Michèle Roberts: The Art of Writing a Cookbook
Lauren Elkin interviews the Booker-nominated novelist Michèle Roberts about writing her first cookbook. Sketches by Michèle Roberts.
Good morning and welcome to Vittles. This week, the writer and translator Lauren Elkin interviews the Booker-nominated novelist Michèle Roberts about writing French Cooking for One, food in feminist communes, and the worst kind of dinner guest.
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Michèle Roberts: The Art of Writing a Cookbook
Lauren Elkin interviews the Booker-nominated novelist Michèle Roberts about writing her first cookbook. Sketches by Michèle Roberts.
Michèle Roberts, the French-and-British author of sixteen critically acclaimed novels, including the Booker-shortlisted Daughters of the House, writes often about food, cooking, and feminism. ‘She breaks egg yolks into a bowl,’ writes Roberts in her 1987 novel The Book of Mrs Noah, ‘whips them with sugar and flour, boils them with milk. Beats and beats with her wooden spoon to remove lumps. Lumpy female bodies. Lumpy bellies and breasts. Eggs breaking and splattering, warm mess of sweetness on the sheets, warm flow of sweat and blood. We can’t have that in our nice Anglican chapel. Only male chefs please.’
It makes sense, then, that Roberts has finally written a cookbook. French Cooking for One, published this month, looks back to her Normandy grandparents’ kitchen, recalling the way they were able to ‘produce good food speedily, confidently, thriftily’. Roberts’s culinary register includes words like pleasure, celebrate, cheer up, sensuous, luxurious, and flair, as she guides the solo cook through everyday French recipes with wit and imagination. We met in her South London flat over coffee for a rollicking, wide-ranging conversation about recipes and embodiment, her writing process, cooking in feminist communes, and the meaning of appetite.
—Lauren Elkin
LE: How do you think about the difference between writing recipes versus writing fiction?
MR: Well, it’s about length and narrative. I think I was helped composing that cookery book because the narrative was, I grew up partly in France and I’m remembering these people I loved who taught me to cook and here’s some ideas. But you have to use your imagination when you cook; that’s the link with writing fiction.
I think perhaps writing a recipe is very close to writing a poem, which is about choosing words and ingredients and things. The right thing in the right place and so on, the time, the narrative.
Or perhaps a recipe is like composing a magic spell to give yourself pleasure or consolation or ideas. It comes into fairy tales a lot, doesn’t it? You’re given an apple to eat or a potion to drink and something happens, or somebody makes a potion and good things can happen, like you fall in love.
LE: You write so beautifully about sensuality and embodiment and cooking. For instance:
The philosopher Julia Kristeva remarks somewhere that the rapturous pleasures of reading are a form of jouissance. So are the pleasures of eating. Sex and poetry and anchovies and friendship and pasta = delight.
How do you think about cooking and thinking together? What kind of thinking is cooking?
MR: The thinking required in cooking is just being very attentive to the ingredients and to certain techniques. I mean things like if you’re gently sautéing some vegetables, you splash in a bit of water to loosen it up and then if you leave it, of course the water will dry up and the thing will scorch. Whereas if you don’t put the water in, you just keep tossing it, because it’s oil, it just keeps going. So there’s a sort of, basic chemistry that you need to know.
I’m not going to use that terrible word, mindfulness [laughs], but it’s something about alertness and attentiveness. It’s almost like a bodily thinking – your hand learns to do things. You learn how to hold a frying pan to toss a pancake or you learn how to hold a knife to scrape something or to chop something.
It returns you to the body in a way – that thinking [when cooking] is very, very physical. And it’s a bit like art, I think, where you don’t just pick up a brush and, or a pen and think about marks. It’s you, your arm and your hand. It’s your whole physical self that interacts with the material.
I think cooking is very like that. It’s a disposable art that involves bodily thinking that’s not intellectual, but there’s an intellectual level to it – if I have the oven on too hot, it will burn.
LE: Yeah.
MR: And I know how easily I can make mistakes if I’m not really paying attention, or if I’m in a bad mood. Like when I was younger and I was married disastrously to this architectural historian. We lived in Italy and he was always inviting these fantastically grand art historians home for impromptu supper and partly I was very angry that I hadn’t been given notice and partly I was very anxious because they were all gourmets and I would mess up and I would cook really really badly. Whereas when I cook for friends whom I really love, I want to give them something beautiful, and so I really pay attention because I love them and I want to give to them.
And I’ve realised cooking for yourself, you’ve got to treat yourself like a dear friend. Not like a horrible, posh, uninvited guest.
LE: And it wasn’t a product of being inexperienced at that point?
MR: No, I think it was unconscious rage.
LE: Ha!
MR: The marriage did not last. I escaped after four years. But the nice thing was I was living in Italy and I was taught to cook by a Venetian friend, and he just taught me, well it was Italian cooking, but this thing about discrimination: You don’t need black pepper in that. Why are you putting garlic in that? What is this red pepper doing in a ragu? And he was so good, very stern, but we always drank while we cooked. And he just made me see that, again, and pay attention. Think about what you’re doing in this sensual, unconscious way.
