Cooking with Sybille Bedford

This is the fifth installment of Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words column. 

The decline of the continental European aristocracy just before World War I doesn’t sound like a promising period for food … until you read Sybille Bedford (1911–2006). Bedford was the daughter of a German baron (part of the anti-Prussian aristocracy) and a wealthy Jewish German woman from Hamburg. She had Jewish blood and glamorous friends, and she escaped the Nazis with the help of Aldous Huxley. Her greatest novel, A Legacy, first published in 1956 and reprinted by New York Review Books Classics in 2015, is the story of two German families, one based on her father’s family, the other on Berlin’s rich Jews. These beautiful and inflexible characters collect objets d’art, gamble, eat sumptuous feasts, and unwittingly play their parts in the rise of fascism in Germany. It’s one of the book’s many pleasurable sophistications that the narrator is barely a character; once you’ve seen her parents—seen her legacy—you’ve seen it all.

Another sophistication is the food. The character based on Bedford’s father, “the beau Jules,” hides out in Spain. There he lives in the same natural, close-to-the-land way that he would have on his own estate, had his world not been collapsing. His table is(a sea bass, “though not quite”) is served on fine china placed on a slab of pink marble under a mulberry trellis. The description reads in part: “There was a loaf of butter on a leaf, the bread was on a board; there was a dish of lemons and there were wooden mills for black pepper and gray pepper and the salt; the China was Eighteenth Century and the wine stood, undecanted, in a row of thick green cool unlabelled bottles.” kinds of pepper. Yum.