Aside from the standard TV procedural jobs—doctor, lawyer, cop—no other profession has been as mined for cultural gold as the chef’s. The Bear, a show about a restaurant where the secret spice is trauma, has won every Emmy in sight. As I write this, Top Chef is filming season 21. (Oh, Canada!) We are inundated with chef content: reality shows, profiles, Youtube channels, memoirs, feature films, on and on. I’m part of this: my novel is about the life and death of a legendary chef (why yes, you can buy it wherever books are sold).
When I pitched this piece to this website, I figured it would be pretty easy to find great literary chefs. Instead, I found that actual working chefs are about as rare in fiction as realistic depictions of autopsies are on TV. (Another thing my book is about!) While there are a handful of recent novels about the restaurant industry, almost none of them are set in the kitchen. So to make this piece work I wound up expanding the frame to include the greatest cooks in literature—but don’t worry. They include, as with any decent restaurant, a bunch of absolute freaks.
Babette from “Babette’s Feast” in Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard by Isak Dinesen
Babette Hersant is the greatest chef—not cook, chef—in English literature, and it’s not close. But we won’t know it until the end of the short story (or flawless 1987 movie by Gabriel Axel). In 1871, two pious spinster sisters in the Norwegian town of Berlevaag open their door to find a “massive, dark, deadly pale woman with a bundle on her arm,” who faints the moment they lay eyes on her. She is bearing a letter from one of the sisters’ former suitor, and it identifies the woman as Babette, a refugee from the political violence then raging in Paris. The sisters take her in, and steadfastly, for 12 years, she dutifully cooks for them the bland, abstemious Danish food to which they are accustomed.
And then, one day, Babette comes into 10,000 francs. She insists on making the sisters and their community a feast. The sisters have deep misgivings about such a meal, as do the townsfolk, especially once they discover that there is a turtle involved. They all vow that whatever they are served, they will not let it seduce or delude them: “we will cleanse our tongues of all taste and purify them of all delight or disgust of the senses, keeping and preserving them for the higher things of praise and thanksgiving.” They sit down to dinner mute and full of holiness.
It takes one glass of wine for it all to unravel. Brilliantly, Dinesen doesn’t begin to describe the food, because to do so would be like trying to describe a Beethoven symphony. “Of what happened later in the evening nothing definite can here be stated. None of the 17 guests later on had any clear remembrance of it. They only knew that the rooms had been filled with a heavenly light, as if a number of small halos had blended into one glorious radiance.”
No one who eats this meal leaves untransformed; all are, for a few hours, enraptured. Then we discover the meal has cost Babette—who we discover was the chef at an illustrious Paris restaurant—all 10,000 francs. “So you will be poor now all your life, Babette?” asks a sister. Vehemently she replies, “Poor? I shall never be poor. A great artist, mesdames, is never poor.”
If we can let ourselves believe one great meal can change a person’s life, then maybe we can believe that, too.
Mickey from In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
It’s hard to imagine this children’s book about a little nudist—to my mind, the finest work of Maurice Sendak’s career—getting published today. It’s not just that Mickey is frontally naked half the book, it’s that it’s trippy as fuck, with absolutely no socially-relevant messages. Instead, Sendak produces a gorgeous color-soaked dream sequence in which Mickey falls out of his bed and clothes, landing in cake batter mixed by three gargantuan bakers who look like Oliver Hardy (of Laurel & Hardy). The cooks put him in the oven, and he bursts out, yelling, “I’m not the milk and the milk’s not me! I’m Mickey!” Then he jumps out and fashions an airplane out of bread dough, and flies up into the night, before diving—again, buck naked—into a milk bottle. It’s my kids’ favorite book, and still, after six years, my favorite to read them, and the mere fact that Mickey builds a fully-functioning propeller airplane out of bread dough more than justifies his inclusion on this list.
Hannibal Lecter from Red Dragon by Thomas Harris (followed by multiple sequels and TV/film adaptations)
Let’s pretend we can get Donald Trump’s sneering pronunciation of the name out of our head for a while, and focus instead on the actual character, for whom good manners are as important as they are to Paddington Bear. Of course, while Paddington handles people who forget their manners by giving them a Hard Stare, Lecter kills and eats them. But if that were all he did, he wouldn’t have spawned four decades of multimedia franchising. We keep coming back to Hannibal not because he turns people into food, but into cuisine. He gave us the most famous wine pairing in American culture, liver and Chianti. The most recent portrayal of Harris’s character, by Mads Mikkelsen, is food porn at its most exquisite. The show’s food stylist, Janice Poon, released a full cookbook of Hannibal’s recipes. Small wonder that our response to Hannibal’s killing sprees is usually: “let him cook.”
