Under the White Mulberry Tree: Food and Artistry in Cather’s Orchards

Food in Cather’s work has begun to receive the attention it warrants. Paralleling the development of literary food studies or the examination of food’s multivalent significance in works of literature, Cather’s body of work, given its frequent engagement with culinary themes, has served as a point of interest for many critics. Most prominently, scholars have explored the significance of immigrant foods in Cather’s oeuvre, often linking her celebration of “ethnic” foods—such as Bohemian kolaches and German cakes—to a broader anti-Americanization argument.[1] Elsewhere, critics have examined Cather’s novels in relation to pivotal culinary histories, such as early twentieth-century developments in agriculture, the pure food movement, and attitudes toward alcohol consumption and temperance.[2]

Despite crucial inroads made by these scholars, there remains much work to be done in exploring food in Cather’s fiction. In particular, the relationship between Cather’s artistic philosophy and her ideas about food, cooking, and eating remains relatively unexplored, yet can potentially lead to a new understanding about Cather’s artistic praxis and the role that food, specifically as linked to the senses, plays within her artistry. In this essay, I connect Cather’s relationship to producing literature to her ideas about cooking as an art form and suggest that Cather valued the same things in good cooking that she valued in good writing—simplicity, authenticity, and the creation of indefinable pleasure. Likewise, I begin to identify within Cather’s fiction the function of culinary imagery with specific attention to the sensory effect of this imagery and its ability to produce what she famously identified as her goal in “The Novel Démeublé”: “the inexplicable thing not named.” Indeed, Cather’s utilization of culinary imagery in her writings precisely allows her work to produce moments of the intangible by invoking smell, taste, and other sensations that food has the potential to elicit.

Given Cather’s extensive oeuvre and her copious references to food, eating, and cooking, it is imperative to narrow one’s focus. In conceiving this essay, I was struck by the emotive and sensory significance of orchards in Cather’s fiction and will thus use two of her novels that feature orchards—O Pioneers! and Sapphira and the Slave Girl—to analyze how Cather utilizes food.

Orchards are rich spaces because they are the manifestation of human intervention in the natural landscape, and they produce food to be smelled, tasted, and consumed. Scholars have already begun to examine the significance of orchards in Cather’s fiction as sites of culinary and cultural exchange, as well as spaces of creative generation and economic prosperity for female characters. Ántonia Shimerda and Alexandra Bergson cultivate their own orchards. The trees themselves are living testament to women’s endurance, potentially symbolizing, in turn, the success of specific immigrant groups over others.[3] Likewise, as Esther M. Lopez points out, despite the potential celebratory cultural melding that Bishop Latour’s future apricot orchard represents, other culinary scenes in Death Comes for the Archbishop reveal Cather’s own “ambivalence about . . . changes occurring in the Southwest” (89). In these ways, orchards emerge as places of contradictory ethnic and economic significance—also intimately connected to the body and the proliferation of bodies and the melding or clashing of cultures. Less so explored, however, is how orchards, as places of cultural, creative, and culinary import, help express Cather’s artistic philosophy of simplification and “the inexplicable thing not named.”

CATHER, FOOD, AND ART

Cather’s artistic philosophy in “The Novel Démeublé,” published in 1922, emphasizes the importance that young writers move away from the act of cataloging in fiction—or “mere verisimilitude”—and instead toward “[presenting] their scene by suggestion” (6). Partially a stab at the mores of American literary realism and partially a celebration of Tolstoy, Cather asserts that the creation of “the thing not named” is “the over-tone divined by the ear but not heard by it . . . that gives high quality to the novel or drama, as well as to poetry itself” (6). In other words, a novel draws its artistic value from the writer’s ability to relay emotion and meaning on the page without explicitly naming the emotion or sensation itself. Meanwhile, Cather also emphasizes the fact that such a narrative effect results from the process of simplification, of throwing “all the furniture out of the window” (6), so to speak. Put differently, the novel should not be “crowded with physical sensations”; rather, the sensations themselves should be fused to the characters’ selves, creating complete beings. Implied throughout “The Novel Démeublé” is Cather’s tendency to value this notion of “simplification,” meanwhile denigrating writers’ attempts to ostentatiously draw together a series of observations just for the sake of doing so.

Cather again echoes this artistic philosophy in her of-quoted introduction to Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, published in 1925. In one passage, Cather claims that a great story “must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure. A quality that one can remember without the volume at hand, can experience over and over again in the mind but can never absolutely define, as one can experience in memory a melody, or the summer perfume of a garden” (xiv–xv). This intangibility is much like “the over-tone divined”—it is a product of the artist’s ability to show without telling, to express without saying. This philosophy is wrapped up in the subtlety of the senses—an auditory trace picked up by the ears, the olfactory residue of plants and flowers, both crystallized in the mind and memory in precise yet indefinable ways.

