“Every dinner party is an act of hope.” Journalist and critic Alissa Wilkinson (Senior Culture Correspondent, Vox Media) and Evan Rosa talk about eating, drinking, and being merry—but also being human. Wilkinson’s book Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women, offers an opportunity to join Hannah Arendt at a cocktail party to discuss views on friendship, love, evil, and difference. We all get really hungry while thinking through the Southern food writer Edna Lewis who brought farm-to-table to New York way before it was cool. And a discussion of the gorgeous film Babette’s Feast offers an imaginative and experiential education in the place of joy and pleasure in a flourishing spiritual life. This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.
Show Notes
About Alissa Wilkinson
Alissa Wilkinson is a Brooklyn-based critic, journalist, and author. She is a senior correspondent and critic at Vox.com, writing about film, TV, and culture. She is currently writing We Tell Ourselves Stories, a cultural history of American myth-making in Hollywood through the life and work of Joan Didion, which will be published by Liveright.
She's contributed essays, features, and criticism to a wide variety of publications, including Rolling Stone, Vulture, Bon Appetit, Eater, RogerEbert.com, Pacific Standard, The Dallas Morning News, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Books & Culture, Christianity Today, and others. I’m a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Society of Film Critics, and the Writers Guild of America, East, and was an inaugural writing fellow with the Sundance Institute’s Art of Nonfiction initiative. She's served on juries at the Sundance Film Festival, DOC NYC, Sheffield Doc/Fest, the Hamptons International Film Festival, and others, and selection committees for groups including the Gotham Awards and the Sundance Documentary Film Program.
In June 2022, her book Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women was published by Broadleaf Books. In 2016, her book How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, and Politics at the End of the World was released, co-written with Robert Joustra.
I frequently pop up as a commentator and guest host on radio, TV, and podcasts. Some recent appearances include CBS News; PBS Newshour; CNN International Newsroom; BBC America’s Talking Movies; NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, On Point, and 1A; HBO’s Allen v. Farrow; AMC's James Cameron's Story of Science Fiction; WNYC's The Takeaway; ABC's Religion & Ethics and The Drum; CBC Eyeopener, Vox’s Today, Explained and The Gray Area; and many more.
For 14 years, until the college ceased offering classes in 2023, she was also an associate professor of English and humanities at The King’s College in New York City, and taught courses in criticism, cinema studies, literature, and cultural theory. She earned an M.F.A in creative nonfiction from Seattle Pacific University, an M.A. in humanities and social thought from New York University, and a B.S. in information technology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
You can read my most up-to-date work on my Vox author page, or subscribe to my mostly-weekly newsletter.
Production Notes
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu. This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.
Alissa Wilkinson: "Southern is a bowl of shrimp paste, rich in butter, shrimp, sherry, spices, and lemon juice, blended to a soft consistency and served over a plate of grits: a delicious breakfast treat. Southern is a barbecued pig that was cooked for hours and served with a tomato or vinegar-based sauce, as well as coleslaw, potato salad, baked beans, hushpuppies, and iced tea. Southern is a bowl of homemade peach ice cream, served during the peach season. Southern is Richard Wright and his Bright and Morning Star. Southern is an oyster roast. Guests are presented with white gloves for shucking and pots of melted butter. Southern is leftover pieces of boiled ham, trimmed and added to a saucepan of heavy cream, set on the back of the stove to mull and bring out the ham flavor, then spooned over hot biscuits with poached eggs on the side."
Evan Rosa: This is glorious.
Alissa Wilkinson: And it just goes on like that. It's incredible.
Evan Rosa: And people who get confused about- why would you want to read food writing? I hope after listening to Alissa read this poetry- I hope that stirred something in you. I hope you became hungry.
Alissa Wilkinson: It should always make you hungry.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Imagine you're planning a dinner party. Not just any dinner party, but the dinner party to end all dinner parties, serving a supper like it was your last.
Location's locked in, menu's set, every course is perfectly timed, themed, and you've got all the recipes, from the amuse bouche, main course, to the sauces, palate cleansers, to dessert. I know I've got you hungry, but something's missing. Who's coming for supper? Who's tasting and seeing the goodness of this party?
Whose salty presence will season the night, bringing out the very best of every flavor and every bite? And here's maybe the funnest part. Imagine you could invite anyone through history. Who would you have over for dinner? Who would sit at the table of your supper club? Well, Alissa Wilkinson wrote a book that invited a revolutionary recipe of nine extraordinary women over for dinner to see what kind of insights might emerge.
Ella Baker, Alice B. Toklas, Hannah Arendt, Octavia Butler, Agnes Varda, Elizabeth David, Edna Lewis, Maya Angelou, and Lori Coleman. Alissa herself is a journalist and film critic and senior correspondent at Vox Media. In this conversation, she and I talk about eating, drinking, being merry, but also being human.
We join Hannah Arendt at a cocktail party to discuss views on friendship, love, evil, and difference. We get really hungry thinking and reading through the southern food writer Edna Lewis, who brought Farm to Table to New York way before it was cool. And we discussed surely one of the best movies of all time, the gorgeous film Babette's Feast, which offers an imaginative and experiential education in the place of joy, pleasure and recognition in a flourishing spiritual life.
So, thanks for coming to the dinner party. Bon appetit. Alissa, thanks so much for joining me on For the Life of the World. Thanks for coming back on the show.
