Steal the Menu (21 page)

Although the first series of symposia stuck to their technical subject—investigating the work of eminent food scientists of the past; Count Rumford, the inventor of the modern oven; and Justus von Liebig, the father of the bouillon cube—these were not conventional academic sessions. Word spread quickly. People who had theretofore pursued their interest in food history on their own now found a meeting place and flocked to it: restaurateurs, cooking teachers, food-oriented antiquarian booksellers, gastronomes—among them American expats and Dutch intellectuals.

The unexpected demand for places, and for continuing the program beyond Davidson’s fellowship year, persuaded Zeldin and Davidson to create an annual symposium at St. Antony’s that could welcome a sizable crowd.

The first of these meetings took place in 1981. Roughly 150 people attended, among them J. J. Flandrin, the doyen of French food historians; Rudolf Grewe, the editor of the first European
cookbook, the fourteenth-century Catalan treatise
I Sent Sovi;
the food editor of the
London Observer
, Paul Levy; the Arabist and
Rolling Stone
writer Charles Perry; two American cookbook authors who had married rich and titled Englishmen;
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a cookbook dealer; a cookbook shoplifter; experts on the cuisines of Sumatra, the Balkans, precolonial New Zealand; a colorful assortment of serious foodies;
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and me.

I had persuaded Alan Ternes that I should cover the first international conference ever held in my “field.” He agreed and kept sending me right through the end of my column, fourteen years later. That first year, right away in the registration line, I knew I was among real colleagues for the first time. Up until then I had been working in a vacuum. Here was a room full of people who’d been doing the same thing in isolation from one another. Now we were a community, all in one place, chattering away. And the name for what we were chattering about came to be “food history.”

The topic of that intellectual love feast was National and Regional Styles of Cooking. And the papers were appropriately all over the map. Several were in French, among them Marie-Claude Mahias’s analysis of Jain meals in northern India. But the papers weren’t, and never have been, the only purpose of the Symposium, which is not a conventional academic meeting.

In the Symposium’s early years, there were no academic programs
in food history or food studies. The whole idea of food history was a renegade notion, even a laughable notion in the hidebound world of university history departments. The professional scholars in attendance at that first symposium had not made their careers with their articles on food (with the exception of a few mainstream historians who had published or edited texts that happened to touch on food). The majority of the symposiasts were amateurs, serious intellectuals but amateurs nonetheless. In those days, no symposiast expected to advance an academic career with a paper she had submitted to this fledgling organization.

The structure of the meeting was deliberately informal. Papers were not read in their entirety—not read, in fact, at all but briefly summarized by their authors, usually in a panel with authors of essays with related subjects.

Plenary sessions in 1981 were even less structured. Basically, we sat in the dining room of St. Antony’s and tried out our ideas on one another. It reminded me of a freshman-year bull session, but these were adults who knew things. Maria Johnson knew everything about the intricacies of Balkan regional foods, as an emigrant fluent in all the many languages spoken in this literally Balkanized former Ottoman territory. Sarah Kelly, a San Franciscan transplanted to German-speaking Europe, had made an encyclopedic study of baking in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and shared it with us, analytically.

In the background, Alan Davidson and Theodore Zeldin hovered benignly. Neither of them ever gave a paper or joined in the discussions much. They were conducting a social experiment as well as a mildly subversive scholarly meeting. The Symposium had a deliberately unhierarchical, Summerhillian, sixtyish air of freedom and classlessness. Davidson and Zeldin were just Alan and Theodore. The Saturday lunch was a potluck affair, for which local symposiasts brought food from home and shared it in the
most cosmopolitan display of exotic dishes anyone has ever seen under one roof. This lasted for years, until U.K. regulations about food served in public places snuffed it out. At the end of each year’s weekend, there was a plenary session in which suggestions from the floor for the next Symposium were discussed and put to a vote. And if Theodore did somehow manage to guide the ultimate choice of topic in a direction he favored, the process was still public and nominally democratic.

I liked this libertarian approach to the intellectual study of sensuality. It suited my situation as an intellectual operating outside academia. The Symposium, as deliberately uninstitutional as an institution could be, seemed almost tailor-made for me. It did not offer me a career path, as an academic department would have. It was more like a club, in which all the members shared my previously idiosyncratic passions and pursuits.