Furthermore, Cather’s addition of the notion of “pleasure” in this excerpt resonates even more forcefully with the ability of the senses, specifically, to illicit a particular type of emotional response in the reader. According to Cather, a piece of literature written expertly should be able to imprint on the “sensitive” reader’s mind to such a degree that they can recall the sensations it elicits without the text in front of them. Like one’s ability to hear, to smell, and to see, one’s ability to taste (or imagine taste) would have been crucial to the creation of this type of intangible sensation or the “inexplicable thing not named”—such as recalling the smell of a roast cooked in a particular way by one’s grandmother, or imagining the fresh taste of cherries in the spring plucked from a specific tree, each one in its own way unique. Indeed, food in particular often conveys subtle and enigmatic emotions and experiences that cannot be captured in any other way in literature and is likewise tied inextricably to the body.

Cather openly linked food and cooking to art, pleasure, and the senses. In a 1921 interview with the Lincoln Sunday Star, Cather proclaimed, “Art is a matter of enjoyment through the five senses. . . . Esthetic appreciation begins with the enjoyment of the morning bath. It should include all the activities of life. There is real art in cooking a roast just right, so that it is brown and dripping and odorous and ‘saignant’” (qtd. in Bohlke 47). Throughout this interview, Cather expounds upon her artistic philosophy, which emphasizes the relationship between the enjoyment of the culinary realm (as well as life’s other everyday sensations and sensory pleasures) and a writer’s ability to absorb and re-create the realities of life on the page. According to Cather, the enactment of this philosophy should then presumably lead to a more authentic art that can adequately capture one’s complex existence on the page.“Art must spring out of the fullness and richness of life,” Cather states later in this same interview.

There is ample evidence that Cather respected cookery as a legitimate and worthwhile art form and believed that food—and eating— deserved respect. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant once recalled: “Sharing a good meal with [Cather] remained . . . one of life’s serious pleasures. Conversation must never divert one from the quality of the food on the plate and the wine in the glass” (51). Indeed, throughout Cather’s correspondence, her views about the value of food and good cooking and cooking’s status as a form of artistry also frequently appear in relation to her longtime French maid Josephine Bourda, whose father ran a restaurant and who worked for Cather and Edith Lewis from the 1910s through the 1930s. In 1921 Cather wrote of Josephine in a letter,“Nobody can take care of me and the house as well as [Josephine] can. She knows just how I like things done,—and she too, is an artist in her way; most French people are. She respects my work, and I respect hers.” Not only does Cather identify cooking (and housekeeping, by proxy) as an art form in this passage but she also compares Josephine’s form of artistry to her own highly valued career as a writer. By writing “she too” and likening her work to Josephine’s, Cather subtly elevates her French maid’s daily practices in the home and in the kitchen to the level of serious artistic profession.

Strikingly, Cather’s emphasis on the artistic practice of simplification in “The Novel Démeublé” reappears, in a parallel register, in commentary about Josephine’s cooking techniques. On December 10, 1921, Cather wrote to Irene Miner Weisz, explaining that Josephine “gets us a delicious French dinner every night—the kind of food that is so simple, so honest, so truly elegant because it is not over-rich and showy.” Cather’s Francophilia aside, she once again characterizes Josephine as an artist and this time specifically through her cookery. Unlike the “over-furnished” fictional rooms of novels that fail to capture life at its core, food that is “over-rich and showy,” according to Cather, similarly lacks elegance, authenticity, and artistry. Indeed, Cather’s description and use of these terms ascribes a certain clarity of vision on Josephine’s part—an artistic vision that understands how to bring into being the wholeness of life in the practice of cookery and is not simply a pale imitation of a recipe or a needlessly ornate collection of ingredients.

Throughout her fiction and correspondence, Cather tends to characterize good food in terms of its simplicity and even its honesty, suggesting that her ideas about what constituted excellent literature carried over into her ideas about the aesthetics and quality of food. Cather favors and openly praises foods that are simple, whole, and unprocessed, foods that innately carry with them emotional, familial, and cultural significance. Like her emphasis on Josephine’s cooking techniques and artistry in the kitchen, Cather often notes the value of particular foods and ingredients, manifesting itself in the excitement of receiving fresh butter or the disappointment of not being able to get an “honest” beefsteak anywhere in New York City due to wartime food shortages in the 1940s. Food is also often a polarizing subject for Cather: while jam, roasted chicken, and vintage wines all appear frequently as objects of praise and delight, fish and especially lobster receive ample derision. In a 1945 letter to her brother Roscoe, Cather emphatically states, “I think God made a mistake when he created fish at all!” Nonetheless, the variety of ways in which Cather engages with food in her letters and in her fiction is striking: her work displays an ongoing emphasis on food as an object of pleasure, distaste, aesthetic significance, and cultural value.