Alissa Wilkinson: Yeah, I'm so glad I could. It's been a while, but I'm excited to talk.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, we're going to talk about Salty. The spirit behind what we try to do on this podcast and in general at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture is appreciate the long shelf life of ideas, whether that shows up in books or culture, or however those might be presented. There's a kind of long arc to the narrative, the stories that you're working on in this book also, I think, can present themselves as having that kind of long, maybe timeless shelf life.
Alissa Wilkinson: I mean, that's the hope, right? There are books that are pegged to, you know, elections or like cultural happenings or whatever, and that's great, and I admire the people who write those, but that is not me. It's much more interesting to dip into people, I think, who knew something, who are no longer with us, but have something to teach us.
Evan Rosa: But that's interesting, I mean, the use of writing as both inhabiting a moment and somehow, like, existing as far beyond and transcending that moment is kind of where so much delight comes. There's like a little bit of a paradox in that, that transcendent frame perhaps that helps to connect people, in the moment and out of it. And I think I see that on display in the format of Salty, but you're writing all the time and you're always trying to both inhabit the moment and get outside of it.
Alissa Wilkinson: That's right. I mean, it's also a scary proposition for journalists. Whatever you write is of the moment and it's sort of the record of the moment, but like you realize when you're writing a book like this, that 50 and 100 and who even knows how many, how far into the future people will be looking at our writing, not to give them information about that moment, but to give them information about how people were thinking about that moment. And so it feels like an extra responsibility, which is like funny when you're writing something like this and dipping back into those old stories, or the old kind of headlines and things like that.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about the subtitle: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women. The expression of it in Lessons on Eating and Drinking, and Living, of course, but the genre of the book is- it's experimental, you've got memoir, you've got cookbook, you've got biography, you can't help but be a critic still. There's an element of theater in it and like philosophical dialogue at times. It's a cultural history, but it's still lessons on eating, drinking, living. And so then there's recipes in it, of course, and so...
Alissa Wilkinson: And illustrations - which I did not provide...
Evan Rosa: Well, those are gorgeous, and they're really well done, and, I mean, that's a nice treat that most academic types aren't really privy to, to have their work illustrated so lovely. So talk a little bit about that genre...
Alissa Wilkinson: So, I have been calling it an essay collection because that's what it feels like the most to me.
And I did my MFA work in creative nonfiction, so we talked incessantly about essays, and it's sort of a joke/cliché among people who study creative nonfiction, but it's true, that the word essay comes from the French word essayer, which means to sort of ride out in pursuit of something, and so the idea behind the essay form is that you are kind of just watching a writer's mind at work, and you're kind of following them down the path that they wish to lead you. I guess what I was trying to do was come up with ways into the lives of these women who I find interesting that would also be compelling to someone who had never heard of them. And I know for a lot of people who have picked up the book, they haven't- it's like half or more of them are unfamiliar names.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, myself included.
Alissa Wilkinson: Yeah, it's not as if they're obscure people, but they're- they've flown under the radar maybe if you weren't in their field of study or something like that.
Evan Rosa: You're sort of creating a compendium as well. You're curating as a kind of maven of women's intellectual history even, or activism in those cases as well. But setting this up as a dinner party, which you do right away, I think is an important valence to your approach, and you are the hostess with the mostest. And so in that sense, you do have to bring yourself to the party, but a good host knows how to get out of the way such that the guests create this kind of improvisational ensemble that joins in with the food that like- I see this as an act of intellectual and cultural hospitality on your part for the world. So you're setting the menu, you've paid careful attention to the guest list, and then you just kind of see what happens.
Alissa Wilkinson: Yeah, exactly. And I sort of felt like I was seeing what happened for myself as a process of the writing. I went in with an idea of who I was writing about, but not always why they were there, and the good thing about the food and drink thing is that everyone eats, right? Like, food is a part of everyone's life. And so I knew that going into their lives, I would find something through that lens that would help me understand them and hopefully help the reader understand them. So for, I don't know, I think about half of the people in it, maybe like four out of five are food writers or sort of known for a cookbook they wrote, or in the case of Maya Angelou, like most people don't think of her as a food writer, but she did write two cookbooks and so that's part of her story, but then there's other women in the book who were not at all known in connection with the food world, and I didn't intend to drag them in there. Instead I wanted to use food or drink or hospitality or something as our way into thinking about their lives.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, let's talk about some of those. I think one of those is Hannah Arendt. Why is she at the party? Why don't you start there?
Alissa Wilkinson: She's at the party in part 'cause I just think she's really interesting. There's actually a little bit of a story as to why she's in there, which is that the real genesis of this book came at a wine night at the house of someone who was a instructor in my MFA program. And so we were talking about, and he does this sometimes, and he said, "you should write a book called 'Cocktails with Hannah.'" And I said, "What?" And he said, "yeah, 'cause they had these great cocktail parties." And that always stuck in my head as just kind of a fun concept for a book I would enjoy writing, and so I figured, well, where better to start than with her cocktail parties? Anyone who's been in like a real New York apartment where it's like, a little shabby, not really big enough for the number of people who are in it, and there are martinis and there are some canapes or whatever, but people are there mostly to yell at one another about ideas. And that really struck me as foundational to who she was and a lot of her writing and the way she thought about thinking, which for her was very much about being in conversation with others and with the self. And so I sort of used that cocktail party as a way into thinking about her ideas about friendship.
