The Books: Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink; edited by David Remnick; ‘Two Roast Beefs’, by V.S. Pritchett

Next up on the essays shelf:

Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, edited by David Remnick

Secret Ingredients is a collection of food writing from The New Yorker. I love these collections. So far, we have excerpted from the following collections: Life Stories, The Fun of It, and The New Gilded Age.

I’m not a foodie, but I love this collection because 1. it gives snapshots of different eras, 2. the writing is great.

The collection ends with a Fiction section, short stories that somehow revolve around food. Some I like, some bore me (I am bored by Italo Calvino, and I’ve tried – believe me, I’ve tried. Multiple times. Enough. Life’s too short.) I’m not a big short story reader, unless I am already in love with the writer in question. There are some gems here, though! I am not familiar with V.S. Pritchett’s other work, and this story makes me want to read more. He was mainly known for short stories, although he did write novels and criticism as well. His life spanned the 20th century. He saw two world wars, he saw England destroyed, he saw the death of Empire.

I read a bit about him, and it gives interesting context to this one wee short story, ‘Two Roast Beefs’, published in The New Yorker in 1952.

He grew up middle-class (although a British person would probably know better the exact classification). His dad ran a shop, and his family lived in an apartment. But his dad was a failure at everything he tried, trying his hand at all kinds of ventures for which he had no aptitude. It sounds like a chaotic childhood. Of course, Pritchett went away to school as a boy. World War I was the first rupture. Pritchett left school and began making his living as a writer. He traveled extensively. He got jobs as a critic, as an editor. His short stories were collected in volumes.

So if you think of England in 1952, you think of the post-war years, the encroaching poverty, the pinched quality of life. England had it rough. England had been destroyed by air raids. The rubble, in some cases, lasted for years. But, famously, the British people are tough, stiff-upper-lip people. They kept on, walking to work past the bombed-out buildings, having tea, life goes on. But they were hard up. This was the generation that scrimped, saved, endured. Tough tough people. That world is in this short story, which tells the relationship between a man and his employee, but also tells the story of that generation, and what it was like. To have HUNGER. Not just hunger in between meals, but hunger in GENERAL. Food stuffs hard to find, no excess, lines in front of the shops, just putting dinner on the table was a massive event requiring creativity on a daily basis.

‘Two Roast Beefs’ takes place during the war, when the air-raid sirens go off every night, and you wake up in the morning to find the building next door pulverized, your neighbors dead. Chaos. But again, life goes on. Mr. Plymbell runs an antique shop which, naturally, nobody ever visits. Who needs a walnut cabinet when buildings are flying through the air? A rich old broad has left her entire household of furniture to Mr. Plymbell for the duration of the war. She left for America. But she will return and she expects that her furniture will not have been sold. So basically Mr. Plymbell has been duped into using his shop as a warehouse, for no charge. This is a problem. But he is a proper man, a polite man, and he sees no problem in doing a favor for the rich old broad who had bought so much of her stuff from him in the past, in better times gone by.

Mr. Plymbell has one employee, a Miss Tell. She is what you would call a spinster. She lives with her parents, and her beloved cat Tiger. One night, the air-raid siren goes off and she and her parents huddle in the cellar which is out in the yard behind the house. Miss Tell realizes they have forgotten her cat, so she rushes back out into the house calling for her cat. At that moment, the bomb drops onto the yard, killing Miss Tell’s parents. She is spared. Because she was looking for her cat.

Miss Tell is clearly traumatized, but she keeps coming to work. She refuses to eat. Mr. Plymbell takes his lunch every day, come hell or high water, at a nearby restaurant, where he has roast beef. He knows he has to get there at a certain time to be the first one in the door. If he waits too long, there will be no more roast beef. Miss Tell joins him for lunch. She is uninterested in food. Eventually, Mr. Plymbell asks Miss Tell if she wouldn’t like to stay with him, because she seems a bit … dazed and confused, frankly.

Where the story goes is absolutely fascinating, and unexpected.

What is so awesome is the images you get of what it was like during those chaotic days. The way the social order re-arranged itself around the nightly bombings, the way life did go on, and yet things were changed. What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean to be hungry?

It makes me want to read more Pritchett. And there’s so much out there!

Here’s an excerpt.

Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, edited by David Remnick; ‘Two Roast Beefs’, by V.S. Pritchett

When Plymbell recalls his experience in the war for the inquiring foreign customer, he says there were times when one was inclined to ask oneself whether the computed odds of something like 897,000 to 1 in favor of one’s nightly survival were not, perhaps, an evasion of a private estimate one had arrived at without any special statistical apparatus – that it was fifty-fifty, and even providential. It was a point, he said, one recollected making to one’s assistant at the time, when she came back.

Miss Tell came back to Plymbell’s at lunchtime one day a fortnight after she had been dug out.She was singular: she had been saved by looking for her cat. Mr. Plymbell was not at the shop, or in his rooms above it. In the vainglory of her escape she went round to Polli’s. Plymbell was more than halfway through his meal when he saw her come in. She was wearing no hat on her dusty black hair, and under her black coat, which so often had ends of cotton on it, she was wearing navy-blue trousers. Plymbell winced: it was the human aspect of war that was so lowering; he saw at once that Miss Tell had become a personality. Watching the wag of her narrow shoulders as she walked, he saw she had caught the general immodesty of the “bombed out”.

Without being invited, she sat down at his table and put herself sideways, at her ease, crossing her legs to show her trousers. Her face had filled out into two little puffs of vanity on either side of her mouth, as if she were eating or containing a yawn. The two rings of age on her neck looked like a cheap necklace. Lipstick was for the first time on her lips. It looked like blood.

“One inquired in vain,” said Plymbell with condescension. “I am glad to see you back.”

“I thought I may as well pop round,” said Miss Tell.

Mr. Plymbell was alarmed; her tone was breezy. “Aren’t you coming back?”

“I haven’t found Tiger,” said Miss Tell.

“Tiger?”

Miss Tell told him her story.

Plymbell saw that he must try and put himself for a moment in his employee’s situation and think of her grief. “One recalls the thought that passed through one’s mind when one’s own mother died,” he said.

“They had their life,” said Miss Tell petulantly.

A connoisseur by trade, Plymbell was disappointed by the banality of Miss Tell’s remark. What was grief? It was a hunger. Not merely personal, emotional, and spiritual; it was physical. Plymbell had been forty-two when his mother died, and he, her only child, had always lived with her. Her skill with money, her jackdaw eye had made the business. The morning she died in hospital he had felt that a care had been opened inside his body under the ribs, a cave getting larger and colder and emptier. He went out and ate one of the largest meals of his life.

While Miss Tell, a little fleshed already in her tragedy, was still talking, the waiter came to the table with Plymbell’s allowance of cheese and biscuits.

Plymbell remembered his grief. “Bring me another portion for my secretary,” he said.

“Oh no, not for me,” said Miss Tell. She was too dazed by the importance of loss to eat. “I couldn’t.”

But Polli’s waiter had a tired, deaf head. He came back with biscuits for Miss Tell.

Miss Tell looked about the restaurant until the waiter left and then coquettishly passed her plate to Plymbell. “For you,” she said. “I couldn’t.”

Plymbell thought Miss Tell ill-bred to suggest that he would eat what she did not want. He affected not to notice and gazed over her head, but his white hand had already taken the plate, and in a moment, still looking disparagingly beyond her, in order not to catch her eye, Mr. Plymbell bit into one of Miss Tell’s biscuits. Miss Tell was smiling slyly.

After he had eaten her food, Mr. Plymbell looked at Miss Tell with a warmer interest. She had come to work for him in his mother’s time, more than fifteen years before. Her hair was still black, her skin was now gray and yellow with a lilac streak on the jaw, there were sharp stains like poor coffee under her eyes. These were brown with a circle of gold in the pupils, and they seemed to burn as if there were a fever in their shadows. Her black coat, her trousers, her cotton blouse were cheap, and even her body seemed to be thin with cheapness. Her speech was awkward, for part of her throat was trying to speak in a refined accent and the effect was half arrogant, half disheartened. Now, as he swallowed the last piece of biscuit, she seemed to him to change. Her eyes were brilliant. She had become quietly a human being.

What is a human being? The chef whom he could see through the hatch was one; Polli, who was looking at the menu by the cash desk, was another; his mother, who had made remarkable ravioli, people like Lady Hackthorpe, who had given such wonderful dinner parties before the war; that circle which the war had scattered and where he had moved from one lunch to the next in a life that rippled to the sound of changing plates that tasted of sauces now never made. These people had been human beings. One knew a human being when the juices flowed over one’s teeth. A human creature was a creature who fed one. Plymbell moved his jaws. Miss Tell’s sly smile went. He looked as though he was going to eat her.