Between 1933 and 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt served revenge, cold or otherwise, up to three times a day to her philandering husband Franklin, a feat performed courtesy of her housekeeper, Henrietta Nesbitt, who combined a quite stunning lack of talent when it came to the preparation of food with a self-confidence so varnished that when her stint in the White House finally came to an end, she proudly donated her papers, menus and all, to the Library of Congress (Eleanor, who’d hired her personally, would never give in to demands that she be fired). What kind of dishes appear on these menus, exactly? Tempting as it is to devote this review entirely to her ghastly recipes, I’ll simply note here that she once presented as a starter sticks of pineapple rolled in crushed peppermint candy.
Eleanor’s revenge sounds like something out of Roald Dahl – picture Mrs Twit, serving Mr Twit a plateful of wormy spaghetti – until you remember that when she was in situ she, too, had to eat these abominations. How, you wonder, did she get through the days? Did she struggle to swallow her lunchtime helping of jellied bouillon salad, or did her glee help to push it down? Historians have long depicted the ascetic Roosevelt as a woman who was completely indifferent to food. But the American journalist Laura Shapiro, who describes Mrs Nesbitt’s rank incompetence in her new book, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories, has other ideas. Away from the White House, she insists, it was a different story. On a trip to Beirut in 1952, the former first lady came over all swoony at the lamb she was given. In Paris, she even had a favourite restaurant, Les Porquerolles, on the Left Bank.
Somehow, though, this doesn’t convince. A woman who truly loved to eat would not, you feel, have been able to endure so many years of shrimp wiggle (don’t ask), stuffed eggs and watery prunes. And herein lies the major problem with Shapiro’s book. Of the six women included in it, Eleanor Roosevelt, Eva Braun and Helen Gurley Brown had little or no real interest in food, not to mention a complete lack of kitchen skills; a fourth, Rosa Lewis, the cockney caterer whose elaborate menus were so loved by Edward VII, was interested chiefly because it was by cooking that she made her living. Which leaves us, in the way of real, intimate eating, only with Dorothy Wordsworth and Barbara Pym, writers whose ways with a skillet are, even by Shapiro’s telling, surely the least interesting things about them. What links the six? The only truthful answer to this question is: absolutely nothing.
To be fair, I found Gurley Brown’s story unexpectedly resonant. The editor of Cosmopolitan was an orthorexic before the fact, her early interest in “healthy” foods having developed into a diet so restricted, it’s a wonder she ever managed to get out of bed. Like our own clean eaters, she was never happier than when boasting of her “feasts”, bacchanals that involved a few unsalted almonds and – so 21st century, this – avocados stuffed with orange ice. Elsewhere, though, I was struck by how tired Shapiro’s material seemed. Perhaps there are American readers who do not know of Dorothy Wordsworth’s intense relationship with the poet brother for whom she liked to cook chops; it may be, too, that they aren’t aware that it was Philip Larkin who helped to get Barbara Pym’s novels, and their satirical depictions of vicarage teas, back into print after she was dropped by her publisher. But surely most British readers are familiar with these narratives by now.
Less well known (though not to those who remember The Duchess of Duke Street, the BBC series she inspired) is Rosa Lewis, who began her working life as a scullery maid and ended up the proprietor of the Cavendish hotel in Jermyn Street. Like Roosevelt, Lewis weaponised food, using it for her own ends. Given that there was nothing she liked more than a title, and very little that Edwardian toffs liked more than a 25-course dinner, her career was well chosen; the king himself was fond of one of her specialities, a white truffle boiled in champagne or Madeira and served whole, wrapped in a napkin. But despite the aphorism, Shapiro claims as her book’s starting point – “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are,” wrote Brillat-Savarin – Lewis remains a cipher. Her determination not to be palmed off with inferior woodcock speaks loudly of her business sense and her social aspirations. But I do not think it reveals the woman beneath.
Eva Braun, too, is here more of an absence than a presence. It may well be true that the first words she uttered to Hitler were “guten appetit” (at the insistence of the photographer for whom she was then working, she had just served his not-yet-fully-vegetarian client some Bavarian sausage); and yes, we know that in the Third Reich’s desperate last days, as the Red Army circled Berlin, she asked the bunker staff for champagne and sweets for Albert Speer, visiting to say his goodbyes. The problem is, though, that Braun was little more than an appendage, and a pretty decorative one at that. No wonder, then, that this essay is far more concerned with the palates of Hitler and those around him than with her own meagre diet. As Shapiro notes, the image-obsessed Braun, who changed her clothes several times a day, was careful to keep her gaze always on the surface of things. Her waist needed to be tiny, and as a result, so did her appetite.
• What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories by Laura Shapiro is published by 4th Estate (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