Evan Rosa: Right. I want to talk a little bit about, like, about Arendt's ideas and how the cocktail party is symbolic of that kind of- this chapter is a subversive feast among friends. You're careful to point out the kind of evolving nature of Arendt's thought, the difficulty of boiling her thought down and perhaps the importance of that difficulty as well for her approach to ideas and thinking as conversation with the self.
And so bring us into a little bit of the substance behind what that cocktail party, holding a drink in one hand and holding a conversation at the same time, what that contributes to your life and a good life.
Alissa Wilkinson: Right, yeah. I think it's important to start by realizing that her cocktail parties were not, like, networking events, right? Or they weren't, like, "see me." So, so a common experience for me and many other people is you go to a cocktail party, and you're talking to someone, but both of you are kind of looking over the shoulder of that person to see who else is in the room and whatever, which is so gross, but so common and so common in academic circles and media circles, for sure, publishing, I mean, everywhere I spend my life.
Evan Rosa: Or even in the business world, like, you take a glance at someone's name tag, size them up, and then you might've checked out already. So you're kind of presenting that in contrast.
Alissa Wilkinson: Yeah, that's not what hers are. Hers are definitely cocktail parties. There's definitely cocktails, that much is clear.
But they, like many others in her circle, were places where you were hashing out ideas. There was plenty of bickering and infighting and intrigue and all that stuff too, but there's this definite emphasis on arguing in order to find out what you think, and also to not come into agreement necessarily with other people but be in the same space having the same argument.
And what she didn't- As far as I can tell from her writing, she didn't mean this sort of, I don't know, there's this sort of weak idea, I think, that floats around these days where it's like, you should have friends who have different, like, diametrically opposed viewpoints from yours. And she definitely did not think that because she also believes that your thoughts stem from your virtue, I think I would say, and that we can make judgments about that, but that you don't always know with finality what you think, or if you do, you're probably wrong.
And that it is in conversation with friends and with the self that we actually do that thinking. And she literally thought that thinking- she described thinking as a conversation with the self, which I really like. But in her friendships, an emphasis is made in her writing on friendship only existing when you see and love the ways that your friend is different from you.
And she really thought that love could only, and by that I mean, kind of, love writ large, could only exist in the specificity of relationship. So she would say things like, you can't say "I love women." Because you don't know all women. You could say you admire or care for or feel compassion toward a group of people, but you couldn't say that you love them.
You can only love people. And so there was that real emphasis, and it's really borne out in her life. I cite a great book in there, it's called Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship. John Nixon, I believe, is the author, and it goes through four of the most important friendships in her life, which included Martin Heidegger and Mary McCarthy.
And she, well, the Heidegger thing is wild, and I'm sure like very problematic.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. What to say? I mean, like the Nazi connection being the most important one.
Alissa Wilkinson: It stems from, he was her professor and they had an affair when she was 18, and then she left, and he was- she was horrified by his choices in life and then she- but she never really stopped trying to figure out what was- who he was, even when he seems like a very difficult man.
So, her friendship with Mary McCarthy started with three years of them basically hating each other, but showing up at all the same events, and then one night they got trapped on a subway platform in the middle of the night after a party, which is like a very relatable circumstance, and one of them said to the other, "This is ridiculous. We think the same way about so many things. Let's just be friends." And then they were like best friends. You can go buy a volume of their letters to one another. When Hannah died, Mary finished her last book, dropped her own work to finish it and publish it.
Evan Rosa: What I love about how this is- this expresses so much, the complicated nature of Arendt's thinking is, I wouldn't say caused by, but it at least correlates with and very likely is related to, the complicated nature of her life. But this is to say, and then perhaps I'm breaking one of Arendt's most important rules, which is not to overgeneralize, but this is perhaps expressive of, I think what is a universal of human life, which is there's ideas, but then there's the people behind those ideas, and there's the lived experience that gives rise to those ideas. I wanted to read a little bit from how you sum up some of her thinking in Salty. You're speaking about her concept of Amor Mundi - love of the world. But you say, "Loving the world means working on two specific tasks. The first is to doggedly insist on seeing the world just as it is with its disappointments and horrors and committing to it all the same. The second is to encounter people in the world and embrace their alterity or difference." I think when we say complicated, people are complicated or things are messy, I think this is one good way to add a little bit of coherence or clarity to the idea is that we're talking about many forms of difference or alterity that are constantly placing us in some form of tension or conflict with the other, and so much emerges from that: ideas, beliefs, preferences, ways of being in the world all emerge from this encounter of difference and the other.
Alissa Wilkinson: You know, the reason that was so resonant was in part because in my life, I feel like a lot of times I've encountered that in a meaningful way. I mean, not to rag on the internet, but it's not really on the internet so much as it is at somebody's dinner table. I really admire people who can put together gatherings where they know not everyone in this room is the same, which requires like a lot of life work to get to that point, right? But yeah, I mean, just the idea that I would encounter and sort of understand myself through encountering, and not just encountering, but like in a deep way in a relationship, an ongoing relationship with someone, start to understand why I think the way I do, not in order to stop thinking the way I do, which is sometimes the way people, I think, use that idea, but rather to build it out, make it more robust. It's not just like a slogan I heard in a class or something. It's something that like stems from inside of me, and I can kind of articulate that.
