Dining Well On Woolf

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."

--Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Food is not a topic generally accepted on serious editorial pages. It is shunted aside for domestic crisis and political intrigue, pushed to the back of Sunday magazines and relegated to Wednesday supplements. Men of power and women of means do not deign to discuss the particulars of a succulent piece of quail or the lightness of a perfectly-cooked souffle, preferring instead to jabber about the stock market or their pet poodles. They do not understand the obsession of the "foodie," the person for whom the best of life can be summed up in one divine meal.

That said, I am convinced the Virginia Woolf, one of the greatest modernist novelists and feminist writers, will go down in history not for her perfectly shaped sentences but for her understanding of the subtleties of sauce and gravy.

In A Room of One's Own, Woolf contrasts two meals. The first, at a men's college, consists of soles in "the whitest cream," partridges "with all their retinue of sauces and salads," potatoes "thin as coins but not so hard," and a "confection which rose all sugar from the waves" for dessert. The meal produces a conviction in all those gathered that "We are all going to heaven and Vandyck is of the company--in other words, how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one's kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sunk among the cushions in the window-seat."

The second meal Woolf describes, at a women's college, consists of a "plain gravy soup," stringy beef "with its attendant greens and potatoes--a homely trinity," prunes "exuding a fluid such as might run in misers' veins who have denied themselves wine and warmth for eighty years and yet not given to the poor," custard to mitigate the prunes and biscuits so dry as to require jugs of water to wash them down. After this unsettling meal, she speculates, "We are all probably going to heaven, and Vandyck is, we hope, to meet us round the next corner--that is the dubious and qualifying state of mind that beef and prunes at the end of the day's work breed between them." The meal has shed no light on the meaning of life or even on what to do until bedtime.

Woolf draws attention to something that we often forget: Good conversation takes cultivating. It is not enough to meet at a dining hall at 6 p.m., fresh from section or work, and hope to launch into a deep, meaningful or even relaxed conversation. It is not enough to make do with lukewarm corn and limp pasta and hope to foster a night of insights. We must accept that on many nights, Dining Services, no matter how well-intentioned, will not present us with anything more than stringy prunes and plain gravy soup. We must conjure our own culinary havens.

The secret of a good dinner is that it creates time. Over a well-seasoned consomme or a ripe glass of wine, time becomes something to savor rather than to fight against. A cozy restaurant, or perhaps the common room to your kitchened suite, becomes the world for a few hours. Some music to fill the emptiness, some bread to soak up the sauce, and you will forget about the assignments due Monday. The conversation will flow. Aromas of basil and garlic will fill your senses. You will understand the benefits of social drinking.

So this weekend, as the urge to go out to dinner comes over you, consider what moves you. Is it steak, dripping in its own juice? It is chicken marsala with mushrooms? Is it soles in the whitest cream? Discover your passion, and follow it.

Even the staid Cambridge dons from A Room of One's Own understood the power of food to feed the minds of men. Feed your mind, your soul and your heart tonight with the gentle rapture of a good meal and good company. Harvard will be much better for it.

Sarah J. Schaffer's column appears on alternate Fridays.