Omelette and a Glass of Wine (20 page)

Once during that last summer of his life, on Capri (he was then eighty-three), I took him a basket of figs from the market in the piazza. He asked me from which stall I had bought them. ‘That one down nearest to the steps.’

‘Not bad, my dear, not bad. Next time, you could try Graziella. I fancy you’ll find her figs are sweeter; just wait a few days, if you can.’

He knew, who better, from which garden those figs came; he was familiar with the history of the trees, he knew their age and in what type of soil they grew; he knew by which tempests, blights, invasions, and plagues that particular property had or had not been affected during the past three hundred years; how many times it had changed hands, in what lawsuits the owners had been involved; that the son now grown up was a man less grasping than his neighbours and was consequently in less of a hurry to pick and sell his fruit before it ripened … I may add that it was not Norman’s way to give lectures. These pieces of information emerged gradually, in the course of walks, sessions at the tavern, apropos a chance remark. It was up to you to put two and two together if you were sufficiently interested.

Knowing, as he made it his business wherever he lived and
travelled to know, every innkeeper and restaurant owner on the island (including, naturally, Miss Grade Fields; these two remarkable human beings were much to each other’s taste) and all their families and their staff as well, still Norman would rarely go to eat in any establishment without first, in the morning, having looked in; or if he felt too poorly in those latter days, sent a message. What was to be had that day? What fish had come in? Was the mozzarella cheese dripping, positively dripping fresh? Otherwise we should have to have it fried. ‘Giovanni’s wine will slip down all right, my dear. At least he doesn’t pick his grapes green.’ When things did not go according to plan – and on Capri this could happen even to Norman Douglas – he wasted no time in recriminations. ‘Come on. Nothing to be gained by staying here. Can you deal with a little glass up at the Cercola? Off we go then.’

Well-meaning people nowadays are always telling us to complain when we get a bad meal, to send back a dish if it is not as it should be. I remember, one bleak February day in 1962, reading that a British Cabinet Minister had told the hotel-keepers and caterers assembled at Olympia for the opening of their bi-annual exhibition of icing-sugar buses and models of Windsor Forest in chocolate-work, ‘If the food you have in a restaurant is lousy, condemn it …’

At the time Norman Douglas was much in my mind, for it was round about the tenth anniversary of his death. How would he have reacted to this piece of advice? The inelegance of the phrase would not have been to his taste, of that much one can be certain. And from the Shades I think I hear a snort, that snort he gave when he caught you out in a piece of woolly thinking. ‘Condemn it? Ha! That won’t get you far. Better see you don’t have cause for complaint, I’d say. No sense in growling when it’s too late.’

Gourmet
, February 1969

South Wind through the Kitchen

‘A venerated Queen of Northern Isles reared to the memory of her loving Consort a monument whereat the nations stand aghast.’ Thus Norman Douglas on the Albert Memorial. All Norman’s friends must, as did I, have stood aghast when they saw what had been perpetrated on his posthumously published
Venus in the
Kitchen
.
¹
‘Decorations by Bruce Roberts’ announced the title-page. Decorations? Defacements would have been a more accurate description. Had not any director or editor at Messrs Heinemann’s ever glanced at so much as a paragraph of even one of the Douglas books before publishing
Venus in the Kitchen?
Did they simply take it on trust from Mr Graham Greene (whose brief, moving and purposeful introduction to the book would, had anyone in the publishing house taken the trouble to study it, have provided all the necessary clues) that Norman Douglas was a rather famous writer and that they would be lucky to get his final work? Did they hand a typescript or a set of galley proofs to their illustrator? Or did they think it sufficient to commission him to provide ‘decorations’ for what they innocently supposed was a cookery book which would sell on a title and illustrations with an erotic twist? If so, then their intentions were cruelly foiled by Mr Roberts. Anything more anaphrodisiac than his simpering cupids (in bathing trunks), his bows and arrows and hearts, his chefs in Christmas cracker hats, his amorphous fishes and bottles and birds, his waiters in jocular poses, his lifeless, sexless couples seated at tables-for-two, it would be hard to envisage. One would not dwell upon the dismal blunder were it not that these so-called decorations (where was the necessity for decorations?) have given to
Venus in the Kitchen
an image of Valentine-card mawkishness so absurdly alien to the author’s intentions that potential buyers of the book (now reissued in an American paper-back
²
with, intact, alas, the English illustrations plus a gigantic scarlet heart on the cover thrown in for good measure) should be warned that the contents of the little book have nothing whatsoever to do with its appearance.

