As Wheaton and I talked into the afternoon, surrounded by mute rows of cookbooks and studies in culinary history, I found myself wondering how food at this moment looks to a person so deeply rooted in its history. “The status available to people who cook,” Wheaton said, “has helped recruit very creative people. Something that’s been good for American cooking is that it’s been possible for women who love to cook at home to move into paid work as cooks. But something disastrous is happening in France. It’s very unpleasant for women to work in restaurant kitchens there because of the high level of sexual harassment. I think the result of this has been that the home-cooking tradition, the cuisine bourgeoise tradition, is drying up and blowing away.”
History is always an accounting of losses and gains, and while we seem these days to live in a miraculous era for food and cooking, there are subtleties in the historical balance sheet that are easily overlooked. Something was lost, Wheaton argues, when standardized products and standardized measurements began to appear in the United States after the Civil War—the result of railroads, big midwestern flour mills, and the shift from hearth cooking to cast-iron ranges.
At Hamersley’s, over cassoulet, Wheaton talked about the fact that the diversity of high-quality, artisanal foodstuffs available now—an almost unmitigated good—can also be seen in a different light, one that has everything to do with the subtlety of the senses. “I think,” she said, “that there’s another kind of creativity that comes from having a limited number of sources and knowing them extremely well. When we eat 500 different things instead of 100 different things, maybe we only know each one a fifth as well.”
None of this is to advocate a return to the past. But it’s a reminder that cooking is an exercise of the senses and that the best cooking is a matter of touch and taste, not precise measurements and inflexible recipes. “I think even nowadays,” Wheaton remarks, “a lot of people are drawn to cooking because they don’t like the written word.” That is an essential caution for a culinary historian, a recognition that the practice of cooking in real kitchens, in real life, is not always reflected in what gets written about cooking.
That caution came to mind not only in Wheaton’s study—devoted as it is to the literature of cooking—but also at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library, in Cambridge, where I met her the following afternoon. When she began writing Savoring the Past, in the early 1960s, she says, “I didn’t know anybody who was interested. Julia Child, God bless her, was always supportive.” But by the time Savoring the Past appeared, in 1983, culinary history had begun to emerge as a distinct and energetic discipline. Now, Wheaton continues, after drawing in an unusually large breath, “I am the honorary curator of the Culinary Collection at the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.”
This is a far cry from the days when Wheaton was forced to borrow rare cookbooks from the few sophisticated chefs who owned them. The Schlesinger Library is now one of a handful of American libraries to hold major collections of cookbooks—more than 15,000 in the Schlesinger Library alone. It began as a small group of books, shelved, as Wheaton says, “between Philately and Premature Burial” in Harvard’s Widener Library. Since then, the Culinary Collection has received major donations, including books gathered by Arthur Schlesinger for his 1946 work Learning How to Behave: A Historical Study of American Etiquette and from Julia Child’s library. Wheaton says, “We have a very rich collection, which has resulted in some oddities, including two pamphlets on how to cook your guinea pig.”
In a way, it seems strange to see such an enormous collection of cookbooks so far from a kitchen. But even at Wheaton’s Concord home there is a division between her working library in the study and her working library—vastly smaller, though perhaps less thoroughly thumbed—in the kitchen, on the far side of the house. That division reflects the difference between the study of cooking as a branch of social history and the study of cooking as a means of putting good food on the table.
Between the order of her large, immaculate kitchen and the apparent disarray of her book-crowded study, there is the balance of a well-lived life, rich in the pleasures of the mind and the senses. Wheaton cooks and travels, and drives to the Schlesinger Library at least once a week. Her Radcliffe workshop, “Reading Cookbooks as Social History,” has been called “boot camp for culinary historians.” Cooking, she says, “is a cultural artifact. It bears the mark of the time and the place that produces it.” The same can be said for Wheaton’s career. It began with an instinct for research and a love of feeding her family. It has turned, over the years, into an enterprise of great breadth and subtlety, a reminder of how deep the roots of the kitchen’s simple pleasures really are.
Pinterest