But you can only articulate it if you need to, in order to be in relationship with someone else. And that's not possible with all people. Most people have heard of her concept of the banality of evil. This has gotten thrown around a lot, it's sort of one of those quotes that- it's not exactly taken out of context, but the fuller context makes it a lot more interesting, so the idea of the banality of evil, she doesn't mean that evil is boring exactly, she just means that you don't have to- that evil doesn't come from people who present themselves as evil so often, as from like true evil comes from nothing, from the good people who do nothing. So part of that concept comes from just how she fled the Nazis. She fled the Holocaust. She's Jewish, and she fled to the U. S. along with many of her friends, and they knew that the problem- it was obviously very bad that there were people who were actively trying to harm them, but the people who refused to stand in the way of that harm are the ones you need to worry about. And then she goes and reports on this trial of Adolf Eichmann, who's the architect of the final solution, and she reports on it for the New Yorker, and she writes back home, basically, this is not like the- this man is remarkable in his banality. He's just. He's just a bureaucrat. He's just like a guy. You don't look at him- he's not Charles Manson. You don't look at him and think, "Oh, this guy, like, obviously architected the slaughter of millions of people." And this statement was hugely controversial to the point where it's almost funny now to see how uncontroversial it is when you sort of throw it around, because it was- she lost friends over this, because people said, "well, how can you call him banal if he did all those evil things?" And I totally see the point. It's just that if you sort of look at where she's coming from, you can also, I hope, see her point. And I think it's really borne itself out in the 20th century that the people doing these wicked things often on large scales, wicked leaders or whatever, are not remarkable geniuses or brilliant serial killer, schemester types, they're just- they just know how to grab an opportunity or are just doing what they're told. So that whole thing is really interesting to me, but it's especially interesting because she did lose friends over it. There was a lot of argument about it. I think there's a robustness to her thinking about alterity and difference that is often lacking in, like, Facebook memes about how you should be friends with people who don't think the way you do.
So there's a bigger issue at stake there. And she, coming from- it's interesting because she wrote her undergraduate thesis on St. John and Augustine. She is Jewish, not particularly religious in adulthood, she argues with John a bit, actually, in her thesis, but generally that's where her idea about love of the world comes from, is actually trying to get around the idea that we can't love the world. For her, loving the world is seeing it in all its reality and not looking away. Not pretending you can erase reality that makes you uncomfortable or whatever.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. I mean, it's so much of the, I think, the imaginative force of what you're doing in this book is bringing us all together across, in this case, time as well as space. It's irreplaceable. The idea of bringing all that you are to a room, to a specific room, that if you want to know anything about the world, you won't find it through generalizations, a conceptual understanding, a propositional knowledge. You only get to knowledge, you only get to love through acquaintance, through encounter. And that's where that like- encountering difference, even if it's just a difference of particulars and not necessarily a difference of kind, that's what - we want our friendships to be a sameness of kind in some respects - but there's still that reaching out into the world and moving into a particular space and encountering yourself in those moments of opposition, moments with the other. It's life-giving and meaningful.
Alissa Wilkinson: And I think it's worth noting that, for large stretches of her most important friendships, she was physically displaced from the people who were her close friends, including McCarthy. They were always kind of orbiting each other. And it was really important to them to write letters. There's just like tons of letters from mid-century. And I love reading letters between close friends who don't see each other very much but write these letters, because there's this sort of sharing of the self, sharing of like anecdotes from your life, silly things that happened, saying, "Oh, I can't wait till we can see you, we're going to be in the city like three weeks from Monday, will you be there?" And also ongoing, long, years-long ongoing arguments about various ideas, or you pick up on things that they said to one another when you saw- when they did see each other, and I think that's, really spectacular way to get to know somebody is to read their letters much more than their biographies, I think, because you start to get a sense of their personality.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, yeah. Who should we talk about next?
Alissa Wilkinson: Well, one of my favorite people in this book is Edna Lewis. So, maybe we can talk about Edna Lewis.
Evan Rosa: So, how did you come to know of Edna Lewis, and why is she at your dinner party?
Alissa Wilkinson: See, I should have known about her before I did, because I have always been a little bit of a cookbook hound. Years ago, I was really into, kind of, the history of the farm to table movement in America, Alice Waters and all this stuff. I heard about her because the first - I think it was the first week of the pandemic, actually - the New York Times podcast was having writers come on and read recipes, if I remember correctly?
Evan Rosa: I think I remember that.
Alissa Wilkinson: Yeah, and Wesley Morris got on and read her biscuit recipe. And I was like, "who is this lady? I want to know more about her. She sounds incredible." I started to realize that she was a really big deal that I didn't know about, and then I felt a little better because apparently there was an episode of Top Chef where- that was Edna Lewis inspired a few years back, and almost nobody had heard of her, and that was really telling to me. So, who was Edna Lewis? She was the granddaughter of formerly enslaved people who founded a town for others from their community in Virginia called Freetown. And then she moved north after she finished high school, and she lived in New York City for a long time, and then she kind of moved, she lived in the South and the North, back and forth. She is the reason that Southern food is considered sort of the American cuisine. She's the reason anyone's eating Southern food outside the South. So she was cooking at a place called Cafe Nicholson on the Upper East Side in the forties, I want to say until I'm doubting my dates, but it was before the Civil Rights Act and New York was not officially, but definitely pretty segregated. And she was cooking there, and word kind of spread among the city's Southern celebrities, like the Truman Capotes of the world, that somebody was cooking Southern food. She became a partner in the business, which was like, it was unheard of that a black woman would be a chef, like a chef in a kitchen at the time in New York. She eventually left, but she ended up writing these cookbooks, one of which, The Taste of Country Cooking, sort of functions as a memoir of her youth in Freetown, and it kind of goes through all the seasons, and she'll have a recipe for plum jam or pickled something or like a pork dish, and then there'll be all these kind of reminiscings about life in Freetown, which she's kind of remembering through her child's eyes. And this is all very interesting, there's recipes for certain holidays and like homecomings that would have been celebrated among the families in that community.
