What counts is not the uniqueness or the fanciness of what one cooks, but the sense of comfort and satisfaction food provides, the consolation, the sensations it brings back, or the fantasies it creates with fragments of memories and emotions. All of which can be easily commodified.
As I ease into the holiday break, I am starting to catch up with movies and books I had not had the time for while teaching. Laura Lindenfeld, who coauthored Feasting Our Eyes: Food Films and Cultural Identity in the United States with me, suggested I watched Kelly Reichardt’s 2019 film First Cow, streaming on Showtime and available for rent on Amazon Prime Video.
The story takes place in 1820s Oregon, when the area was occupied jointly by the new United States and Britain. At the time the region teemed with trappers trying to make their fortune with the fur trade. The protagonist of the story, Otis Figowitz (John Magaro), also known as Cookie, as King-lu (Orion Lee), are among these. However, neither of them really fit with the rugged bunch surrounding them, the former because of his occupation, the second because of his race. While traveling as a cook with some trappers, Cookie is constantly demeaned, in many ways stuck in a feminine role of caregiver, and berated because he cannot find enough food to feed his companions. At the beginning of the movie, we see him picking mushrooms and traying to fish with a net in a brook. Around him, only native women seem busy cooking, grinding acorns and finding way to mediate between their skills and customs and the trappers’ preferences. The natives are clearly in a much better position, as they are familiar with the environment and what it can offer, and they commodify this advantage to ensure a revenue in the newly budding local society. From the beginning, food (and the lack thereof) position itself as a central theme of the movie.
Cookie meets King-Lu when the Chinese immigrant slips into his camp during the night in search of food and hear but also escaping some Russians that consider him responsible for the death of their friend. Cookie and King-Lu meet again at a trading post, Fort Tilikum, where the British Chief Factor is stationed. Both outsiders, they immediately join forces. King-lu dreams to open a hotel, Cookie a bakery where he could sell wild huckleberry pies. In fact, we get to know that Cookie is a trained baker, having been indentured to a baker in Boston. While Otis has a knack for cooking, King-lu is focused on business, dreaming about growing hazelnuts, almonds, and other products that can be transported and last long, as well as about beaver oil from the glands of beavers killed for their pelts and left there to rot.
The absence of familiar food makes it the object of constant desire. Tired of water bread and hardtack, the two imagine savoring cookies, scones, and biscuits with butter. Except there is no butter around, until one single cow arrives at the fort for the Chief Factor. Sometimes a cow is enough to increase one’s social capital: in fact, the Chief Factor will make a point to offer imported Chinese tea with fresh cream to a visiting American officer. Access to rare food immediately marks him as powerful and relatively wealthy. To make his point, the Chief boasts that the cow has great lineage from prime French breed.
Cookie and King-lu come up with a scheme to make some money. During the night, Otis starts milking the cow in secret to make oily cakes (fritters fried in oil) and sell them to the trappers at the fort. King-lu is a good salesman, telling stories to potential customers about a secret Chinese ingredient that would explain the extraordinary taste. The men immediately fall in love with the cakes, line up to get them, and are ready to pay good money. As a matter of fact, they compete with each other and the prices go up. The movie avoids romanticizing food: while underlying its psychological power, it also reminds us that food is produced to be sold, it is part of the economy, and that it can easily be exploited to bamboozle potential clients. It is not just the good flavor (courtesy of the milk) that attracts customers: the men enjoy looking at Cookie making the cakes in front of them, smearing honey and grating cinnamon on them. The sound of sizzling oil, the smell allow them to taste memories from home. Even the refined Chief Factor is immediately brought back to London when he savors his first bite of the simple dessert. The very fact that even in such a harsh environment men are ready to pay good money for a sweet, something that is far from necessary, underline both the emotional power and the economic potential of food.
Fearful that the Briton would discover they are stealing his milk, Cookie is ready to leave, but King-lu convinces him to stay longer and make more money to get a head start on their future business in San Francisco. Impressed with Cookie’s skill, the Chief Factor asks him to make clafoutis for the American officer, who thinks the frontier is a barbaric place. Cookie immediately points out that he needs apricots and raspberries, but the Briton suggests to tweak the recipe and use local blueberries. A constant theme in the movie is the culinary adaptation to a new context and the available ingredients, the negotiation between the immigrants’ foodways and the reality surrounding them. A native chief expresses his surprise that white men are fixated with beaver pelts and not with the delicious tails of the animals. The American officer is open to taste them, as he declares to be sick of salmon. When Cookie milks the cow to prepare the clafoutis, the animal immediately shows familiarity with him. A series of events will lead to the conclusion of the story, which I will not spoil.
The movie is slow, embracing a low key mood and a visual approach that celebrate the beauty and the harshness of nature. The style is a far cry from the celebratory tone of most food films (and First Cow definitely falls into the category). The oil cakes do not look that good. They are irregular, some are half burned. Cookie and King-Lu sell them on a plank of wood placed in the mud. All the tools used to cook are rudimentary, the methods are unsanitary. Visually, the filmmaker stays clear from the trappings of food porn. Yet the cakes are fried on demand, in front of a line of eager customers, who can enjoy the spectacle of the preparation. The excitement and the wait are as important to the success of the oily cakes as the cakes themselves, reminding us that what counts is not the uniqueness or the fanciness of what one cooks, but the sense of comfort and satisfaction food provides, the consolation, the sensations it brings back, or the fantasies it creates with fragments of memories and emotions. All of which can be easily commodified.
If you are looking for a fast-paced, action-packed food film with plenty of culinary prowess on display, First Cow may not be the right choice for you. But if you are ready to slow down and let yourself be brought back to another time, when food was already a commodity but a much simpler one, this is the movie for you.