Food, France & "rigorous sensual intellectuality"

This afternoon, I took my Honda in for an oil change, and sat in the waiting room at the garage reading the food writer John Thorne's essay collection, "Pot on the Fire." When my car was ready, I stood at the counter making chit-chat with the Honda guy about Thanksgiving. We got to talking about food, and it turns out he's a real foodie. He talked about how he recently cooked salmon steaks for his wife and himself on cedar planks that had been soaked in water and apple juice. By the time I left the garage, I was promising to text him a link to Mark Bittman's famous recipe for no-knead bread (if you haven't tried it, you really, really have to).

Driving away, it struck me how odd that conversation was: two guys having a passionate conversation about cooking and eating. I find that more often than not, whenever I talk about food and my passion for it, I end up making defensive apologies, to take the sting out of the judgment of others. After Thanksgiving dinner last night, we were piled up in the kitchen drinking and listening to music, when one of my guests asked what I thought of a particular wine I'd served. "I was disappointed in it," I replied. "I'd been saving it for a while, and it turned out to be so flabby."

A spell of general, good-natured hilarity followed, over my wine fussiness, and I ended up accusing myself of being a fop. This is my usual pose, and that's what it is, a pose, in the same way a high school kid who likes to read might speak ungrammatically on purpose, to keep the other kids from thinking there's something wrong with him. Why am I so jumpy about this stuff?

Thorne, in an essay appreciating the great expatriate American food writer Richard Olney, who emigrated from Iowa to France, where he lived and cooked and wrote powerfully about food and wine, says that there's something in American culture that disdains thoughtfulness about hedonism. Unlike Olney, most of us Americans approach aestheticism with shame, or, in Thorne's words, "shame's usual appurtenances: diffidence, joviality, confession." Thorne goes on to quote a passage from Olney's "Simple French Food" in which he waxes lyrical about salad. The passage is too long for me to recreate here, but the curious thing about it is that despite the poetical quality of Olney's description of salad and its place in the good life, as he conceives of it, there's nothing effete about this writing. There's nothing soft and indulgent about it -- and Thorne picks up on this quality. Here's Thorne:

Am I wrong to think that many of us feel something more akin to unease than relief when we come across such prose, with its self-possessed concentration on a salad? We have been brought up to think that intelligence used in this fashion is intelligence misused, especially when it is, as here, utterly unqualified by explanation of apology. He is obsessed by neither gluttony nor health. Nor is he an aesthetic butterfly flitting among the herbs and vegetables ("knock the eel unconscious" [Thorne here refers to a tough-minded recipe in which Olney instructs the squeamish amateur cook to get on with it]). The disquieted reader's only recourse is to speculate on what secret unhappiness could drive a writer so smart, so aloof, so tough, to such a life, to such a subject.

My own conjecture is that our culture's implacable resistance to the legitimacy of such a life helps explain Olney's lifelong expatriation. France is still a country where you can sit down at their midmorning snack with the workers who have come to fix your plumbing and talk seriously about Grandmother's daube; it is also a place where you can then write about it with what can only be called rigorous sensual intellectuality.

Rigorous sensual intellectuality. In that phrase, I think Thorne has summed up why I love France, and am drawn to things French. A culture that prizes and encourages the development of rigorous sensual intellectuality is one that I cannot help loving, precisely because that is not the culture I grew up in. When I was down visiting my folks a couple of weeks ago, Dad shared with me his concern about a fellow retiree. "I'm worried about him. He has no hobbies. All he does is cook." As it happens, I know Dad's friend to be an enthusiastic and accomplished amateur cook. But it simply doesn't make sense to most people in this culture that ordinary people would approach cooking as something done for pleasure -- and certainly not something a man takes deep pleasure in. As Thorne puts it:

More than any other food writer, Richard Olney makes me want to move to France. Not to learn how the French cook and eat, but to learn how I might -- if my appetite and mind were similarly set free.

Just so. Vive le rigorous sensual intellectuality!