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In Good Taste: Rethinking American History with Our Palates
Gerard J. Fitzgerald and Gabriella M. Petrick
Good food writing can make the mouth water, the nose tingle, and the stomach growl. It invites readers to reconstruct a dish or a meal so that they may reflect on or imagine its taste, flavor, and texture. M. F. K. Fisher is probably the best known of the literary gourmands who helped spark gustatory imaginations and linked words to taste. In her book An Alphabet for Gourmets, she evokes the essence of a pea. "I watched the headwaiter, as skilled as a magician, dry peas over a flame in a generous pan, add what looked like an equal weight of butter, which almost visibly sent out a cloud of sweet-smelling hay and meadow air." In describing her own perfect garden peas she wrote,
Small brown roasted chickens, the best ones I have ever eaten, done for me that afternoon...and not chilled since but cooled in their own intangibly delicate juices. There was salad of mountain lettuces. There was honest bread.... But what really mattered, what piped the high unforgettable tune of perfection, were the peas, which came from their hot pot onto our thick china plates in a cloud, a kind of miasma, of everything anyone could ever want from them, even in a dream.1
What is striking about Fisher's work is that she not only places the reader at the table with her, but engages all the reader's senses to evoke taste. To convey the perfection of the peas, she relies on the readers' previous experiences with the foods (and their imagination of what they could be), conjuring the sensuality of peas freshly picked from the garden, cooked for only the briefest moment in boiling water, and brought steaming to the table with all their vegetal sweetness bursting in our mouths. Although only Fisher and her table mates actually tasted the peas and knew the delight they brought and while her description assumes a universal experience with taste that is unlikely to exist, her vivid descriptions and attention to flavor can evoke a simulacra of the peas based on readers' previous experiences, especially if those readers share a common gustatory heritage. Rather than arguing for some universal or ahistorical sense of taste, we are suggesting that reading and writing with a sense of taste, one that is both sensitive to context and experience and also infused with historical imagination, can help historians think through the contingent nature of taste and its historical meanings. |
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As historians of food and taste, we find that we depend on our previous gastronomic experiences to try to taste the past. Whether we are reading a grandmother's cryptic recipes, a technical paper, a cookbook, tasting panel notes, or a dietary survey, when it comes to food, we try to taste it in our minds if we can, and sometimes one of us, Gabriella M. Petrick, even prepares foods to give us a better understanding of the techniques used to produce them and of their flavor. (We must confess that Petrick probably has more experience than many historians, since she is a professionally trained chef and specialized in food and wine pairing for many years before beginning her doctoral work. We would argue, however, that honing one's palate and tasting a wide variety of foods are useful pursuits for anyone interested in writing about the history of taste.) Tasting allows historians to place the sensory experience in historical context and to utilize an often-ignored analytical tool: the body's senses. Just as historians of art or music use their senses to analyze material, so too can historians of food and taste. However, using the sense of taste to investigate the past has its limits (we will never know what Fisher's peas really tasted like), but exercising historical imagination while attending to how people described past flavor experiences can help us approximate the nature of taste historically.2 In short, to understand a culture, past or present, we should endeavor to understand how a society feeds itself. It is the ubiquity and everydayness of eating that makes understanding it historically so important. The taste and flavor of food play an important part in social relationships, and a food's taste can embody meanings well beyond what is put into the mouth. |
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