Between Meals by A.J. Liebling Published: 2023 Read from: 27 Dec to 04 Jan My rating: 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟
The temptation, of course, is to review the book as one might a restaurant or a meal, to talk about savouring each witty gem while regretting that the meal must end, profess to being full without having overindulged, knowingly wink at past kitchen practices that today would be frowned upon, or at least hidden from patrons.
Depending on whether I count the date I started or the day I finished, Between Meals is a shoo-in for best non-fiction of 2025 and quite possibly 2026 too. I found it in the unread section of my bookshelves shortly after the Christmas pork chops had been cleaned away, and though I had not the faintest inkling where I got it, possibly as a two-for-one in Derry, possibly not, I thanked past me for my forethought.
I knew tangentially of AJ Liebling; war correspondent, New Yorker writer with eclectic enthusiasms, big guy, famous eater, inspiration to Tom Wolfe. I could not be certain I had ever read anything, and I was clearly drawn to the quote on the back cover. “The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite.” That he certainly had, and in allying himself fully with the gourmand, rather than the prissie gourmet, I rather feel he was the original anti-foodie.
The prose is absolutely delicious, and I relished the chance to expand my education by chasing down passing references that might have been fully understood by contemporary readers. One of the very first meals he describes involves a trout “doused with enough melted butter to thrombose a regiment of Paul Dudley Whites”. Who he? Ed. Lots of opportunities to chase down that and similar nuggets throughout.
Beyond the individual stories and anecdotes of restaurants and meals remembered is an astute analysis of the slow and inevitable decline of French cuisines. Liebling and his colleague Waverly Root, whose The Food of France he references often, first get to eat France in the 1920s when, at least by their accounts the food is still pretty amazing. They come to realise, however, that even then it had fallen a ways from its peak, which they place in the final decade of the 19th century and first of the 20th.
The changes were many. For Root, the small provincial hotel, close by the railway station and home to travelling salesmen with discerning appetites and an expense account to satisfy them, was a first casualty. The motor car created a demand for Potemkin auberges that had no real tradition of classical regional cooking. With travel, too, regional specialities were no longer as closely tied to regions, and the rise of a tyre company as the arbiter of good eating is a warning of worse to come.
Liebling also identifies the aftermath of the First World War as a contributing factor. No Frenchman who survived the war came home less than skinny, and anyone who had not been at the front did not want their corpulence to advertise the matter, so meals shrank to suit the shrunken idea of a good body. Then there was the decline of the courtisanes de marque and the rise of modern, post-war women. The former were among the restaurants’ best clients, with their clients paying for top quality food.
And this was no clip-joint bubbly that the girls barely drank. The courtesans, as Liebling writes, enjoyed the food as much as their clients. They were, “substantial in a Venus de Milo-y, just short of billowy way. Waists and ankles tapered, but their owners provided a lot for them to taper from. Eating was a soin de beauté that the girls enjoyed.”
Compare that to the straight up and down flapper of the 1920s, and you see how restaurants began to lose their clientele and their lustre.
Of course it is hard to feel too sorry for Liebling and his lost arcadia of French cuisine, even if there is a twinge of suspicion that all was not quite as lamentable as he makes out. He seems to have had a pretty good time of it regardless, and seeing the story through his reminiscences is eye-opening. His way with words is eye-opening too, and the way he flits from topic to detour and eventually back again does strike me as inspirational. I note that he was 59 when he died. Some might say his was too short a life; I believe he would have disagreed.
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