Diary with Recipe: Patricia Storace, The Appetites of Poets
What we eat and drink is a profound part of our experience and perception, a vocabulary of wishes
Snow Buffet Party, by Thornton Utz (Saturday Evening Post cover, February 20, 1960
“Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine—good god how fine,” Keats wrote to his friend Charles Dilke in 1819. “It went down soft, pulpy, slushy, oozy—all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified Strawberry. I shall certainly breed.”
We are lucky Keats had no camera. His vivid words offer his lived experience to the reader, evidence of his capacity, rare even among poets, to remain articulate in the face of not only tragedy, but ecstasy. Witnessing Keats as he tastes gives him to us, suddenly incarnate, like seeing the words of his poems inked in his own handwriting. There he is: breathing. And looking, as an artist does, through a nectarine to see everything.
The title of David Yezzi’s new biography of the American poet Anthony Hecht, A Late Romance, evokes the great shaping experience of Hecht’s middle age: “receiving a second life” through an unexpected requited love and enduring marriage. Of course, for the poet’s substantially younger wife, the marriage was not a “late romance,” but the fulfillment of a suspended first love born when she was Anthony Hecht’s student in college.
Yezzi’s book is a biography of one poet’s mind, and above all, of his poetry. But a life is also the biography of a body—both how a person thought and lived. What we eat and drink, too, is a profound part of our experience and perception, a vocabulary of wishes and of class and community, of memories, travels, and relationships, not only a record of personal taste, but a social portrait of the era in which we live.
Hecht, as Yezzi quotes him, was reserved about his personal life: “I work at disguising the autobiographical,” he warned off one interviewer. And yet, there’s an unexpected source, one which Yezzi overlooks, through which we can catch diary-like, intense, if oblique glimpses of a poet’s life.
Helen Hecht, the poet’s late romance, was a talented cook and author of four elegant cookbooks. In another culture, with a more developed literature of food, this might have been a trove of biographical inquiry that would be less likely to be neglected. The poets Pablo Neruda and Miguel Asturias, for example, wrote an appreciation of Hungarian food, while Bernard Pivot, a quintessential French man of letters famous for his weekly television series about books, wrote a richly anecdotal personal dictionary of wine. He even playfully confessed his wish to reincarnate as a vine producing grapes for Romanée-Conti, the Burgundy wine he described as something like liquid immortality.
Helen Hecht’s Cuisine for All Seasons, most notably, is a kind of souvenir of the life the couple created together. A cookbook organized through menus works like a journal, lending itself naturally to biography, real or imaginary. Edna Lewis’s A Taste of Country Cooking, for example, is an archive of the abundant use a black community in rural Virginia made of their freedom. Lewis’s parents could not read, but their cooking was a kind of literacy: a chronicle of their agricultural expertise, botanical knowledge, and the aristocratic cooking crafted by former slaves. The journalist Helen Gurley Brown’s 1969 The Single Girl’s Cookbook is a tongue-in-cheek pilgrim’s progress from culinary inexperience to the Cordon Bleu achievements of both culinary expertise and a marriage certificate. Paul Reboux’s novelistic Food for the Rich is a both tender and cynical portrait of the French bourgeoisie of the 1930s, menus for obtaining wives, mistresses, and legacies from rich uncles. Helen Hecht’s book is a kind of conversation with her husband, a journal of their travels and their shared professional life through a mosaic of recipes. Her spoon, fork, and knife were the implements for her culinary poetry that was a complement to her husband’s verse. Her kitchen is a center of observation.
The Hecht table is a glimpse at what now seems the almost unimaginably lavish life of a Cold War poet and academic, a parenthesis when the postwar political ambitions of an affluent United States sponsored artists, musicians, and writers abroad to perform cultural diplomacy, at times with hidden CIA participation. Helen’s repertoire reflects the couple’s frequent sabbaticals and yearly summers in Italy: a residence in Asolo in what had been Robert Browning’s villa, or sunset cocktails on a terrace in Venice overlooking the Grand Canal, the martinis misted with French vermouth from the Venetian atomizer Helen carried in her purse, with a finesse that matched her painstaking poet’s. Many of Helen’s recipes are inspired by their Italian sojourns. Her variation on veal scallopini, her then less familiar blend of green and white fettucine, her Chicken Malcontenta, named for Venice’s Villa Foscari, conjure their beloved Italy into their American setting. Like many American postwar writers, artists, and publishers—Robert Silvers, Gore Vidal, Susan Mary Alsop, James Baldwin, Richard Seaver (whose publisher wife, Jeannette, was herself a brilliant cook)—Hecht’s intense and unending encounter with Europe became an indelible presence in his poetry.