In one memorable series of correspondence, Cather wrote repeatedly to Roscoe and his wife, praising marmalade they had sent her. On January 2, 1918, she wrote to Meta: “I have seldom been so much pleased with a present as I was with the box of jelly and marmalade you sent me. I had never seen it put up like that before, and the jelly is made of real fruit, dé-licious.” At the end of that same year, she wrote, “The box of jams and jellies that you and Roscoe sent me is perfect for afternoon tea—all done up in cunning little jars, and such strange and interesting varieties! So far I have tried only the Citrus Jam, and it is delicious!” In early January of 1919, Cather was still eating the jam and wrote this time to Roscoe, “Tell Meta I am still eating that delicious jam on my toast at tea every afternoon when I have tea at home. I have finished the scuppernong jam, and am now on the pineapple.” Cather’s repeated return to the jam she received from Roscoe and Meta suggests not only a love of life’s simple pleasures but also a propensity toward thinking and writing about food as well as a proclivity for foods that were “real” and carried with them familial and intimate significance.

These trends—Cather’s classification of cooking as an art form, her appreciation of simple and quality ingredients, and the connection she draws between food and intimate relationships, thereby acknowledging food’s intangible value—coalesce in a memorable letter she sent to her mother in 1916, its date suggesting that these notions were alive in Cather’s concept of the culinary very early in her life. In this letter, Cather writes affectionately of a Christmas dinner party put together by Isabelle McClung: “She had cooked all the dinner herself right there in the tiny closet-kitchen opening of the parlor, and it was delicious; real terrapin soup, a leg of mutton beautifully cooked, plain boiled potatoes in their skins, grapefruit salad, good wine, and for desert [sic] a chocolate cake bought at an excellent bakery. Very little, but everything the best of it’s [sic] kind.” All at once praising Isabelle’s toil over the meal’s preparation (akin to the writer or artist laboring over their artistic product), highlighting the quality of the product in its simplicity and authenticity—the “real” terrapin (or turtle) soup, the “plain” boiled potatoes in their skins, and the mutton “beautifully” prepared—Cather’s budding artistic philosophy becomes evident precisely in her writings about food. Isabelle’s dinner, much like Cather’s own careful drawing of imagery and use of simplification throughout her writing, both eventually offer “very little, but . . . the best of its kind.”

CHERRIES AND INSATIABLE APPETITES IN SAPPHIRA AND THE SLAVE GIRL

Although in Sapphira and the Slave Girl orchards feature less prominently throughout, the novel is full of food imagery and scenes of sensory significance surrounding food. Ann Romines discusses many of these instances in her essay on southern food in Sapphira, writing that “food and food service are a major subject and subtext throughout” (86). Romines goes on to point out that the novel begins and ends with food—its inaugural scene shows Henry Colbert joining his wife at breakfast, and ultimately the reunion between Nancy and Till occurs in the Cather family’s Virginia home, featuring “a literal portrait of the kitchen at Willow Shade” (87). Not unlike culinary threads that run through Cather’s other works, these crucial scenes and settings signal that the novel is serious about the cultural and practical role of food and its deep impact on everyday life.

Beyond these bookends, the novel provides plentiful culinary imagery evoking the senses, such as the dinners Rachel Blake cooks for her husband. Rachel spends all day preparing her husband’s favorite dishes and feeding his pleasures, using local animal products and fresh, abundant produce ranging from wild ducks to Baltimore lobsters, from asparagus to strawberries (139). Elsewhere, foods like freshly ground coffee, sugar cakes, “light” bread, ice cream, ham, eggs, fresh mushrooms, and maple brown sugar appear, peppering the novel’s landscape with sensory imagery. As Romines argues, the novel “demonstrates how southern food is deeply implicated in histories of race and class abuse and, at the same time, retains a delicious appeal that is alluring to both blacks and whites” (102). Indeed, my focus here is on the “delicious appeal” or, more accurately, how this sense of deliciousness and its elusive sensory appeal gets conveyed in the space of the orchard in order to produce the effect of the “inexplicable thing not named.”