LE: What are your earliest memories of cooking?
MR: My French mother married an Englishman and made her life in England, but I learned to cook from my Londoner grandmother who came to live with us when her husband died, because Mum was a full-time teacher. Mum cooked for us when we were little, but it was – I mustn’t be rude about my poor mama, but she was trying to cook food that she thought English people liked, such as little lamb chops with lots of gristle and potatoes and cabbage.
Nana would cook amazing old-fashioned English dishes. She made us cakes when we got home from school and puddings for Sunday lunch and just liked us hanging around with her, so it was that thing of watching. Stirring and watching and being chatted to. And of course trying things that tasted lovely and thinking, I want to know how to make this. And then at the same time, going on holiday to Normandy in the summer holidays, and hanging around in the kitchen with my aunt, who came home at the weekend from her job and cooked.
I hope I’m not sentimentalising, because French culture was very gendered in ways that were quite oppressive of women, obviously. But there was a plus side to this idea of the feminine goddess in the kitchen, who was a very ordinary person in a checked overall. She wasn’t Nigella Lawson – that was the point, she was an ordinary woman. And it’s just something that women did. And so, as a girl, you hung around and watched and learned. And I loved it because there was this gang of women on Sundays, aunties and whoever, all of us, cooking. It was really, really lovely just being in this gang of women. Because the men all had to sit in the little parlour with the priest and sip glasses or something and say, Oh, mon père, quel joli serment aujourd’hui [Oh, Father, what a lovely sermon you gave today]. Oh mon dieu, c’était formidable [My goodness, it was wonderful]. And monsieur le curé again, Ah oui, je suis très doué pour ça [Oh, yes, I have a real gift for it]. So I thought the women had the better of it.
LE: Let’s talk about feminism and cooking and domesticity. I didn’t cook for a long time, I think because I’m very much a product of America in the nineties, when home cooking was looked down on – I remember when Bill Clinton was running for president and Hillary said something like, I’m not the kind of mother who’s going to stay home and bake cookies. Or like Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City who kept her shoes in her oven.
And so I had this very strong sense of not even wanting to know how to cook – I should add, I don’t feel this way anymore. As a lifetime, lifelong, very strong feminist, what has your relationship been to cooking and domesticity?
MR: Well, the interesting thing about the 1970s was that I lived in communes. Sometimes they were single-sex and sometimes we had male lovers living with us and we had to eat and we were all poor. So, we had to cook. And some people cooked terribly badly because they felt really ambivalent about cooking and femininity and domesticity. And other people, like me, coming out of a tradition of cooking, enjoyed it and just did it. I understood the dilemmas and the contradictions, because we used to sit around very earnestly discussing all that stuff. About women’s unpaid labour being part of the gross national product and if you costed the unpaid hours that women put into the kitchen they would be worth thousands and thousands per year.
In one house there was this delightful woman who cooked for us before we went on demonstrations. And she made this terrible dish that was scrambled eggs with bran in. Because she thought it was fortifying. So we had scrambled eggs with kind of raw bran. And then off we went on the demo to fight the National Front, and the funny thing about that was that we’d been infiltrated by the special branch. There was this undercover cop living with us as Nina’s lover. So this poor evil cop had to eat scrambled eggs with bran and then go out and face his comrades on the line. So I thought he’d got everything that was coming to him.
LE: Oh yeah.
MR: I suppose I identified what you’re talking about with a certain strain of feminism, that rather meanly, I think, we used to call capitalist feminism, that it was about having shoulder pads and succeeding in a male world and, and it often of course meant that some other woman did the cooking. Or an immigrant man who was very badly paid, so more contradictions. So I look back and see many conflicts around it all, but I found my way through because of this love of cooking.
LE: To shift from cooking for friends to cooking for one: how is it different, apart from the quantities are smaller?
MR: Well, I can’t speak for everybody, but it’s as though I’ve found I’ve got to recognise my own appetite, recognise my own desire for pleasure, which is incredibly strong, and just allow myself to give myself pleasure every day by cooking something nice for supper or lunch. And while I’ve been praising the French culture I grew up in, there was also a puritanical streak in it, almost as though women mustn’t openly enjoy themselves too much because it was dangerous and dodgy. And they mustn’t be greedy and they mustn’t get fat and they must nurture others.
But nurturing yourself was not something you were taught. So again, contradictions. And I suppose I learned to cook well for myself in [the writings of] Colette. She talks about the spaces between male lovers in your life as the white spaces. She says the woman has to tell her own story. In her time [the early–mid twentieth century], when you were with a man, the story could be a conventional traditional one, the kind which was already told by male writers, so all you had to do was sort of be an object in the story. But what Colette is saying is that in the gaps between love affairs, nobody else is telling your story – you’ve got to tell it, because you’re living it. You’re the subject. I think that helped me realise that I could choose how to live. It’s about existential freedom somehow. Well, that sounds a bit grandiose.
