Pleasures of the Literary Meal

The pleasure of reading about what others eat and drink is somewhere between the satisfaction of feeding and that of being fed.ILLUSTRATION BY NICOLE RIFKIN

One of the rudest things you can do, food-wise, is to stare at someone in the act of eating. It draws attention to the unseemly fact that eating is a bodily function—like animals, we are trapped by our hungers, but we do our best to disguise them with such civilized props as menus and forks. When someone watches us eating, we feel exposed. We might also harbor a suspicion that the person staring wants to steal food from our plate. The taboo, in any case, is long-standing. In 1530, Erasmus of Rotterdam noted that it was “bad manners to let your eyes roam around observing what each person is eating.” Even now, for all our Instagramming, we find it invasive for someone to watch too closely as we chew and swallow. Last year, there was outrage over a Facebook group entitled “Women Who Eat on Tubes,” which collected photographs of unsuspecting women eating on London subway trains.

And yet we have a deep yearning to watch others eat. Part of the appeal, of course, is the food-porn factor: to see Anthony Bourdain nibbling seafood risotto in Venice on “No Reservations” distracts us from the sorry carton of reheated pad thai on our own plate. But, just as often, our gaze is seeking not only food but also company. Consider the “eating broadcasts,” now popular in South Korea, which depict people enjoying solitary meals. Such videos liberate us to stare all we like, without feeling rude. And, now that so many of us eat alone, to watch others doing it also takes away the sting of loneliness. Writing on this site about the phenomenon of eating alone in China, where one video of a young woman eating a picnic in Shanghai has been viewed around a quarter of a million times, Jiayang Fan wrote, “Sometimes, a strawberry waffle is all the companionship you need.”

There are times, however, when watching is not enough—when we hunger to know what the eater feels about the strawberry waffle as it enters her gullet. For this degree of closeness, we need books, where we might learn, for example, that Madame Bovary “felt a thrill go through her as she tasted the coldness” of iced champagne in her mouth. Our desire to observe others eating, from the inside, is a large part of the appeal of reading about food in literature, as I was reminded by a splendid new collection edited by Christina Hardyment, “Pleasures of the Table: A Literary Anthology,” illustrated with vivid historic images from the collection of the British Library. This is by no means the first food anthology, and many of its entries are well-worn: Virginia Woolf’s beef daube from “To the Lighthouse,” Proust on madeleines. Yet the collection as a whole reads like a fresh treat, thanks to Hardyment’s keen eye for pleasures of many kinds. She allows us to stare, unobserved, at many an intimate breakfast and ad-hoc luncheon.

Sometimes the buzz of reading about others eating comes from the voyeuristic thrill of seeing how the other half lives: the gold leaf and truffles or – in the case of Trimalchio’s feast in Petronius’ “Satyricon”—the dormice and honey. It’s like watching lavish dishes circulate to other tables in a restaurant, or nosily looking in someone else’s refrigerator or shopping basket. At one of Jay Gatsby’s legendary parties, included in Hardyment’s collection_,_ we get a glimpse of glamorous “men and girls” consuming “spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs,” and “cordials so long forgotten that most of [the] female guests were too young to know one from another.” Hardyment features plenty of extraordinary feasts, not all of them appetizing. In “The Accomplisht Cook,” the most significant English cookbook of the seventeenth century, the royalist cook Robert May describes seeing ladies “skip and shriek” at a pie containing live frogs.

But we also enjoy contemplating what others consume when it is close to what we eat and drink ourselves. Years ago, during a John Grisham phase, I tried to pinpoint exactly why I found Grisham’s often predictable legal thrillers quite so comforting. The best answer I could come up with was the frequency with which Grisham tells us that his lead characters are sipping coffee. When it comes to food and drink, predictability can console. The same is true of reading about it. “At five Wednesday morning, Jake sipped coffee in his office and stared through the French doors,” Grisham writes in a typical passage in “A Time to Kill.” For those of us who also punctuate our days with coffee, this banal detail is flattering: Grisham makes the sipping of coffee—note, never gulping or swigging—seem like a purposeful prelude to action.

