As a neophyte to the, as yet, unnamed discipline of food studies, I needed help deciphering the assumptions in the early cooking manuals. Julia Child, part-time Santa Barbara resident at the time, came to the rescue. Indeed, she proved to be indispensable at the very outset of my project because she had the right connections. She introduced me to the Culinary Historians of Boston, whose wisdom substantially broadened my perspective on foodways in early modern Europe. With a passion for the social history of food, these historians often draw on the rich resources of the Schlesinger Library of the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University for scholarly pursuits into nutrition. The most important member for me at that point was Barbara Wheaton whose 1983 tome, Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789, became the bible for research into food in France.

Julia Child
FROM THE FILES
OF NOEL RILEY FITCH

I got to know Julia especially well for the last ten years of her life when she became a full-time resident in Santa Barbara. During that time she taught me more about the diplomacy of tasting than about the preparation of meals — at which I remain an amateur in both senses of the term. Whenever we went to lunch or supper, she would always reserve her criticisms — “the beets were soggy” — for the ride home. Most of all, it was her enthusiastic way of greeting people on the phone that I miss about her. “RON! How are you?” made me feel that I was the only person in the world that counted for her.

But the truth is that she had many friends, and they all admired the way she could remember a tale about dining with friends that became the heart of her memoirs. She connected food and life in her writings as she did every day of her existence. For her all guests were, as the French have it, compagnons or copains, those who break bread together.

…I sometimes wander down to the old streets, walking beside those ancient tenements, and I can smell the rugelach. I can smell the pierogis. And I’m a boy again, heading to see grandma.

Since most writing about food is, like Julia’s, upbeat and imaginative, the decade of the 1980s was inspirational for me, especially as I followed the excited explosion of cooking manuals that began back in the seventeenth century with Le Cuisinier françois. Perhaps the prime modern example of the rapport between style and sauce occurs in the writings of M.F.K. Fisher. Never satisfied with practice alone, Fisher suffused it with theory. The influence of Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du goût in particular haunts her work. It is no wonder, then, that she has given us a remarkable translation, The Physiology of Taste (1949), that earned high praise as being the King James version of the 1848 text. I am surely not the only person who thought that she deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature for her finely nuanced stories of love of food as it was revealed through love of place and of people.

My personal contribution to this literary genre was my book, Tarte à la crème: Comedy and Gastronomy in Molière’s Theater, also published in Italian. This groundbreaking work reoriented my career and offered the scholarly world a new perspective on matters of taste in the French Classical Age. I demonstrated that one of the principal criteria of distinction in a very class-conscious age resided in the ability to conceive and express judgments about refined acts of ingestion. My conversion to what I call gastrocriticism (a potentially explosive approach, to be sure) has paid multiple dividends, for I am often called upon to contribute to colloquia in a variety of countries as the appointed “gastronaught,” speaking to the lexicon of food and drink that enriches most literary texts from Homer to Hemingway and beyond.

I also eat better.

And yet…

On my rare trips back to New York, I sometimes wander down to the old streets, walking beside those ancient tenements, and I can smell the rugelach. I can smell the pierogis. And I’m a boy again, heading to see grandma. To smell the borscht. To find the raisins. On a morning when I do not yet know that ahead of me lies France.