Twilight of the Snobs

The American Century? That — more precisely — was the century when the people of the United States, many of us descendants of immigrants from Europe, reckoned with the glories of European culture and society and made them our own. So it was in abstract art, in Roman Catholicism, in design – and in food and what is called (I can’t use the term without using distancing punctuation) “cookery.”

Luke Barr – an editor with Travel + Leisure, and a great-nephew of the eminent food writer M.F.K. Fisher – tells the cookery part of the story in Provence, 1970: an account, drawn from his grandmother’s journals and much else, of the years in the sixties and early seventies when Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, Simone Beck, and others spent time together and proximately in France, reckoned with the legacy of French cooking they purveyed in America, and began “to move away in decisive fashion from their France fixation.”

They were all contending with what amounted to a philosoophical problem: a question of taste and style and authenticity, and specifically about how those qualities were expressed in food and cooking – things they all cared deeply about. What was it, exactly, that they were doing? Teaching Americans to cook French food? No, that wasn’t it, that had never been it. Child had always known that what she did was teach people to be fearless, unintimidated, to try and if necessary to try again, to cook, to taste, to enjoy, to have fun – although she herself had been having ever less fun with Beck. That was going to change. And M.F., too, had not simply been celebrating French food and hedonism all these years; she’d been writing about something more essential, about how to live, to find pleasure in the moment. But was she living too much in the past? She was determined to find out.

The turn of the decade from the sixties to the seventies, a time of lost illusions in so many areas, was for them “the moment of American disillusionment with the sentimental glories of France” they had known as expatriates and apprentices at midcentury.

It was a beautiful world, preserved in the amber of fiction and memory. A world of faded aristocrats and remembered vintages, of boat trains and small family-run hotels that never changed, of excursions to Switzerland and meals in French restaurants where the sole meunière was always impeccably fresh and perfectly cooked. The ethos and aesthetic of the period had survived all the way through the 1960s, a worldview held together with wit and irony, tone and inflection, unimpeachable taste, and finally, at bottom, enforced by the logic of money and privilege.

But the mood had changed. The easy authority of the cultured and discerning was not so easy anymore.

“This” – Barr puts it so memorably that you suspect he originally used the expression as his book’s title – “was the twilight of the snobs.”

• 22 December 2013