Or maybe we get a kick from snooping on the meals of others precisely because eating and drinking are such intimate acts. To read “Jake sipped coffee” is to mirror back to ourselves the private enjoyment we feel in our own daily mug of French press. In Hardyment’s collection, it is the private joy of tea that occurs more frequently. (I should note here that Hardyment is British.) We see Agnes, Lady Jekyll, a grand English cookery writer of the nineteen-twenties, relishing a “fragrant infusion” of tea in a cup of “thinnest china,” sitting on “a sofa cushioned with Asiatic charm,” while “a wood fire flickers sympathetically on the hearth.” The Edwardian writer George Gissing, likewise, allows us to join him in his study with his teapot: “What solace in the first cup, what deliberate sipping of that which follows!”

The pleasure of reading about what others eat and drink is somewhere between the satisfaction of feeding and that of being fed. We salivate to share Proust’s memories of cherries and cream cheese and almond cake, and we can almost taste the sweet almondy crumbs in our own mouths and feel nourished by them. But we also have an urge to see others receiving satisfaction, especially children. Hardyment has previously published books on children’s literature, and she has selected especially well from childhood books for this anthology. She gives us Edmund gorging on Turkish delight in the Narnia books, and Heidi eating toasted cheese with her grandfather. There’s also the scene in “Swallows and Amazons,” by Arthur Ransome, in which the children picnic on “Wild Cat Island.” We are told that the four children eat scrambled eggs from a communal frying pan, before having “four big slabs of seed cake” and “apples all round.” This idea of having exactly enough food to go round is a powerful one. To watch others eat is not necessarily a selfish or envious act: like a parent, we want to see each person at the meal getting a fair share.

To see others enjoying themselves, after all, is one of the universal forms of human enjoyment. Our staring, which seems so rude in person, can actually be a look of sympathetic engagement. Just as it is distressing to contemplate the hungry, it is cheering to contemplate others becoming replete. You don’t even have to aspire to eat the food in question. Hardyment includes a picnic scene from Dickens’s “Pickwick Papers”: bread, “knuckle o’ ham,” cold beef in slices, veal pie, stone jars of beer. This wouldn’t be an ideal picnic for many of us now: too meat-heavy and stodgy and lacking in vegetables. Yet we can still enter into Sam Weller’s lip-smacking excitement about the lunch: “Wery good thing is weal pie, when you know the lady as made it, and is quite sure it ain’t kittens.… A wery good notion of lunch it is.”

Descriptions of people eating provide something that recipes can never give: closure. So much of our food culture now serves to tantalize us with hypothetical meals. We are endlessly promised the “10 best quinoa recipes,” but the odds are that we’ll never make even one of them. Recipes as a form of prose—as opposed to practical guidelines for cooking—promise more than they can deliver. It is noticeable that Hardyment’s chapter of “literary recipes” (Katherine Mansfield’s orange soufflé, Alexandre Dumas’s ostrich-egg omelette) is nothing like as satisfying as her chapter on “Simple Pleasures,” where we read of various people eating such humble delights as buttered toast. Even the greatest recipe is like a mystery without a solution: we are given the clues and the setup—the ingredients and the method—without the longed-for denouement. What we really want to know is: How did it turn out? Who ate it, and did they enjoy it? When M. F. K. Fisher writes, of cauliflower cooked in heavy cream and Gruyère, “We cleaned our plates with bits of crisp bread crust and drank the wine,” the reminiscence is worth more than any number of “ultimate” cauliflower recipes.

It is no accident that detective stories often end with a meal. When we see someone eating, we are left in suspense no longer. Hardyment includes a section from the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty.” After a fiendish puzzle that culminates with Holmes serving a recovered stolen document to its rightful owner on a breakfast platter, the story ends with the detective enjoying a meal himself. “Sherlock Holmes swallowed a cup of coffee, and turned his attention to the ham and eggs. Then he rose, lit his pipe, and settled himself down into his chair.” The joy of reading about the meals of others shows that, in many ways, we are simple creatures: by merely looking upon someone else eating we can feel better fed.