Each sharply drawn profile reflects the personality, the opportunities and challenges, and the times they lived in. Particularly well-executed is Shapiro's placement of Lewis' rise from kitchen to drawing room in the context of late Victorian and Edwardian culinary and social mores. By writing about these women and not focusing on gastronomy's usual suspects, Shapiro is able to use the unexpected context of the book to bring great insight into the roles and expectations of women and men, particularly during the 20th century. Reading these stories, one after the other, one realizes how Shapiro deftly uses food to link one woman to another — and to us today ... a deliciously satisfying read.
Food writing is often unrigorous, more emotional than cerebral. But Shapiro approaches her subject like a surgeon, analytical tools sharpened. The result is a collection of essays that are tough, elegant and fresh ... Shapiro has less success getting inside the pretty head of Eva Braun, Adolf Hitler’s mistress, but we probably aren’t missing much: Braun’s head appears to have been empty. Shapiro shows us a vapid, childlike woman who ate very little in order to stay slender ... a vibrant food culture has burgeoned, one that has spawned a rich body of literature to which What She Ate is just the latest addition.
...a collection of deft portraits in which food supplies an added facet to the whole. Sometimes it strains to do so. With Dorothy Wordsworth in particular, Shapiro is forced to read a great deal into a single line from a 1829 diary entry...But Shapiro is such a shrewd, sprightly writer that it’s hard to fault her for reading more into Wordsworth’s 'food story' than the record warrants. Each of her subjects fascinates in a different way, and Shapiro has a wizardly epigrammatic knack for summing up paradoxes ... British cuisine becomes a metaphor or counterpart to Pym’s fiction, and perhaps (I’m obliged to admit) food writing itself, at least the way Shapiro does it: underestimated by those who judge too quickly and by appearances, but full of hidden glories.
That she’s selected her subjects this time not from a specific era but according to her own interests is a gamble, but her nose for a good story doesn’t fail her. It turns out that these women have more in common than you might imagine. They’re linked, like women everywhere, by the covert methods they used to acquire whatever power was available to them. At a moment when women have far more overt ways of expressing their desire for influence—if not fully exerting it—it’s instructive to see the gains Shapiro’s heroines made via more subterranean methods. Each one, in her own way, used food as both 'her shield and her weapon.'
In the resulting portraits, Shapiro, like a consummate maître d', sets down plate after plate of the food these women cooked, ate or thought about and an amazing thing happens: Slowly the more familiar accounts of each of their lives recede and other, messier narratives emerge ... Several times throughout What She Ate, Shapiro repeats what surely is one of her life's mantras: 'Food talks — but somebody has to hear it.' How lucky for us readers that Shapiro has been listening so perceptively for decades to the language of food.
In this joyful examination of six women’s lives in food, [Shapiro] sets out to excavate the minutiae of domestic routines for insights into the connection between mental state and menu … Shapiro focuses not only on chefs and food writers (though both feature here), but also shows how food, as the primary output of domestic labour, always plays a subtle role in the way women construct their femininity, against the backdrop of external pressures. Several of the women in this book use food — consciously or not — as a way to mediate relationships with the men around them … Food, Shapiro writes, is ‘intimately associated with all our appetites.’ Her approach lends itself to fascinating insights into her subjects’ relationships; in every domestic partnership that she details, food is revealed as an unstated battleground.
The idea behind the culinary historian Laura Shapiro’s new book, What She Ate, which purports to tell the 'food stories' of six notable women...Shapiro attempts to do what Pym does, working backward by examining any mention of food that appears in the historical records of the real-life characters she has chosen, she is less successful ... Of all the women, the writer and Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown perhaps best lends herself to Shapiro’s task.
Laura Shapiro's fascinating new book, What She Ate, takes a 'you are what you eat' approach to biography .. Delving into written records — diaries, newspaper articles, cookbooks and more — Shapiro finds meaning in every morsel.
...six crisply written, ardently researched, and entertainingly revelatory portraits of very different women with complicated relationships with eating and cooking ... A bounteous and elegant feast for hungry minds.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
