Dorothy Wordsworth’s black pudding, Eleanor Roosevelt and clams, Barbara Pym’s tinned spaghetti ... What does the food these women devoured – or detested – tell us about their lives?
“Tell me what you eat,” wrote the philosopher-gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, “and I shall tell you what you are.” It’s one of the most famous aphorisms in the literature of food, and I thought about it many times as I was probing the lives of the six women in my book What She Ate. Food was my entry point into their worlds, so naturally I wanted to know what they ate, but I wanted to know everything else, too. Tell me what you eat, I longed to say to each woman, and then tell me whether you like to eat alone, and if you really taste the flavours of food or ignore them, or forget all about them a moment later. Tell me what hunger feels like to you, and if you’ve ever experienced it without knowing when you’re going to eat next. Tell me where you buy food, and how you choose it, and whether you spend too much.
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If she glimpsed a well-dressed woman in a cafe pouring ketchup over fish and chips, Pym came away with a character
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