Evan Rosa: Emancipation Day, there's a recipe.
Alissa Wilkinson: Emancipation Day, and noticeably lacking in a few holidays that you might have expected to see, Thanksgiving, I believe, and Independence Day. And there's something there that's very interesting, just in her kind of subtle- it's about her youth, but it's- the book is being sold to people who didn't experience her youth and just sort of the subtlety of what mattered to them, and also there's some stuff about what it meant to be safe in that community. There may or may not be, but there seems to be some subtle evocation of what it was like to live near a place where lynchings had taken place in some of the imagery she uses. So it's a very smart and interesting book, but you can miss all that if you just read it and you're like, "Oh, look at this kindly lady writing about grits" or whatever.
And that's all really interesting, I think. And then in the end, that's the reason that Southern food- and her other cookbooks are the reason that Southern food stopped being considered, sort of, food for what people might have prejudicially considered like poor or uneducated people. And so in a way, she pioneered the farm to table movement because that's what she cooked and that's what she advocated for...
Evan Rosa: And that's what seems to be- I think that there are probably some that don't realize that that's what Southern cooking is really based on.
Alissa Wilkinson: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Evan Rosa: It's like, when we hear farm to table, and we hear some kind of, like, nouveau, like hipster idea that this is like- that had never existed before, but we just were so imaginative to create it; it took high, fine chef imagination to create, but no.
Alissa Wilkinson: No, it was like literally the farm was at your back door because that's how you ate. But it's not even just Southern food, the less money you have, the more likely you are to have, at least at that period of time, to have done farm to table cooking, like just lived on it, right? Because...
Evan Rosa: Yeah, I mean, think about how farm to table encountered this kind of incredible rebranding from like- we all received it as it became en vogue, we received it as the highest form or the hippest form, at least, of how you would eat. Sort of like, that's going to be the most expensive kind of food that you would experience given. And it's lovely what they did, Alice Waters and Chez Panisse.
Alissa Wilkinson: I went there recently, actually, and it is very good.
Evan Rosa: As someone with Berkeley close to his heart, I miss it.
Alissa Wilkinson: So good.
Evan Rosa: And I only went once. But it definitely was not elevated cooking in its origin - Farm to Table was born out of necessity. It was because, as you point out, the farm is just outside your door. on the other wall from your table.
Alissa Wilkinson: It's economical and something she also points out is for people in Freetown, the next town over was white and it was not necessarily safe for them to go shopping in the next town over, so you kept as much as you could close to home because it was safer and it re-fed the community rather than having to stretch resources out the door, and it was a historical grounding for that. So it's kind of a time honored American tradition, but I think we get, sometimes, what can we say, whitewashed ideas about what that tradition actually is. And I think that that's really fascinating, and she just- she's just such an interesting lady.
Also, fascinatingly, her recipes might have been the most modern of all of the recipes that I looked at for the book.
Evan Rosa: Interesting.
Alissa Wilkinson: Yeah. I mean, you could buy anything- well, maybe not like rabbit, but for the most part, you can buy most anything in her cookbook at your local grocery store, which is of recipe books written in the middle of the century, not so common.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, perhaps it's not so easy. So I want to talk about- a little bit more about her distinctive Southern identity. You say, "Lewis defines Southern as the experience of an emancipated people and their descendants, a cultural and culinary heritage to be proud of, a distinctly American culture, and as she offers definitions, readers are reminded she's refusing to be defined by anyone but herself."
Alissa Wilkinson: Yeah. Right. She wrote this article called "What is Southern?" that- for Gourmet Magazine, I believe, and it didn't get published before she passed away, and then they sort of found it in a stack and were like, "Oh, we got to publish this." And it's this lovely- you can go look it up, Google it, it's out there. It's this lovely poetic sort of definition of what it is to be Southern that's very much through her definition. I mean, you even hear in there that she's reclaiming Southern cooking for Black people in the South, right? Recently emancipated people. So it's very much about that, and that even is entirely correct. There's lots of community cookbooks from the South from the antebellum period onwards, but most of them were white women using the- taking the recipes from their Black chefs and sort of putting them in the community cookbook, and that was just accepted practice, and that's what people were doing.
Evan Rosa: And probably putting their own name on it.
Alissa Wilkinson: And probably putting their own name on it. And sometimes putting really kind of very disturbingly racist stereotypes in there, too. But that's where- that's what we think of, right, as Southern food. And certainly there are people who don't fit that mold, or there are people who didn't- weren't wealthy enough to have help.
But, you know, what became Southern food was defined by Black people, mostly Black women, who were cooking, and that is now the food that America eats all the time.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. You include a portion of that essay in the book, and I think you rightly say it reads like poetry. I'm wondering if you'd read it for us.
