Feeding frenzy: memories of a gourmand in Paris

‘Bald, overweight and gluttonous’ is how the American journalist and food writer A.J. Liebling described himself. Born in Manhattan in 1904, he wrote extensively about boxing and horse racing and was a war correspondent during the second world war, taking part in the Normandy landings in that capacity. He also recounted his gastronomic adventures in Paris before the war in Between Meals, a collection of essays largely derived from a four-part series, ‘Memoirs of a Feeder in France’, which ran in the New Yorker in 1959.

The sign of a good restaurant
might be seeing two priests or two ‘sporting girls’ eating together

As a gourmand (rather than a gourmet, a ‘snob word, and a silly one’), Liebling is dismissive of Proust’s madeleine, because the amount of brandy it contains ‘would not furnish a gnat with an alcohol rub’. In contrast, he writes approvingly about a chef who, while cooking ‘a choucroute, or sauerkraut, well garnie with pâté de foie gras, for three French senators… poured in a whole bottle of ancient cognac to improve the flavour’. It is perhaps unsurprising to find that Liebling developed gout.

As a writer, however, he manages the Proust-like achievement, increasingly enhanced by the passing of time, of resurrecting a vanished world through the remembrance of foods. Between Meals brings back in vivid snapshots the atmosphere of 1927 Paris, to where the young Liebling sailed from America to study medieval literature at the Sorbonne. In fact, he taught himself how to eat French food instead, explaining: ‘I use the verb “to eat” here to denote a selective activity, as opposed to the passive acceptance and regular renewal of nourishment, learned in infancy.’