How could a gay man who loved food express his passion for cooking and eating in socialist Poland? Easy: he created a fictional straight couple and had them write a cookbook meant to help singles (and the soon-to-be-married) improve their quality of life, at least in the kitchen.
The late 1950s and early 1960s were a fascinating time when it comes to representations of men and cooking. Especially in the English-speaking world, food books and magazines were published that were specifically geared towards male audiences. Apparently, that was also the case in Poland, at the time under a socialist regime experiencing a period of political “thaw” after the death of Stalin and the 1956 beginning of Gomułka’s rise to power. As I continue my research project in Poland, conducting fieldwork on the revaluation of regional and traditional food, I am also trying to get to know its culinary history better. So, both to help me better understand the recent past of the country and to practice my culinary Polish, my co-researcher Mateusz Halawa suggested that I read the 1962, slightly expanded edition of Książka kucharska dla samotnych i zakochanych (A cookbook for those alone and those in love), a little volume from 1958. The second edition came about because the first one, according to the introduction, was sold out in five weeks. It is a delightful book, both in content and in its visual layout and illustrations. After all, at the time Poland was the home of a lively and extremely creative graphic poster production.
The book is signed by Maria Lemnis and Henryk Vitry. The real author, however, was noted musicologist Tadeusz Żakiej (1915-1994), who wrote as Tadeusz Marek when discussing music and Maria Lemnis and Henryk Vitry in case of culinary topics. Under the same couple pseudonym, in 1979 he also authored W staropolskiej kuchni i przy polskim stole (later translated into English in 1996 as Old Polish Traditions in the Kitchen and at the Table) and the food column in the monthly magazine Ty i Ja (you and I), published from 1960 to 1973. As author Justyna Jaworska observes, it was “a magazine about lifestyle aspirations, possibly the first of its kind in post-war Poland.” One of the few attempts at glossy magazines, Ty i Ja offered the Polish elites visions of the consumer culture that was developing abroad: often images were used to create collages of fashionable and stylish clothes, interiors, design, furniture, foreign books and films. It is telling that Żakiej’s food column, which considered eating as part of the pleasures a refined person should enjoy, becomes part of this imaginary, possibly the most embodied and accessible aspect of the lifestyle the magazine promoted.
The cookbook is particularly intriguing because Tadeusz Żakiej was gay. In fact, he counted novelist Jerzy Andrejewski, as well as pianist and music critic Karol Szymanowski among his lovers. While homosexuality was more or less grudgingly accepted among Warsaw intellectuals and artists, it did not fare too well in the rest of Polish society, dominated by socialist moralism on the one hand, and catholic church on the other. Polish secret police would often use homosexuality to compromise people. In 1959, for example, Michel Foucault (few people know he lived in Warsaw for a year directing the French Cultural Center and working on Madness and Civilization) was entrapped by one of his lovers and ultimately expelled from the country. It is understandable that a gay man who clearly loved food and cooking felt more comfortable creating two fictional straight authors – and a married couple, to boot – to deal with the topic. In the book introduction, Żakiej actually makes up a whole life for them, using the characters also to encourage (male) singles and those yet unmarried, although in a relationship, to face their fears in the kitchen and enjoy expressing themselves at the stove.
The fictional couple insists that at first, just like their readers, they were not good with food, as cooking was not a subject taught at school and cookbooks could be intimidating. “Beginnings were not easy, believe us!” they state, informing us that they started from scrambled eggs and potatoes. This lack of skill among the youth may point to a break, or at least a crisis, in the domestic transmission of culinary knowledge from cooks of other generations. In a society where gender parity was more advanced than elsewhere, women were often working outside of their homes. Eespecially in urban environments, it is likely they did not have much time to teach their offspring. This is one of the many aspects of this book that would deserve further research (which I plan to embark on, at some point).
The fictional Maria and Henryk stay well within the accepted behaviors of the actual heterosexual couples of the period: over time, she becomes good at making salads, he at steaks (befsztyk, probably a weekend delicacy even for the better-off urbanites for which the author writes). As it is typical of many made-up married couple, they cooked their meals together, often for their friends, including those “who in their life have not yet reached the road towards a wedding.” Heteronormativity ruled, with the author declaring that “most of the time, loneliness ends with love, and love with marriage.” Of course, he has to mention the saying “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” which he finds correct. It is interesting how the single person is imagined as a male, even if this is never clearly stated in the book. “Hungry and malnourished persons often go out in a bad mood, especially Poles, about whom the saying goes: Hungry – is bad!” That is why the author writes this book, stating that also after getting married some of his advice would be useful.
In that period, these subtle gender negotiations around cooking and eating were not unique to Poland. Although men were consuming food around the family table, in business meetings, at the bar for drinks after work, and at sport games, they were not preoccupied with feeding their families on a daily basis. In Italy, for instance, men kept clear of kitchens, even restaurant ones, which at the time were considered places for the working class and not for respectable professionals. Only from the 1970s, the appearance of gourmets full of bonhomie and style, like Luigi Carnacina or actor Ugo Tognazzi slowly brought cooking into the male sphere, together with the raise of start chefs like Gualtiero Marchesi. That said, cookbooks or even food columns in men magazines did not appear until later. Instead, in English-speaking cultures, cookbooks geared towards men were not a novelty. Cooking on special occasions such as outdoor barbecues, carving the turkey for the holidays, or making Sunday breakfast, were widely perceived as appropriate masculine activities. Since they were far from regular, these meals allowed men to display specific skills, without being interpreted as expressions of caregiving. Actually, by cooking only in very specific cases, men reaffirmed that daily domesticity was not part of their life world.
Cookbooks for men started appearing in the 1930s, displaying intriguing discursive strategies to take the stigma of femininity away from culinary activities. So male cooking was presented as an artistic, creative activity, and recipes were often collected from famous men, giving more prestige to the text. One of the first American magazines in this category was Gourmet, launched in 1941 by Earle R. MacAusland and discontinued in 2009. As Anne Mendelson observes in her reflection on Gourmet’s first decade “Today, looking back at the lively pages of the first issues can trigger considerable culture shock. Lurking behind many of the stories was a mentality that suggests an American idea of a prewar London gentlemen’s club.” This same approach, which somehow resisted domestic bliss, was to be found in Playboy food pages, published between 1953 to the early 1960s, which also presented an imaginary high class lifestyle.
Although ostensibly focusing on recipes, cookbooks in the 1950s and 1960s often expressed anxiety about the changing role of women, as social structures and expectations were already shifting. In the same period, books like The Drinking Man’s Diet: How to Lose Weight with a Minimum of Willpower, addressed concerns about health and wellbeing without threatening the readers’ masculinity. Actually food and drink could become a tool to reassert it in a cool and sophisticated form, as James Bond’s martinis and food consumption in Len Deighton’s 1962 spy novel The IPCRESS File indicate. Traditional masculinity was instead totally replaced by camp in the 1965 The Gay Cookbook, where chef Lou Rand Hogan, who had previously published the mystery story The Gay Detective, offers a model of non-heteronormative domesticity that dispels the misconceptions about gay life as abnormal and dangerous, while underlining its style and refinement.
It would be interesting to read Żakiej alongside. Originating in vastly different context, but within the same time period, Żakiej and Hogan display different strategies to negotiate queerness while establishing alternative masculinities.
Mateusz Halawa contributed information and analysis to this post