How to Cook a Book

The Feast

I’ve just finished Lucy Steeds’ The Artist, and I am bereft. It’s not because the bookshelf in my Airbnb in Marseillan is packed with Lee Childs and Robert Harris, but because it’s rare to find a book that has me looking at the world through the lens of a painter’s love of food.

The Artist is Lucy Steeds’ Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize Award-winning novel set in the South of France, where our annual road trip has brought us to in search of a base to, well, we’re still not quite sure, but let’s settle on spend more time.

But the oppressive heat and dark, dank farmhouse where the hero and heroine are held in a strangely consensual captivity by the great 1920s artist, Eduoard Tartuffe, Master of Light and fictional ex best friend of Paul Cezanne, is an antithesis to the vast blue skies and seas of our Mediterranean seaside town.

Into this sweaty, tense hideaway rides an American gang of decadent art buyers, bored of Paris and looking for some entertainment chez le Grand Tartuffe. And to everyone’s surprise, the grumpy recluse invites them in… as models for what would become his next masterpiece, The Feast.

The use of food in this novel reminds me of the origins of Cooking the Books. I’m a voracious reader, and I initially wanted to use the pod to explore the use of food in fiction and memoir. Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Mercies, Benjamin Myers’ The Offing, Joanne Harris’ The Strawberry Thief were just some of the early interviews on CTB that fed my deep love of food as metaphor.

Here’s a little soupçon of Ben Myers and me chatting about how he uses food to paint his characters. He reads one of his food moments of a young man’s supper with a reclusive much older woman:

BM She then gently, but deftly, pulled back the smaller jaw of the pincer until it broke away, revealing a cuticle shaped crescent of pure white flesh. She dipped this twice in the garlic butter and then tipped it to her mouth, pulling the meat from the shell. Then she folded a piece of bread into her mouth after it, chased it with a gulp of wine and took the nut cracker back from me and used it to crack the main claw, carefully picking off two or three tiny flecks of the broken shell. A hunk of flesh fell onto the plate. She skewered some garlic leaves, then split the claw meat with the edge of her fork, and twice-dipped the whole lot into the butter again, and then ate it, chewing noisily and making a sound of satisfaction.

GS It's a wonderful sort of visceral pleasure of food, and it's not greedy. It's greedily eating, and it's what absolutely captivates him. He's never seen a woman behave like this. It's a sort of an androgynous act, isn't it? She just doesn't play by the rules. And he's never seen anything like this before, and he's utterly entranced by it. So the food and the moment and this extraordinary woman kind of are changing his life in that moment.

BM: Yeah, and I've used food as almost like a blackboard on which she is able to, kind of educate Robert. She uses it almost as a, not as a tool, but as a way into him, because he has come from a very austere world in the Northeast of England, from a mining community where food will be bought from, you know, the local corner shop or the local butchers or whatever. But ingredients were basic, particularly after the war, and one thing I wanted to do was show that Dulcie had access to all these foodstuffs and ingredients that the average person wouldn't be able to get, which kind of was another way of showing her connections to a kind of a black market of food. But also, food is a universal language, really, isn't it? It's beyond language. It's how we commune and communicate. Food really is the great unifier.

And how food creates atmosphere! Here’s Kiran Millwood-Hargrave reading a snippet from The Mercies, her story of love, evil, and obsession based on the 1621 witch trials on Cooking the Books.

‘What does she think of you living up here?’ He is now mashing the fish flat on a slice of bread with the back of his fork. It pulps and glints. Ursa feels nauseous. ‘She's dead’, interjects Absalom, but it isn't done to save her, only to get a foot in the conversation. ‘I am sorry’, says Kristen, moving her hand from Ursa and taking up the plate. ‘Herring?’ Ursa takes some the jelly, sliding through the tines of her fork and soaking the rye bread. They chew.'

Lucy Steeds had me at tarte aux noisettes.

The Great Tartuffe was never going to let a bunch of entitled Americans, however rich, spoil his feast. He was already dreaming up a painting of gluttony and drunken excess, bruised fruits and discarded claws. The deliciously nutty caramelised but ultimately brown tarte was never going to make it to the easel.

‘We want the feast to feel alive’ says Ettie (heroine, love interest) as they pluck textures and shapes from the shaded stalls. They buy fist-sized artichokes, purple and spiky like creatures pulled from the sea. Bumpy lemons and waxy globes of fennel. Dusty baguettes from the baker and translucent flickers of ham from the butcher.

This is a painting that she’s cooking up for her uncle, the grand artist. She and Joseph (hero, love interest) prepare the feast ahead of the American’s arrival.

The kitchen fills with intertwining aromas; scorched flesh and citrus zest. The salty grime of ocean creatures. The bitter tang of herbs. And all the while, Joseph is palpably aware of Ettie’s closeness... Her lips smudge against the skin of an apricot as she takes a bite…

Sigh.

The Americans arrive, loud, obnoxious and entitled. They eat. Tartuffe sketches.

Saffron-cuffed hands plunge into bundles of grapes. Signet-ringed fingers scoop oyster shells. Tobacco-stained fingertips tear at artichokes and pull at fish spines. Morgan plucks a radish and throws it in the air before catching it in his mouth.

No spoilers here; The Artist is a book to devour.

But it makes me think of how many food writers I know who are either writing novels or plotting them - Ravinder Bhogal, Gurd Loyal, Gill Meller for starters. I wonder, as British food writing really settles into itself, how it will develop. And as the British become more food literate, where fiction and food will meet next. It’s a delicious thought.

Lucy told me how she lived in France while she was researching the book, and began to look at the market produce as she would gaze at art in a gallery. “I was really intrigued by the relationship between food and painting” she wrote to me. “Having looked at so many still life paintings while writing The Artist, I realised that often the food in paintings was chosen for its visual qualities rather than its taste. A pheasant surrounded by lemons. Fish with uncracked walnuts. Raw globe artichokes and lobsters. So often food in art is selected for its shape or its colour, rather than its realistic depiction of a meal. I wanted to take this idea and reverse engineer it into the characters' daily lives. They are only allowed to eat food that looks good in a painting, which tells you: here is a man who is so dedicated to his art he will only eat food if it can also be painted.”

MFK Fisher would be so proud.