What She Ate

In this vastly entertaining book, Shapiro uncovers the 'food stories' of six women: from Dorothy Wordsworth who cooked for her brother as if she were his wife, to Helen Gurley Brown who might gush about food but who never ate much more than protein powder and sugar-free jelly (yeurch!)

Shapiro has done her research rustling around in the archives but this is determinedly 'popular' culinary history - she disses academic researchers at the start, but it's noticeable that there's no theoretical scaffolding to her work - this is just a collection of stories: amusing, sad, illuminating, for sure, but it would have been nice to have seen some analysis added to the wealth of material collected here.

That said, Shapiro tells her mini-biographies with a lively fluency, whether we're with Eva Braun eating with Hitler, or Eleanor Roosevelt superintending menus in the White House. Not all the women are necessarily interesting: I admit to skimming the section on the Edwardian caterer, Rosa Lewis; and the novelist Barbara Pym who wrote about 'nice' food in 1970s England.

This is a quick read as about 25-30% is notes: interesting, undoubtedly, and enjoyably entertaining but a bit more intellectual depth would have been helpful.

“If I eat I feel guilty. And I’d rather feel hungry.”

The above is a quote from one of the six women featured in this book – Helen Gurley Brown, editor of “Cosmopolitan,” for over thirty years. It helps highlight the difficult, complicated relationship, that so many women have with food. Author, Laura Shapiro, takes six women and gives us a potted biography of each, with a particular slant towards their attitudes, and relationship, to eating.

Those featured are Dorothy Wordsworth, Rosa Lewis, Eleanor Roosevelt, Eva Braun, Barbara Pym and Helen Gurley Brown. There are those who enjoy a fairly uncomplicated love of comfort food – such as Barbara Pym. Those who equate cooking, or providing over meals, as a way of pleasing the men in their life, such as Dorothy Wordsworth and Eva Braun. Rosa Lewis, who apparently inspired, “The Duchess of Duke Street,” used her skills as a cook to rise from a scullery maid (born in the ‘village’ of Leyton – well, I expect it was a village at the time!) to the owner of the Cavendish Hotel and a famous chef, who prepared food for King Edward VII, among other famous clients.

The two women whose food stories were, to me, the most interesting were Eleanor Roosevelt and Helen Gurley Brown. Eleanor Roosevelt apparently employed the ‘most reviled cook in Presidential history,’ in Mrs Nesbitt; who continually provided meals that her husband found repugnant. Helen Gurley Brown, as I mentioned in the beginning of this review, spent her life eternally dieting measured success in her marriage to David, gloating that he was a “motion picture producer, forty-four, brains, charming and sexy. And I got him!”

This is very much a book of social history and biography and there is little analysis about why these women acted the way they did, or had such troubled, or happy, relationships with food. That aside, it is an enjoyable read, which may well lead you on to read full biographies of the women included. I have read biographies about some of them, such as Eva Braun, which is why, perhaps, this work added little that was new to me. However, it does look at such an important part of all our lives – eating and preparing food – and is a fascinating read. I received a copy of the book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.