Papa's "Good Eats" Café:

Ernest Hemingway as a Food Writer by Kelley Dupuis

One of the first things you realize when you read Hemingway, and this was in fact one of the boldest brushstrokes in the portrait of himself which he presented to the world, is that the man loved to eat and drink. His Rabelaisian appetite for life included, (and quite logically so) a concomitant appetite for the pleasures of the table (not to mention the bar.)

In fact, it has occurred to me more than once that had Hemingway not taken up the writing of fiction as his life's work, he might have had a brilliant career as a restaurant critic for the slicker magazines, a sort of foul-mouthed Duncan Hines.

I've mentioned in other places the fact that the self-educated Hemingway liked to boast about the breadth of his reading and his knowledge of books; one of Hemingway's best-known affectations was in fact his claim to have "the inside dope" on just about everything, and that went for food and wine as well as books, baseball, boxing, battles, bullfighters and trout-fishing streams.

Yes, Hemingway loved to eat and drink. And of all the claims he made about himself which, over the years, various people have questioned, none succumbs to the pin-prick of evidence more quickly than his claim, late in life, that he and his first wife were going romantically hungry in Paris during the 1920s. True, they were living simply and economizing so that they could afford to go on ski trips and such, but starving? I don't want to be catty about this, but take a look at a photograph of Hemingway taken on his wedding day in 1921, and then glance at a photo of him taken in 1924 in the courtyard of 113 rue Notre Dame des Champs in Paris, where he and his wife Hadley were living at the time. After less than three years in Paris, the slender bridegroom of 1921 is already getting a bit jowly, and that suit he's wearing looks tight. If "hunger was good discipline," as he boasted in his late-life memoir A Moveable Feast, Hemingway was getting his discipline somewhere else. I won't stoop so low as to point out the irony in the book's title. (In fairness to Hemingway, I've been to Paris, and you can't not eat there. Those travel brochures which tout Paris as the world capital of good food are only stating an objective fact: it is that.)

I confess that I once ate something pretty disgusting, if not exactly on Hemingway's recommendation, then at least because he made it sound so good. No, it wasn't a thousand-legger, but in the terms that any gourmet would understand, it might as well have been.

I was 18 and had already been under Hemingway's spell for a couple of years. One fine Saturday afternoon I was re-reading one of my favorites among his early stories, Big Two Hearted River, Part I. I read through the following passage. (See if this doesn't make you hungry too, even though we're clearly not talking here about anything you'd be served at Michaud's in Paris):

Nick was hungry. He did not believe he had ever been hungrier. He opened and emptied a can of pork and beans and a can of spaghetti into the frying pan. "I've got a right to eat this kind of stuff, if I'm willing to carry it," Nick said. His voice sounded strange in the darkening woods. He did not speak again.

Then a little further on:

The beans and spaghetti warmed. Nick stirred them and mixed them together. They began to bubble, making little bubbles that rose with difficulty to the surface. There was a good smell. Nick got out a bottle of tomato catchup and cut four slices of bread. The little bubbles were coming faster now. Nick sat down beside the fire and lifted the frying pan off. He poured about half the contents out into the tin plate. It spread slowly on the plate. Nick knew it was too hot. He poured on some tomato catchup…He ate the whole plateful before he remembered the bread. Nick finished the second plateful with the bread, mopping the plate shiny…While he waited for the coffee to boil, he opened a can of apricots. He liked to open cans. He emptied the can of apricots out into a tin cup. While he watched the coffee on the fire, he drank the juice syrup of the apricots…

By now, depending on the sophistication of your palette, you're probably either salivating or becoming nauseated. But after reading this vivid passage, I just had to find out what all of this actually tasted like, so I walked over to Safeway and bought a can of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti, a can of Van Camp's pork and beans, and a can of Del Monte apricots. Then, grossing my mother right out of the kitchen, I cooked up this mess, sliced some bread and dumped catchup over it, just like in the story.

You know, it actually wasn't bad, and sipping apricot juice right out of the can while the coffee was perking was also kind of pleasant.

Give me a break. I was 18.

Hemingway wrote "Big Two Hearted River" in 1923, when he was on the verge of his first triumphs. And although his powers waned with the passing years, the victims of too many injuries and too much booze, not to mention too much fame and adoration, more than 30 years later he had lost none of his touch for making his readers hungry. Check out this mouth-watering passage from A Moveable Feast in which Hemingway walks into Lipp's, a bistro on the left bank in Paris, and orders himself a fine lunch:

…I sat down on the bench against the wall with the mirror in back and a table in front and the waiter asked if I wanted beer and I asked for a distingue, the big glass mug that held a liter, and for potato salad.