But it lasted for only one weekend, once a year. And during the next twenty years, I was only a part-timer in the food world. For those two decades, I worked for Dow Jones & Co. Before I joined its
Wall Street Journal
, in my first real job since I’d left the
Times
in 1973, I edited a dreadful Dow Jones magazine called
Book Digest
. It was a magazine I’d never even heard of, and my connection with it began, fittingly, with a phone call from a man I’d never heard of either.

Francis X. Dealy, Jr., a dramatically good-looking former ad salesman, ran the business side of
Book Digest
, which did its tacky best to copy the
Reader’s Digest
formula in the world of books. Basically, it ran excerpts of best sellers. I’m not sure I quite understood this, even after “Bud” Dealy tried to explain it to me. But I needed a job. I made an impressive enough living for a freelance journalist and writer of books, but that wasn’t saying much. And I had two children in an expensive private school in New York City. So I accepted Bud’s invitation to interview for the top editor’s job.

I was in the competition because Peter Kann, the anointed successor to Warren Phillips as the Dow Jones chairman, had known me at the
Harvard Crimson
in the early 1960s and was a fan of mine. Phillips and Kann were about to hire a woman from the staff of
Ms
. magazine, Ruth Sullivan, to run
Book Digest
. In a final interview, as Ruth told me years later, they asked her if she’d had any experience editing men. Why, yes, she replied, she had edited Ray Sokolov.

This was true. She had edited a short piece I’d written for
Ms
. on the French Jewish philosopher Simone Weil.

Kann perked up at the mention of my name. He told Bud Dealy to find me. Bud succeeded, and I was hired.

Life as an executive at a major media corporation was beautiful. My office, on a high floor of a classy building at Fifty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue, overlooked Bergdorf’s and offered an unobstructed view above Central Park all the way to the Metropolitan Museum. I had been able to handpick an intelligent and amenable staff. The work was incredibly simple.

Each month, I would scan the best-seller list and buy the rights to reprint a short excerpt from a mix of those and other current books. Technically, such rights are known as second serial rights. First serial rights give a magazine (a serial publication) the right to publish material from a book before it is published. The
New Yorker
buys first serial rights and pays plenty for them. Second serial rights allow a magazine to publish material from a book after it is published. This is not a lively marketplace, but we managed. The problem was to sell subscriptions to readers and to sell ads. Our readers tended to be women over fifty living in retirement communities, a highly undesirable demographic.

This was dispiriting, but the end came soon. By the beginning of the summer of 1982, Dow Jones had shut down the magazine and fired the entire staff, except me.

Peter Kann said to me cheerfully, “You’ve wrecked our magazine. Come downtown and see what you can do to our newspaper.” There ensued a kind of nirvana.

After some initial weeks with the
Wall Street Journal
news department, during which I wrote front-page features on the kiwi and tofu,
^g
I moved upstairs to the neoconservative editorial page, where I’d been an occasional contributor of book reviews for years. Bob Bartley needed somebody to create a daily arts page, and he picked me.

I foresaw, correctly, that it would be easy and fun to fill a single page of the
Journal
every day by soliciting three to four pieces, mostly from freelances. New York was teeming with talented, lively cultural writers. Good ones needed only light editing. The less good ones I could edit without strain. In fact, I found it positively rejuvenating to rewrite a swatch of lame copy. It took me back to my twenties at
Newsweek
, when I often was assigned to take a file from a bureau reporter and, as we used to say, run it through my typewriter.

So life was a dream and stayed that way for me for nineteen years. All that time I worked at the same job, for the same intelligent boss. I disagreed with his political and economic views, but I could easily ignore his loony passion for supply-side economics, and he just as easily—actually, more easily—paid no attention to my views on classical music.

Also, the job came with an expense account. Like every other editor in town, I needed to meet with writers, and that is how I managed to stay current with the New York restaurant scene during
the 1980s and 1990s. It was much better than being a restaurant critic. I ate only at good places, and I didn’t have to write reviews. For most of this period, I continued to think about food for my
Natural History
column, and I produced four cookbooks, while I watched the food trends of the 1970s explode into the glamour scene of star chefs and the TV food hysteria of today.