Glen Ellen, Fisher brought the ripened flavors of the local countryside to her table, eating California cuisine well ahead of its time. Nourished by these flavors she began to write, driven by the knowledge that Our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it…and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied…and it is all one. And to close my discussion of Fisher, I’d like to read a passage that crystallizes her gastronomic philosophy in one image, with which she depicts an evening fighting off a stubborn illness: I coughed steadily in a small dry exhausting way…. Then that night the speed and sound of the cough changed, and….up into my throat moved my soul….The soul, smooth and about the size of a small truffle or scallop or a large marble, rose firmly into my upper throat….I knew what it looked like, for I had seen it long ago. I knew its color and its contours and its taste….’Go back,’ I cried out to it, in language it recognized through wild coughing….I told it, in a flash…of our first meeting, and of the mystery and respect and indeed affection I had battened on from that day. I was about five, maybe four….[A]ll I remember is that…my young small soul rose into my throat and then came out….It was about as big as a little hazelnut or chickpea, of the subtlest creamy white, like ivory but deeper…. I recognized it fully, without any doubt or timidity, as my own soul. Then I put it gently into my mouth, bit into it, and chewed and swallowed it…. I made sure that none had stayed in my mouth and that all of it was well down my throat, for it was important that it reassemble itself and stay there inside me, to grow….I never wondered about its next visit, but I knew there would be one….But the night that it did come again was a mistake, except for the reassurance that it was still there…. There was no clash of wills between us, certainly,… before it did withdraw. (Last House 28-31) By imaging her soul as like a “truffle” or “chickpea” which she chews and swallows, Fisher dissolves the boundaries between inside and outside, self and other, eater and eaten, body and soul. She is not disturbed by the embodiment of her soul because she “recognizes” herself with “affection.” In this move, Fisher not only dissolves boundaries, but she also effectively converges opposites by imaging inside as outside, self as other, eater as eaten, and the soul as embodied. This passage literalizes one of the most quoted aphorisms from gastronomic literature: “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.” Fisher not only is what she eats, but she eats what she is.