Albina Becevello.

During a life of astonishing incident and variety, Gabriele D’Annunzio inhabited many guises. In the twenty years before World War I he established himself as a giant of Italian culture: an epochal writer often known simply as “the Poet” in Italy, a nationalist proselytizer, a storied lothario, and a daring aviator of spellbinding charisma. When the war came, D’Annunzio transformed himself into a soldier and a statesman who presaged the rise of Mussolini and the aesthetics of Fascism. A “poet, seducer and prophet of war” is how his biographer Lucy Hughes-Hallett describes him, “an urbane socialite and man of letters,” as well as “a frenzied demagogue” who was “as ruthless and selfish as a baby.”

His life intersected with many famous and infamous people, such as his sometime lover and muse Eleonora Duse, one of the most acclaimed actors of her day. But away from the excitement, scandal, and infamy that defined D’Annunzio’s public existence, one curious relationship ran like a steel girder through the last twenty-three years of his life: that with his cook, a much younger woman named Albina Becevello, about whom little is known other than her cooking. At a time when certain thinkers—inspired, to some degree, by D’Annunzio’s ideas about aestheticism, technology, and national identity—were advocating a complete revolution in Italian cuisine, Becevello nourished and indulged her employer with recipes that would have been familiar to the people of the Italian Peninsula even before the unification of Italy in the late nineteenth century.

Becevello was not a pioneering chef, but one who catered perfectly to her audience. As the authors Maddalena Santeroni and Donatella Miliani detail in their book about Becevello, D’Annunzio’s mania for eggs—he would routinely eat five a day—meant his cook became a brilliant exponent of frittata, the Italian variant of the omelet. Often Becevello could send him into raptures with an even more simple creation, such as her re-creation of the egg-and-anchovy dish he remembered from his childhood. “Albina, be praised forever and ever,” he once wrote her, “shine forever in the Constellation of the Egg and the Nebula of the Anchovy! Amen.” Santeroni and Miliani suggest that the relationship between Becevello and D’Annunzio gives the lie to the Poet’s reputation for misogyny. That seems a stretch, to put it kindly. But they’re surely correct in saying that through Becevello and her traditional cooking—her risotto alla Milanese and her spaghetti alla chitarra—a real human emerges beneath the layers of obnoxious and grandiloquent mythmaking in which D’Annunzio swaddled himself for the half-century that he occupied a central place in Italian public life.

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Albina Becevello was in her early twenties when she first cooked for D’Annunzio. From 1910 the Poet lived as a sybaritic celebrity in Paris but returned to his homeland to support its entry into World War I, a conflict he saw as an unprecedented national opportunity. To him, the carnage wrought by modern warfare was a chance to destroy, cleanse, and rejuvenate. Only in slaughter, he believed, could Italy claim its glorious destiny.

D’Annunzio settled in Venice, where he rented the Casetta Rossa, a property belonging to Prince Fritz Hohenlohe of Austria. With the house came a small domestic staff, including the young woman who ran the kitchen. Where Becevello had learned her craft is unknown, but she would surely have picked up the rudiments of the local cuisine—characterized by risotto, polenta, and radicchio—from the sharecropping family who raised her from the age of eight in the countryside surrounding Treviso, not far from Venice. Considering how dedicated D’Annunzio was to the indulgence of the senses, he was surprisingly ambivalent about food. Immaculate in dress and manners, he found the physical process of eating messy; he considered it “humiliating to fill the sad sack,” he said, though he had no qualms about sating his other bodily appetites. Often, he would forego meals, and claimed to prefer dining alone, though that may have been due to pain or embarrassment caused by his appalling teeth. Yet food—its flavors, colors, and aromas—could excite him as much as any artwork. The event of dining could likewise stimulate him, if only because it gave him a captive audience, and Becevello became a vital element in D’Annunzio’s political and personal life, catering for the guests who flowed through the Casetta Rossa.

During the war years D’Annunzio crafted a distinct public reputation as a warrior-poet, and found ever more exhibitionist ways to champion the nationalist cause, culminating in a highly publicized flight over Vienna in 1918, when he dropped thousands of leaflets urging the Viennese to surrender. Because D’Annunzio had seen the war as a chance for national glory, he was enraged when Italy—despite being among the victorious Allied powers—was prevented from acquiring the city of Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) by the terms drawn up at the Paris Peace Conference. In September 1919, D’Annunzio defied the Paris settlement by leading two thousand soldiers into Fiume, seizing control of the city, and setting himself up as its dictator. For fourteen months Fiume was like nowhere else on earth, a place that attracted artists, radicals, and outsiders of all sorts. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti—the founder of the futurist movement of artists and thinkers, heavily influenced by D’Annunzio’s veneration of speed and violence—was thrilled by Fiume, as was a young Mussolini; many of D’Annunzio’s political ideas and his flamboyant, theatrical style of leadership, complete with Roman salutes, black uniforms, and rabble-rousing oratory, laid the groundwork for the Fascist surge that was soon to come.

When D’Annunzio was driven out of Fiume, on Christmas of 1920, he returned to Italy and looked on as Mussolini—whom D’Annunzio apparently considered to be an ill-educated vulgarian—established himself as Italy’s dominant political force. After suffering serious injury from being pushed out of a window—possibly by one of Mussolini’s supporters—the Poet withdrew to the banks of Lake Garda, where he created the Vittoriale degli italiani, a vast estate that was to be his home for the rest of his life. Here, D’Annunzio built a magical kingdom all his own, insulated from the daily realities of Mussolini’s Italy, where he could further his mythology and leave future generations of Italians with a physical monument to himself.

Albina Becevello was integral to the project; she cooked not only for D’Annunzio but for all twenty-five people who lived on the estate. As with every other inch of the Vittoriale, Becevello’s kitchen was carefully designed, with the contemporary abutting the traditional: modern refrigeration devices were placed next to tools for making pasta native to the Abruzzo region, D’Annunzio’s childhood home. Much of the food that Becevello prepared in this space evoked the Abruzzo—pecorino cheese, cured meats, and many cakes and desserts—but she refrained from making the region’s famous meatballs, which D’Annunzio dismissed as “Abruzzo bullets.”

When D’Annunzio was entertaining, Becevello’s creations were served in the “Cheli Room,” a lavish dining room of gold and red, named after his pet tortoise. When Cheli died from overindulging in tube roses, D’Annunzio had a bronze cast of him made and fixed to the end of the dining table—a warning to guests about the perils of gluttony. However, much of Becevello’s work was not designed to impress guests but to salve and fuel D’Annunzio as he wrote, made new plans for the Vittoriale, and conducted his sexual adventures. Frequently, Becevello would be called upon at short notice late at night or early in the morning to make a plate of eggs for D’Annunzio and something for a woman he had shared his bed with.

In 2015, Maddalena Santeroni and Donatella Miliani published a book about the tranche of notes and letters that D’Annunzio sent to Becevello during the course of their long association. What emerges is a fascinating insight into the domestic routines of a highly unusual man, and a portrait of a unique, peculiarly intimate relationship. As Santeroni and Miliani note, despite D’Annunzio being nearly twenty years Becevello’s senior, the relationship between them sometimes appeared more like son and mother than boss and employee, something the authors put down to D’Annunzio’s endless search for a mother figure and his associating food with maternal love. He would sprinkle his messages to her with words and phrases from their native dialects (Venetian and Abruzzese), and had numerous pet names for her that were both jocular and respectful: “Sister Gluttony,” “Sister Sauce,” “Sister of the Plenary Indulgences.” Santeroni and Miliani agree with Giordano Bruno Guerri, president of the foundation that now looks after Vittoriale, that Becevello was one of the few women in D’Annunzio’s life with whom he didn’t try to have sex. Indeed, it seems that she was granted a great deal more respect than other women on his domestic staff, whom he harassed and mistreated. As Lucy Hughes-Hallett reveals in her biography, D’Annunzio said that he considered a maid who brought him the meals that Becevello cooked to be no more to him than “a piece of furniture, a cupboard on feet.”

As Santeroni and Miliani show, D’Annunzio often issued Becevello strangely specific instructions. Sometimes he wanted ribs beaten “thinner than a banana peel” with a stone pestle. Out of the blue, he once insisted that “from now on, every day, between three and four in the afternoon, you must be ready to prepare me cold veal with or without sauce.” If fresh meat proved hard to come by on any given day, he instructed Becevello to buy a live calf, slaughter and butcher it herself, and freeze whatever wasn’t used. This is the D’Annunzio that’s familiar to us: impulsive, demanding, egocentric. But Santeroni and Miliani’s study offers a glimpse of a much less recognizable man who was capable of empathy, compassion, and thoughtfulness. According to the notes he sent Becevello, he sometimes insisted that she prolong her vacations because she seemed tired, and very frequently he gave her cash bonuses, as well as substantial sums of money to send to her disabled brother. Perhaps it was gratitude for service, and her ability to coat him in nostalgia and home comforts; perhaps, in his solipsistic way, he saw in her creative talent and hard-earned skill something that he recognized as true artistry, and therefore deserving of a respect he withheld from other servants.

By and large, the fare that D’Annunzio required of Becevello was rooted in the nineteenth century in which he had been raised. “I have a sudden passion for can-nel-lo-ni,” he wrote Becevello one evening. “You must have cannelloni ready at any time of the day and night. cannelloni! cannelloni!” Not all of his contemporaries shared his passion for the traditional taste of Italy; at a time when Fascism threatened to transform Europe, certain of those in his circle wanted to turn Italian cuisine on its head. In the thirties, Marinetti, the leader of the futurist movement who had been so excited by D’Annunzio’s Fiume escapade, published his half-joking ideas for futurist cooking and eating, which advocated radical new flavor combinations and the use of poetry, music, colored lighting, and perfume in the dining experience. “Until now men have fed themselves like ants, rats, cats or oxen,” proclaimed Marinetti. “Now with the Futurists the first human way of eating is born.” He foresaw a time when most nutrition would be consumed in the form of pills and powders, freeing up time for people to study, create, and think. The few mealtimes that remained would be opportunities to stimulate the senses and inflame passions, by making them multisensory experiences. The interior of the Taverna del Santopalato (Tavern of the Holy Palate), a futurist restaurant that Marinetti helped to establish in Turin in 1931, was intended to resemble a submarine, but decorated with aluminum (then an excitingly futuristic material), bright columns of color, and large eyes painted on the walls. When the food came, diners received small portions of various strange-sounding dishes such as chicken stuffed with zabaglione (similar to eggnog) and topped with silver confetti, and an orange risotto named the Roar of Ascent.

Marinetti’s ideas, collated in The Futurist Cookbook, have been described by one scholar as “a serious joke” intended to rile and provoke. He certainly provoked a strong response to his call for the abolition of pasta, which he argued kept Italians trapped in a sluggish, premodern existence. Marinetti viewed gastronomy as a vehicle for making a new breed of Italians to inhabit what was still a young country. As he saw it, pasta was the coddling embrace of tradition in carbohydrate form. “Men think, dream and act according to what they eat and drink,” he averred. Replacing the thick beige ribbons of pappardelle with small mouthfuls of “Alaskan salmon in the rays of the sun with Mars sauce,“ or “Polyrhythmic Salad,” which diners would eat with one hand while simultaneously turning the crank on a music box with the other, would help to create lithe bodies and alert minds, all the better to pursue national glory.

Mussolini’s regime was no less committed to fashioning new Italians, but it drew a direct link between traditional cooking and national identity, a scheme supported by popular magazines such as La cucina Italiana, established in 1929 and still going to this day. One could see Becevello in her kitchen at the Vittoriale as a fusion of these two visions: a domestic cook working in the established Italian tradition for a novel, very modern cause, and the provider of comfort food to a Modernist aesthete who entertained in the louche splendor of the Cheli Room.

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As Mussolini grew ever closer with Hitler in the early thirties, D’Annunzio wrote to the Duce expressing his disgust for the German chancellor. However, when Italy invaded Ethiopia, in 1935, D’Annunzio was so delighted that he sent Mussolini the gift of a sword adorned with a depiction of Fiume. Despite his misgivings about Nazi Germany, D’Annunzio still believed Italy’s rightful destiny lay in war, conquest, and imperial expansion. He died at the age of seventy-four in 1938, before these ideas reaped their bitter fruits. Marinetti, committed to the priapic madness of futurism and Fascism until the last, died in 1944, at the age of sixty-seven, having served a stint on the Eastern Front a couple of years earlier.

Following the Poet’s death, Becevello, then in her fifties, returned to the Veneto and her family. If she was hoping for a comfortable early retirement, she was to be cruelly disappointed. Santeroni and Milaini tell us that her brother had squandered all the money D’Annunzio sent him over the years, leaving Becevello with a great financial burden. Santeroni and Miliani don’t know quite how her final days played out, but she died in poverty in 1940, at the age of fifty-six.

At the Vittoriale—now open to the public as a museum to D’Annunzio’s life and work—traces of Becevello live on, though, as always, one must look through the lens of the Poet to glimpse them. The Cheli Room, with its bronze cast of D’Annunzio’s beloved tortoise, looks as it would have just before an epicurean evening ninety years ago, ready to receive some of D’Annunzio’s favorites: lean slices of cold partridge, perhaps, or a rose risotto, followed by budino al cioccolato, a delicious Italian chocolate pudding.

Many of the dishes she cooked are still with us, of course, but in restaurants across the world they share space with elements of Marinetti’s futurist food revolution. His prescriptions for treating cooking and eating as a multisensory art foreshadowed the nouvelle cuisine that developed after World War II. Heston Blumenthal is the best known of a generation of celebrity chefs who have brought Marinetti’s ideas about eating into the mainstream. His recipes for bacon-and-egg ice cream and snail porridge could have been taken from Marinetti’s manifesto, as could his dishes that come served with atomizers, dry ice, and soundscapes—but these are the lauded dishes that have earned him Michelin stars and great commercial success. Albina Becevello had neither of those. But she did add a unique texture to one of the most consequential lives of the twentieth century. Thanks to Maddalena Santeroni and Donatella Miliani, perhaps in time Becevello will be remembered not simply as the hidden woman who cooked for D’Annunzio, but as a culinary artist in her own right.

