Hide Your Knives

[caption id="attachment_3600" align="alignleft" width="382" caption="Photo by Elena Gormley"]

Julia and Jacques flat out told her she could never be a chef. And on a certain level, Netta Davis knew they were right. After a few months training under the two cooking giants in a culinary certificate program at Boston University (BU) after being laid off as an arts administrator in Boston Mayor Kevin White’s office, Davis still scared Pépin with her knife skills and asked questions like an academic, not a chef. But Child and Pépin had a solution: They were helping to launch a master’s program in gastronomy that would do more than teach how to cook — it would look at the role of food in history and society in a serious, interdisciplinary way. They wanted Davis to sign on.

“They told me to take the first class and see if this was a better fit, as a scholar,” says Davis. “I never looked back.”

Today, Davis is a lecturer in the program, in addition to her full-time job at Gutman Library as manager of administrative services. She is also working on her Ph.D. in American studies at BU.

Her love of all things food started young, a way to bond with her mother who worked for a time at Radcliffe. It was at Radcliffe, in fact, that Davis would forge her first connection to Child, who had started to donate some of her papers, as well as more than 500 rare cookbooks, to the culinary collection at the Schlesinger Library.

“It was so magical to be able to go into the stacks and touch them,” Davis says of the material. Since then, the stacks have been closed to the public, something that made a lot of people sad, she says.

The collection also got people mad. How could a feminist library allow cookbooks to share space with the records of the National Organization for Women and the writings of heavyweights like Adrienne Rich and Charlotte Perkins Gilman?

“I remember that some thought this was silliness, not scholarly. They’d say we’re trying to get away from women in the kitchen,” says Davis of the controversial decision. “As a young person, I thought, ‘Why is it shameful to remember that women’s history is rooted in the domestic realm?’”

Since then, the entire field of food studies has exploded with more and more programs like BU’s cropping up each year. Indiana University even offers a Ph.D. in food anthropology.

Davis isn’t surprised, given the huge role that food plays in our lives.

“Food is the only culturally significant act that you can’t not perform. You perform it several times a day,” she says. “So of course it’s ubiquitous. It shows up everywhere but people just don’t notice it much.”

At BU, Davis teaches a diverse group of students. About half have worked in professional kitchens. The rest cover a range of people, including those interested in policymaking, tourism, agriculture, consulting, teaching, and food writing. In addition to class discussions and lectures, with Davis they watch cartoons (“The Little Mermaid — it’s all about food!”) and Monty Python skits, always looking for the food angle. And they cook in the school’s professional demonstration kitchen, with recipes complementing the discussions.

“If I’m doing a lecture on the migration of food stuffs or where something like the chickpea belongs in world history,” Davis says, “I’ll give them recipes on how the chickpea is used in the Middle East and in Mexico and at what point these ingredients moved from one place to the next. We’ll look at the history of the spice route and the ways that different cultures relate to these ingredients. It’s interdisciplinary.”

Yes, she says, she does follow recipes — something Child would have appreciated.

“Julia followed recipes. She didn’t follow them slavishly though,” Davis says, which she learned while working for the woman who demystified French cooking at her Cambridge home three days a week. Davis was a student in the culinary program at the time, just before being hired at the Ed School.

“I remember the last summer I was working for her. She had brought all of her books over from France for the mass donation to the Schlesinger,” says Davis. “I had to make sure nothing weird was growing in them or had any of her notes in the margins — she was critical. She didn’t think all recipes were good. But she certainly believed in them.”
And what would Child and Pépin think now of Davis’ cooking skills, especially the long, slow-cooked “CSA box stew” she regularly makes with whatever she gets each week in her consumer supported agriculture delivery?

“What would they think of my CSA box stew?” Davis ponders. “Well, Jacques is the king of smoking and curing. He taught a session in just that at BU as part of my Food and the Senses class last semester, so he would be delighted, I imagine, with the use of local hand-smoked bacon from Blood Farm and the frugal use of every useful part of the vegetables. They were both very conscious of freshness, of the delight in discovering local produce that you might not have ever tried to eat or cook.

“And the idea of cooking up a really big batch of it would delight Julia. I use the enormous Le Creuset vat she passed on to me to make it, too. It’s the only thing in my kitchen both tough enough and big enough,” she says. “Whenever I’m cooking or teaching in the BU kitchen, I get the eerie feeling Julia is sitting on her stool rolling her eyes at how disorganized I am. Luckily I’m not primarily trying to teach anyone how to cook food, just how to think about food better.”