Tarquin Winot from The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester
If you like Hannibal, wait until you meet Tarquin. A supreme sybarite, he floats through life on a river of crème anglaise. The book is presented as Winot’s culinary manifesto, replete with seasonal menus and sophisticated glosses on Brillat-Savarin and Rabelais, all framed by his leisurely drive to his villa in sun-soaked Provence. I say “presented,” because it slowly becomes apparent that something much darker is going on, for Winot will not tolerate limits on his hedonism—any limits. To say much more would diminish the pleasure of this perfect novel, and invite the fury of Tarquin himself, which, trust me, you do not want.
Aida from Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang
Aida is one of the few working chefs in contemporary fiction (credit also to Bryan Washington’s Lot and Lillian Li’s Number One Chinese Restaurant), but Zhang quickly removes her from the hustle of the restaurant industry. Agricultural experiments by a Monsanto-style company in middle America have choked Earth’s atmosphere with smog, annihilating crops worldwide and forcing humans to rely on mung bean flour. The book kicks off when she is invited to cook in an “elite research community” of plutocrats in the Italian Alps, in a tech billionaire’s secret redoubt untouched by the smog. Zhang’s food writing is exquisite, soaked in sex and pleasure (“larks’ bones crunching in the molars like the detonation of a small star”), and made all the more so by the sinisterness of Aida’s environment. The book asks a question: How far will we go to fulfill our desires?
Stanley Tucci from “Stanley Tucci” by the Internet
“Hold on, buddy,” I hear you say, “Stanley Tucci is real. I have beheld him in culinary-themed films such as Julie and Julia and Big Night. Now you are just padding your word count.” You would be wrong. Sure, there is a Stanley Tucci who has a social security number and an IMDb profile. I am not talking about him. I am talking about the grand literary project that we of the internet have collectively undertaken, a project called “Stanley Tucci.”
This Stanley Tucci, who tells us he is proud of us while kneading our backs with his erotically-bare forearms, is our invention. We have adapted him, coopted him, as Hilary Mantel did for Thomas Cromwell; indeed, Stanley Tucci is the Cromwell of social-media-generated erotic fiction. Our work with him has already been adapted to the screen, in a CNN series where he swans about Italy, eating and gazing. He is a safe harbor for our horniest fantasies (mine involves him blurbing my novel), and yet, we share him freely with one another. Those fantasies, notably, involve him cooking for us and making us a negroni; he has that quality that all great fictional cooks, from Babette onward, possess: that somehow eating their food can heal us.
Jiro from Get Jiro! by Anthony Bourdain
Jiro, the titular character of Anthony Bourdain’s first graphic novel, Get Jiro!, sort of exists as a tandem bike for Bourdain’s id and superego: he is an ultradisciplined sushi chef, a man of few words and utter self-control, who also responds to people badgering him for California rolls by swacking off their heads right there at the counter. (Which seems like a clear cross-contamination hazard.)
Jiro can do this because he lives in a Los Angeles that is riven by a power struggle between two chef gangs (just go with it), one of which is run by a manifest clone of Alice Waters. I am not going to explain the story any more than that. It’s fun, go read it. But what’s fascinating is how dated this vision of a badass chef seems now—and by extension, how the world popularized by Tony Bourdain (whom I revered, and still deeply mourn) has transformed in the last decade.
Bourdain’s initial fame rested on his image of the chef as a chainsmoking feral being, a man (almost always a man) with no feeling in his fingers or his heart, a man who, were he not inside a kitchen slicing leeks, would be outside slitting throats. A mad god-king, the madder the better. It was seductive, it was exciting! We wanted to taste the crazy. A sushi chef so psychotically committed to his art that he would decapitate an unworthy customer? Obviously, we’d be lining up to try it.
My theory is that chefs are vehicles for our collective cultural ambition. Get Jiro! was released in 2012. The most famous chef alive was Gordon Ramsay, and the most lauded restaurants were those that chased perfection at any cost, preferably a high one. Even after the global financial crisis washed away the places that were coasting on Lehman Brothers first-years playing credit card roulette, it was still the era of the $1000 omakase and meals with the runtime of Götterdammerung.
A decade later, gastronomy in this country has evolved to a point where going to restaurants and traveling for food and watching cooking shows has become a substitute for culture, replacing things like going to the theater. So where the hell are the novels about it? In all of these works, cooks embody the culture that calved them. Babette is revealed to be a true Romantic, a communard who even in exile still finds a way to be an artist of pleasure amid the ascetic Norwegian Calvinists. In the Night Kitchen is published in 1970, when you could get away with putting a buck-naked kid in a book. The grasping hedonism of the 80s and 90s gave us Hannibal and Tarquin. Today, what do we get? The Bear—an encyclopedia of modern trauma. Name your personal damage, and you can find a member of the Berzatto family that represents it. I love the Bear, but what if you could create a chef who wasn’t a human panic attack? It’s long past time that the novel stepped up to the pass.