Would you mind pulling it up?
Alissa Wilkinson: Yes.
Evan Rosa: It's on page 21.
Alissa Wilkinson: "Southern is a bowl of shrimp paste, rich in butter, shrimp, sherry, spices, and lemon juice, blended to a soft consistency and served over a plate of grits: a delicious breakfast treat. Southern is a barbecued pig that was cooked for hours and served with a tomato or vinegar based sauce, as well as coleslaw, potato salad, baked beans, hush puppies, and iced tea. Southern is a bowl of homemade peach ice cream served during the peach season. Southern is Richard Wright and his Bright and Morning Star. Southern is an oyster roast. Guests are presented with white gloves for shucking and pots of melted butter. Southern is leftover pieces of boiled ham, trimmed and added to a saucepan of heavy cream set on the back of the stove to mull and bring out the ham flavor, then spooned over hot biscuits with poached eggs on the side."
Evan Rosa: It's just glorious.
Alissa Wilkinson: And it just goes on like that. It's incredible.
Evan Rosa: And people who get confused about, why would you want to read food writing? I hope after listening to Alissa read this poetry, I hope that stirred something in you. I hope you became hungry.
Alissa Wilkinson: It should always make you hungry. But also, one thing I love about food writing, generally, is that it isn't just about your taste; it's also like your smell, the texture, sometimes it's what you're hearing.
I have like very clear memories of, in the Little House on the Prairie books, which are some of the best food writing around, Laura's writing about eating, I think it was pig fat or something, and hearing it squeak. And this was- as a child, this was like so evocative for me. So that's what you hope for.
Evan Rosa: So can we do one more? Yeah. Because I want to talk a little bit about Babette's Feast.
Alissa Wilkinson: Oh yes.
Evan Rosa: I'm still- so much of, I think, the experience of reading Salty...I started commenting on the genre I think for an important reason. I think it's one of those instances where awareness of the genre, as you read it, feels like a good thing.
And I just- I appreciate the sense in which it becomes a kind of metaphor- or the dinner party is a metaphor for an intellectual feast. But not just merely intellectual, I really do feel like the worlds of the intellectual and the cultural and the physical and the spiritual are kind of colliding in the spirit, and I think this is what dinner parties are all about, and I'll offer a little bit.
Before I moved to Connecticut from California, I was part of a supper club with five other couples, and we're all kind of in the same life stage, and my wife, Laney, and I were invited into this supper club, which had been a long running supper club. It's been going for almost 20 years, in fact. It's called the Los Padres National Forest Supper Club. And it is fine dining, but it's fine dining put on by very ordinary people who are not themselves chefs. And it was a kind of experiment in a temporary transcendence from the ordinary into extraordinary, right? Like it was- you dress up to the nines, this was a black tie event. And it became an important regulation. Several courses were required, a lot of study went into it. They were often themed, different themes, so we once put on a Kentucky Derby themed party. We did Roald Dahl, who is not well known for it, but was also a food writer.
Alissa Wilkinson: Did you have a chocolate fountain? And did anyone fall into it?
Evan Rosa: No one fell into it. No, in fact, the invitations were chocolate bars that were homemade. And that's just the start of it. There was- A Midsummer Night's Dream was another theme that someone else put on. Only the Good Die Young was another. Now, I could go on and on and on, but those are just some of the expressions in it. And here's a shout out to, let me just name, Matt and Ashley and Chris and Layla, and I mean, really, there's a community that formed around it. Gavin, Rebecca, Juan and Christine. These are the people that were part of our tenure in Supper Club, and a lot of other people have been there, but it's that movement from ordinary into extraordinary, right? Like you get babysitters for your kids and you show up, and I don't normally dress like this, I don't normally eat like this, but damn, just being there in this moment, it just opens up vistas of life and experience that make sense for why food writing, and why a kind of intellectual fore like a dinner party, does give you lessons for living. This is so much about life and it's- yes, it is a necessity, as Arendt was about, but it's full of bounty and poetry, and I think that's kind of encapsulated by this movie I've loved for a long time.
So I- how could I have a conversation with you and not bring up at least one film? The movie Babette's Feast is just this- I think it came into my life maybe a decade ago, but it just, from one angle, it's just slow and difficult to get through if you are used to a different kind of movie. But the fact is, once you start paying close attention to the way it's made, and of course, like the narrative that drives it, it's just astounding and gorgeous, and...
Alissa Wilkinson: Once it starts becoming extremely compelling, suddenly, especially if you're hungry.
Evan Rosa: Oh, absolutely. Why don't we segue with a little bit of Babette's Feast? I feel like this is a connection for you, too, I can tell. And so introduce a little bit and maybe we can just go ahead and say, "Hey, spoiler alert, everybody. You can skip ahead if you want to see the movie first, but..."
Alissa Wilkinson: It's from 1987. And I do feel like the spoiler's kind of in the title of the movie, I think.
Evan Rosa: She puts on a feast.
Alissa Wilkinson: She puts on a feast. So yeah, there's a- it's not metaphorical. Well, it is, but it's also literal. Yeah, it's actually based on a Isak Dinesen story, which I at one point had thought of putting Dinesen in the book, then I didn't, mainly because I wanted to talk about Babette's Feast. Also, weird fact, Hannah Arendt loved Izak Dinesen, so that was interesting. But anyhow, yeah, I mean, it's the story of a woman who fled Paris under political circumstances that I don't really know what they were...
