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    What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories
    Unavailable
    What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories
    Unavailable
    What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories
    Audiobook10 hours

    What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

    Written by Laura Shapiro

    Narrated by Laura Shapiro and Kimberly Farr

    3.5/5

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    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    ‘If you find the subject of food to be both vexing and transfixing, you’ll love What She Ate’ Elle

    Dorothy Wordsworth believed that feeding her poet brother, William, gooseberry tarts was her part to play in a literary movement.
    Cockney chef Rosa Lewis became a favourite of King Edward VII, who loved her signature dish of whole truffles boiled in Champagne.
    Eleanor Roosevelt dished up Eggs Mexican – a concoction of rice, fried eggs, and bananas – in the White House.
    Eva Braun treated herself to Champagne and cake in the bunker before killing herself, alongside Adolf Hitler.
    Barbara Pym's novels overflow with enjoyment of everyday meals – of frozen fish fingers and Chablis – in midcentury England.
    Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown's idea of “having it all” meant having almost nothing on the plate except a supersized portion of diet gelatin.

    In the irresistible What She Ate, Laura Shapiro examines the plates, recipe books and shopping trolleys of these six extraordinary women, casting a new light on each of their lives – revealing love and rage, desire and denial, need and pleasure.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateJan 25, 2018
    ISBN9780008281090
    Unavailable
    What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

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    Reviews for What She Ate

    3.5/5

    57 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Excellent fun historical spicy (in all its meanings)... and an excellent narrator
    • 2/5
      This a curious book. It sets out to shed light on the eating and culinary habits of six women, and what that can tell us about those women. For a start, the selection of women, ranging from Eva Braun to Dorothy Wordsworth, is very singular. There is no real clue as to why these women and not others are the subject matter - was it availability of sources, or some other reason?The quality of the sections on the individual women is highly variable. That on Barbara Pym (about whom I know quite a lot anyway) is accurate and coherent (apart from an incorrect statement about food rationing). But other chapters jump about from topic to topic, and seem to include material which is interesting to the author rather than being particularly relevant to the character of the woman in question. The chapters on Dorothy Wordsworth and Helen Gurley Brown are particularly prone to this. The chapter on Eva Braun, although fairly balanced, does not avoid a certain condescension and also contains some conclusions which make little sense.It may be significant that the most coherent chapter is the afterword in which the author talks about her own reaction to food and cooking in the context of her new marriage and living in India. That had a more authentic and less manufactured ring to it.
    • 4/5
      Not sure how you can write this type of book and exclude Julia Child or Alice Walker
    • 4/5
      Women have a complex relationship with food. I include myself in that statement so I was interested in the subject matter of this book. Perhaps I could learn something about myself by reading about other women. The book was somewhat of a letdown in that respect but it was interesting.The six women highlighted were all well known in their time and I knew something about all of them but not much about their relationship with food. The first woman showcased was Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of the famous poet, and probably the least familiar of the group. Dorothy lived with and looked after her brother for many years so she provided the food that nurtured that poetic soul. She seems to have had no other ambition in life except looking after him and she certainly had no other close relationship with a man. Other women celebrated in this book also had obsessive attachments to men. Eva Braun, Hitler's mistress, had no other goal in her life except to spend it with Hitler. Helen Gurley Brown, longtime editor of Cosmopolitan, thought the pinnacle of her life's achievements was getting David Brown to marry her. Both those women also had an compulsive personality when it came to dieting so perhaps OCD extended to all areas of their life. Two of the chapter subjects did actually seem to like food. Rosa Lewis was a poor Cockney girl who became famous as King Edward the VII's favourite cook (and perhaps his mistress). Barbara Pym wrote novels that celebrated English cookery along with middle-class English lives and she seems to have enjoyed cooking and eating. Eleanor Roosevelt doesn't really seem to match any of the others. Although she stayed married to FDR she could hardly be said to have been devoted to him after she discovered he was having an affair. She directed the White House kitchens to serve very plain food, cooked badly, and does not seem to have realized the food was bad. She was far too busy working on issues of the day such as civil rights, poverty and then World War II. She was also a champion of home economics being taught in school and college which may account for her inclusion in this book.I guess this book lives up to its subtitle. These women were all remarkable and they did all have a relationship with food, although for some it was a love-hate relationship. I don't imagine many readers will identify with these women; I certainly didn't. To paraphrase an old cigarette ad: We've come a long way, baby from the lives these women led. Women still struggle with their relationship with food however.
    • 4/5
      Six fascinating women, some of whom I'd heard of, and some not. Loved hearing about Barbara Pym's attitudes about food and what she liked and didn't like. Similarly, I found Eleanor Roosevelt's chapter fascinating, as well. Not so much Helen Gurley Brown, though it was good to discuss the whole "never too thin" side of the coin, too. Interesting book.
    • 4/5
      Food writer Laura Shapiro examines the lives of six prominent women through their "food stories" in this collective biography. The women are:
      • Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of the poet William Wordsworth, whose evocative reference to "black puddings" in her diary summarizes the vicissitudes of her life.
      • Edwardian caterer Rosa Lewis, who hobnobbed with aristocracy but could never overcome her Cockney roots.
      • First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who used food as a weapon in her passive-aggressive war with her philandering husband.
      • Hitler's champagne-swilling, empty-headed mistress Eva Braun, who dieted as millions starved.
      • Author Barbara Pym, who celebrated the much maligned British cuisine in her domestic novels.
      • Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, who believed that a "tiny touch of anorexia nervosa" was good for a woman and her figure.
      This book provides an unusual, and long overdue, way of looking at women's lives. Recommended.