For further reading, the author recommends the following:

• La cuoca di d’Annunzio: I biglietti del Vate a “Suor Intingola.” Cibi, menù, desideri e inappetenze al Vittoriale, Maddalena Santeroni and Donatella Miliani (in Italian)
• The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War, Lucy Hughes-Hallett
• The Futurist Cookbook, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
• Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917–1924, Charles Emmerson

Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America. His latest book, The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock: An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense, was published earlier this year by W. W. Norton. Read earlier installments of Off Menu.

Alma Reville with a wax figure of Alfred Hitchcock’s head, 1974. © Philippe Halsman/Magnum Photos.

Within the shifted reality of an Alfred Hitchcock movie there is no steady fact of existence that cannot be undermined. The ambiguity extends even to food and drink. In Notorious, Ingrid Bergman’s heroine is poisoned in her own home by a cup of coffee, while homebodies in The Man Who Knew Too Much feel discomfort in foreign lands because of the exotic food they are fed. In mid-twentieth-century America, nothing could be more wholesome and nourishing than a glass of milk—except when it’s handed to an unwitting guest at the Bates Motel as part of her final meal.

In his private life, Hitchcock felt the same unease about comestibles. He adored food and the experience of dining but resented the impact that consumption had on his body: “I’m simply one of those unfortunates who can accidentally swallow a cashew nut and put on thirty pounds right away,” he explained. Of the various aspects of Hitchcock’s identity that I wrote about for my book The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock, it was his existence as a self-described “fat man” that most revealed him as a cultural figure ahead of his time. Hitchcock being Hitchcock—an expert self-mythologizer—he turned his anguish about his appearance into a joke and then exploited its potential for publicity. Though he made his love of food a prominent part of his reputation, he also shared his dissatisfaction with his body image in a way that no male celebrity had ever done, posing for photographs that charted the progression of his weight loss and expressing the pain of counting calories.

As with so much else in his life, Hitchcock’s accomplice in this peculiar gastronomic odyssey was Alma Reville, his wife, best friend, longest-serving creative collaborator, and, to quote Hitchcock, “as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen.” Their partnership began in the mid-’20s, when Reville worked as Hitchcock’s assistant director on the silent films that launched him to fame in his native Britain. For the next fifty years, she was his steel girder, lending her talents to scriptwriting, casting, editing, and promotion, in both official and unofficial capacities. And at their residences in England and America, it was Reville’s exceptional cooking that made their home a living extension of the Hitchcock screen universe, a place of sensory stimulation, both earthly and transporting.

At the height of Hitchcock’s fame, in the fifties and sixties, Reville combined the culinary traditions of France, Britain, and the United States in her kitchen, an embodiment of the kind of sophisticated American domestic cook that Julia Child communicated through her books and TV shows. Yet in an ironic subtext worthy of a Hitchcock classic, Reville’s cooking also represented something of the emotional complexity that attended being married to the Master of Suspense. Though Reville gave Hitchcock his Proustian flashes of home with Yorkshire puddings and Sunday roasts, and bolstered his idea of himself as a man of taste and discernment with classic French dishes, she was also the one who filled the Hitchcock home with the food that Alfred found so hard to resist.

For Alma, however, food never had a dark side. To the woman who was known by many as “Mrs. Hitchcock,” cooking became a means of creative expression separate from that of the Hitchcock juggernaut, a project to which she contributed so much for so long, but which also underscored the lost potential of her own adventures in film.

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When Hitchcock communicated the mythology of his childhood, he did so through a string of emotionally intense memories, many of which were connected to food: the smell and taste of the biscuits from the local bakery; the fish, fruits, and vegetables that were sold in his father’s shops; the comfort he gained from eating cold cuts alone at night in the family kitchen. Unlike Hitchcock, Alma Reville rarely spoke about her past; her daughter and granddaughters attest that she had a genuine aversion to talking about herself. Consequently, quite where her passion for cooking came from is unclear, though we do know rather a lot about how she fell in love with cinema.

She was born in Nottingham, England, on August 14, 1899, a day after her future husband was born in Essex, a hundred miles south. Her family moved to London when her father took a job in the wardrobe department of Twickenham Film Studios, a hub of British moviemaking during the silent era. As a teenager, Reville gained experience in various aspects of film production, including on D.W. Griffith’s Hearts of the World. As she entered her twenties, she was mostly involved in editing (or “cutting”) and continuity, and she pursued both with self-confidence and obvious ambition. At age twenty-three, she wrote a piece for a trade paper in which she framed herself as an artist—“the art of cutting is Art indeed”—and an expert in her field, asserting that movies would be greatly enhanced if “Mr. Producer would give just a little more forethought to the cutting and continuity of his production before commencing it.”

Reville believed in the magical properties of cinema, its capacity to transform the quotidian into the fantastical. It was a feeling she shared with Hitchcock, with whom she first worked on films directed by Graham Cutts in the early twenties. When Hitchcock was given the chance to direct a feature film, he hired Reville as his assistant, and they married not long after, in 1926. For a few years, she wrote scripts for non-Hitchcock films, including Nine Till Six, a movie with an all-female cast that engaged with the working lives of ordinary British women. But in the main, her talents were absorbed into the project of Alfred Hitchcock.

One wonders how things might have gone had she been given the opportunities that were laid at her husband’s feet. Then as now, female film directors were a rarity. In 1929, puffed up by his early successes, Hitchcock told a journalist that women were unsuited to being film directors because of their narrow experience of life. To support his argument, he said that Reville found “some of the more unwieldy departments of film producing were difficult for her to control.” In such an environment, when even her husband publicly expressed doubts about her ability to direct, avenues to nurture her cinematic talents were clearly limited.

From their earliest days together, Hitchcock made his partnership with Reville a pillar of his distinctive, self-framed reputation as a pioneering modern genius who was also devoted to traditional family life. He wrote articles about fraught filming experiences in which he was soothed by his Alma, a sunny-natured dynamo of “four-foot-eleven in stockings” who never ceased to tell him he was “the snake’s hips and the cat’s pyjamas.” In a publicity piece for the 1930 movie Murder! he revealed that the film was “the product of the Hitchcock combination—Mr. and Mrs.,” who cowrote their script about murder, cross-dressing, and miscegenation in bourgeois middle England. On several occasions, journalists were invited into their homes, which one writer described as “imbued with the atmosphere of the Middle Ages, together with all the comforts of these Modern days.” This is a perfect summation of the way in which Alfred and Alma presented themselves: young fogies at the cutting edge, their marriage—like Hitchcock’s films—simultaneously traditional and innovative.

The home was the hub of the Hitchcock operation, and the hub of the home was the dining table. Mealtimes were when Hitchcock worked through creative problems, formed relationships, and indulged his need to perform and entertain. Reville facilitated all those things. Charles Bennett, the writer of Hitchcock thrillers such as The 39 Steps, had a fractious relationship with the director, and alleged that Reville’s contribution to Hitchcock’s work has been greatly overstated. But even he conceded that “one advantage of working with Hitchcock was the wonderful food when Alma cooked.” This was in the thirties, so the “wonderful food” Bennett sampled likely included traditional English dishes dense in sleep-inducing carbohydrate—steak-and-kidney pudding, spotted dick—and a few French dishes, such as coq au vin and bouillabaisse. By this point in their lives, the couple had traveled Europe and eaten at the best restaurants. Reville incorporated foreign flavors and techniques into her home cooking, just as Alfred hoovered up filmmaking influences from Germany, Russia, America, and elsewhere. Over the years, some of Reville’s best dishes worked their way into Hitchcock’s films. Her quiche lorraine, for example, made an appearance in To Catch a Thief, its delicate golden pastry made by the hands of a character who had once strangled a Nazi to death—an impish inside joke, perhaps, about the diminutive Reville’s hidden strengths, or maybe another sign of Hitchcock’s unease with gastronomic pleasure.

Hitchcock maintained that he did his best work when he made movies for audiences to enjoy. Reville appears to have adopted a similar attitude in the kitchen. She ate like a bird but loved to cook for others, and once the family permanently relocated from London to Los Angeles, in 1939, her cooking became an even more important part of their social and professional existence. For those lucky enough to be invited, Hitchcock dinner parties became something of a Hollywood institution. Ingrid Bergman was one of many who recorded the pleasure of eating Reville’s menus, which were always topped off with a delicious dessert; Hitchcock’s greatest weakness was ice cream, which Reville believed prevented him from staying his desired weight, though it was clear to most that his heavy drinking was as much to blame.

Although they gained a reputation for eschewing traditional Hollywood ostentation, the couple spent great sums on importing wine from France and ingredients from Britain that they couldn’t do without: oysters and sole from Kent, beef from Jersey and Scotland. Even in informal settings, the food at the their table was divine. Herbert Coleman, a long-serving Hitchcock employee, recalled staying over one weekend and being treated to a working brunch of champagne, lobster, and “perfectly broiled” cuts of beef. Largely thanks to Reville, eating was a joyous experience at the Hitchcock residence, no matter what the bill of fare. When Frederick Knott, the writer of Dial M for Murder, came to visit, he took a blurry photograph of Grace Kelly beaming as she chomped into a hamburger, a most unfamiliar pose for a woman Hitchcock dubbed “the snow princess.”

After a decade in Hollywood, the Alfred and Alma’s marriage appeared to go through a period of turbulence, which coincided—and perhaps precipitated—Reville’s decision to step back from her husband’s filmmaking, just as the Hitchcock “brand” expanded. With the launch of his TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1955, he became a mainstream celebrity, his cultural reach extended even further by magazines, children’s books, and music albums that all bore his name. This coincided with a golden run of movies, including North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds. As Hitchcock bounded from success to success, Reville’s creative energies were invested more fully into cooking. In a biography of her mother published in 2003, Pat Hitchcock includes several of Reville’s favorite recipes and dinner party menus circa 1960. English dishes such as veal and ham pie sit alongside poulet vallée d’auge, a delicious chicken dish from Normandy, cooked with apples, calvados, and cream. These are as revealing of the couple’s cultural orientation as any of the films they made—and like the Hitchcock filmography, Reville’s cookbook was flavored with the taste of the United States. For example, she often served vichyssoise, a spin on French cuisine believed to have been invented for American diners in the kitchen of the Ritz-Carlton in New York. Similarly, though her recipe for sole mousse is rooted in French tradition, fish mousses of this kind were wildly popular in wealthy American homes in the fifties and sixties.

To complement Reville’s creativity, in the early sixties the couple spent a reputed $65,000 on a total renovation of the kitchen in their Bel Air home. To quote one who saw it, they had “invented conveniences, made push-button windows and screens, put drawers on wheels and contemporary art on the walls,” and installed a huge walk-in refrigerator, as well as a giant wine cellar. When the work was finished, reporters were invited to survey the changes. The resulting articles reflected the way Hitchcock’s ambitious use of design and technology had been reported in the publicity campaigns for such films as Lifeboat, Rope, and Rear Window. They were also an update of the pieces about the couple that British publications had run thirty-odd years earlier: Alfred and Alma were once again profiled as homely but eccentric connoisseurs, an ordinary husband-and-wife team engaged in an extraordinary creative pursuit.

The historian Jan Olsson has pointed out that these new personae as the Francophile sophisticates next door dovetailed the concurrent transformation of Hitchcock’s reputation from pot-boiling storyteller to serious artist. But they also chimed with a broader shift in American popular culture. Julia Child’s The French Chef aired the same year the articles about the new kitchen were published, a time when the popular media was exploring what France could teach Americans about cooking and eating. Indeed, the May 12, 1958, issue of Life magazine contains a lengthy feature called “French Lesson in Innards,” which challenged its readers’ “unthinking prejudice” by revealing the various wonderful ways that offal is used in the “grand tradition” of French cuisine. In the middle of the feature runs a vibrant half-page advertisement for Vertigo, released that very week in U.S. cinemas. Directly opposite the ad is a recipe for cold tongue with horseradish, a dish listed in Pat Hitchcock’s book as something her mother occasionally prepared for weekend lunches. Reville might have had the recipe in her repertoire for many years. But it’s also possible that she picked it up from this magazine, one in which she and Hitchcock appeared many times over the decades, and which they both regularly read.

The articles about the new kitchen all framed it as Hitchcock’s project; one named Reville as “his sous chef.” This was nonsense: the kitchen and the creativity that took place therein belonged to Alma Reville. Hitchcock filled his movies with food, and built his social and working life around it. But when it came to cooking Reville was clearly the creative driving force. When Hitchcock’s career was at its peak, he and Reville would speak most afternoons to finalize dinner arrangements for that evening. He might, as Pat Hitchcock recalls, take the trouble to pair the food with the best wine from his cellar, and wash the dishes once the meal was finished, but that was the extent of his involvement. In his enthusiastic consumption and fulsome praise of her culinary endeavors across a half century of married life, it was he who served as “continuity” to Reville, whose acts of creativity rounded off every day in the Hitchcock universe and put art into the domestic routine of the world’s most renowned filmmaker.

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Long after she had given up her formal, credited duties on Hitchcock’s movies, Reville remained his most valued collaborator. In late 1964, Hitchcock worked with Richard Condon, author of The Manchurian Candidate, on a made-for-TV movie designed to promote the work of the World Health Organization. The script, which tells the story of a frenzied attempt to quash a lethal viral pandemic, feels spookily topical in 2021, but at the time Hitchcock was not at all impressed, and he withdrew from the project. The death knell was sounded when Hitchcock wrote Condon to say that Reville had read the script and “her only comment to me was that she has just read Infinity of Mirrors [Condon’s most recent novel] and thought it was so beautifully written and asked me why the script could not have the same quality.” As far as Hitchcock was concerned, his wife was still the ultimate arbiter on what would make a good Hitchcock script.

In 1972, Reville’s creativity in the kitchen turned up in parodic form in Frenzy, Hitchcock’s penultimate movie, in which a Scotland Yard detective endures his wife’s hideous attempts at cordon bleu cuisine—a humorous inversion of the situation at Hitchcock’s home, though some critics would have us believe that the gag reflects the director’s inner resentment of food and the woman who cooked it for him. After Frenzy, ill health stymied the couple’s creative output in film and food. In 1976, Hitchcock told a relative in England of his worry for Reville, who had been severely debilitated by the effects of a stroke. Tellingly, it was through their daily menu—so much blander and more mundane that it used to be—that he expressed their unhappiness:

Lunch usually consists of a sandwich of thin bread, one we enjoy most is a roast beef spread, and we always keep a ham. She has a toast breakfast, afternoon tea with a chocolate biscuit and then dinner. If Pat doesn’t provide it, I go out and with the help of the day nurse usually prepare something like a fillet steak or half a chicken, which is easy to handle … This is a very sad letter, but there’s little else I can tell you. Naturally, she never leaves the house, but I try to take her out one night a week to our favorite restaurant, but manoeuvring her is quite a business.