Evan Rosa: Yeah, I mean, they're fairly vague in the film.
Alissa Wilkinson: Yeah, and it's set in the 19th century, I believe. And she kind of fled to this remote village on the coast of Denmark, and she was sent there by a man. She doesn't kind of know why at first, I guess we can leave some of this to the spoilers, but she ends up working for these two sisters who are sort of just past middle age, I would say, and their father, was this very stern, Protestant minister who started like a sect or a church, I don't know. And it's a remote village, it's sort of the only game in town. And everyone who goes to this church at this point is quite old as well. Their father has passed away, but the community is still there. And it's a very stern, strict sect that, you know, eschews worldly pleasures of all kinds, and they're very- they live a very aesthetic lifestyle.
And Babette bursts in, and she's this like French woman who can- who cooks for the women, and she's sort of horrified by the food they have her make - is bread soup in there? Am I remembering that correctly? It's like, she's just- everything- they're like, "Oh, this is what we eat." And she's, "Okay." And she's very kind and just grateful to be there and grateful to be safe, and so she does it, and they come to love her and she's sort of viewed with a little bit of suspicion by everyone, but, you know, they get used to her.
And then one day she finds out that she's won a lottery home in France, and it's enough money that she doesn't need to keep working for the women, and they're sad to lose her, but they understand and they say- and she says, "well before I leave, I would like to cook you a dinner in celebration of your father's centennial birthday," I think it's something like that and invites the church over so there's 12 people coming. And she begs and she begs, and they're like, "Oh, I don't know. We don't eat rich food" or whatever, and she's "no, just let me give this gift to you; this is all I've ever asked you for for 15 years" or something like that.
So they- they relent, and she spends her money to buy the food. And so like, things start to arrive at the house, it's like tortoises and like little tiny quail and like...
Evan Rosa: I just think they don't really know what they've agreed to.
Alissa Wilkinson: They have no idea. I don't think anyone could. And then in the end, you sort of simultaneously find out that she used to be a chef and also that she spent all of her money on this. So it's sort of a parable, she's- and she can't leave now because she spent her entire- but it's this gift that she gives. And meanwhile, the scene, I think the scene where they eat the dinner is like one of the funniest scenes I've ever watched in a film where they're just- and they're like not supposed to be enjoying this, but they're really, really enjoying this.
And then they have a little wine, and none of them have had wine like in decades, and then like some of the like long-standing quarrels in the community start to be resolved as they sort of talk and they're sort of becoming merry, and there are other things that happen in the course of that, but that's sort of the core of it, and I just- I think it's a sumptuous movie to watch. I've just- food has rarely looked so good on-screen, especially in a movie from the eighties. I have to say the eighties were just like not good at filming food, but this one's good. And I actually talked to someone, was it you? I don't remember. Someone told me that they did a Babette's Feast-themed feast.
Evan Rosa: That's pretty good. It was not me.
Alissa Wilkinson: Okay. Suddenly that seems like something you might do. Well, I don't know that they had the tortoise, but there's...
Evan Rosa: Well I found the menu, so I'm going to read the menu. Here's what she served. And I wish I could pronounce the French better; I really wish I could. I'm just going to butcher it. So I'm going to just go ahead and say, it's a seven course meal that's served over a large portion of the film. Turtle soup served with Amontillado sherry, buckwheat pancakes with caviar and sour cream, quail in puff pastry with foie gras and truffle sauce, rum sponge cake with figs and candied cherries, assorted cheeses and fruits, and coffee with vieux marc Grand Champagne cognac to top it all off.
But the process of going through this is a kind of, I mean, there's a- it's like recognition, like what you described in the experience of those who are stern and mundane but also just don't appear to have a place for pleasure, an understanding of pleasure in the good life. They're invited into this room. In fact, I mean, it feels like sinful almost to them, right? And I think this is fairly important because it's ultimately this comment on the role of joy and pleasure in a spiritual life.
And- but it's like, this experiential, like this form of recognition, and you see it on their faces, and I mean, however you want to criticize the acting of it, but like the wide eyes of these very understated and humble people that are just like holding it down, holding down the joy, trying to stuff it, suppress it, repress it all.
But then there's this important, and I- you'll have to remind me about the plotline that brings him there, but there's a kind of Prince.
Alissa Wilkinson: Yes.
Evan Rosa: It's important plot to the kind of the big reveal.
Alissa Wilkinson: Yes. This is actually the piece of the story that always escapes me myself, but it's something to do with him having been in love years earlier with one of the daughters, and he's in the Swedish army or something like that, and the whole reason Babette even found them in the first place is that a opera singer had met the daughters as well many decades before, and when he met Babette and ate a meal at her restaurant and knew that she had to flee, he said, "I know these people who will take you in. They're good people." And he probably thought like they could use a cook. There's this parable aspect to Babette's feast that is really quite stunning, especially when you consider this movie won- I believe it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1988, premiered at Cannes. It was like a- it's an important art film of the 80s, but it's also kind of continued to resonate. I think in part, for me, one reason I love it is that it feels like a cinematic adaptation of The Supper of the Lamb, which is a book I love.
Evan Rosa: I do know that.
