An Insatiable Appetite

Here’s a book to relish, savour and devour. I would say digest, too, but for reasons which will soon become evident, that may be easier said than done. There is a lot – and I mean a lot – of eating and drinking to get through and, for today’s readers at least, the quantities alone, never mind the richness of the dishes consumed, and the gallons of wine, apéritifs and digestifs which accompany them, propel us into territory clearly marked ‘Completely Indigestible’. Happily, that is the very opposite of the book’s prose, which is light, delicious and verging on the addictive.

I only came across A. J. Liebling recently, during a tour of France with my wife in the ancient Bristol. The mid-twentieth century motoring vibe, evoking the time when Liebling was at the peak of his powers during a long career at the New Yorker, together with the daily gastronomic treats awaiting us in la France profonde, seemed the perfect setting in which to explore this enigmatic and overlooked writer. Born in New York in 1904, the son of a Jewish immigrant from Austria who had done well as a furrier, Liebling adopted an irreverent approach to formal education. He was booted out of Dartmouth for missing chapel, then did a stint at Columbia Journalism School, which he later summarized in a chapter of his memoir, The Wayward Pressman (1947), called ‘How to Learn Nothing’. In 1926, his admirably forbearing, or perhaps that should be indulgent, father agreed to fund a year at the Sorbonne. But in France, as in America, the young Liebling took little interest in his university, embarking instead on an informal gastronomic education which takes centre stage in Between Meals, his memoir of the wonderland that was Paris in the 1920s. Here he learnt far more than he ever would have done within the narrow syllabus of the Sorbonne: about food, wine, sex, love, life. In later decades, he became known for his reporting on the Second World War, available in assorted collections, for his writing on boxing (The Sweet Science: see SF no. 74), American politics (The Earl of Louisiana) and, more generally, for his thirty-odd years at the New Yorker. But Between Meals is all about the food, and the memories of a much older man, celebrated in this, his last book, published in 1962, just before his death the following year at the age of only 59. Given all his hilariously counter-intuitive and devil-may-care pronounce ments about the health benefits of what will appear to most readers as reckless indulgence, that early death from heart and kidney failure is tinged with gallows humour, a frisson for those of us who are not scoffing and swigging our way, as the gluttonous Liebling did, into an early grave. Think of it, perhaps, as the literary precursor of La Grande Bouffe. ‘The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite,’ Liebling begins. So far, so reasonable. But it becomes very clear, very quickly, that his ideas of what constitutes a good appetite may vary significantly from our own. Take, as one example, his account of a lunch with his friend and mentor Yves Mirande, the womanizing playwright and gastronome, in a restaurant opened by Madame G, one of the Frenchman’s protégées. The lunch began with a half-dozen oysters, which Mirande opened himself and served with little rounds of buttered bread. T hen there was a pâté de foie gras, which we ate with the same bread, and then a slice of ham from Bayonne, which Mirande had brought back from a trip to the South. After that came a hot sausage in crust, and then a fillet of pike in a rose-coloured sauce Nantua, made with crayfish butter. The pièce de résistance was a saddle of lamb larded with anchovies, accompanied by artichokes on foie gras. We had cheeses after that – Camembert, Pont l’Evêque, and Roquefort – and finally some figs. With the oysters we drank a bottle of white Bordeaux; with the pâté and the ham, a bottle of red; with the sausage and the pike, champagne; and with the lamb, more red Bordeaux. Monty Python fans may find themselves picturing Mr Creosote. ‘No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures; no ascetic can be considered reliably sane,’ Liebling writes. And again: ‘Mens sana in corpore sano is a contradiction in terms, the fantasy of a Mr Have-your-cake-and-eat-it.’ When, in later life, his octogenarian friend Mirande follows his doctor’s orders and goes on a strict diet, Liebling is convinced that it is ‘the fatal trap of abstinence’ – rather than the decades of gourmandizing that preceded it – that has brought about his ruinous physical decline. Between Meals is a love letter to a Paris that no longer existed by the time Liebling was memorializing it. It is not the Hemingway Paris of pleasure-seeking expatriates, but that of a young man discovering the city for himself as he embarks on his own journey of self-discovery, surrounded by Frenchmen and women, rather than his fellow Americans, with one notable exception: the newspaperman Waverley Root, later the culinary adventurer and author of The Food of France. This is the Paris of dusk-to-dawn routs and romance, of larks and langoustes, truffles and Tripes à la mode de Caen, of prostitutes nursing cheap, post-prandial consommations in the cafés along Boulevard Saint-Michel, of memories of belle époque feasting on the eve of the Great War. Liebling would return to the city many times, as a correspondent on the eve of war in 1939, on the liberation of the city in 1944, and regularly in the postwar years. One of the unexpected stars of this mouthwatering little volume is Tavel, the robust rosé wine, not widely known to British drinkers, which Liebling is forever quaffing and eulogizing. Here, in one of several passages explaining how and why rich people fail to learn what constitutes good cuisine, he imagines how a wealthy diner would be much more likely to order a bottle of Pommard than a Tavel from the wine list simply because it was more expensive: He would then never have learned that a good Tavel is better than a fair-to-middling Pommard – better than a fair-to- middling almost anything, in my opinion . . . A man who is rich in his adolescence is almost doomed to be a dilettante at table. This is not because all millionaires are stupid but because they are not impelled to experiment. I confess I have yet to try a Tavel, but the Liebling recommendation will soon send me to Yapp Brothers, one of the few UK suppliers, who offer an example with ‘a deep, brick red robe, diverse summer berry scents and a rich palate of redcurrants and raspberries offset by fresh acidity’. I hope our gourmand friend would approve. In Paris Liebling was by necessity an adventurer, often impoverished while waiting for the next paternal remittance to arrive. The experience convinced him that there was no direct correlation between price and quality. One could spend a lifetime in the most expensive restaurants in Paris without learning that there are plenty more fish to treasure than sole, turbot, salmon, trout, the Mediterranean rouget and loup de mer. How about fresh herrings, sardine sauce moutarde, colin froid mayonnaise, the conger eel en matelote, the whiting en colère (‘his tail in his mouth, as if contorted with anger’), the small freshwater fish of the Seine and the Marne, ‘fried crisp and served en buisson’, the humble skate and the dorade? Whatever he is writing about, there are basketfuls of bons mots and oodles of wisdom and humour. He begins with a few lines about Proust and his madeleines. ‘In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus,’ he recalls regretfully, ‘it is the world’s loss that he did not have a heartier appetite.’ He remembers a dear friend deploring his declining wine cellar: ‘Last week I had to offer my publisher a bottle that was too good for him, simply because there was nothing between the insulting and the superlative.’ In a rare moment of doubt in his early fifties, Liebling checks in to a ‘slimming prison in Switzerland, but I was suffering from only temporary insanity’. The excesses are swiftly resumed. Looking ahead from the vantage point of one who had revelled in the last gasp of Paris in its glorious, decadent heyday, he fears the impending ‘Dark Time’ of gastronomy: ‘Chinese haute cuisine is unlikely to improve under the austere regime of Mao.’ A reliable indication of a good restaurant, he argues, is the sight of ‘priests eating with priests’ and prostitutes with prostitutes – Liebling calls them ‘sporting girls’. One of them, a former lover called Angèle, receives her own affectionate chapter, the last in the book, a dreamy reminiscence dripping in an already-lost-forever atmosphere which reminded me of Alain-Fournier. The author of the introduction in my Penguin Modern Classics edition is the late James Salter (see SF no. 85), who slightly damns Liebling with faint praise, recognizing his ‘great talent’ and accusing him of not having made the best use of it. But in his judgement on Between Meals, Salter is spot on. Between Meals is a ‘luminous account’ which lives on, long after it was written, radiating warmth and good humour. A century later, we marvel at Liebling’s insatiable appetite, for food and wine of course, but for much more than that. This is the joy of living distilled into a small book, a celebration of life itself.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 88 © Justin Marozzi 2025