Hitchcock died, age eighty, on April 29, 1980. Alma—who died on July 6, 1982—struggled to comprehend the loss and spent the remaining two years of her life believing he was still with her. But in their final years together, there had still been glimpses of how things used to be—the old partnership, odd, unequal, and unbreakable, surging to the fore. David Freeman, the writer of Hitchcock’s final, unmade film, was at the director’s home on the day in 1979 when Hitchcock acted out the script to his wife. Freeman was amazed to see the doleful, immobile old man he had come to know become suddenly animated, gesticulating and switching voices, performing each of the characters. Reville was rapt. “It was like watching two people on a first date that was going really well,” recalls Freeman. “I think he wanted to show her how clever he was, and more importantly that there was hope, a future.” The old Alfred—or, to be more exact, the younger one—was back, and Alma couldn’t have been happier.

Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America. His latest book, The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock: An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense, was published this week by W. W. Norton. Read earlier installments of Off Menu.

David Teniers the Younger, The Twelve Days of Christmas No. 8, 1634-40

These days, British and American Christmases are by and large the same hodgepodge of tradition, with relatively minor variations. This Christmas Eve, for example, when millions of American kids put out cookies and milk for Santa, children in Britain will lay out the more adult combination of mince pies and brandy for the old man many of them know as Father Christmas. For the last hundred years or so, Father Christmas has been indistinguishable from the American character of Santa Claus; two interchangeable names for the same white-bearded pensioner garbed in Coca-Cola red, delivering presents in the dead of night. But the two characters have very different roots. Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of children, was given his role of nocturnal gift-giver in medieval Netherlands. Father Christmas, however, was no holy man, but a personification of Dionysian fun: dancing, eating, late-night drinking—and the subversion of societal norms.

The earliest recognizable iteration of Father Christmas probably came in 1616 when, referring to himself as “Captain Christmas,” he appeared as the main character in Ben Jonson’s Christmas, His Masque, performed at the royal court that festive season. Nattily dressed and rotund from indulgence, he embodied Christmas as an openhearted festival of feasts and frolics. But by the time he appeared on the front cover of John Taylor’s pamphlet The Vindication of Christmas, in 1652, Father Christmas had grown skinny, mournful, and lonely, depressed by the grim fate that had befallen the most magical time of year. The days of carol singing and merrymaking were over; for the past several years Christmas across Britain had been officially canceled. The island was living through a so-called Puritan Revolution, in which the most radical changes to daily life were being attempted. Even the institution of monarchy had been discarded. As a ballad of the time put it, this was “the world turned upside down.”

The prohibitions on Christmas dining would have particularly aggrieved Robert May. One of the most skilled chefs in the land, the English-born, French-trained chef cooked Christmas dinners fit for a king—a doubly unwelcome skill in a time of republicanism and puritanism. May connected the medieval traditions of English country cooking with the early innovations of urban French gastronomy, and was at the height of his powers when the Puritan Revolution took effect. During those years, he compiled The Accomplisht Cook, an English cookbook of distinction and importance that was eventually published in 1660. In more than a thousand recipes, May recorded not only the tastes and textures of a culinary tradition, but a cultural world that he feared was being obliterated—including the Christmas dinner, an evocative sensory experience that links the holiday of four centuries ago with that of today.

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Pretty much the only things we know about Robert May come from the biographical section that introduces The Accomplisht Cook. According to that, May was born in Buckinghamshire, in the south of England, in 1588, during the reign of Elizabeth I. At the time of May’s birth, his father was cook to the Dormers, a prominent Catholic family closely connected to Spanish ruling elite. At the age of ten, May was sent to France where he performed a five-year apprenticeship in the best kitchens in Paris, before returning to England where he honed his skills cooking for a number of the most prominent Catholic families in the country. Since the days of Henry VIII, Catholics had been a persecuted minority in England, but the ascension of the Stuart dynasty when James I took the throne upon the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 heralded decades of relative tolerance. Wealthy Catholics were able to spend lavishly on food and entertainment, allowing May to thrive.

The young May’s experiences abroad hint at the changes occurring in English food culture of the time, especially among the social elite. During the late Tudor and Stuart eras, numerous foodstuffs, including potatoes, tea, coffee, chocolate, and tobacco, arrived from the Americas and established themselves as staples of the national diet. The Accomplisht Cook is replete with non-English influences, giving us a vivid idea of what new fashions entered his kitchen in the early 1600s. May drew heavily from Spanish and Italian recipes, and his book includes thirty-five dishes for eggs that he took from the pioneering French chef François Pierre La Varenne. Despite this, May’s food was quintessentially English. The Accomplisht Cook laments that French chefs “have bewitcht some of the Gallants of our Nation with Epigram Dishes” in favor of the sturdy traditions of English cooking. The Englishness of May’s approach is palpable in his suggestions for Christmas dinner, dominated by roast meats and featuring a mince pie. Today’s mince pies—a Christmas institution in Britain and Ireland—are filled with a sickly-sweet concoction of dried fruit, fortified wine, mixed spices, and mounds of brown sugar, but before the Victorian era they also contained meat. May suggests numerous cuts of beef (including tongue, buttock, and intestine) or hare, turkey, and mutton, among others. In his recipes for a veal-based mince pie, he recommends mixing it with more familiar ingredients such as dates, orange peel, nutmeg, and cinnamon, flavors that are still powerfully evocative of what many of us would consider a “traditional” Christmas.

May’s bill of fare for Christmas Day is huge: forty dishes split across two courses, with additional oysters and fruit. Partly this reflects the nature of May’s experience in the service of some of the wealthiest people in the country, and partly the Stuart approach to dining. The diaries of May’s contemporary Samuel Pepys detail the meat-heavy, gut-busting dinners he hosted each year on the anniversary of his kidney stone operation (that the procedure worked and didn’t kill him was, in the seventeenth century, truly a cause for celebration). For a party of six, Pepys once served a salmon, two carp, six roast chickens, ox tongue, and cheese. May’s Christmas dinner has a similar feel. For the first course the mince pie is served alongside nineteen other dishes, including a roast swan, sweetbreads, a boiled partridge, a roast turkey infused with cloves, mutton with anchovy sauce, and “a kid with a pudding in his belly.” As was customary for the era, these would arrive on the table in one grand exhibition of food, in an ostentatious display of hospitality; surely there was no expectation that all this food would be consumed. The historian Liza Picard sums it up bluntly: “everything got cold, and there was a shocking amount of wasted food at the end.”

Jacob Jordaens, The Feast of the Bean King, 1640-1645

The spirit of abundance, indulgence, and generosity communicated by May’s menu was the very cornerstone of Christmas at the start of the seventeenth century, a time of year that, then as now, was tied to food and drink. For the observant, there were three church services on Christmas Day. The first took place before dawn, immediately after which it was time to break the ritual abstemiousness of Advent with a breakfast rich with dairy and meat. This was the official start of twelve days in which the bounty of that year’s harvest was enjoyed to its fullest extent. For many the festive highlight was Twelfth Night, traditionally honored with very boozy parties and Twelfth-cake, a fruit cake made with liberal amounts of sherry.

The sorts of Christmas dinners cooked by Robert May were beyond the means of most families. Even acquiring the ingredients for a Twelfth-cake could be difficult and expensive. Pepys spent the costly sum of twenty shillings for the cake that his maid Jane baked for one of his Twelfth Night parties. And yet throughout the medieval and early modern period it was common for rich landowners to put on great spreads and entertainments for those in their community. For a few days each year, even many of the poorest people had the chance to eat rich, sweet, fatty foods, to drink plentifully, and to experience the exquisite pleasure of a warm fire in the depth of winter. This wasn’t seen as a charitable custom so much as a social obligation. Mirroring the moment in the Nativity when the three kings bowed down to a baby born in a stable, Christmas was a time when the usual repressive social order was, in brief but thrilling ways, flipped on its head. As the historian Diane Purkiss explains this was a season of “licensed openness with a careful structure.” It was universally understood that as soon as the magical twelve days of Christmas were over, the usual order would be restored.

In some towns and villages, a Lord of Misrule was appointed during Christmastide to direct the revelry, with freedom to cause irreligious havoc. There were also beloved traditions such as mumming, a sort of trick-or-treat ritual of costuming and performing, sometimes involving cross-dressing or mockery of important people. Similarly, wassailing involved groups of singers going to the doors of the rich in expectation of food and drink. Wassailing was not begging, but one half of an unspoken social contract; to withhold one’s hospitality would be an egregious breach that could result in violence. The remnants of wassailing, and the attitude that underpinned it, is still found in the carol “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” in which the faintly obnoxious verse of “We all like figgy pudding, so bring some out here” is followed by the unambiguously menacing “We won’t go until we’ve got some, so bring some out here.” This was not the Christmas of our post-Dickens world, a time associated with children and domestic coziness. To Robert May’s generation, Christmas was much more about the adult experience of the world—and it crackled with potential danger.

Throughout England and Scotland, there was a growing section of society who decried Christmas as popery. Such sentiments were common among Protestant zealots opposed to the injudicious rule of Charles I, who inherited the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1625, and who some suspected of wanting to re-establish Catholicism. The religious tensions metastasized into a political crisis. In 1642, civil war broke out in England between the Crown and Parliament, the start of horrendous bloodshed that swallowed most of the next decade. By and large, Catholics supported the royal cause, with the more radical Protestants on the side of the Parliamentarians. The main period of war raged for seven years, claiming roughly two hundred thousand lives, somewhere between two and three percent of the population. It seems that Robert May continued to work in the kitchens of wealthy homes, but as food became scarce and opportunities to prepare opulent meals dwindled, his income must surely have been diminished.

As the war raged, the religious extremists who controlled Parliament attempted drastic reforms of English life. First, the Puritans struck festivals and saints’ days from the calendar on the basis that they did not feature in the Bible. Then, in 1647, the observance of Christmas was officially banned. From now on, it was decreed, there were to be no special church services, all shops must remain open, and no special activities undertaken to acknowledge the date.

The ferocity of the public backlash was inevitable. Riots broke out in towns such as Canterbury and Ipswich in December 1647, and when apprentices marched in London the following spring shouting “Now for King Charles!” resentment over the abolition of Christmas was understood to be part of their grievance. By this point, Charles had been captured by Parliamentarian forces and was staring at humiliating defeat. His court had been famous for its Christmas indulgences. But during Christmas 1648, even his request for the simplest festive pleasures of mince pie and plum pottage were denied him. A month later, he was tried, convicted, and executed of crimes against his own people. Soon after, the monarchy was disbanded and Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector, a dictator in all but name. In these staggering circumstances, unthinkable just a few weeks earlier, the Puritan assault on tradition widened and accelerated. By the early 1650s, it seemed there was not a church open anywhere in England on December 25, and that Christmas had succumbed to an eternal winter.

Pieter Claesz, Tabletop Still Life with Mince Pie and Basket of Grapes, 1625

This, at least, was the surface impression. As Ronald Hutton has shown, the Puritan Revolution managed only “to strip the festival of its public aspect and (ironically) much of its Christian content.” Cromwell’s regime could—and did—tear down community decorations, force shops to open and churches to shut, and puncture any merriment on the streets, but eradicating the rituals being observed within the home was far harder. So much of the meaning of Christmas was manifest in food and drink, and so Christmas was kept alive in kitchens throughout the land. It’s true that in London and other parts of the country, soldiers had the authority to enter premises where the cooking of celebratory food was suspected. But Cromwell’s regime had no chance of rooting out every mince pie, every bowl of plum pottage, or every Twelfth-cake being quietly enjoyed in ordinary homes.

Indeed, Hutton suggests that during Cromwell’s time in power the very wealthiest households still spent generously on Christmas food supplies and paid for the services of itinerant entertainers. It was in the homes of such rich and well-connected people that May continued to work throughout the 1650s. We know little of his experience of cooking in the thick of the Puritan Revolution but it’s likely that he carried on preparing Christmas meals, albeit in less joyous circumstances, and on a more modest scale. Ever since the Reformation, England’s recusant Catholics—the community in which May had learned his craft—had grown used to honoring their faith in quiet, discreet ritual. Now, along with all but the most zealous Protestants, each December they attempted to keep Christmas alive in their hearts by means of what they put in their bellies.

*

Had the ban on Christmas lasted for many more years it’s possible the festival would have permanently disappeared from British shores, and therefore from the lands of its burgeoning empire. As it was, the Puritan Revolution sputtered to an end when Cromwell died in September 1658. Absent its totemic strongman, the experiment in republican government collapsed. In 1660 the old king’s son, Charles II, was put on the throne.

The collapse of the monarchy had engendered a wave of nostalgia for the “good old days” before the war. During Cromwell’s tenure eight new cookbooks—a substantial number at the time—were published, tapping into a public fascination with the habits and customs of the old aristocracy. One of May’s former employers, Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent, was responsible for one such book, A True Gentlewomans Delight, in 1653. Another, The Queens Closet Opened, in 1655, promised to share the secrets of the old royal household, including its kitchen.

May’s own book, The Accomplisht Cook, was published in 1660, the year the monarchy was restored. It differed from previous English cookbooks in that it was aimed unapologetically at those who wished to be chefs at a grand establishment, more in keeping with books that were beginning to be seen on the continent. Yet, in his introduction May explained that this was also intended as a work of cultural continuity, a celebration not only of great cooking but of the exuberant hospitality that the war and the revolution had stymied—a time “before good House-keeping had left England” in his own wistful turn of phrase. He advises, with relish, on how to create a theatrical centerpiece of a stag made from pastry filled with claret, a nod to the old aristocratic pastime of hunting. He also instructs how to make joke pies full of live frogs and birds that will escape the very moment the crust is cut. He assures us that this never fails to “make the Ladies to skip and shreek,” and it’s for their amusement that he recommends removing the yolk and albumen from eggs and replacing them with rosewater, at which point the host should “let the Ladies take the egg-shells full of sweet waters and throw them at each other,” like water balloons.

