Succulence

Toward a queer-food praxis of sensuality.

I’m the author of the forthcoming book What Is Queer Food? How We Served a Revolution, due from Norton in spring 2025.

Paul Bertolli is the rare cookbook author whose hands, eyes, ears, nose, and tongue press intimately through his recipes, if you can call his process descriptions “recipes.” At his best, in some of Chez Panisse Cooking (1988) and all of Cooking By Hand (2003), he doesn’t give you a formula but seduces you into a narrative, a sensory account of what it is to cook something. This is cooking as sustained gesture, using the body and all its senses in the service of expression: to coax an ideal result from a half dozen duck legs, a haul of potatoes, a joint of lamb.

“Memento Mori,” by Andrès Lozano. (In our collection.)

Flip to Bertolli’s “recipe,” pages 151 and 152 of Cooking By Hand, for pan-roasted chicken. He has you cut up a bird and put the pieces in a dry sauté pan. Makes you move them around so the skin doesn’t stick calamitously, but even where it does as it caramelizes, where it does attach itself, you’re going to scrape those bits up with a little water at the end. It’s all good, except that it’s really hard to get this particular process right. It takes repetition over time to get right—the right $30 chicken, if you can get yourself to pay that; the proper large and heavy sauté pan, and a flame you you have made peace with over a long, patient history. To achieve an ideal level of succulence, what Bertolli calls the manifestation of the common Italian exclamation saporito.

Now, it’s food writing’s crustiest cliché to call the cooking process magic, or alchemy, but it’s hard to stay blasé about the intensity of transformation that results from a process so intimately involved with life as a human being, so echoey with the ineluctables of change. Maybe metaphor is the easiest way to capture how completely, ungraspably mind-shattering it is to transform flesh into succulence.

There’s a moment in Sea and Sardinia, D. H. Lawrence’s 1921 travel diary across that Mediterranean island, when Lawrence and his wife Frieda arrive by bus at an inn in the mountainous town of Nuoro for an evening layover. It’s winter: cold, dark, and stony. They’re starving, but have to wait for the cinghiale, the wild boar, to finish cooking. At last they’re led into a dining room, a single large table, and sit with male bus drivers. The boar comes in two courses: the brodo, broth, “boiling hot and very, very strong,” Lawrence says, eaten with cold bread. next the boiled meat itself, which is, alas, dry and coarse, the flavor having been extracted in the broth. But one of the bus drivers comes through; sets on the table some food he’s hauled with him and insists everyone eat: a loaf of homemade bread, packet of green olives, and half a cold roast lamb. Lawrence is astounded by this spontaneous, generous act of sharing succulence. He calls out the “essential courtesy” of this act (italics his), and seems a little turned on by it—turned on by the bus drivers who treat Frieda with what he calls “sensitive, manly simplicity.” I mean, I can picture him wrestling one naked, the way Alan Bates wrestles Oliver Reed in Ken Russell’s Women in Love. Lawrence is Odysseus the stranger come home, shown succulence by his brotherly swineherd Eumaeus, who slaughters and spit-roasts a pair of young pigs for his as yet unrecognized guest.

It’s important to say that Lawrence is a dick in this book. He’s boorish and uptight. His misogyny’s constantly surfacing, his annoyance with Frieda’s presence. His argument is that a half-wild place like Sardinia is more civilized than the fake, fussy, capitalistic, “polite” Britain he’s sick of.  And the way I read it, food—the primitive succulence of Italian food, food that makes you want to cry saporito when you taste it—is queer in the way that essential human nature is queer: Queer as in anti-capitalist, anti-conformist—real. If Lawrence weren’t such a misogynist he might come around to the point that queerness / succulence is feminist; anti-patriarchal. 

You can extend this argument for queerness as an artistic and cultural ideal across the brutal 20th century by saying that an essential anti-recipe like Paul Bertolli’s pan-roasted chicken is queer. I mean my $30 chicken dig was a bit of a grim joke. Still, I believe authentic queerness would be structuring one’s life in a way where the ideal chicken is one you or someone in your tribe has raised, and that in fact paying exorbitantly for one is a travesty of queerness. But hey, I’m an idealist at heart. And in place of magic or alchemy, my queer doctrine of food demands leading a raw ingredient to its true, its essential nature.

Audre Lorde in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name gives us queer succulence indistinguishable from process. Preparing her mother’s West Indies souse requires pounding salt and aromatics—garlic and celery leaves and black pepper—in the elaborate Grenadian family mortar kept on a high shelf in the family’s New York City kitchen. For young Audre, touching this mortar of “foreign fragrant wood,” with its carved relief of plums and “oval indeterminate fruit, some long and fluted like a banana, others ovular and end-swollen like a ripe alligator pear,” was transforming. Working the pestle, “with one hand firmly pressed around the carved side of the mortar caressing the wooden fruit” with aromatic fingers, she thrusts downward, “feeling the shifting salt and the hard little pellets of garlic right up through the shaft.” 

To achieve succulence in souse, you begin with this erotic gesture of making the aromatic salt paste with which to flavor the meat, whether beef ends, heart, or chicken backs—a gesture that at once ties you to a long chain of cooks who have done likewise, for generations. Which is to suggest that cooking is not just about leading a central ingredient back to its true, ineluctable nature, but about leading the cook back to theirs. Which is also to suggest that any trip to succulence can also, properly, be the kind of sensual human journey that takes us to the place that is, for lack of a more precise or less luminous word, queer.