Helen’s cooking also reflects the arduous formal hospitality and familiarity with the vocabulary of Western European cooking expected of an academic wife of the period. The food historian Betty Fussell, in her memoir, My Kitchen Wars, remembers her wifely obligations more bitterly, skills she practiced in part as a bulwark against her belittling professor husband’s disdain for her own writing.
Helen includes menus devised for James Merrill (salmon fillets with two sauces) and a fanciful Chinese banquet she presented in honor of Joseph Brodsky, who loved Chinese food. During Hecht’s term as Poet Laureate, Helen renovated and decorated their Washington house. It had a separate poetry library, a study dedicated to Hecht’s “correspondence and prose writing,” and “a beautifully appointed dining room” where they received visiting poets and writers, with parties and dinners served from Helen’s “airy solarium” of a kitchen, known as “The Crystal Palace.” Their guest book was filled with bread-and-butter notes from poets, like Joseph Brodsky’s quatrain: “I am a heathen / in all respects / I crave no Eden / with its effects / Since I have eaten/and slept at the Hechts.”
Hecht’s menus are perceptions. She is thinking as she is cooking about who she is feeding. Although she doesn’t give details of her own family background, there are menus and occasions that make a kind of collage portrait of her reticent husband. She gives us the poet’s life before she knew him, through recipes he learned as a young bachelor with an appetite to see the world, “when he collected exotic and unfamiliar dishes with which to dazzle his friends”: Istanbul-style artichokes, Ceylon coconut shrimp, and a complex and elegant dish of meat stuffed grape leaves with chestnuts and quince, taught by a Turkish friend during a stay on Ischia. There are fall picnics in the apple orchards of upstate New York, before the onset of the severe winters Hecht ironically commemorated in his Rochester sestina. Most touching of all is her four-course, showstopping birthday dinner for Tony, an annual event: “My husband loves to celebrate his birthday, and I love giving him parties.” She would invent a different sumptuous cake for each birthday, a walnut torte with almond paste and chocolate filling, a stately layer cake with alternating fillings of chocolate-marron mousse, and chestnut cream. Hecht’s youth seems to have been clouded by a never-resolved sense of parental ambivalence or indifference toward him, but the festivities Helen designed for him every year articulated a passionate certainty of her celebration of his life. The way a man’s wife loves him is also his biography, and in Hecht’s case, part of poetry, one of his final poems, “Aubade,” a contemplation of Helen, acknowledges.
Aside from his birthday, Hecht also loved Christmas, which was celebrated with splendor in their household: “Our very ample and well-shaped tree is all in place, lighted and decorated, the house is garlanded and full of flowers, red and white poinsettias, white roses, baby’s breath, and a fine smell of balsam.” Helen’s Christmas menu, from the Winter section of Cuisine for All Seasons, features beefsteak and kidney pie and her personal Bûche de Noël, flavored with lemon mousse. Her first course is a chestnut soup I, a chestnut addict, make a version of every year, though I make it with game stock instead of chicken broth. It’s a dish to make Christmas Eve, one less chore on Christmas Day.
Chestnut Soup
2 and ½ pounds unshelled chestnuts, 5 cups shelled
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 and ½ tablespoons minced shallot
3 tablespoons flour
4 and ¼ cups chicken stock or broth
1 cup heavy cream
¼ cup Madeira
A pinch of nutmeg
Cut an X into the flat side of each chestnut shell. Cover them with water, bring to a boil, and boil for 5 minutes. Drain, and while they are still warm, peel off the shells and skins. Put the chestnuts in a large saucepan with the butter and shallots and cook gently for a few minutes. Blend in the flour. Add the chicken stock gradually, blending with a whisk, and bring to a simmer. Cover and cook gently for 30 to 40 minutes, or until the chestnuts are soft.
Purée the chestnuts in a food processor or blender, in batches, adding the stock in a thin stream. Stir in the cream and Madeira, and a little nutmeg. Reheat before serving.
Yield: 7 and ½ to 8 cups, or 8 servings
Patricia Storace’s most recent book is the novel The Book of Heaven, in which the intimate histories of eating and storytelling are deeply entwined. She is also the author of Dinner with Persephone: Travels in Greece and a book of poems, Heredity. This is the latest in her series of diaries on cooking and reading for Book Post. Her previous recipes for the holidays included chestnut and chocolate pavé, with a consideration of Christmas ghosts, the famous turkey dressing of Civil Rights activist and author Lilian Smith, and “My Dinner with Ismael,” about a late-night journey and potato paté from Jeanne Moreau via Ismail Merchant.
Read our review of David Yezzi’s A Late Romance by Glyn Maxwell.
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Delicious…and very touching.