A is for dining alone …
… and so am I, if a choice must be made between most people I know and myself. This misanthropic attitude is one I am not proud of, but it is firmly there, based on my increasing conviction that sharing food with another human being is an intimate act, which should not be indulged in lightly.
There are few people alive with whom I care to pray, sleep, dance, sing, and (perhaps most of all, except sleep) share my bread and wine. Of course there are moments when such unholy performances must take place, in order to exist socially, but they are endurable because they need not be the only fashion of self-nourishment.
There is always the prospect to cheer us of a quiet or giddy or warmly somber or lightly notable meal with "One," as Elizabeth Robins Pennell refers to him or her in The Feasts of Autolycus. “… one sits at your side feasting in silent sympathy,” this lady wrote at the end of the last century, in her mannered and delightful book. She was, just there on the page, thinking of eating an orange in southern Europe, but any kind of food will do, in any clime, so long as One is there.
Myself, I have been blessed among women in this respect … which is, of course, the main reason that if one is not there, to dine alone is preferable to any other way for me.
Naturally there have been times when my self-made solitude has irked me. I have often eaten an egg and drunk a glass of jug-wine, surrounded deliberately with the trappings of busyness in a hollow flat in Hollywood near the studio where I was called a Writer, and not been able to stifle my longing to be anywhere but there, in the company of any of a dozen predatory or ambitious or even kind people who had not invited me.
That was the trouble: nobody did.
I cannot pretend, even on an invisible black couch of day-dreams, that I have ever been hounded by Sunset Boulevardiers who wanted to woo me with caviar and win me with champagne. But in my few desolate periods of being without One, I have known two or three avuncular gentlemen with a latent gleam in their eyes, who understood how to order a good mixed-grill-with-water-cress. For the most part, to the lasting shame of my female vanity, they have shied away from any suggestion that we might dally, gastronomically speaking. “Wouldn't dare ask you,” they have murmured, shifting their gaze with no apparent difficulty or regret to some much younger and prettier woman who never read a recipe in her life, much less wrote one, and who was for that very reason far better fed than I.
It has for too long been the same with the ambitious eaters, the amateur chefs and the self-styled gourmets, the leading lights of nearby food-and-wine societies. When we meet, in other people's houses or in restaurants, they tell me a few sacrosanct and impressive details of how they baste grouse with truffle juice, and then they murmur, “Wouldn't dare serve it to you, of course,” and forthwith invite some visiting potentate from Nebraska, who never saw a truffle in his life, to register the proper awe in return for a Lucullan and perhaps delicious meal.
And the kind people: they are the ones who have made me feel the loneliest. Wherever I have lived they have indeed been kind … up to a certain point. They have poured cocktails for me, and praised me generously for things I have written to their liking, and showed me their children. And behind their offspring I have seen the discreetly drawn curtains to their family dining rooms, so different from the uncluttered spinsterish emptiness of my own. Behind the far door to the kitchen I have sensed, with the mystic materialism of a hungry woman, the presence of honest-to-God fried chops, peas and carrots, a gelatin salad, and lemon meringue pie … all things I admire in theory but do not like, which I would give my eye-teeth to be offered. But the kind people murmur always, “We'd love to have you stay to supper sometime … we wouldn't dare, of course … the simple way we eat, and all …”
As I leave, by myself, of course, two nice plump kin neighbors come in. They say Howdo, and then Goodbye with obvious relief, after a polite, respectful mention of culinary literature as represented, no matter how doubtfully, by me.They sniff the fine, creeping, straightforward smells in the hall and living room, with silent thanks that they are not condemned to my daily fare of quails financière, pâté de Strasbourg truffé en brioche, sole Marguery, bombe vanille au Cointreau … They close the door on me.
