THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, September 7 - 8, 2019 |C5
and is nothing but Montasio or Parme-
san cheese grated and toasted in a pan
until it forms a giant, lacy disk. You
find yourself breaking off piece
after piece of the crispy
cheese, especially if you have a
glass of Prosecco in your other
hand.
Instead of berating our-
selves for eating snacks, we
should allow ourselves to eat
better ones and give them the
attention they are due. Making
yourself a snack is a good way
to find out what you really
crave, however eccentric, be-
cause with a snack, anything
goes. At Prune restaurant in
New York City, chef Gabrielle
Hamilton serves a bar snack of canned
sardines with triscuits, Dijon mustard,
parsley and cornichons. No one would
serve such a weird and salty collation
for dinner, but as a snack, it is perfect.
Sometimes, the best eating is the kind
you do “between meals.”‘A life
well lived
is full
of small
edible
delights.’
MEERASODHA
FoodwriterClockwise from top right: Marie Spartali Stillman’s ‘Love’s Messenger,’
Edward Burne-Jones’s ‘The Briar Wood’ and William Morris’s ‘Fruit.’EXHIBIT
THE ENGLISH ARTIST Edward Burne-Jones once told Oscar Wilde, “The
more materialistic science becomes, the more angels I shall paint: Their
wings are my protest in favor of the immortality of the soul.” Burne-Jones
was associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of British art-
ists and writers founded in 1848 by William Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and
John Everett Millais. Their goal was to push back against the conventions
of Victorian art and society by imitating the rich detail and brilliant color
of the 15th-century Italian painters whocame before the Renaissance. The
Pre-Raphaelites drew from poets like Shakespeare, Keats and Tennyson to
depict religious and mythological themes with vibrant realism.
In “The Pre-Raphaelites,” which will be published by Abbeville Press on Oct.
8, the art historian Aurélie Petiot assembles 300 full-color images of their
work. “Love’s Messenger” (right), an 1885 watercolor by Marie Spartali Still-
man, includes the dove and the rose as symbols of the love goddess Venus.
“The Briar Wood” (below right), by Burne-Jones, is part of a series of canvases
from 1890 based on the legend of Sleeping Beauty. “Fruit” (below left) is an
elaborately patterned wallpaper designed by William Morris.
— Elizabeth WinklerVictorianLegends
“DON’T EAT BETWEEN MEALS” was the stern
old advice, spoken to ravenous children. I am
old enough to remember these warnings
against snacks and recall feeling puzzled by
the logic. Why was it OK to eat a slice of
toast as part of breakfast but not OK to
eat the exact same toast during a peck-
ish hour in the afternoon?
Almost no one lives by the “no
snacking” rule any more, judging
from the abundance of potato
chips and protein bars in our
lives. And yet, there’s still a lin-
gering sense of moral disap-
proval about snacking, which is
strange given that most of us
snack more often than we
brush our teeth. The average
American now eats nearly
three commercial savory baked
snacks (pretzels, popcorn,
crackers, etc.) every day, and
that’s before we even start to
factor in the cupcakes and the
sodas, the energy balls and the
toaster pastries.
But there are snacks and snacks.
Throughout history, there have been
food cultures where the snack is ac-
cepted and ritualized rather than
viewed with moral disapproval. In Tudor
England, the day was generally broken up
into two full meals—a midday “dinner” and
an evening “supper”—with around three
snacks in between. The first of the snacks was
breakfast, which was unlike dinner in that it
was consumed in private, without much cere-
mony. Between dinner and supper, Tudors en-
joyed a snack called “drinking,” equivalent to
afternoon tea, which might be something like
cakes and ale. At the very end of the day, af-
ter supper, came a snack called “all night,” a
kind of midnight feast of
bread and wine.
Maybe we wouldn’t be so
hostile to snacks if we could
recognize them as a small
meal in their own right, as
many European cultures do.
In France, children expect to
be given “le goûter” after
school, consisting of some-
thing like a small hunk of
baguette and butter, or pan-
cakes and jam with a glass
of milk. A friend of mine
moved to Sweden for a year and came back en-
amored of the tradition of “fika,” a sociable
pause in the day to drink several cups of coffee
with a cinnamon bun or wonderful homemade
cakes. When enjoying their “fika,” the slender
Swedes my friend met did not feel the need to
berate themselves for their moral failings.
Snacks are unjustly maligned as a way of
eating, argues Meera Sodha, an Indian-British
cookery writer whose latest book is “East: 120
Vegan and Vegetarian Recipes from Bangalore
to Beijing,” a collection of flavorsome and
healthy Asian dishes. Ms. Sodha devotes a
whole chapter in the book to “snacks and small
things” and remarks that she would like to ap-
ply for the role of “ambassador for snacking.”