As with O Pioneers! this sensory effect is inevitably wrapped up in the body and its ongoing and complicated relationship to nourishment, sexuality, and decay. The space of the orchard provides its characters both pleasure and pain, although in Sapphira these sensations are generally compounded into a single scene. Building up to this pivotal moment and continuing through it, meanwhile, is Cather’s establishment of Martin Colbert and Nancy as opposite poles of how one can—and should—appreciate food, from appetite to attentiveness.

Prior to Nancy and Martin’s encounter in the orchard, Cather highlights Colbert’s insatiable appetite—an unrestrained desire to consume that is both literal and figurative. On multiple occasions he dines with Henry and Sapphira, eating and drinking copiously. He “helped himself to sandwiches” (153), liberally drinks the family’s “best Madeira” (159–60), and on the morning assaults Nancy in the orchard “forgot everything except that he wanted his ham and eggs” (176). Colbert’s relationship to food illustrates his lack of sensitivity when it comes to distinguishing between quality ingredients and products (he downs the Madeira), as well as his skewed relationship to food’s various pleasures. He enjoys food because of its abundance and because it is there for the taking, not because it is an aesthetically and emotionally valuable thing in and of itself, an experience worth savoring and appreciating.

Elsewhere, Cather describes how Colbert loses a tooth when attacked by the brothers of a girl with whom he has a sexual encounter, a conspicuously blue tooth put in to replace what was forcefully knocked out. Cather writes of Colbert that “this ignominious brand [showed] every time he opened his mouth” (175), locating his past indiscretion and the inevitability of his future ones in the sensory space of his mouth. Indeed, Martin is morally bankrupt, and he devours everything in sight. The site of his mouth, each time it opens, reveals its capacity for destruction and symbolizes the physical and psychic pain that he inflicts upon others.

In contrast, Nancy’s consumption of the cherries in the orchard reveals her humble and joyful relationship to food, as well as the value of obtaining food at its source, gathering it whole. The fresh cherries that Nancy picks from the trees stand in stark opposition to Martin’s greedy consumption of meals that have been prepared for a group of diners by the Colberts’ slaves. Cather writes of Nancy: “[She] scrambled nimbly up to the first big limb, where she could sit comfortably; could reach the cherries shining all about her and bend down the branches over her head. The morning air was still so fresh that the sunlight on her bare feet and legs was grateful. She was lighthearted this morning. She loved to pick cherries, and she loved being up in a tree” (177–78). Cather continues: “She was in no hurry to pick the cherries. She ate the ripest ones and dropped the hard ones into her basket” (178). Unlike Colbert’s wolfish consumption of culinary and bodily pleasures, Nancy takes her time and is discerning, gentle, and playful, appreciating the simple beauty of the cherries and their sensory delights.

Nancy’s consumption of the cherries is, of course, interrupted by Colbert’s arrival. The cherries quickly transform into objects portending danger, as their meaning is remade through Martin’s aggressive and suggestive language: “Good morning Nancy Cherries are ripe, eh?” (179).[6] The ripeness of the cherries first symbolize Nancy’s girlish self-exploration, but are quickly oversexualized by Colbert, imbued with a host of tensions. It is precisely this juxtaposition of Nancy’s exploratory relationship to the cherries and Martin’s view of the cherries (and Nancy) as objects of facile consumption that makes this scene feel simultaneously possible and impossible, beautiful and ugly, dreamlike and horrific. The cherries themselves—and the orchard that bears them—become the vehicle through which this delicate yet violent negotiation occurs.

Throughout O Pioneers! and Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Cather utilizes food imagery, especially within the space of the orchard, to awaken the senses. Furthermore, it is in these moments where Cather’s artistic process of simplification and the creation of the “thing not named” are most readily expressed. The pale-yellow pink-cheeked apricots, the ripe cherries, and the white mulberries covered in dark stain—each one of these images presents itself as whole yet complex, highlighting in the process precisely how the body remembers without saying, without naming. Indeed, food, cooking, and eating are all significant for Cather, and she treats the culinary process seriously, with a sense of purpose, recognizing in it the capacity for artistry. Returning for a moment to Sergeant’s memoir, she recalls a memorable dinner with Cather at the famed French restaurant Delmonico’s in New York City. During this dinner, Cather “requested that tea be served “hot, Hot, HOT,” with “Brioche, petit fours, a Napoléon, two babas au rhum,” and “the best China tea.” Cather then turned to her companion and said,“You’re not superior to the sense of taste, are you?” (60).[7]