I drive home by way of the corner supermarket to pick up another box of Ry-Krisp, which, with a can of tomato soup and a glass of California sherry, will make a good nourishing meal for me, as I sit on my tuffet in a circle of page proofs and pocket detective stories.…
It took me several years of such fairly rare (thank God!) periods of being alone to learn how to care for myself, at least at table. I came to believe that since nobody else dared feed me as I wished to be fed, I must do it myself, and with as much aplomb as I could muster. Enough of hit-or-miss suppers of tinned soup and boxed biscuits and an occasional egg, just because I had failed once more to rate an invitation! Enough of gallant and basically boring solitude!
I resolved to establish myself as a well-behaved female at one or two good restaurants where I could dine alone at a pleasant table with adequate attentions rather than be pushed into a corner and given a raw or over-weary waiter simply because I might become a nuisance. To my credit I manage to carry this resolution out, at least to the point where two headwaiters accepted me: they knew I tipped well, they knew I wanted simple but excellent menus, and, above all, they knew that I could not only order but also drink, all by myself, an apértif and a small bottle of wine or a mug of ale without turning into a potentially maudlin pickup for The Gentleman at the Bar.
Once or twice a week, when it was obvious that none of my three types of acquaintances was going to dare feed me, I would go to the restaurant I had selected, and with carefully disguised self-consciousness I would order my meal, taking heed to have things that would nourish me most thoroughly as well as agreeably, because of the other nights ahead when soup and crackers would be mine. I met some interesting waiters: I continue to agree with a modern Mrs. Malaprop who said, “They are so much nicer than people!”
But my expensive little dinners became, in spite of my good intentions, no more than a routine prescription for existence. I had long believed that, once having bowed to the inevitability of the dictum that we must eat to live, we should ignore it and live to eat—in proportion, of course. And there I was, spending more money than I should, in a grim plan which became increasingly complicated. In spite of the loyalty of my waiter-friends, wolves in a dozen different kinds of sheep's clothing, from normally lecherous to lesbian, sniffed at the high wall of my isolation. I changed seats, then tables. I read; I read everything from Tropic of Cancer to Riders of the Purple Sage. Finally I began to look around the room and hum.
That was when I decided that my own walk-up flat, my own script-cluttered room with the let-down bed, was the place for me.“Never be daunted in public,” was an early Hemingway phrase which had more than once bolstered me in my Timid Twenties. I changed it now: “Never be daunted in private,” I said resolutely…
I rearranged my schedule, so that I marketed cozily on my way to the studio each morning and hid my more perishable tidbits in the water cooler just outside my office in the Writers Building, instead of dashing to an all-night grocery for tins of this and that at the end of a long day. I bought things that would adapt themselves artfully to an electric chafing dish … cans of shad roe (a good solitary dish, since I always feel that nobody really likes it but me), and consommé double, and such. I grew deliberately fastidious about eggs and butter: the biggest,brownest eggs were none too good, nor could any butter be too clover-fresh and sweet. I laid in a case or two of“unpretentious but delightful little wines.”
I was determined about the whole thing, which in itself is a great drawback, emotionally. But I knew no alternative.
I ate very well indeed. I liked it, too … at least more than I had liked my former can-openings, or my elaborate preparations for dining out. I treated myself fairly dispassionately as a marketable thing, at least from ten to six daily and at least in a Hollywood studio story department, and fed myself for top efficiency. I recognized the dull fact that certain foods affected me this way, others that way. I tried to apply what I knew of proteins and so forth to my own chemical pattern, and deliberately I scramble two eggs in a little sweet butter when quite often I would like to have had a glass of sherry and a hot bath and said to hell with food.
I almost never ate meat, mainly because I did not miss it and secondarily because it was inconvenient to cook it on a little grill or cut it up on a plate balanced on my knee. And it made the one-room apartment smell. I invented a great many different salads, of fresh lettuces with fresh herbs and vegetables, of marinate tinned vegetables, now and then of crab meat and suchlike. I learned a few tricks to play on canned soups, and Escoffier as well as the Chinese would be astonished at what I did with beef bouillon and a handful of water cress or a teaspoonful of soy.