The carnival antics might have played well at one of his Christmas banquets, replete with its exotic delicacies, mountains of rich meats, and dishes of sweet jellies, steaming pies, and creamy custards. His entry for Christmas food is only a small proportion of the thousand or so recipes, yet with knowledge of the times he lived through, its presence was a pointed reminder: the world was back on its axis; the new normal was, at last, the old normal.

It’s believed that Robert May died in 1664, at age seventy-two, by which point Christmas, with all its traditions, had returned, along with the other pleasures, such as the theater, that had been outlawed. Four years later, Samuel Pepys recorded the end of a delightful Twelfth Night at home with friends and family. With all of life’s great enjoyments returned to him, Pepys’s heart had space for nothing but gratitude: “Away to bed, weary and mightily pleased, and have the happiness to reflect upon it as I do sometimes on other things, as going to a play or the like, to be the greatest real comfort that I am to expect in the world, and that it is that that we do really labour in the hopes of.”

For further reading, the author recommends: The Accomplisht Cook by Robert May,  The English Civil War: A People’s History by Diane Purkiss, Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain by Ronald Hutton, Restoration London: Everyday Life in London, 1660-1670 by Liza Picard, Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1638-1660 by Trevor Royle, The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum, The Oxford Companion to Food by Alan Davidson, and The Diary of Samuel Pepys by Samuel Pepys.

Read earlier installments of Off Menu.

Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America. He is currently working on a book about Alfred Hitchcock. His former column for The Paris Review Daily was The Lives of Others.

Still from Fanny Cradock’s BBC Christmas Special

On the evening of November 11, 1976, the BBC broadcast the third episode of The Big Time, which followed members of the public as they tested themselves in high-pressure situations. It was what we’d term today a reality TV–style show, and that week was the turn of Mrs. Gwen Troake, a middle-aged woman from rural Devon in southwest England, who was being given the chance to design and cook a special banquet at the world-famous Dorchester Hotel in London. Troake, an amiable, soft-spoken lady any audience would root for, was assigned the most demanding mentor the production team could muster: Fanny Cradock, an extraordinary character who was the face and voice of cooking on British television from the mid-’50s to the mid-’70s and was once described by one national newspaper as “a preposterous character, the foodie you loved to loathe.”

Cradock built an entertainment brand on her putative brilliance in the kitchen, but also her superciliousness, hectoring her husband, mistreating her colleagues, and patronizing her audience, the great British public, whom she regarded as gastronomic philistines. Evidently, this included Gwen Troake, the amateur cook on The Big Time. As Troake ran through what she was planning to serve at the banquet—a seafood cocktail, followed by duck, and rounded off with a rum and coffee cream pudding—Cradock rolled her eyes, gulped, and grimaced in a pantomime of disgust and disbelief at the overbearing richness of the menu, at one point blowing her cheeks out as though she were about to be physically sick. When Troake revealed that the duck would be served with a blackberry jam, Cradock could stomach no more and unleashed what she thought was the ultimate insult. “All these jams,” she said, “they are so English.”  Despite being stereotypically English in so many ways, in her mind the only really good English—or, indeed, British—food was really just French food by a different name. “The English have never had a cuisine. There’s nothing English. Yorkshire pudding came from Burgundy.”

She was probably wrong about Yorkshire pudding, but she definitely had a point, both about the heaviness of Troake’s menu and about the sorry state of her nation’s cuisine. In the postwar decades of Cradock’s great success, amid heated debates about what it meant to be British in a post-imperial world, British food was an international laughingstock. It was fitting, then, that Cradock herself seemed to be in a perpetual identity crisis. Her personality was as peculiar as many of her famous recipes, and nobody was quite sure which of the stories she told about herself were true, and whether, despite her constant talk of refined French food, she was half as accomplished in the kitchen as she claimed to be. As Kevin Geddes, in his biography Keep Calm and Fanny On, quotes one of Fanny’s friends, Evangeline Evans, as saying, “She wasn’t real … she didn’t know who she was. She made herself up as she went along.”

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The notion that Britishness is inimical to good food is almost as old as Great Britain itself. Across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Industrial Revolution, which occurred in Britain earlier and faster than in most other countries, did great harm to its “peasant” food tradition, the foundation of any national cuisine. Places such as Manchester and Birmingham swelled to smoking urban behemoths in the blink of an eye, relocating workers from farmland to factories and causing havoc to regional food cultures. By the start of the twentieth century, the global reputation of the nation’s food was poor, except when it came to the tables of the wealthy and the lordly. Auguste Escoffier, Cradock’s French cooking idol, ran celebrated restaurants in London, and stately homes hosted banquets that were vast, technically brilliant, and replete with ingredients, recipes, and customs unique to the British Isles. But after World War I, aristocratic households could no longer afford such indulgences, and the production line of skilled and knowledgeable kitchen staff dried up.

Fanny Cradock, born Phyllis Nan Sortain Pechey, was only nine when the war came to an end and wasn’t much affected by the conflict, but her early years were full of upheaval. After her sybaritic parents decided they were either unable or unwilling to look after her, she was raised by her grandparents. By the age of thirty, she had been married three times, widowed once, and birthed two sons with whom she had no contact, a sad shadow of her own childhood. At least some of the extraordinary personality for which she would later be known, and her predilection for inventing and reinventing her biography, was surely rooted in these early decades of trauma, abandonment, and failed fresh starts.

It was probably during her disrupted childhood that she first acquired her skills in the kitchen. According to Cradock’s reminiscences—which are littered with tall tales and deceptions large and small—her grandmother taught her the rudiments of how to be a lady: deportment, the piano, French, hosting soirees, and cooking. As Geddes points out, Cradock sometimes claimed these lessons took place not in suburban England but in the grandest kitchens of Paris and the Riviera, though these stories were obviously untrue. They were attempts, perhaps, to rewrite a painful past, or simply to make herself seem more glamorous and distance herself from the bland inadequacies of British food.

Everything changed for Fanny in 1939, when she met Johnnie Cradock, an officer in the British army. Their connection was instant, deep, and profound: not only did they adore food and drink—their first date was a five-hour lunch—but they also had a yearning for wealth and glamour and shared ambitious designs for the life they would share together. With Johnnie offering moral support, Fanny thrived. Between 1942 and 1952, she published twenty-one books of fiction and nonfiction for children and adults under a range of assumed names. As a writer she was prolific but unfocused, shifting from one identity to the next, never settling on one fixed idea of herself.

Around this time, she also perfected the art of entertaining, using those skills her grandmother had taught her to host dinner parties and soirees. In the conditions of the day, this was no small accomplishment. Food rationing had begun in Britain in January 1940 and did not end until 1954, causing shortages of even basic foodstuffs. When the English food writer Elizabeth David returned home in 1946 after many years abroad, she was horrified to see some people eating meals as paltry as flour-and-water soup. From a public health point of view, this was obviously gravely serious. It also dealt a further blow to the integrity of British cuisine, as another generation lost out on vital skills, knowledge, and experiences. In response to this situation, Cradock became involved with the British Housewives’ League, an organization that urged the government to end rationing and make radical changes to the British food system. Her involvement with the group led to her writing a series of hotel and restaurant reviews for the Daily Telegraph. She adopted yet another pseudonym, Bon Viveur. This name was more considered than the others she’d used, articulating how Cradock saw herself in her iteration as food expert: a steadfastly British woman filled with French sophistication.

Her reviews were hugely popular with readers, and throughout the fifties, the Cradocks developed Bon Viveur into a brand, producing books and a live stage show that traded heavily on their personal relationship. Onstage, Fanny cooked in ball gowns and high heels, the glamorous, extroverted star of the show, while Johnnie, dressed in black tie, played her hapless sidekick, a henpecked lackey who bore the brunt of his wife’s short temper. They were like sitcom spouses, though one could never be sure how much of it was put on for the audience and how much was a reflection of their real relationship. Certainly, Fanny kept everybody on their toes. She communicated an “innate superiority,” to quote the writer John Walsh, “as if she were a grande dame condescending to offer cookery tips to the great unwashed.” She succeeded, it seemed, because of her astringent personality, not in spite of it. Perhaps somewhere deep in the British collective consciousness, there was a feeling that the nation deserved to be rebuked for its bloody awful food—and waspish, haughty Fanny Cradock was the perfect person to do it.

In the sixties, the couple became household names, fixtures on radio and television, Fanny almost as famous for her performative rudeness—snapping her fingers and barking orders at Johnnie and a cast of onscreen helpers—as for her prolific output. Though there were always doubts about precisely how expert she was in the kitchen, she was assiduous in building her brand as a British home cook of rare sophistication. She grasped any commercial opportunity and published books on every conceivable aspect of cooking: soup, the brave new world of pasta—she even managed to devote an entire book to the uses of aluminum foil. Doubtless these ventures helped to educate their audience, but what the Cradocks did more than anything was to put glamour, fantasy, and indulgence into ordinary British food at a time when that seemed mightily difficult to do.

Yet there was always something off-kilter about Fanny Cradock’s food, fitting for the most famous cook in a land that had lost the thread of its culinary identity. She gave her public green mashed potatoes, green Gruyère-flavored ice cream, blue hard-boiled eggs, and a recipe for roast swan decorated with gold leaf, even though eating swan was against English law. She was addicted to garnishes and overpowering sauces, and never passed up an opportunity to flambé something in brandy. When that wasn’t a viable option, she doused everything in icing sugar, including the bizarre and unappealing mincemeat omelet she made as part of her 1975 BBC series Fanny Cradock Cooks for Christmas. Her appearance got more striking each year, and by the time of that Christmas series—presented without Johnnie—she resembled a psychedelic Cruella de Vil, her face heavily powdered, her eyebrows plucked and redrawn an inch above her eyes, her hair decorated with large pink ribbons. She was—and still is—magnificently watchable, partly because she’s so elusive; she switches from ingratiating smiles to impatient scowls so quickly that one can’t tell what she’s thinking or feeling, whether she wants to embrace her viewers or rap their knuckles. Perhaps this was the effect of the mood-altering amphetamines that some have alleged she took before filming. Whatever the reason, the person beneath the Fanny Cradock persona is as confusing as her food.

Though Cradock’s peak years were probably the mid to late sixties, she and her cooking seem tailor-made for the seventies. In his novel Jake’s Thing, Kingsley Amis described a seventies menu that was “firmly in the English tradition: packet soup with added flour, roast chicken so overcooked that each chunk immediately absorbed every drop of saliva in your mouth … soggy tinned gooseberry flan and coffee tasting of old coffeepots.” Yet although the quality of British food may have been as disastrous as it had been for as long as anyone could remember, a spirit of gastronomic adventurousness broke through in that decade, one that Cradock had done more than a little to stoke. It was the decade of fondue parties, cheese and pineapple chunks on cocktail sticks (considered an exotic indulgence at the time), Black Forest gâteau, chicken Kiev, chili con carne, Neapolitan ice cream, and the prawn cocktail. The latter is often cited as a Cradock invention, and although that’s probably not the case, it does seem like the sort of thing that could have emerged from her imagination: a fusion of colors, textures, and flavors with a veneer of sophistication, yet simple enough to be cooked in every kitchen in the land.

Inexpert and clumsy though it may have been, Britain’s exploration of new foods was indicative of deeper currents, as Britain, its empire definitively dead and buried, reexamined its place in the world. In 1975, a referendum was held to decide whether or not the UK should join the European Economic Community, the precursor to the European Union. Amid the huge economic difficulties besetting Britain at the time, food was central to both sides of the argument. In the buildup to the vote, Cradock was given a regular spot on the magazine television show Nationwide, in which she visited various member states of the EEC to profile, mainly positively, their cuisine. A spin-off series of books—Common Market Cookery­—followed; the volume on France, naturally, was especially exultant.

The referendum took place in June 1975; 67 percent voted in favor of joining the European project. It was hailed as a definitive turning point in Britain’s relationship with the outside world. Edward Heath, the former prime minister, was a key pro-European figure of the day, and the banquet that Gwen Troake prepared as part of the Big Time television series was in his honor. When Cradock made her infamous appearance, assailing the Englishness of Troake’s menu, the public apparently decided that it had had enough of her imperiousness. Bullying Johnnie was one thing but, in a pre–Gordon Ramsay era, being unkind to a nice lady from Devon was a soupçon too much. Viewers complained, and the British newspapers—primed as ever with confected moralism—declared themselves outraged. “Not since 1940,” wrote the Daily Telegraph, the paper that had first allowed Cradock to write about food, “can the people of England have risen in such unified wrath.” Her goose was cooked. It was time for Fanny Cradock to get out of the kitchen.

*

Cradock never hosted another show, although that wasn’t entirely down to the Troake incident. She and Johnnie had already left the UK to live as tax exiles in Ireland, where Fanny rediscovered herself as a novelist and, alongside Johnnie, practiced faith healing, which they claimed had helped to cure them both of cancer.

Their public image had always rested on their relationship as husband and wife, though in fact they had never tied the knot. When Fanny split with her Catholic second husband, Arthur Chapman, in 1929, he refused to give her a divorce, meaning that when she married for a third time (to Gregory Holden-Dye, shortly before she met Johnnie), she had done so bigamously. Johnnie, too had been married at the time he met Fanny; breaking from that marriage was dreadfully messy and destroyed his relationship with his four children, just as Fanny only ever had strained and fractured relationships with the two sons she gave up in her youth. However, in 1977, Johnnie learned that Arthur Chapman had died and Fanny was at last free to marry. Curiously, the Cradocks were unable to resist tweaking their biographies even on the marriage certificate. As Geddes notes, they both lowered their ages by several years, gave a wrong address, and Fanny recorded her father, Archibald, as Arthur. To add to the confusion, it turned out that Johnnie had been mistaken, and that Arthur Chapman was alive and well. Unwittingly, Fanny had committed bigamy for a second time.

When Johnnie died, age eighty-two, in 1987, Fanny struggled to cope with the loss. She refused to see him in his final days, a reflection, perhaps, of her selfishness, but also of her fear and distress at the prospect of losing another beloved. In a final tribute to him, she signed herself Jill, his pet name for her. It was one more alternate identity, this one shared just between the two of them.