The beer was very cold and wonderful to drink. The pommes a l'huile were firm and marinated and the olive oil delicious. I ground black pepper over the potatoes and moistened the bread in the olive oil. After the first heavy draft of beer I ate and drank very slowly. When the pommes a l'huile were gone I ordered another serving and a cervelas. This was a sausage like a heavy, wide frankfurter split in two and covered with a special mustard sauce.

I mopped up all the oil and all of the sauce with bread and drank the beer slowly until it began to lose its coldness and then I finished it and ordered a demi and watched it drawn. It seemed colder than the distingue and I drank half of it.

Are you hungry yet? I had to go to the kitchen while I was typing that out and get myself a snack. And by the way, Lipp's, like Pamplona, is one of those places that Hemingway "put on the map." A couple of years ago I was in Paris and thought I'd drop in at Lipp's and sample some hemingwayesque ambience. No way-the place was wall-to-wall tourists, all doing exactly what I was doing. I ended up having my lunch at a tiny Greek grill (not there in Hemingway's time, I'm sure) on a tiny side-street across from the Ile de la Cite and Notre Dame.

Or try this meal, from an earlier sketch in the same collection:

I asked the waiter for a dozen Portugaises and a half-carafe of the dry white wine they had there…As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I...began to be happy and to make plans.

Yes, after a meal like that, I probably would too.

As the short-story example cited above makes clear, Hemingway didn't confine his culinary passages to memoirs. I always loved this little scene from The Sun Also Rises in which his two male characters, who have left a couple of bottles of wine in an ice-cold stream to chill while they go off trout-fishing, sit down to enjoy their picnic lunch and, using the news of the recent death of William Jennings Bryan as the springboard for a bit of typical snappy jazz-age repartee, indulge in a little creative playing-with-their-food:

The wine was icy cold and tasted faintly rusty. "That's not such a filthy wine," Bill said. "The cold helps it," I said. We unwrapped the little parcels of lunch. "Chicken." "There's hard-boiled eggs." "Find any salt?" "First the egg," said Bill. "Then the chicken. Even Bryan could see that." "He's dead. I read it in the paper yesterday." "No. Not really?" "Yes. Bryan's dead." Bill laid down the egg he was peeling. "Gentlemen," he said, and unwrapped a drumstick from a piece of newspaper, "I reverse the order. For Bryan's sake. As a tribute to the Great Commoner. First the chicken, then the egg." "Wonder what day God created the chicken?" "Oh," said Bill, sucking the drumstick, "how should we know?"

In the almost universally-panned Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) Hemingway seems to spend half of what's purportedly a tragic love story going on and on about what his characters are sipping or digging into:

"Two very dry martinis," the colonel said. "Montgomerys. Fifteen to one."…"The Martinis were icy cold and true Montgomerys, and after touching the edges, they felt them glow happily all through their upper bodies." …

"Just then the lobster was served.

It was tender, with the peculiar slippery grace of that kicking muscle which is the tail, and the claws were excellent, neither too thin nor too fat. "A lobster fills with the moon," the colonel told the girl. "When the moon is dark he is not worth eating."

It's been speculated that if Hemingway's editor Max Perkins had still been alive when Hemingway wrote this novel, he might have tried to persuade the touchy Hemingway to cut it down to novella-length. It would have been easy to do, actually-cut out all the talk about eating and drinking and Across the River would have been a novella by default.

In truth, Hemingway was anything but a gourmet. To the chagrin of anyone who had to live with him, in fact, one of his favorite taste-treats was raw onion sandwiches with plenty of ketchup. And although he boasted throughout his life of his supposedly great knowledge of wines, true wine connoisseurs who either knew him or have read his works assure us all that much of it was pose. No, Hemingway's value to us as a "food writer" does not lie in any claim he can make to directing his readers toward the most exquisite and the best-prepared. Rather, it lies where the rest of his value lies, in an art so deeply involved in the world of sense-experience, an art in which the five sensory organs are virtually instruments of thought and expression, that we share in that world, which Hemingway made to come alive at his fingertips. Just as Hemingway's chiseled prose brings us to breathe the air his characters breathe and feel their emotions at a remove, so that same prose makes us taste the meals they eat and savor the wines they sip in a world as three-dimensional as good writing can make it. Hemingway wrote well about everything he loved, and he loved a good meal. We're all a little richer (and maybe a little fatter) for his having done so.

Kelley Dupuis is one of the most informative people on Hemingway we have ever come across. He can help American students with their studies on Hemingway, but please respect his immense literary insight and knowledge and do not ask him to do your homework. Your understanding of Hemingway comes from your own personal research. Kelley Dupuis can help with his literary insight of Hemingway but his help is for serious students of Hemingway. Thanks. kelley@kelleydupuis.com

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