I always ate slowly, from a big tray set with a nice mixture of Woolworth and Spode. I always soothed my spirits beforehand with a glass of sherry or vermouth, subscribing to the ancient truth that only a relaxed throat can make a swallow. More often than not I drank, then, a glass or two of light wine, with the hot fresh food: a big bowl of soup, with a fine pear and some Teleme Jack cheese; or two very round eggs from a misnamed “poacher,” on sour-dough toast, with browned butter poured over and a celery heart alongside to be the crisp part; or a can of bean sprouts tossed with sweet butter and some soy and lemon juice, and a big glass of milk.
Things tasted good, and it was a relief to be away from my job and from the curious, disbelieving impertinence of the people in restaurants. I still wished, in what was almost a theoretical way, that I was not cut off from the world's trenchermen by what I had written for and about them. But, and there was no cavil here, I felt firmly as I do this very minute, that snug misanthropic solitude is better than hit-or-miss congeniality. If One could not be with me,“feasting in silent sympathy,” then I was my best companion….
B is for bachelors …
… and the wonderful dinners they pull out of their cupboards, with such dining-room aplomb and kitchen chaos.
Their approach to gastronomy is basically sexual, since few of them under seventy-nine will bother to produce a good meal unless it is for a pretty woman. Few of them of any age at all will consciously ponder on the aphrodisiacal qualities of the dishes they serve forth, but subconsciously they use what tricks they have to make their little banquets, whether intimate or merely convivial, lead as subtly as possible to the hoped-for bedding-down.
Soft lights, plenty of tipples (from champagne to straight rye), and, if possible, a little music, are the time-worn props in any such entertainment, no matter on what financial level the host is operating. Some men head for the back booth at the corner pub and play the juke box, with overtones of medium-rare steak and French-fried potatoes. Others are forced to fall back on the soft-footed alcoholic ministrations of a Filipino houseboy, muted Stan Kenton on the super-Capehart, and a little supper beginning with caviar malossol on ice an ending with a soufflé au kirschwasser d'Alsace.
The bachelors I consider at this moment are at neither end of the gastronomical scale. They are the men between twenty-five and fifty who, if they have been married, are temporarily not and, therefore, triply conscious of both their heaven-sent freedom and their domestic clumsiness. They are in the middle brackets, financially if not emotionally. They have “been around,” and know the niceties or amenities or whatever they choose to call the tricks of a well-set table an a well-poured glass, and yet they have neither the tastes nor the pocketbooks to indulge in signing endless chits at Mike Romanoff's or Twenty One.
In other words, they like to give a little dinner now and then in the far-from-circumspect intimacy of their apartments … which more often than not consist of a studio-living room with either a disguised let-down bed or a tiny bedroom, a bath, and a stuffy closet called the kitchen.
I have eaten many meals prepared an served in such surroundings. I am perhaps fortunate to be able to say that I have always enjoyed them … and perhaps even more fortunate to be able to say that I did enjoy them because of my acquired knowledge of the basic rules of seduction. I assumed that I had been invited for either a direct or an indirect approach. I judged as best I could which one was being contemplated, let my host know of my own foreknowledge, and then sat back to have as much pleasure as possible.
I almost always found that when my host knew of my opinions on the situation, he was more relaxed and philosophical about its very improbable outcome and could listen to the phonograph records and savor his cautiously concocted Martini with more inner calm. And I almost always ate and drank well, finding that any man who knows that a woman will behave in her cups, whether of consommé double or of double Scotch, is resigned happily to a good dinner. In fact, that given the choice between it an a rousing tumble in the hay, he will inevitably choose the first, convinced that the latter can easily be found elsewhere.
The drinks offered to me were easy ones, dictated by my statements made early in the game. I never bothered to hint but always said plainly, in self-protection, that I liked very dry Gibsons with good ale to follow, or dry sherry with good wine. Safe but happy, that was my motto! I was given some purely beautiful liquors: really old Scotch, Swiss Dezaley light as mountain water, proud vintage Burgundies … countless bottles of champagne, all good, too, and what fine cognacs! Only once did a professional bachelor ever offer me a glass of sweet liqueur. I never saw him again, feeling that his perceptions were too dull to exhaust myself on, if in even the short time after winning my acceptance to his dinner he had not guessed my tastes that far.