Cradock lived for a further seven years, during which time she made a few appearances on talk shows, where she was treated as a kitsch curio from a distant age. In some ways, she was. By the time of her death in 1994, Britain was in the foothills of something like a food renaissance, much of which has been communicated through her television successors. The global popularity of Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, and The Great British Bake Off would have seemed implausible in Cradock’s day, when good British food was universally considered a contradiction in terms.

Though just as it was in 1918, 1945, and 1975, food remains a contested part of the nation’s endless tussles over its identity on the world stage. Prawn cocktail–flavored crisps, bendy bananas, and chlorinated chicken all featured in the Brexit campaign arguments. And as Britain prepares (or fails to prepare, depending on one’s perspective) to leave the EU in December, there are dire prognostications of food shortages, rationing, and malnutrition, countered by elysian visions of a self-sufficient country returned to the soil amid teeming fields of homegrown produce. It would have seemed like déjà vu to Fanny Cradock, a lodestar in the foul-tasting odyssey of bad British food.

*This article has been updated to provide attribution to Kevin Geddes’s Keep Calm and Fanny On.

Readers in the UK can see the whole of Fanny Cradock’s Christmas series on the BBC iPlayer.

Read earlier installments of “Off Menu.”

Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America. He is currently working on a book about Alfred Hitchcock. His former column for The Paris Review Daily was “The Lives of Others.” 

Original Kellogg’s cereal box (left), Ella Eaton Kellogg (right)

Few novels in American history have had the seismic social impact of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s 1906 work set among the gore and misery of Chicago’s slaughterhouses. Though the critics were sniffy about Sinclair’s drum-beating prose, his vivid descriptions of the insanitary conditions inside America’s abattoirs caused an outcry that hastened the passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Despite the sales figures, Sinclair was only partially satisfied with the public reaction to his book. His aim had been to convert Americans to socialism; instead, he lamented, he had succeeded only in turning them into fussy eaters. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” he later wrote, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

1906 turned out to be a landmark year for both the American food industry, and American cuisine. While The Jungle was lighting fires in Congress, in Battle Creek, Michigan, William Keith Kellogg struck a deal with his brother John Harvey Kellogg that would begin a new, acrimonious chapter in the peculiar psychodrama of their relationship, and spark a revolution of the breakfast table. William bought from John full ownership of the company that produced their Toasted Corn Flakes, and swiftly turned a niche health food product into one of the biggest American brands in history, changing the diets of billions around the world.

Both these events, the regulation of the meat industry and the rise of breakfast cereal, were redolent of the Progressive Era of the early 1900s, in which it was assumed that a mixture of moral zeal and technocratic expertise could remedy all social ills, and alleviate individual suffering. But they are also wonderful examples of an unmistakably American approach to cooking and eating, what the academic Nicholas Bauch describes as “an obsession with getting food right … never being satisfied with the movement of organisms from nature to the eater’s body.”

In the Kellogg story there was one person in particular devoted to getting food right—not the flamboyant, egocentric John, nor the embittered, entrepreneurial William, but Ella Eaton Kellogg, John’s wife, one of the most overlooked but most important names in the ever-twisting story of America’s relationship with food. It was Ella who applied the Progressive mindset to a working kitchen, sowed the seeds of dietetics, and devised a new culinary philosophy for ordinary Americans which she outlined in 1892 with her book Science in the Kitchen. In her sober, efficient way—which perfectly mirrored the sober, efficient dishes she concocted in her kitchen—Ella bequeathed a huge legacy. Beyond the content of her recipes, which promoted vegetarianism and swore off refined sugar, she articulated the heady idea that perfecting food (and the systems in which it is created and consumed) is the key to perfecting human civilization. From Diet Coke to the Impossible Burger, America has long sought to perfect its food through scientific intervention. Few have gone at it as successfully as Ella Eaton Kellogg.

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John and William Kellogg were raised in Battle Creek, Michigan. As a family of devout Seventh-day Adventists, the Kelloggs followed strict dietary proscriptions: no caffeine; no alcohol; no sugar; rules that would eventually become a point of great tension between the brothers. Though given little schooling—his parents favored preparation for the Second Coming over education—John had obvious intellectual talents and an irrepressible personality. At the age of twelve he was taken under the wing of Ellen White, a prophet and leader of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, who gave him the job of copy editor for the Review and Herald. In his early twenties, and with White’s financial assistance, he spent three years studying medicine at the University of Michigan, and Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York, before being appointed, in 1875, head physician at the Western Health Reform Institute, a clinic owned by White and her husband. Within a year he renamed the place the Battle Creek Sanitarium, and began to pursue his dream of turning it into one of the most famous health resorts in the world, a beacon of hygienic living that would improve the physical and moral health of America and beyond.

At this same moment, Ella came into his life. Raised in New York State, Ella is still the youngest person to receive a bachelor’s degree from Alfred University in New York, which she achieved at age nineteen in 1872. In the summer of 1876, Ella and her sister went to visit an aunt in Battle Creek. Soon after their arrival, Ella’s sister was stricken by typhoid, and received care from staff at Kellogg’s sanitarium. When Ella took over nursing duties she caught John’s eye, though it does not sound like love at first sight; he said he was struck by her “absolute reliability and responsibility” and “unswerving devotion to duty,” and convinced her to stay in Battle Creek to help deal with the typhoid outbreak and work at the sanitarium.

They had met at a crucial juncture. He was “struggling with the multitudinous duties” of trying to make the sanitarium the place of his vision, and she was looking for some stimulating outlet for her talents and ambition, somewhere beyond the classroom where she could make a mark on the world. They married in February 1879, and Ella swiftly became integral to John’s mission at Battle Creek. She took on writing and responsibilities at Good Health, gave regular classes in home economics, and became centrally involved in the Women’s Temperance Union. Though she and John never had children of their own, they fostered more than forty during their married life, and adopted nine of them, with most of the parenting duties assumed by Ella, who immersed herself in the latest theories of pedagogy and child rearing. She was also involved in the day-to-day operations of the sanitarium, though that was mainly the stage upon which John performed. It was he who oversaw the dance classes and exercise sessions, the electric light baths and the salt scrubs; it was he who took all the patients up to the roof at the end of each day and led them in a rendition of “The Battle Creek Sanitarium March.”

One historian has described John as having an imperious attitude to his family, treating the children “more like research subjects than beloved sons and daughters,” and Ella “more like a business associate than a wife.” John was certainly a single-minded man with an enormous sense of destiny. Even those close to him found him overbearing and capable of great selfishness. William, the younger sibling by eight years, worked at the sanitarium, supposedly in a senior role, though he felt constantly demeaned by his elder brother. In view of the patients, John frequently rode his bicycle in the sanitarium’s grounds giving dictation to John as he jogged alongside. Sometimes he even had William take instructions from him while John had one of his frequent enemas. “He was a czar and a law unto himself,” said William of his brother, late in life.

On the page, at least, John was capable of tenderness and gratitude toward his wife. “A constant inspiration,” is how he described Ella, “as well as a most efficient and congenial helper and companion,” though she was much more than his “helpmeet.” In addition to all her other activities, Ella was instrumental in creating daily menus for the sanitarium’s staff and patients that were both healthful and palatable, a feat John described as her “greatest single achievement.” For his first several years in charge, John had been frustrated that so many of those who sampled his design for living had balked at the food. Meals were served in strict accordance with John’s philosophy of “biologic living.” Meat, thought to inflame carnal appetites, was banned, as were spices, which the Kelloggs were convinced led directly to alcoholism. Dairy was permissible in certain cases, but refined sugar was rarely allowed. Raised on spartan fare, John had no problem foregoing flavor for healthfulness, but conceded that to most people “what was left after meats of all sorts, butter, cane sugar, all condiments except salt, pies, cakes, gravies and most other likable and tasty things were excluded … was a rather uninviting residue. New arrivals were usually very much dissatisfied.” Many found the diet so grim that a few establishments in town—including the knowingly named Sinner’s Club—did roaring trade with absconding patients in search of a good steak, a cool beer, and a long, lung-clogging smoke.

In 1883, Ella attempted to solve the problem in a very Progressive way, by turning a kitchen into a laboratory in which she would experiment with endless ideas not only for new recipes but new ways of treating basic foodstuffs. Under the influence of the latest food science, she devised twenty-six basic diets, each of which could be adjusted to meet a patient’s individual needs. She also took the innovative step of breaking down recipes into their nutritional content, in tables listing proteins, fats, carbohydrates. From Ella’s kitchen also emerged meat substitutes, and the first commercially available peanut butter. Ella and John also developed Granola; they “borrowed” the concept from an associate who had developed a product called Granula, altered the recipe and changed the name to sidestep any legal problems. In turn, when C. W. Post came to stay at the sanitarium, he was so taken with Granola that he adapted it into his own product, Grape-Nuts, and used the Kelloggs’ coffee substitute as the basis of his drink Postum, phenomenally popular throughout the U.S. in the early twentieth century.

In 1892, the fruit of Ella’s labors was presented to the public in the form of Science in the Kitchen. Though it includes hundreds of recipes, it is less a cookbook, more a manual on how to feed the human body. It begins with a lengthy section explaining the workings of the digestive system, and goes on to explain the importance of hygiene and orderliness in the kitchen, before several hundred pages of dishes, most based around vegetables, legumes, grains, nuts, and pulses. The moral and spiritual aspects of cooking and eating are paramount to Ella. “How wide-spread is this habit of sensuous gratification through the sense of taste,” she wails, experiencing something close to horror at the prospect of eating for pleasure. It’s an odd way to preface a book of recipes, but it’s an instructive summation of the Kelloggs’ approach to consumption.

Though frequently bland, some of Ella’s dishes seem notably eccentric, especially in their textures. “Beets, boiled, 1 hour if young; old, 3 to 5 hours,” sounds appropriate only for the preparation of baby food, though her recipe for “macaroni baked with granola” is an intriguing concept. We’re on more familiar territory with “macaroni with cream sauce.” In fact, Ella suggests pouring cream on just about everything. With so much else branded unhealthy and immoral, cream does an awful lot of heavy lifting; Ella suggests combining it with potatoes, celery, beets, mushed chestnuts, baked pear, cabbage, cauliflower, asparagus, rice, pasta, bread, and dozens of other things.

Science in the Kitchen has little in it to inspire the gastronome. Recipes such as “graham mush” and “bran jelly” are unlikely to make most readers salivate. However, the book made a substantial impact, both for its recipes and its underlying philosophy of food. As John noted in 1920, “hundreds of her inventions in the line of new dishes have been adopted by the general public and are currently in modern cook-books, as well as the columns devoted to housewifery in newspapers and magazines.” This is especially true of the recipes in the section of the book dedicated to breakfast, a meal that occupied the Kelloggs more than any other. Breakfasts in late nineteenth-century America were often belt-loosening affairs. The writer Carl Van Vechten recalled that the daily breakfast spread of his Iowan childhood of the 1880s and 1890s included bacon, eggs, sausages, fried steaks, potatoes in cream, pancakes, doughnuts, and tea and coffee. This was anathema to the Kelloggs. Too much meat, too much salt and sugar, too much caffeine; a gluttonous mass of stimulation and base gratification. Instead, Ella posited a prototype of a modern breakfast: soft fresh fruit such as peaches, grapefruit, or oranges, followed by “some of the various cereals, oatmeal, rye, corn, barley, rice, or one of the numerous preparations of wheat, well cooked,” and, of course, “served with cream.”

These cereals were regarded as a key to the biologic living diet, bountiful Midwestern crops full of nutrition waiting to be unleashed by scientific principles. In Ella’s experimental kitchen, grains were split, ground, soaked, dried, rolled, mashed, baked, and double baked. In 1894, they stumbled upon a process that resulted in crisp flakes of wheat, which they packaged up and sold as Granose, the very first flaked cereal product. As the twentieth century approached, the Kelloggs and their sanitarium were famous across the country, making the town of Battle Creek a magnet for other health food companies. John was under no illusion who was most responsible for this: “the great food industries of Battle Creek,” he believed, were “all direct or indirect outgrowths of Ms. Kellogg’s experimental kitchen.”

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In 1898, the Kelloggs adapted the Granose recipe to come up with their product Corn Flakes, the thing to which their name is still tied. By this time, however, life had taken a dark turn for Ella, who had suffered a serious breakdown a few months earlier. Exhaustion was likely a major cause. John described her working routine as “a miracle of efficiency and endurance … she broke under the strain which was too much for human nature to bear.” It’s possible John’s demanding nature also played its part, as perhaps did his fractious relationship with William.

Though Ella and John regarded the growth of other cereal-manufacturing companies as evidence that their mission to transform American eating habits was succeeding, William saw it as proof of a gigantic missed opportunity. While entrepreneurs scaled up production, deployed modern advertising techniques, and got their products onto Main Street, the Kelloggs sold only by mail order, and mainly to former patients. Sensing an opportunity to sprint clear of his brother’s shadow, William offered to buy the rights to make and sell Corn Flakes. John, eager for cash, agreed. In an unambiguous statement of self-assertion, William put both his name and his signature on the boxes. Seemingly unhappy that his little brother should be appropriating the family reputation, John responded by putting the Kellogg name on his own brand of breakfast cereal. It sparked a legal battle over the use of the Kellogg name which was only definitively settled, in William’s favor, in 1917.

The acrimony between the brothers did not impede the work of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. As the new century began, the venue had four hundred rooms, two indoor swimming pools, a thousand-seat chapel, and four hundred acres of bucolic farmland. Celebrities and eminences, including Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, continued to book themselves in for treatment. Though he satirized the vogue for spa treatments in his novel The Metropolis, Upton Sinclair submitted himself to the Battle Creek experience in 1909, and was convinced by John that going vegetarian would cure his long-standing digestive problems. It didn’t; he embraced various different diets over the years, but never reached the nirvana of intestinal equanimity.

Throughout this time, Ella was ailing. In an account of his wife’s life, John implied that neither her mental or physical health was ever truly restored after her breakdown. Most distressing was a rapid but inexorable loss of hearing, which John said was “rendered incurable by injudicious treatment by a renowned specialist.” Though it robbed Ella of her enjoyment of birdsong—especially that of a gray parrot that was her beloved pet in her final years—she taught herself to lip-read and acquired the ability to modulate her voice and carry out conversation. Placing her hand on the top of the family piano allowed her to feel music, but it pained her that she could no longer hear it.