LE: That’s what we’re here for!
MR: I am really driven by the desire for pleasure. The more pleasure the better, in lots of different forms of it. And cooking is part of that, really. The incredible pleasure there is in eating. It goes back to the breast, I mean it must do, and the rapture that a baby feels at the mother's breast. That’s the first rapture in life. So every time you cook yourself a lovely meal, even if it’s just, an exquisitely fried egg on an exquisite piece of toast, I think you are sort of, recognising your baby self and saying, Hey, you can be nurtured.
LE: That’s a wonderful way to think about it. Do you cook every day?
MR: At least once a day. If I’m working at home, I do. I do the French idea of lunch, which isn’t always for me a cooked lunch, but it would be a salade composée. And if I’m hungry, I might have more than that. And then at night, I often want to go out, because if I’ve been working at home all day, I don’t want to be at home at night as well.
LE: What’s a useful post-divorce dish?
MR: Oh, well it is the dish I mentioned near the start of the book – Les Délicieuses [fried balls of whipped egg white and Gruyère], because it’s so sort of funny and comic and over-the-top that it just cheers you up if you’re sad about getting divorced or even if you’re feeling a bit lonely or even actually celebratory. It’s a ridiculous dish – that’s what its charm is. It’s so, so good. I would recommend it to anybody post-divorce.
LE: What’s your philosophy of leftovers?
MR: To me, it’s the most creative part of cooking almost. Because you just don’t know what you’re going to do and you look at whatever it is and then you invent something.
LE: Any tips for doing that better?
MR: I would always use the leftovers the next day, then there’s some continuity. Then of course perhaps it is that the initial dish gives me great pleasure, so the leftovers are of something that I really loved and enjoyed. So it’s not like rubbish or junk – like the pure and the impure. It’s potentially already something delicious. I think that’s the trick.
And then, normally I just make an omelette and put [the leftovers] in as a filling, or make a soup. In French cookery books there’s a chapter called ‘L’Art D’Accommoder les Restes’ [‘The Art of Preparing Leftovers’] – I was brought up by people who’d been through the war with very little food and having to make the best of it and everything got used so it’s just normal.
LE: You have to see it as having the potential to be something else.
MR: Yes.
LE: So it’s magic, really.
MR: It gives you this feeling of, Ooh, I’ve made something magically good.
LE: Yeah.
MR: I think that’s the real trick, genuinely. It’s not just, Can you make something good? but: Can you make something good the next day? It’s this urge to create something. It’s thrilling.
LE: It’s also a very important ethical commitment, in the sense of eliminating waste and making sure that we’re eating the things we buy.
MR: Yeah. Absolutely. And it’s very interesting, I think, because, I think we both recognise that putting constraints on yourself can work with writing. Like the [Georges] Perec idea: write something without an ‘e’ in it. So, if you’re thinking, I’m going to make such a dish and you open the fridge and you haven’t got the stuff, but you’ve got other things, what can I make? So you haven’t got a courgette, but you’ve got an aubergine.
LE: There’s this wonderful last paragraph where you say, if you cherish yourself and your appetites, you can’t go wrong. Do you want to develop that a bit?
MR: It’s very much coming out of having been a Catholic. We were taught to distrust appetite, to think it was bad and wrong, and not to understand that it’s the beginning of love.
And then you look at little babies and they put things in their mouths because they want to find out what they’re made of, or experiment, experience. And so it’s very, very early and basic and deep in human beings, I think, that appetite is how we enter the world.
So, if you cherish your appetites, you’re open to the world. You live more fully if you’re open. And that can include feeding yourself. And testing out new things and so on and so on. Appetite is wonderful because it takes you forward. Makes you engage with other people’s recipes or what they’ve said or just with items on a market stall or memories of Colette. Appetite is fundamental.
Editors’ note: this interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Credits
Michèle Roberts has always written about food and cookery in her novels and short stories and is a former food columnist for the New Statesman. Half-French and half-English, she learned to cook at her grandparents’ home in Normandy. She is the author of sixteen highly acclaimed novels, including Daughters of the House (shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction). She is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. As a republican, she turned down an OBE in 2003.
Lauren Elkin is a French and American writer and translator, whose books include Scaffolding, Art Monsters, and Flâneuse. She lives in London.
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Oooh what an utterly delicious interview! I identify with what Michele says about the desire for pleasure. Feel as if I am emerging from a lovely warm bath. Thank you!
I’d pre-ordered this, so when it arrived I’d forgotten all about it and it felt like a present! I wish more cookery books were in this format (pocket, or handbag size) so that they might come with you out shopping, or to read easily on the bus. Sadly the index numbers at the beginning don’t correlate with the actual chapters. A lovely “leftovers” idea is to tuck away privily before serving a little cooked pasta + sauce; if you don’t think ahead it’ll be eaten! This makes a lovely omelette filling. Fried breadcrumbs lift a dish into the sublime category.