Poetic simplicity: Ernest Hemingway’s favourite meal
“We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other,” Ernest Hemingway once wrote in A Moveable Feast. His pleasures were simple in his happiest years. As he meandered through Paris and beyond as a young writer before his breakthrough, the only thing on his mind was art, love and scraping together enough money to treat himself to something tasty. While more commonly associated with booze, the writer loved food just as much.
He’d wax lyrical about both. In his later years, he’d be found in Havana drinking ‘Hemingway Daiquiris’, his own cocktail made of rum, lime juice, maraschino cherries, and grapefruit juice. As his success was built, he scaled up from impoverished cheap eats to indulgent, luxurious dinners of fish risotto and lobster ragù in Venice or Marennes-Oléron oysters chased with a Cuban cigar.
During his poorer years, captured beautifully in his memoir A Moveable Feast, he’d walk his regular walk from his apartment at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine around the left bank of Paris to his various watering holes or office. He’d stare into the windows of bakeries or restaurants, counting up his coins. “Hunger is good discipline,” he said, using the thought of a luxurious meal as a motivator to get back to work, earn more and save to be able to indulge. When he did, his descriptions of his meals were just as beautiful as any other bit of prose he wrote.
Clearly, the writer saw food as one of the purest joys in life. Just like art, music or a good book, he saw food as an inspiring experience, one made even more magical by different cultures, social rituals or simply good conversation. Whether it was a cheap meal with his wife or a long, luxurious lunch taken slowly with the likes of F Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, James Joyce or any of his other modernist peers, it was always something to write home about.
Perhaps that’s why there seems to be something so poetic about Hemingway’s favourite meal and the fact that he decided it should be his last. Throughout the 1950s, even into the later years of his life, the writer was still obsessively reworking the material that would make up A Moveable Feast, reflecting on those early years and the meals he took. He had a lot on his mind as worries about his work, his finances and even paranoia that the government was watching him spiralled into severe mental illness. But through it all, he stayed focused on the text, remembering simple times and simple meals.
Eventually, he was checked into a mental hospital to attempt to recover. Upon his release, he wanted one thing. At Michel’s Christiania Restaurant in Ketchum, Idaho, he ordered his favourite: a simple New York strip steak with a baked potato, Caesar salad, and a glass of Bordeaux. He wanted to sit at the table he always sat at to eat it, and he wanted to enjoy it slowly while talking with his wife.
Days later, in July 1961, Hemingway shot himself. It’s a sad ending to the life of one of the modern greats of literature, but it feels so fitting that in his final days, he was hungry for beautiful simplicity.