She is not talking about the mass-produced
sugary snacks of the supermarket but the kind
of fresh and vibrant tidbits eaten in modest
quantities at any time of day in Asia.
“A life well lived,” writes Ms. Sodha, “is a
life full of small edible delights: little opportu-
nities of deliciousness that can be woven into
MIKEL CASALa day.” There is no law that says a snack has to
TABLE
TALKBEE
WILSONPeople Like
You More Than
You Think
Hi, Dan.
I started college a
couple of weeks ago,
and I find myself very
preoccupied about
whether the people I’m meeting like
me. Do you have any advice about
how I can relax around people?
—BronwynYou will be relieved to know that
most of us tend to underestimate
how much people enjoy our company.
In 2018, Erica J. Boothby and col-
leagues published a paper about the
“liking gap”—the difference between
how much we think other people like
us and how much they actually like
us. In one of their studies, they asked
first-year college students to rate
how much they liked a given room-
mate and how much they believed
their roommates liked them, starting
in September and continuing
throughout the school year.
They found that participants sys-
tematically underestimated how
much they were liked. In fact, it
wasn’t until May, after living to-
gether for eight months, that people
accurately perceived how much they
were liked. So try to focus your so-
cial energy on spending quality time
with friends and don’t worry too
much about the outcome.Dear Dan,
I work for a nonprofit organization
that offers mindfulness retreats for
teens. Our tuition model is that we
request 1% of a family’s income, up to
$2,000, for a week-long retreat. We
feel that this model is fair, but some
higher-income families object to pay-
ing more than others for the same
service. Why do they feel this way,
when the cost is such a small share
of their income? —TomOur perception of what is fair depends
to a large degree on what we’re being
asked to give up to achieve a fair out-
come. In your arrangement, people
with more money are being asked to
pay more, so they are likely to see a
fixed price for tuition as being more
fair than a sliding scale—and vice
versa for families with less money.
One way to try to overcome this
bias is what the political philosopher
John Rawls called the “veil of igno-
rance.” In this approach, people are
asked to design an imaginary society
they will have to live in, without
knowing whether they are going to
be rich or poor. This means that they
have to decide what is fair before
they know how much they will per-
sonally stand to gain or lose from
any given arrangement—for instance,
the tax rate. Maybe you can try an
exercise of this sort related to tuition
as part of your mindfulness teaching.Hi, Dan.
I have an aging but perfectly fine car
and waste a lot of time pining for
something more modern and com-
fortable. But I haven’t found a new
model I love, and with technological
improvements happening so fast,
cars are getting better every year.
Should I wait for the perfect car to
come along or should I compromise
and buy something now? —AlexMy sense is that if you don’t like any
of the available options, it means
you’re not yet ready to make a
change. Happiness isn’t just about
what we have and don’t have; it’s
also about not constantly looking for
something better. Why don’t you de-
cide that you won’t look at new cars
for a certain period—say, two years—
and then give yourself a three-month
window to research a purchase. At
the end of that time, you will pick
the best option available. This way,
you won’t waste time and energy on
an open-ended search.ASK ARIELY
DAN ARIELY
Have a dilemma for Dan?
Email [email protected]REVIEW
be unhealthy or factory made. She
points out that “in Bangkok, a snack
might be a freshly pounded salad: the
rising smell of lemon grass, mixing
with chili and garlic.” Across Asia, peo-
ple eat variations of stuffed dumplings
such as the gyoza of Japan or the mo-
mos of Nepal, tasty morsels that are
far more nutritious and interesting to
eat than a muffin.
Ms. Sodha’s book contains recipes
for some truly delightful Asian-in-
spired savory snacks. My favorites so
far are a cumin-spiked potato dosa
with a refreshing pea and coconut
chutney and a turmeric-yellow Viet-
namese coconut pancake stuffed with a
bright salad of shredded red cabbage
with lime juice and mint. This is snack-
ing as sheer joy.
To forswear snacking altogether
would be to deprive ourselves of a
whole world of savory tidbits, from
deviled eggs to samosas. Last year in
northern Italy, I ate one of the best
snacks I’ve ever tasted. It’s called fricoLet’s Bring Back
The Proper Snack
Eating between meals doesn’t have to be a vice,
as long as we give our snacks the attention they deserve.RUTH GWILYCLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: BRIDGEMAN IMAGES, PARIS/DELAWARE ART MUSEUM; THE FARINGDON COLLECTION TRUST; SCALA ARCHIVES, FLORENCE/V&A IMAGES/VICTORIA & ALBERT MUSEUM