On a bitterly cold winter night in Boston—so cold that snow seems to fall from a cloud of warm breath—I step from a cab onto the sidewalk outside Hamersley’s Bistro, on the corner of Tremont and Clarendon. It’s the kind of night when the lights look inviting in every bowfront window, but none are as inviting as the warm glow of dinner that Hamersley’s casts onto the salted walk outside.
Inside, I take my seat at a table for five and admire the way the preliminaries of a restaurant meal—shuffling menus, listening to additions, choosing wine—create short chapters of conversation, making strangers feel somehow less strange to each other by the time the eating has actually begun. For seated next to me is a stranger named Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, the author of Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789, a landmark in the still-young discipline of culinary history. She admits feeling foolish knowing I’ve come to interview her. But discomfort doesn’t last long with her. We turn to the menus, and after a moment or two I hear her say, almost to herself, “Ahhh, I brake for cassoulet.”
And that, perhaps, is the first thing to know about Barbara Wheaton: Through her conversation there runs a subrosa wickedness, an irony that would be quite deadly if it weren’t softened by something jovial, as well as something scholarly, in the tone of her voice. She is “just saturated with character,” as she herself says of La Maison de Campagne, a 19th-century manual of country living by Aglaé Adanson, which she is translating and annotating.
It is still easy to see in 68-year-old Wheaton the Mount Holyoke student she once was or the young graduate student who came to Harvard intending to study art history. As with many scholars, there’s a directness in her eyes that may be a sign of inner focus, or inner distraction. Her diction and accent suggest a society upbringing, but, she admits, “I was a dud in society. I was always peculiar.” And so, like many peculiar people, she has made a career of her own peculiarity.
Instead of finishing her Ph.D., Wheaton, as she tells it, “dropped out, got married, had babies.” With her husband, Robert, and ten-month-old first child she moved to the Netherlands and began cooking from a book called La Bonne Cuisine de Mme. E. Saint-Ange, which first appeared in 1927, a crowning example of cuisine bourgeoise, the superb domestic cooking that has been a staple of French life since the 18th century.
“I like to work with my hands,” Wheaton told me, “and if you have small children and you’re sitting, they will swarm all over you. But if you’re standing up doing something, it’s all right.” The difference between scholars and ordinary people—one difference at least—is that scholars take wondering as a course of action. “I began to wonder,” Wheaton explained, “why cooking varied so much over the face of western Europe and why it changed so much over time. When did people start doing this or that? But one thing leads to another. I became like Stephen Leacock’s hero, who jumped onto his horse and rode madly off in all directions.”
Just what Wheaton means is not quite apparent until the next afternoon, when I visit her in her study in Concord, Massachusetts. It’s a pleasurable sight, familiar to anyone who has been overcome by a lifelong, book-laden passion. On one wall hangs a portrait of her grandfather, who, she says, “taught me how to look things up in books.” Her computer database of cookbooks is a paragon of order: searchable by ingredients, by recipes, by the analogies used to describe the size of lumps of dough or the consistency of batters, and by a dozen other parameters as well.
But then, while hunting up a copy of Mme. Saint-Ange from the stacks of books leaning against the rows of bookcases, Wheaton cries, “We’re going to have another avalanche!” and it becomes clear that avalanches are an everyday hazard in this part of the house. Another book-slide nearly begins as she takes down an early copy of Nicolas de Bonnefons’s Les Délices de la Campagne, which was first published in 1654.
“Bonnefons” is one of Wheaton’s answers when I ask her who her favorite food writers are. (The others on her shortlist are Julia Child, Jane Grigson, and Mme. Saint-Ange.) In a way, Bonnefons defines the transition from medieval and Renaissance French cooking—increasingly absorbed in complexity and spectacle—to a simpler way of thinking about food, which leads to the first edition of La Cuisinière Bourgeoise by François Menon in 1746, to Mme. Saint-Ange in 1927, and on to Julia Child’s first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961. While cooking at the French court had headed off into a late-17th-century realm of spectacular voluptuary excess, Bonnefons provided an education in rural economy and the discreet pleasures of the senses. He is really the first figure in French cooking to assert the primacy of simplicity, taste, and variety. Describing Bonnefons’s recipe for baked apples—little more than cooking cored apples on the hearth with sweet butter rolled in powdered sugar—Wheaton writes, “A medieval recipe would have had more ingredients, and the flavor of the apple would have mattered less.” She also notes that Bonnefons lists 77 kinds of pears ripening in August and September.
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.