Her ability to write, however, was never impeded. She continued in her writing and editing duties for Good Health, and published books about child rearing, cooking, and healthy living, all expositions of the Battle Creek philosophies that she and John had developed. Similarly, her commitment to healthy eating and “getting food right” lasted right up until the day she passed away in 1920, at the age of sixty-seven. The last thing she ate were strawberries, picked from her own garden.

One can only guess at what Ella made of William’s successes with the Kellogg brand, which strayed ever further from the abstemious principles of biologic living. One of William’s early advertising campaigns even seemed a little risqué for the time, with a tagline that encouraged housewives to “wink at your grocer and see what you get.” Perhaps even more harmful, from Ella’s point of view, would have been the refined sugar that William added to the Corn Flakes recipe to make them more enticing to the average consumer. Given that she hoped to change America, mind, body and soul, by removing fat and sugar from its breakfasts, it’s probably for the best that she didn’t live to see the Kellogg name attached to the unholy trinity of Pop-Tarts, Froot Loops, and Frosted Flakes.

Read earlier installments of “Off Menu.”

Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America. He is currently working on a book about Alfred Hitchcock. His former column for The Paris Review Daily was “The Lives of Others.” 

When a devastating cholera pandemic reached Italy in 1884, the disease took its heaviest toll on the sharp-edged, unpolished jewel of Naples. The authorities’ response was disastrous, and as panic and anger rose, a conspiracy theory circulated that the suffering was an orchestrated attack on the city’s poor. Physicians and public health officials were attacked in the street; a popular rumor had it that doctors received twenty lire for each person they bumped off, and that some were greedily chucking patients who were still alive onto funeral wagons. One man was arrested for inciting rebellion when he spread the notion that tomatoes, a symbol of Neapolitan peasant identity and a staple nourishment, were being laced with poison.

The discord caused alarm in the government. The Risorgimento—the movement behind the creation of a single, unified Italian nation in 1861—had promised a new era of prosperity and progress for all. Events in Naples made a mockery of that. Italy’s King Umberto I became a passionate advocate of a radical transformation of Naples that would improve the health of the city, and tie Naples closer than ever to the Italian nation. Corruption and chaotic administration kiboshed the plans, but the royal desire to celebrate the Italian-ness of Naples remained. When Umberto and his wife, Queen Margherita, visited the city in 1899, the queen, bored of overly complex French food, supposedly asked for some real food, a true taste of Naples. A local chef served her a pizza in the colors of the Italian flag—the red of tomato sauce, the white of mozzarella cheese, the green of fresh basil—which Margherita loved so much that it’s been named after her ever since. Whatever the precise truth behind the yarn, its intended message is unmistakable: the experience of being Italian is baked into the food of the ordinary Neapolitan.

It’s a story that would have intrigued Vincenzo Corrado, a man born and bred in the south a century and a half before Queen Margherita’s supposed conversion to the delights of Neapolitan cuisine. Corrado explored that cuisine in the pages of his series of cookbooks, which are a vivid testimony to the cultural life of eighteenth-century Naples, a city of dizzying social disparities and abundant artistic expression. Unwittingly, Corrado did more than almost anybody to define what we think of as Italian food, in which—especially as the food exists in its international incarnations—the flavors of Naples are so prevalent. Yet, one wonders what Corrado would have made of the ways in which food has been used as an important binding agent in the creation of an Italian national identity. Sincere as he was in his passion for the food of his homeland, he recognized that a plate of food is layered, like a Neapolitan timbale, with meanings and associations. As his recipes testify, much of what we consider to be authentically local, regional, or national, rests on small acts of self-deception and selective memory, the endless making and remaking of myths.

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Vincenzo Corrado was born in 1738 in the town of Oria, in the region of Apulia, part of the Kingdom of Naples, which essentially covered the southern half of what we now know as mainland Italy. We know little more about his youth than that his family origins were unspectacular, and that after the death of his parents he may have gone into service at the court of a Neapolitan aristocrat.

The years of Corrado’s childhood were an exciting time for the city of Naples, which was then the heliocentric force within the Kingdom. Since antiquity Naples had occupied a special place in Mediterranean life. In the days of the Roman Empire, it had been a paradisiacal southern retreat for the wealthy and powerful. But by the era of the Renaissance it was one of the most heavily and densely populated cities in the world. As a site of tremendous strategic importance in their wars against Muslims to the east and Protestants to the north, Naples’s Spanish rulers turned the place into a fortress, forbidding any building outside the city walls. The growing population piled up on top of itself. At a time when it was unusual for European cities to have buildings of more than two or three stories, Naples had the early modern equivalent of skyscrapers, reaching five, six, or seven stories tall. When Caravaggio turned up in 1606, he was struck by the intensity of Naples, all the extremes of city life in such close proximity. Within a month of his arrival, he had painted The Seven Works of Mercy, perhaps the most vivid record of the unique energy that so many felt in Naples, a combustible exuberance, simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying.

When the eighteen-year-old Charles of Bourbon acceded the throne in 1734, he embarked upon a reign of so-called enlightened absolutism, turning Naples into what one historian has described as “an intellectual laboratory where intellectuals and government collaborated.” Under his guidance, there were reforms of the judiciary, the civil service, and taxation laws, and Jewish people were officially allowed to settle in the Kingdom for the first time in centuries. Before abdicating the throne to his son Ferdinand in 1759, Charles also invested heavily in Neapolitan arts and culture, patronizing artists, funding theaters, and recruiting the architects Ferdinando Fuga and Luigi Vanvitelli to design many of the landmarks of modern Naples. Taking Charles’s lead, wealthy Neapolitans used their money to beautify the city. One such person was Raimondo di Sangro, who paid for the reconstruction of the Chapel of Sansevero, complete with Giuseppe Sanmartino’s statue Veiled Christ. It was a work of such astonishing quality that locals suspected it had been made with alchemical wizardry rather than a sculptor’s chisel. At the same time as crafting the Neapolitan future, Charles also rediscovered its past: it was he who commissioned excavations of nearby Pompeii, one of the great cultural moments of the eighteenth century.

It was against this backdrop that Vincenzo Corrado entered a Celestine monastery in Naples at the age of seventeen, where he received a thorough education in astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, and history. He also began a culinary education, traveling the Kingdom of Naples and other parts of the Italian peninsula, collecting recipes as he went. We don’t know much about how he refined his skills, but he evidently paid close attention at the tables, kitchens, and marketplaces of the various places he visited; the knowledge he would later display of food from Italy and beyond was immense.

Though it was the contemplative life of the monastery that brought him to Naples, it was the worldly pleasures of cooking and eating that made Corrado’s name. At the court of Michele Imperiali, Prince of Francavilla, he was given the magnificent title of Capo dei Servizi di Bocca, literally translated as “Head of Mouth Services,” and given responsibility for planning banquets that were not only lavish in the quality and quantity of the food served, but distinctly theatrical, of a piece with the social world of Naples that focused so much on display and performance. As well as dozens of individual dishes, Corrado designed table settings and elaborate ornamentations, often complex sugar sculptures or small models made from marzipan. He left few details of exactly who he cooked for, but the Prince attracted the glitterati from across Europe, and Casanova was a guest of his in the 1770s.

The guiding spirit of these elite occasions was certainly Parisian, the default setting of fashionable society across Europe. In Naples, high-status cooks were referred to as monzu, a Neapolitan corruption of monsieur, an indication of the style and atmosphere that Corrado’s food would have been expected to project. It’s for this reason that Corrado’s first book, Il cuoco galante, was a landmark in the development of Italian food—and therefore in the development of Italian national identity—when it was published in 1773. The last cookbook in a native language of Italy was published in the 1690s by Antonio Latini, another Neapolitan, and even that comprised mainly French- or Spanish-style dishes; it was the gastronomic testament of a thoroughbred monzu. In Il cuoco galante, Corrado pointed toward the Italian future, interweaving the dominant fashion for French cuisine with distinctively Italian flavors and textures. Though most of the peninsula is represented in one way or another, it is the Kingdom of Naples to which Corrado returns over and again. Throughout the text, he extols fish from the Bay, as well as the cheese, meat, fruits, and vegetables from Campania, and other southern regions. He has prototypical recipes for things that remain classics of Neapolitan cooking: Genovese sauce, timbales of various kinds, and parmigiana—though as he wasn’t keen on eggplant, his version uses fried slices of squash, layered between Parmesan and butter. For a wealthy, well-to-do audience, Il cuoco galante was the most articulate statement of colloquial Italian food to have been written for more than a century.

There’s a parallel between Corrado’s take on food and other trends in eighteenth-century Neapolitan culture, most notably opera buffa, a form of comic opera that told stories of ordinary Neapolitans, using the language and settings that everyone in the city would recognize. By 1730, Naples had three theaters dedicated to opera buffa, and the form spread to the rest of Italy. Some say the assertion of Neapolitan identity, sometimes at the expense of the political, social, and cultural establishment, can be detected in Corrado’s food writing. In a recipe for pheasant—stuffed with veal, wrapped in bacon, roasted on a spit—he remarks that the birds are in season from winter to spring when they are “persecuted and murdered by hunters,” a strange turn of phrase which the food historian Gillian Riley asserts is a dig at “the sport of kings, enjoyed by the idle and illiterate Bourbons,” the foreign dynasty that ruled the Kingdom.

Corrado was tapping into a widespread feeling of pride in Neapolitan food, but one that was tempered by social and cultural resentments, exacerbated by a deadly famine in 1764. At the cuccagna festival of that year—a kind of early modern Black Friday, in which the poor were encouraged to fight each other as they devoured giant structures made of food—the nobles were disgruntled that the chaos had begun before the King gave his signal. At the carnival four years later, pasta makers, seen by some as guardians of the true Neapolitan identity, handed out pamphlets denouncing the social elite for filling their tables with foreign foods. Pasta had become a symbol of everyday Naples only relatively recently. During the Renaissance, Neapolitans had been referred to, derisively, as “cabbage eaters” by those outside the region. From the late seventeenth century, images of lazzari (the poorest of all Naples’s inhabitants) eating long strands of pasta with their fingers began to appear in depictions of the city, and Neapolitans were now called mangiamaccheroni—“macaroni eaters.” Yet, Il cuoco galante shows us that pasta, and many other types of Neapolitan cucina povera, were also eaten by the wealthy and powerful. Corrado wrote down recipes for gnocchi, lasagna, ravioli, vermicelli, and a startlingly rich macaroni timbale, filled with cheese, sausage mince, mushroom, truffles, and ham, all cooked in a mold of flaky pastry. Though some of Corrado’s recipes were well beyond the means of ordinary people, in this city of extremes the consumption of pasta provided a common experience. Some sources suggest that even King Ferdinand IV ate pasta with his fingers just as the poorest of his subjects did.

What Corrado does not give us, either in Il cuoco galante or any of his subsequent works, is a recipe that fuses pasta with tomato sauce, the combination that, rightly or wrongly, has come to define Neapolitan—and Italian—food for millions around the world. The food historian John Dickie has described tomato sauce in Italy as “a national religion: its Holy Trinity is Fresh, Tinned and Concentrate; and its Jerusalem is Naples.” But, when Corrado was writing, the default accompaniments of pasta were butter and cheese; tomatoes—apples of love, as they were called in English—were still considered poisonous by many Europeans, and even Corrado, who encourages their use, advises removing the seeds and skin before cooking with them, such as in a recipe he called pomodori alla Napolitana, in which tomato halves are stuffed and fried. Elsewhere, he gives us tomato soup, tomato fritters, tomato croquettes, tomatoes stuffed with rice and truffles or anchovies. He also describes a precursor of passata, a broth of tomatoes fried in oil with garlic, parsley, radish, bay leaf, and celery, bulked out with bread crusts and pushed through a sieve. Though he may not have hit upon the killer combination of pasta and tomato sauce, the success of Corrado’s cookbooks (Il cuoco galante was reprinted several times in the decades after its publication) helped ensure that tomatoes became a key ingredient in Neapolitan cooking.

Beyond tomatoes, Corrado adored fruit and vegetables. In 1781, eight years after Il cuoco galante, he published Del cibo pitagorico, expounding the virtues of vegetarian food, and the bounty of the Kingdom’s harvests. His passion for local produce was evident, yet he was also keenly aware that much of what he was dispersing as Neapolitan cuisine was an invention of tradition, rather than its continuation. Tomatoes were products of the Americas, brought to Naples by its Spanish rulers, as were coffee and chocolate, novel ingredients that he included in his recipes. The same was true of potatoes, about which he published a book of recipes in 1798. A number of those recipes, the first in Italian history, have become Neapolitan favorites, such as potato cake, which Corrado suggested making with sweetbreads and pig’s liver.

As Corrado busied himself with a quiet revolution in Italian food, the violence of political and social revolution swept across Italy, leaving the Kingdom of Naples prone. In 1798, alarmed by Napoleon’s conquest of northern Italy, King Ferdinand decided to send an army of seventy thousand soldiers into Rome and halt the French advances. It was a calamitous error. Back in Naples, revolutionaries declared the end of the monarchy, though the nascent republic was violently torn down with the help of thousands of rural peasants and the lazzari of Naples, the “macaroni eaters,” a minority of whom were alleged to have acquired a taste for human flesh. Whether or not reports that counterrevolutionaries “ate their neighbors roasted” are true, they underline the astonishing brutality that enveloped Naples in the final year of the century. For the first sixty years of Corrado’s life, Naples had been a place that spoke of progress, of high ideals of civilization, beauty, and a celebration of Neapolitan culture, all of which shone through in Corrado’s work. As the city spasmed its way to the end of the century, it’s tempting to wonder which of his recipes the old chef turned to for comfort, redolent of the land he loved.

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Naples was in a tug of war for the next several years, until Napoleon’s demise allowed the Bourbon dynasty to reassert a firm grip on power. Corrado’s writing career wound down; the small amount he published lacked the exuberance of earlier work, perhaps reflecting his mindset in these more subdued, uncertain times. But he lived long enough to see stability return to Naples; he died aged ninety-eight in 1836, by which point a great deal of his take on Neapolitan cuisine had become standard.

