What was Ernest Hemingway’s final meal?
For all the talk of Ernest Hemingway as a proto-Ron Swanson, an unreconstructed archetype of American masculinity, there are depths to the man that go a lot further than that. Sure, he was a rugged individualist who could quite literally live off the fat of the land if he needed to. However, this was also a man whose friendship with F Scott Fitzgerald bordered on homoerotic.
Whose anxieties and insecurities plagued his entire life. A man who, no matter how many times he ate beans from a can cooked over an open fire, could also be a massive snob about food. It’s true that the sustenance most associated with Hemingway is booze, but above all, Hemingway was something of a hedonist. A man in thrall to the sensuous pleasures that informed much of his writing, most of all his posthumously published memoir A Moveable Feast.
He travelled all of Europe not to sit in a forest clearing skinning rabbits but to dine in the finest restaurants in the world and see if they measured up. One of his favoured spots was Venice, Italy, where he’d have fish risotto at the Ristorante del Doge and lobster ragu at the Gritti Palace Hotel. This is to say nothing of his legendary exploits in Paris, the kind that most of A Moveable Feast is, in fact, based on.
However, this wasn’t tourism. This wasn’t Premier League footballers paying four-figure prices for Salt Bae to feed them gold-coated steak for lack of anything better to do with their money. This was something that Hemingway felt was not just good for the tastebuds but good for the soul. A sign that someone wasn’t just surviving day to day but truly living.
In A Moveable Feast, he wrote, “As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”
So, what was Ernest Hemingway’s last meal?
Satiating his literal hunger often made space for the metaphorical hunger—the craving to experience everything life had to offer, which tended to fade if left unattended. The man’s hunger was the key to escaping the “empty feeling” that chased him his entire life and would eventually claim him in 1961, at the too-soon age of 61. On June 1st, 1961, Hemingway and his wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, went out for their first meal since Hemingway had been discharged from the Mayo Clinic’s psychiatric ward.
His last, reportedly his favourite meal was a New York-style steak, baked potato and a Caesar salad, washed down with a glass of Bordeaux. Perhaps the fact that he’d eaten his favourite meal the evening prior to leaving us is a sign that he went out punching, still trying whatever he could to fight that empty feeling.