Alissa Wilkinson: Yeah. And just everything that's in that book kind of is in this movie as well, to the point where I don't know that the director, Gabriel Axelrod, had read The Supper of the Lamb, although it's very possible, it sold well, but you would definitely believe it, having watched it...
Evan Rosa: I feel like that's- I mean, I'm gonna have to have you back on at some point to talk about Robert Farrar Capon and Supper of the Lamb because it's, I mean, yeah, it deserves its own thing.
But, I mean, I think the interesting thing here that's kind of representative of- I mean, it was when I heard you were- I didn't know, I thought you might go at least reference it in the book, but it was my first thought when I heard you were doing a food book.
Alissa Wilkinson: Yeah. Well, I thought about doing- I wanted to do kind of a book that was an homage to that. There are people who do that, but I figured some people who'd never been read were first on my docket.
Evan Rosa: I think that's important, but I feel like so much of what food can- what food does to an individual and which is expressed in the faces of all those humble people of Jutland, Denmark is recognition and the ability of food to bring that so close to home for someone.
This famous general who somehow ends- and he's dressed to the nines, and he shows up in this humble coastal community, and the whole way through, he's remembering this meal he had at a famous Cafe Anglais in Paris. And he is- and he's commenting the whole way through, and he's almost giving those people permission to enjoy the meal.
And he's- and it comes through this kind of incredible experience where he's having an existential moment throughout the entire meal. They're kind of weirded out by it, at least at first, to me it seems they can't even taste it. They don't know what they're tasting. But they're almost educated in how to taste and thereby educated how to live a little bit more by this man who understands what it is to- how to taste things. And it's, and there's beautiful- I mean, it's mystical at some point. And I mean he- there's this like amazing moment where he quotes from the Psalms. It's recognition. And I think this is an important thing that you're doing in the text, like bringing recognition to these - some of them unknown, or at least they should be better known, better sung - the unsung heroes of women in food writing.
Alissa Wilkinson: Yeah. And also, I think there's that educative element, the idea of learning how to- I think what they all teach us is learning how to appreciate those things like that we encounter- those sort of ordinary things. So the ones who cooked were cooking ordinary food but helping sort of educate on how to pay attention.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Maybe we wrap with just one last question then I'll let you go. How has this changed the way you eat or think, this process of trying to gather a dinner party of revolutionary women, who do that revolutionary work in various ways, through the subversive practice of preparing, cooking, eating and celebrating a meal?
Alissa Wilkinson: Yeah, I feel like I took away a little bit of something from every one of them, whether it was in the chapter on Elizabeth David I'm talking about her kind of calling up memories of better times in her life while she's writing about food as a kind of a bulwark against the cold, or thinking about Ella Baker and how she believed that to have a just world, we have to perform the just world and that a lot of that work happens around dinner tables and all of these different things. So there were a lot of pieces, and in the end, it's funny, you kind of write a book and you don't- you kind of know what it is, but then you get to the end and you're like, "oh, that's what that was."
And I wrote it, and my husband helped me edit it. And then the day it came out, he, celebrating, and he pulled out the book and he read his favorite- a couple of his favorite bits, and then he was like, "I don't think I realized you were writing a book about hope." And I was like, "Oh, I don't think I realized that either."
So weirdly, I feel like what I actually walked away from the book with was less about food itself or entertaining itself, although those are all important elements, but more about how this feeds into a practice of hope. Especially in dark times, although not only in dark times, and what the elements of hope are.
They don't involve, like Hannah Arendt would teach us, they don't involve closing our eyes to reality, but they don't involve locking ourselves into little rooms and just tweeting furiously, right? They involve like meeting with friends and talking. They involve performing the just world. They involve, in Alice Toklas's case, being an artist when we approach our work and not being ashamed of that, as if it's not important enough for us to care about, even though it's just a platter of fish for lunch or something like that.
So- and I think all of those pieces really came together for me in this chapter on Elizabeth David, who in the midst of a very cold and horrible winter during the just post-war austerity period in England, she'd been living in the Mediterranean for eight years, she'd returned kind of miserable. English food - never the best cuisine on earth, but like really bad at the time. And she was remembering like Italy. So, she started, in kind of a state of, well what else am I going to do, eating like bone and gristle. She starts writing about Mediterranean food, and it's the catalyst for any- if you eat Italian food in England, it is in part because of people like Elizabeth David, and in part because of people who brought their cuisines with them and said, "you can eat this, and this isn't suspicious, this is good for you."
So that's like an act of hope, and I think thinking about writing as an act of hope was important while I was writing this book because of when I wrote it, and so when I have a dinner party now, which I've had a few, it's really kind of wonderful to have that reflection and that thing memorialized for me, that every dinner party is an act of hope.
Evan Rosa: That's awesome. Great way to end. Alissa, thanks for being on the show.
Alissa Wilkinson: Thank you, Evan.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Alissa Wilkinson. Production assistance by Liz Vukovic, Macie Bridge, and Kaylen Yun. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu, where you can find past episodes, articles, books, and other educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity. If you're new to the show, remember to hit subscribe in your favorite podcast app so you don't miss an episode. And to our loyal supporters and our faithful listeners, just a simple humble request: would you mind telling a friend or share an episode? Here's a few ideas for what you could do. You'd hit the share button for this episode in your app and text it to a friend or send an email or put it on your social feed. Or you can give us an honest rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
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