Bourbon rule of Naples continued for another twenty-five years, until it was overwhelmed by the forces of national unification. When Garibaldi’s men closed in on Naples, a leader of the nationalist movement had rejoiced that “the macaroni are cooked and we will eat them.” The outside world, it seems, still tended to view Neapolitans through the holes of a colander, and in subsequent decades the old images of the lazzari eating pasta with their fingers were updated, in photographs staged for tourists who wanted a souvenir that summed up the city in one arresting cliché.

By the close of World War Two the Neapolitan diaspora had exported its cuisine to the rest of the planet. Elaborations on the traditional recipes from the old country were now viewed as quintessentially Italian, especially in the United States. When Paulie Gualtieri goes “home” to Naples in The Sopranos, he’s shocked to discover pasta served in ways he can barely stomach. Native Neapolitans mock him for requesting “gravy” with his macaroni: “and you thought the Germans were classless pieces of shit,” they say, in a language Paulie understands no better than the food on his plate.

As the international fame of Neapolitan food grew, so Italy itself became more attached to it. By the sixties, pizza of the variety made for Queen Margherita was essentially a national dish—a national symbol, even—along with many of the recipes sketched by Vincenzo Corrado nearly two centuries earlier. His books are still reprinted and read across the peninsula, and cafés, pizzerias, and trattorias across southern Italy bear the name “Corrado,” a word now synonymous with the glories of Italian gastronomy.

Read earlier installments of “Off Menu.”

Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America. He is currently working on a book about Alfred Hitchcock. His former column for The Paris Review Daily was “The Lives of Others.” 

Seth Gilliam as James Hemings in Jefferson in Paris (1995)

Among his many claims to distinction, Thomas Jefferson can be regarded as America’s first connoisseur. The term and the concept emerged among the philosophes of eighteenth-century Paris, where Jefferson lived between 1784 and 1789. As minister to France he gorged on French culture. In five years, he bought more than sixty oil paintings, and many more objets d’art. He attended countless operas, plays, recitals, and masquerade balls. He researched the latest discoveries in botany, zoology and horticulture, and read inveterately—poetry, history, philosophy. In every inch of Paris he found something to stir his senses and cultivate his expertise. “Were I to proceed to tell you how much I enjoy their architecture, sculpture, painting, music,” he wrote a friend back in America, “I should want words.”

Ultimately, he poured all these influences into Monticello, the plantation he inherited from his father, which Jefferson redesigned into a palace of his own refined tastes. More than in its domed ceilings, its gardens, or its galleries, it was in Monticello’s dining room that Jefferson the connoisseur reigned. Here, he shared with his guests recipes, produce, and ideas that continue to have a sizable effect on how and what Americans eat.

In keeping with his republican ideals, Jefferson eschewed lavish banquets in favor of small, informal dinners where conversation flowed as freely as the Château Haut-Brion. According to his own account, the famous dinner table bargain of June 1790 was just such an event. Preparing the menu for the “room where it happened” that night was James Hemings, arguably the most accomplished chef in the United States. He was Jefferson’s trusted protégé, his brother-in-law—and his slave.

For nine years in Paris, New York, Philadelphia, and Virginia, it was Hemings who produced the sophisticated haute cuisine dishes with a demotic, Southern twist that we now think of as emblematically Jeffersonian: capon stuffed with Virginia ham; indulgent vanilla ice cream encased in delicate choux pastry; beef stew served in a French bouillon. And it was he who taught his fellow slaves at Monticello everything he knew about food, transmitting his influence down the generations, onto the tables of Virginia’s social elite.

Hemings’s talents had been nurtured by Jefferson, who took him to France and gave him a first-rate culinary education from some of Europe’s most illustrious chefs. Yet, every moment he spent in Jefferson’s kitchens, he did so in servitude. His biography appears to us only in snatched glimpses. We know little about his private life and his interior existence, beyond what he expressed through cooking. But his story exemplifies the strange paradoxes that have come to define the public reputation of Thomas Jefferson, a man who, in turn, exemplifies the strange paradoxes of his age.

*

James Hemings became the property of Thomas Jefferson when he was nine years old. His mother was Elizabeth Hemings, an enslaved woman who had six children by Captain John Wayles, her master and James’s father. With his three wives, Wayles had a further eleven children, one of whom, Martha, married Thomas Jefferson on New Year’s Day in 1772. When Captain Wayles died the following year, the Jeffersons inherited Elizabeth Hemings and her children, including James and his little sister Sarah, known as Sally. They arrived at Monticello in January 1774, a few weeks after the Boston Tea Party, and a few months before Jefferson established himself as an important voice against the tyranny of British rule.

Martha Jefferson almost certainly knew that six of the young slaves she had inherited were her half siblings; her husband surely knew, too. It may have been a truth obvious to everyone but never commented upon, the kind of gymnastic feat of self-delusion that was common on many plantations of the era.

Throughout their lives at Monticello, the Hemingses repeatedly received preferential treatment, were selected for high-status jobs, and given special responsibilities. As the years passed, James appears to have stood out to his master as a young man of particular intelligence and strong character. When Jefferson was elected governor of Virginia in 1779, he gave the fourteen-year-old Hemings the job of messenger and coach driver. Two years later, it was Hemings and his brother Robert who were tasked with guiding Martha Jefferson and her children to safety during Benedict Arnold’s raid on Virginia. The following year, 1782, Martha died, leaving Jefferson deeply grief-stricken. When, at the end of the Revolutionary War, the opportunity came to move to France, Jefferson was happy to accept. Although Robert was head cook at Monticello, it was James, now nineteen, whom Jefferson selected to accompany him across the ocean and learn “the art of cookery,” to quote Jefferson, as no American before him had.

The Paris that Hemings and Jefferson discovered was widely regarded as the apotheosis of European civilization. For much of the preceding century French had been Europe’s lingua franca, and French dress, dance, and manners had dominated high society across the continent. French cuisine was similarly envied and copied, although many notable Parisians wondered whether the cult of food had gone too far. Rousseau once averred that “the French are the only nation who know not how to eat, since they must use such a vast deal of art, to render their victuals agreeable to the palate.” His contemporary Voltaire likewise complained about being served complex dishes such as “sweetbreads swimming in a spicy sauce”—though one wonders how much of that was due to the havoc played on his stomach by the forty cups of coffee he drank each day.

Jefferson was well aware of the intellectual dimensions of cooking and eating, and developed a philosophy of dining around it, one that combined old-world culinary technique with an American disregard for etiquette and hierarchy. How much Hemings knew about, or cared about, such ideas is unknown. In the historical record he comes alive only fitfully, and almost always refracted throughout the prism of his master. What is obvious, however, is that he had talent and an innate understanding of food that flourished under expert instruction.

For the first tranche of his apprenticeship, Hemings learned in the kitchen of a successful chef named Combeaux. After that, he was placed in the tutelage of a pâtissier, before receiving the most impressive portion of his education at the Château de Chantilly under the direction of the chef to Louis Joseph de Bourbon, the Prince of Condé. Chantilly was a thunderous statement of ancien régime magnificence, vast formal gardens outside a grand château that contained interiors of towering ceilings, marble, crystal, and gold. Here, the preparation and service of food was a remarkably serious business. At a banquet in 1671, so claimed the socialite and writer Madame de Sévigné, Chantilly’s maître d’hôtel, François Vatel, became so distressed by the late delivery of fish that he stabbed himself to death in shame and despair.

Hemings’s training was a palpable success. By 1788, aged twenty-one, he was running the kitchen at the Hôtel de Langeac, Jefferson’s official residence on the Champs-Élysées. Hemings incorporated indigenous American ingredients that Jefferson had started to grow in his garden into the recipes and techniques he’d spent two years perfecting. It was all part of Jefferson’s diplomatic mission; the Hôtel de Langeac became a beacon of the young republic’s burgeoning identity, and its commitment to egalitarianism. The screaming irony, of course, was that these platefuls of democratic idealism were being cooked by a man who was considered a slave.

Jefferson, the self-described “savage of the mountains” dove deep into French food culture. In trips to Burgundy and Bordeaux, he toured vineyards in a typically Jeffersonian manner. Not content with sampling the wine, he also made close study of the science involved, the nature of the terroir that produced the grapes of each region, and the processes of harvesting, crushing, fermenting, and aging. He came to see this education in viticulture as part of a project of cultural decolonization. Before the Revolution, he said, American taste in wine had been “artificially created by our long restraint under the English government to the strong wines of Portugal and Spain.” In this new age of liberty, he wanted American palates to stray beyond the muscular port, sherry, and Madeira that the English downed by the barrel. One day, he hoped, America would be self-sufficient in wine as in all things, producing exquisite vintages that expressed the uniqueness of the American experiment.

If living in Paris broadened the horizons of the worldly Thomas Jefferson, Hemings must have felt as though he had slipped into a parallel universe. A world away from the slave society of Virginia, he was allowed to travel around the city on his own and construct a private life that didn’t necessarily run along the rigid racial lines of home. Jefferson paid him a wage, a good deal of which he spent on improving his French. The effect this had on how a young man, born into slavery, thought of himself, must have been seismic. In Virginia, members of his family became equally skilled; his younger brother John, for example, was an excellent carpenter. But his apprenticeship in French cuisine at the apex of Parisian society had made James Hemings not a cook but a chef, more virtuoso artist than master craftsman. As Louis-Sébastien Mercier, the great chronicler of late-eighteenth-century Paris observed in 1788, “it is almost to the point today where chefs will assume the title of culinary artist … they are pampered, they are humored, they are appeased when they are angry, and all the other servants of the household are generally sacrificed to them.”

Except, of course, Hemings could never be fully pampered, humored, or appeased. Despite the opportunities and freedoms that Jefferson gave him, he remained a slave. Technically, manumission—release from slavery—was within his reach every day of his five years in Paris, even though racism was rife in France. In the 1770s and 1780s, a raft of laws had been introduced that required black people to carry identification papers, banned them from using the titles Sieur or Dame, and prohibited interracial marriage. The Police des Noirs of 1777 went as far as requiring detainment and deportation of all people of color who entered France from abroad, or who were living in the country illegally. But, such was the spirit of the times, few of these laws were ever enforced, especially not in Paris, where the notion was vigorously upheld in the courts that slavery was inimical to France and Frenchness. At some point during his time in the city, Hemings was sure to have learned that he could have easily secured his freedom in the Parisian courts, as many enslaved people from the French colonies had done. Quite why he chose not to, we can’t know. Most likely it was the pull of family; to pursue an emancipated life, he would have to remain thousands of miles from enslaved relatives he would never see again. By 1787, there was also an extra complication to consider: his fourteen-year-old sister, Sally, who accompanied Jefferson’s daughter Polly when she moved to Paris at her father’s instruction. It is now widely accepted that Jefferson began a sexual relationship with Sally—his late wife’s little sister—toward the end of their stay in France, resulting in the first of six children.

The account left by Sally’s son Madison suggests that she was pregnant when she, her brother, and the Jeffersons left France in late 1789, the country in the throes of revolution. Jefferson had been a role model to many of the revolutionaries, and heavily influenced Lafayette’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a document that inspired slave uprisings in the French colonies. James Hemings would never see Paris again, though the city must have stayed with him for the rest of his days.

*

When Jefferson relocated to Philadelphia in 1791, to serve as Secretary of State, Hemings went with him. He served as chef and valet, and also oversaw the mammoth task of unpacking the twenty-seven wagonloads of items that Jefferson had accrued overseas. In Philadelphia, Jefferson and Hemings each had ways of keeping the memory of Paris alive. Jefferson had his furniture, paintings, and books. Hemings had the familiar illusion of independence; the wage that Jefferson continued to pay him, and the relative freedom he could enjoy in the City of Brotherly Love. Both men, of course, also had Hemings’s cooking.

In December 1793, Jefferson moved back to Virginia, where he began the work of shaping Monticello into the place it is now, an American expression of the Enlightenment—a museum, in fact, to Jefferson’s idea of himself. The renovations included an overhaul of James Hemings’s kitchen. A new stew stove was installed to complement the top-of-the-range, heat-sensitive copper utensils that Hemings had purchased in Paris. A list of these utensils is the only surviving example of Hemings’s handwriting. It’s a surprisingly eloquent document, showing its author to be as much of a connoisseur as the legendary man for whom he cooked. Jefferson’s sphere of expertise wasn’t the kitchen—that was Hemings’s space—but the dining table, which at Monticello and, in time, the White House became a site of pleasure and education. Guests were inducted into the uncharted territory of fine wine; some even had their first taste of ice cream or macaroni and cheese, a dish unknown to Americans before Jefferson’s return and which one confused diner described as “a rich crust filled with trillions of onions, or shallots, which I took it to be … tasted very strong and not agreeable.”

These innovations are routinely described as Jefferson’s, yet there’s no evidence that the man ever brewed a pot of tea, much less mixed a vinaigrette, whipped peaks of a meringue, trussed a chicken, or any of the other things that Hemings perfected at the Hôtel de Langeac. Only two recipes are attributed directly to Hemings, one for chocolate cream, the other for snow eggs. Several others, in Jefferson’s hand, have survived—but it seems highly likely that Hemings was involved in these, too.

As much as it may have pleased Jefferson, rural Virginia was no place for Hemings, a young man who just a few years earlier had got a tantalizing taste of freedom in the cultural capital of the world. When he asked for his manumission, Jefferson acceded, but only on the condition that he stay at Monticello for as long as it took to train his brother Peter to be the new chef. Within two years Peter could cook in the style that Jefferson valued, one which seemed so fitting to the project of Monticello—“half-French, half-Virginian,” as one of Jefferson’s guests put it. In 1796, Hemings was handed $30 and his liberty. At the age of thirty-one, he was free for the first time.

The details of what Hemings did after leaving Monticello are very sketchy. He sought work in Philadelphia and may have traveled back to Europe for a time. But prospects for a black man, even one of such accomplishment, were dreadfully limited. He drank and drifted. His last known job was at a tavern in Baltimore, where his skills were surely not being put to full use.