The dishes I have eaten at such tables for two range from home-grown snails in home-grown butter to pompano flown in from the Gulf with slivered macadamias from Maui. I found that most bachelors like exotics, at least culinarily speaking: they would rather fuss around with a complex recipe for le hochepot de queue de boeuf than one called “stewed oxtail,” even if both come from André Simon's Concise Encyclopaedia of Gastronomy.
They are snobs, in that they prefer to keep Escoffier on the front of the shelf and hide the Settlement Cook Book tucked in behind.
Most of all, they are experts at the casual: they may quit the office early and sacrifice murderous hours of pay, but when you arrive, the apartment is only pleasantly odorous, glasses and a perfectly frosted shaker or bottle await you, and your host looks not even faintly harried or stovebound; instead his upper lip is unbedewed and his eye is flatteringly wolfish.
Tact and honest common sense forbid any woman's penetrating with mistaken kindliness into the kitchen: motherliness is unthinkable in such a situation, and romance would wither on the culinary threshold and be buried forever beneath its confusion of used pots and spoons.
Instead, the time has come, and of course in proper proportions, for ancient and always interesting blandishments. The Bachelor Spirit unfolds like a hungry sea anemone. The object of his possible affections feels cozily desired. The drink is good. He pops discreetly in and out of his gastronomical workshop where he brews his sly receipts, his digestive attacks upon the fortress of her virtue. She represses her natural curiosity, and if she is at all experienced in such wars, she knows pretty well that she will have a patterned meal which has already been indicated by his restaurant-ordering. More often than not, it will be some kind of chicken, elaborately disguised with everything from Australian pine nuts to herbs grown by the landlady's daughter.
One highly expert bachelor-cook in my immediate circle swears by a recipe for breasts of young chicken, broiled that morning or the night before, and covered with a dramatic and very lemony sauce made at the last minute over a chafing-dish flame. This combines all the tricks of seeming nonchalance, carefully casual presentation, and, above all, attention-getting.
With it he has chilled asparagus tips in his own version of vinaigrette sauce, and little hot rolls. Then for dessert he has what is also his own version of riz à l'Impératrice, which he is convinced all women love because he himself secretly dotes on it … and it can be made the day before (not too successfully).
This meal lends itself almost treacherously to the wiles of alcohol: anything from a light lager to a Moët et Chandon of great year is beautiful with it, and can be well bolstered with the preprandial drinks which any bachelor doles out with at least one ear bent toward the Shakespearian dictum that they may double desire and halve the pursuit thereof.
The most successful dinner I was ever plied with, or perhaps it would be more genteel to say served, was also thoroughly horrible.
Everything was carried out, as well as in, by a real expert, a man then married for the fifth time who had interspersed his connubial adventures with rich periods of technical celibacy. The cocktails were delicately suited to my own tastes rather than his, and I sipped a glass of Tio Pepe, properly chilly. The table, in a candlelit patio, was laid in the best sense of the word “nicely,” with silver and china and Swedish glass which I had long admired. The wine was a last bottle of Chianti, stra vecchio.
We ate thin strips of veal which had been dipped in an artful mixture of grated parmigiano and crumbs, with one of the bachelor's favorite tricks to accompany it: buttered thin noodles gratinés with extra-thin and almond-brown toasted noodles on top. There was a green salad.
The night was full of stars, and so seemed my eager host's brown eyes … and the whole thing was ghastly for two reasons: he had forgotten to take the weather into his menu-planning, so that we were faced with a rich, hot, basically heavy meal on one of the worst summer nights in local history, and I was at the queasiest possible moment of being pregnant.
Of course, the main mistake was in his trying to entertain a woman in that condition as if she were still seduceable and/or he still a bachelor: we had already been married several months.