Written between 1909 and 1922, In Search of Lost Time is one of the most important novels of the 20th century. It is also filled with delicious descriptions of food. In her Dining with Marcel Proust, Shirley King details the recipes of several elaborate dishes the French writer refers to in his monumental novel. There is fish and seafood, meat and game, breads, cakes and pastries, desserts and ices.
Proust’s Word Food and Visual Food
Marcel Proust was said to be a gourmet, indeed his love of food verged on gluttony. However, as he started writing In Search of Lost Time his relationship to food changed. In her Reading Boyishly Carol Mavor supports that Proust’s taste for words grew so much that it replaced food altogether. He eventually subsisted on a diet of coffee and croissants. Proust was eating the “shadows of foods he’d known and loved in the past”.
In the Search of Lost Time eating is an adventure of the mind. Food is a visual pleasure – it is as if it is tasted by the mind not the palate. As James Gilroy relates, for Proust food is a means to discover the essence of things beyond their external reality – “a key to the realm of beauty and truth”. He revels at the beauty of food and its hidden essence but rarely savours it.
Eating In Search of Lost Time
It is by eating a morsel of one of the “plump little cakes called petites madeleines” that Proust is able to recapture the past. In the renowned passage he writes: “Taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring... remain poised a long time... and bear... in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection”. It was from a taste of a piece of madeleine soaked in lime tea that all the volumes of the Search of Lost Time grew
Marcel Proust is eating with the eyes. Eating is a process that transforms the substance and appearance of food into something beyond food. Food is “a delight for the imagination and for the eye”, he writes.
The spiced beef jellies are transparent blocks of quartz; the asparagus with their celestial hues exquisite creatures which assumed vegetable form; the potatoes Japanese ivory buttons; the chocolate cake gracious and sociable, its brown slopes bastions of the palace of Darius; the cherries in the boat-shaped tartlets are beads of corals changed into something precious by the azure sky; the ices votive pillars or Venetian churches; the oranges yield the secret life of their ripening growth to the one who drinks them.
Cooking
James Gilroy has commented that Proust appreciated deeply the achievements of cooks. An important character in the Search for Lost Time is Françoise, the family cook. The food she laid daily on the table was so varied, so delicious, so visually pleasing. It reflected the rhythm of seasons and the incidents of daily life.
Françoise was the Michelangelo of the kitchen. Her dishes were impossible to resist - her chocolate cream light and fleeting as an occasional piece of music into which she had poured the whole of her talent. Françoise was a colonel with all the forces of nature for her subalterns.
Proust Related Article
- Marcel Proust in His Bedroom: Writing In Search of Lost Time
Sources
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vols. I-III, Vintage 1996, 2000, 2002.
James P. Gilroy, “Food, Cooking, and Eating in Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu”, Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 33, no.1 (spring 1987), pp. 98-109.
Carol Mavor, Reading Boyishly, Duke University Press 2008.
Shirley King, Dining with Proust: A Practical Guide to French Cuisine of the Belle Epoque, Thames & Hudson London, 1979.
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