When Jefferson won the presidential election of 1800, he wanted Hemings to run the White House kitchen. He reached out via a mutual acquaintance in a manner that suggested he assumed his former slave would come running straight away. Through a third party, Hemings told Jefferson that he wouldn’t consider the offer unless Jefferson contacted him directly and made a formal offer. As the historian Annette Gordon-Reed outlines “Hemings had been trained in Paris … He was special … Now that he was legally free, he would have from Jefferson the dignity he deserved.” In the knotted dynamics of this strangest of relationships, Jefferson’s own pride prevented him from making a direct request, and Hemings was overlooked for the post. Not long after, Jefferson received the news that Hemings had taken his own life, aged thirty-six.

Unable to hire Hemings, Jefferson went for the next best thing, a French chef named Honoré Julien. The kitchen staff was supplemented with two young slaves from Monticello, Edith and Frances, the first of many black female chefs at the White House, the best-known being Zephyr Wright who cooked for LBJ in the sixties. Edith became a fantastic chef. Through her, Virginian flavors—sweet potato, black-eyed peas, okra—kept their presence at Jefferson’s table. But, like Hemings before her, Edith’s brilliance was tethered to her legal status. When Jefferson’s presidency ended, she ran the Monticello kitchen until his death in 1826, and eventually gained her freedom in 1837, at which point she relocated to the free state of Ohio with her husband, Joseph Fossett, nephew of James Hemings. When their first son was born, they named him James, too, likely in honor of the boy’s uncle, a man who ghosts through the archives of the written word, but whose legacy is alive in kitchens across America.

Read earlier installments of “Off Menu.”

Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America. He is currently working on a book about Alfred Hitchcock. His former column for The Paris Review Daily was “The Lives of Others.” 

Alexis Soyer, artist unknown (courtesy Alexis-Soyer.com)

When the potato blight arrived in Ireland in September 1845, many of those in power downplayed the threat it posed. The disease had already blackened potato crops across the Americas and Western Europe, but dire predictions about the damage it could wreak on Ireland’s staple food were dismissed as irresponsible scaremongering, “deluding the public with a false alarm,” in the words of the mayor of Liverpool.

That line didn’t last long. By October it was obvious that the lives of millions were at risk. In response, the British government offered half measures, unwavering in its determination that the solution should not be worse than the problem. To break economic orthodoxy by providing direct aid to those in need would be tyrannical, it was argued, and create a culture of dependency and deception. Charles Trevelyan, the government official leading the relief effort, put it bluntly: “The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated … The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.”

1847 was the nadir of the crisis. Countless people died of starvation and disease, others fled in droves. The mayor of Liverpool could no longer contest the reality of the crisis; so many destitute refugees came to his city that it was described by the registrar general as “the cemetery of Ireland.”

Into the bleakness stepped Alexis Soyer, the most famous chef in London, a man who had made a fortune from catering to the outsize appetites of sybarites and playboys, and about as unlikely a savior of the famished as it’s possible to imagine. A peacocking, Rabelaisian embodiment of modern London, Soyer was as adept at self-promotion as he was at creating the extravagant high-society banquets for which he was famed. Nevertheless, in Dublin on April 5, 1847, he unveiled his plan to end the suffering of the Irish people: a specially designed soup kitchen, combining the traditional craft of French cooking with the efficiency of modern science.

The launch was attended not only by thousands of famine victims, but by representatives of the press, and hundreds of well-to-do observers, including the Duke of Cambridge and the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. As the hungry stood behind metal railings outside, VIPs were given a first look inside the kitchen, where they sampled for themselves what the famous Soyer had rustled up with food aid rations. “The contrast was sudden and striking,” reported the Dublin Evening Post the following day. “A moment before, and the lovely faces which lighted up the pavilion, smiled their approval of every thing they saw; a moment after, their places became filled by the poor, upon whose persons famine and misery and time had seemed to have done their worst.”

As laudable as it was unsettling, Soyer’s soup kitchen experiment was a precursor of the awkward union of celebrity and humanitarianism so familiar to our own times. But it was also the emblematic moment of Soyer’s unique culinary life, lived at extremes—poverty and wealth, toil and glamor, feast and famine.

*

Soyer was born in France on February 4, 1810, in Meaux, a town best known for its rich wholegrain mustard and its brie. When leaders from across Europe met at the Congress of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the French diplomat Talleyrand, confident that nowhere on earth contained such edifying delights as a French kitchen, arranged a tasting contest of sixty cheeses from across the continent; Brie de Meaux was declared the winner.

Despite the gastronomic distinction of his hometown, Soyer grew up poor and knew what it was to be hungry. Yet, as was the case with many of his compatriots then and now, he was raised to believe that good eating and good cooking should not be the preserve of the affluent. Aged eleven, he was sent by his parents to Paris where his older brother Philippe was already making his way as a chef. When Philippe helped Soyer get his first taste of a professional kitchen, the boy’s talent for cooking was immediately obvious, as was his ebullience and charisma, qualities that allowed him to command a kitchen in the heat and smoke of service. His career soared, but when revolution rattled Paris in the summer of 1830, Soyer fled to London. There, he worked for some of the richest and most powerful aristocrats in England, and built a public profile as a hard-drinking extrovert with a fabulous singing voice, an exotic young genius in and out of the kitchen.

In 1837, still only twenty-seven, Soyer was named chef de cuisine of the Reform Club, the social center of the Liberal movement, and a magnet for foreign dignitaries and celebrated Londoners. On the occasion of Victoria’s coronation the following year, he prepared a huge celebratory breakfast for thousands of paying customers, filled with such wonders as Turban of Larks à la Parisienne, pigeon in vine leaves, and turtle soup. Over the next decade, Soyer developed something of a culinary empire based on his reputation as the most brilliant chef in the land, selling the idea that you, too, could create dishes fit for a queen. He authored several extremely popular cookery books, and his dandyish red beret was used as a brand logo for the wildly successful range of sauces and drinks he launched under his own name, as well as various gadgets and utensils of his own design.

The base of his operations was the futuristic kitchen of the Reform Club, designed from scratch by the man himself. Every square inch of the space made extensive and imaginative use of the very latest science and technology: there were refrigerators, speaking tubes, ventilation devices, and lifts, pulleys, and steam-powered machines of all sorts. Traditional charcoal ovens—which clogged the lungs of kitchen workers and hastened the deaths of innumerable chefs—were banished in favor of gas, allowing chefs to regulate the temperature of each pan as never before. The word “ergonomics” was not coined until 1857, when the Polish scientist Wojciech Jastrzebowski first used it in an essay on “the science of work,” but the essential concept was evident in Soyer’s new kitchen, where space was created from nothing—wheels were added to tables and cabinets while chopping boards slid in and out of countertops. The kitchen was a modern marvel, covered extensively in the press and tied firmly to the chef who had designed it. Amazed visitors arrived daily for a guided tour. Soyer reckoned that in 1846 alone, he welcomed at least fifteen thousand people.

That same year, 1846, was when the Great Famine really took hold—but it was also the moment of Soyer’s most lavish banquet, in honor of Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt. Dozens of dishes were laid on, starting with several different soups and ending with a thirty-inch-high pyramid made of meringue, grapes, nuts, pineapples, and sugar work, on top of which stood a perfect miniature model of the Pasha’s father. That Soyer should have been serving up such indulgence at a time of extreme privation seems to have pricked his conscience. He didn’t even have to look as far as Ireland—or Scotland, which was also suffering the effects of the blight—to find those in need; it was the want, disease, and squalor of 1840s London that led Henry Mayhew to write London Labour and the London Poor, an immensely influential account of the wretched living conditions endured by millions of the city’s poorest inhabitants, who rarely received any more from the laissez-faire government of the day than did the impoverished in Ireland.

When Soyer investigated the charitable efforts in place to feed London’s needy, he was appalled to discover soup that was innutritious, unpalatable, and—perhaps worst of all—wasteful. He could scarcely believe his eyes when he witnessed “one hundred pounds of meat cut into pieces of a quarter of a pound each, put into one hundred gallons of water, at twelve o’clock of one day, to be boiled until twelve o’clock the next day,” leaving nothing but thin, discolored water. Those in charge of the existing soup kitchens were well-meaning and kindhearted, he acknowledged, but severely lacking in the skills he had as a chef, and the knowledge he felt was an immanent part of French culture. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the Platonic ideal of the nineteenth-century French gastronome, considered soup to be “the foundation of French nutrition,” and fundamental to the living of a properly French life. To the mind of a French chef, an inability to make a soup that was both tasty and healthful was a shameful failure.

So, Soyer embarked on a new scheme to nourish the starving and educate the ignorant, designing a soup kitchen in the Spitalfields district that was run with the same inventiveness, professionalism, and efficiency of his space at the Reform Club. He also gave cookery lessons to “respectable” ladies who wanted to provide for ailing communities, and published some of his “famine soup” recipes in newspapers, and in the pamphlet Soyer’s Charitable Cooking. Soyer calculated that he could produce one hundred gallons of soup—meat, fish, or vegetable—for less than £1, and that daily portions were, on their own, nutritious enough to sustain the average person. Exactly how the idea came about to transfer these methods to Ireland is unclear, but by the beginning of the 1847, Soyer had been granted leave from the Reform Club to travel to Dublin, where he spent several weeks exploring the desperateness of the situation.

By early April, the model kitchen in Dublin was complete. When Soyer flung open the doors of the kitchen on its launch day, the dignitaries encountered a space of two thousand square feet, which resembled an assembly line more than a restaurant. In order to maximize space, Soyer had people queue in eight lines, all in a precise zigzag formation. At the end of these lines was a three-sided counter—as one might find in an enormous pub—behind which stood a gigantic bread oven, and a three-hundred-gallon soup boiler, surrounded by eight bains-maries, in which freshly made soup was kept warm before being ladled into bowls on the counter. Next to each bowl was a metal spoon, fixed to the countertop by a chain. Each recipient was given exactly six minutes—measured by the ringing of a bell—to finish their soup, before walking to the exit, where they were given a chunk of bread or a biscuit to take with them. The bowls were rinsed and refilled for the next in line. With this method, Soyer could feed close to nine thousand people a day.

It was undoubtedly efficient, though horribly redolent of the workhouse, and even at the time, the presence of the gawping gentry on opening day struck some as unforgivably exploitative. One observer wondered why these respectable ladies and gentlemen hadn’t simply gone for a day out at the zoo. Others were more concerned that Soyer’s claims that his soups were nutritious enough to sustain the starving were unfounded, the sort of promotional puffery one could expect of a man who was as much salesman as chef. “Soup quackery” was how one skeptic summed it up.

For all its flaws, Soyer’s soup kitchen was an impressive achievement, and its example produced clones all over the country. His model kitchen up and running, he returned to the excitement of London. But, Soyer was never quite the same again. His love of food now served a profound purpose; for the decade of life he had left in him, he continued in his efforts to teach the inhabitants of the British Isles the true value of cooking and eating.

*

As it turned out, Soyer’s legacy in Ireland was short-lived. By September 1847, the government had closed all the soup kitchens, thinking the blight had finally left and the crisis was coming to a close. It was an awful miscalculation. Hundreds of thousands more would die or emigrate as a result of the famine over the next five years.

In 1850, Soyer parted ways with the Reform Club after thirteen years of service. Thirsting for a new challenge, he sank all his money into a madcap scheme he called Alexis Soyer’s Gastronomic Symposium of All Nations, for which he transformed a stately home adjacent to Hyde Park into a cornucopia of world cuisine during the Great Exhibition of 1851. The project hemorrhaged money, and Soyer lost practically everything.

Gradually, he clawed it back, by returning to his roots as a chef who knew how to make a little go a long way. In 1854, he published Soyer’s Shilling Cookery for the People, his first book aimed not at the wealthy, or even the middle classes, but “the million,” as he referred to the laboring people of Britain. Aside from the recipes—often Soyer’s take on hearty English standards—he provided his readers with an elementary education in kitchen skills: paring, skinning, and carving, even how to boil an egg and make toast, a reflection of how lacking he felt the British were in their feel for food. His ultimate hope was that the book would not just allow ordinary people to eat better, but reconnect them with what they put in their bellies, and educate them of its origins. In Ireland he had been outraged to see fish taken from the teeming stocks surrounding the island used not as a source of food, but as a fertilizer for potatoes, the monocrop that had driven the country to famine. Consequently, much of Shilling Cookery is dedicated to avoiding waste, having diversity in one’s diet, and the importance of eating locally and seasonally. This focus on what we now call biodiversity and sustainability strikes modern readers as remarkably prescient, though Soyer would perhaps answer that these were simply the traditional standards of the food culture in which he was raised.

A few months after Shilling Cookery was published, Soyer found himself cooking in a crisis zone once again, this time in the Crimean War. Bogged down by the exigencies of life on campaign, British soldiers were beset by illness, disease, and malnutrition. The reports of Florence Nightingale’s work in reforming the military hospitals had made her a household name back home, and in early 1855 Soyer joined her to sort out the shambolic state of their kitchens. Though wildly different personalities, the pair admired one another, became friends, and formed a formidable, if brief, partnership. Soyer’s impact was transformative. He taught soldiers how to run a kitchen, catering more and better meals faster, cheaper, and with a minimum of waste, all of which helped to slash mortality rates. He also designed a portable gas stove that could be used in the field, a variation of which was regulation kit in the British Army until the eighties.

Within three years of his return from Crimea, Soyer was dead. He succumbed to a stroke on August 5, 1858, aged forty-eight. Today, Florence Nightingale’s memory is as strong in Britain as ever: seven new hospitals across the country, built in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, are named in her honor, evoking the values of compassion and resolve with which she has become synonymous. Soyer’s presence is less obvious, but still detectable. Over the last few weeks, Jamie Oliver, another ball of entrepreneurial energy who became a household name by trying to teach Brits one end of a carrot from the other, has been hosting Keep Cooking and Carry On, a TV series in which he shows lockdown Britain how to make something exquisite out of our stockpiles of canned fruit and frozen vegetables. Soyer would have loved to have done the same. And, the lessons he preached about savoring what you have, knowing where it comes from and how to use it, and appreciating that every time food fills the stomach it also soothes the soul, seem urgently relevant to us all.

Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America. He is currently working on a book about Alfred Hitchcock. His former column for The Paris Review Daily was “The Lives of Others.”