Cupids in the kitchen? Whatever next? The book is no more, and also no less, than an instructive and entertaining little collection of recipes mainly (as was to be expected from an author who had spent some forty years of his life in Italy, who was rather more than familiar with the Greek and Latin classics and had written a treatise dealing with every bird and beast mentioned in the Greek Anthology) of ancient Mediterranean lineage. To those even a little versed in the history and literature of cookery the recipes are unastonishing. In varying versions they are to be found in a number of books in French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, English, Greek. What makes this
particular little anthology notable is not the recipes. It is the characteristically irreverent Douglas spirit which imbues them, and the style in which they are presented; a style which gives the impression that they were written not with a pen, but with a diamond-cutter; and then, appended to many of them – and they are the ones to be looked for – the typical deflating comment. There is nothing erotic here, much less anything with the slightest sniff of the sentimental. It is as plain as the nose on your face that at the age of eighty-two or thereabout, Norman Douglas was back at his old game of mocking at superstition and the superstitious. He regarded the whole business of aphrodisiac recipes as comical and bawdy. And to be frank, he did not know, nor pretend to know, very much about the practical aspects of cooking. Many of the recipes were, I believe, collected by Pino Orioli, the bookseller who was Norman’s great friend and, at one time, his partner in the Florentine publishing venture which produced some of Norman’s own books; and in the postscript to his preface he acknowledges technical assistance received from one of his oldest friends, the late Faith Compton Mackenzie, and from that magical writer, Sybille Bedford. What Norman Douglas did know about, and better than most, was the importance of the relationship between the enjoyment of food and wine and the conduct of love affairs, and for that matter of most other aspects of life.

I was, myself, once inducted onto a panel, somewhat uncertain and disorganized, of ladies and gentlemen thought to be capable of presiding over a kind of gastronomes’ brains-trust at a certain English country food festival. Among the more resourceful worthies on the platform upon that memorable occasion was Mr Osbert Lancaster. A member of the audience demanded to be informed whether the panel considered good food to be possessed of aphrodisiac properties. And if so, what food in particular. A tricky question. The panel was silent. From the audience came shouts and derisive taunts. The whole meeting looked like breaking up in pandemonium. With faultless timing Mr Lancaster rose to his feet and boomed, in authoritative tones, that while he did not feel empowered to pronounce upon what food might or might not be prescribed for those in need of an aphrodisiac, he was prepared to commit himself to the point of declaring that if anyone wanted a sure-fire
an
aphrodisiac then it would be badly cooked food presented with a bad grace. An opinion with which Norman Douglas would have concurred.

‘Indigestion and love will not be yoked together.’ ‘No love-joy comes to bodies misfed, nor shall any progress in knowledge come from them.’ ‘A man’s worst enemy is his own empty stomach.’ ‘Be sober; let the loved one drink.’ ‘Good intentions – no … Gastritis will be the result of good intentions.’ ‘I have been perusing Seneca’s letters. He was a cocoa-drinker, masquerading as an ancient.’ ‘The longer one lives, the more one realizes that nothing is a dish for every day.’ ‘The unseemly haste in rising! One might really think the company were ashamed of so natural and jovial a function as that to which a dining-room is consecrated.’ ‘To be miserly towards your friends is not pretty; to be miserly towards yourself is contemptible.’

That last maxim of Norman’s was one he was particularly fond of enlarging upon when it came to a question of whether we could or should afford an extra treat in a restaurant or a more expensive bottle of wine than usual. It was a lesson from which I have derived much benefit. Eating alone in restaurants, as I have often in the pursuit of gastronomic researches been obliged to, I never fail to recall Norman’s words (a recollection which has resulted in a surprise for many a haughty maître d’hôtel and patronizing wine waiter, expecting a lone woman to order the cheapest dish and the most humble wine on the list). More important, to treat yourself to what you want, need, or are curious to taste, is the proper, and the only way, to learn to enjoy solitary meals, whether in restaurants or at home.

And let nobody waste his time looking into
Venus in the Kitchen
for advice on love-potions. Not once in the entire book does Norman suggest that he regards the idea of aphrodisiac recipes as anything more than a jovial diversion. A certain artichoke dish is ‘appetizing, even if not efficacious’. Salad rocket is ‘certainly a stimulant’. A ‘timid person is advised to sustain himself’ with ‘leopard’s marrow cooked in goat’s milk and abundant white pepper’. Pork chops with fennel seeds (an interesting dish. I know it well. Fennel seeds figure frequently in the country cooking of Tuscany) makes ‘a stimulant for sturdy stomachs’. A piece of loin of pork simmered in milk (a method of meat-cooking well known in certain parts of central and northern Italy) is ‘a good restorative’. Restoratives, stimulants, sustaining dishes, one notes. Why are they restorative, stimulating, sustaining? Because this is good cooking; interesting, well-seasoned, appetizing, fresh, únmonotonous. Nothing is a dish for every day … Certainly not that concoction of the
intestines of a sucking pig stuffed with pieces of eel, peppercorns, cloves and plenty of sage (evidently an uncommonly grisly form of chitterling sausage) concerning which Norman is at his most teasing: ‘This is an extremely appetizing and stimulating dish. The eel goes very well with pork, because it is among fish what the pig is among quadrupeds.’ A simultaneous right and left to certain religious observances and to inherent prejudices with which he had no patience.

‘Anchovies have long been famed for their lust-provoking virtues’ is the piece of information appended to a recipe for anchovy toast. Ha! This recipe, which sounds a good one, consists of an emulsion of four ounces of butter and the yolks of four eggs plus one tablespoon of anchovy sauce and a seasoning of Nepal pepper. Hardly enough anchovy to provoke a mild thirst, let alone a lust. Anyone who hopes that
Venus in the Kitchen
is going to provide a roll on the dining-room floor would do well to reconsider. And to buy the book for a different kind of fun. For the fun, that is, of reading about the spices and wines and herbs, the fruit and flowers, the snails, the truffles, the birds, animals and parts of animals (the crane, the skink, the testicles of bulls) which went into the cooking pots of ancient Rome and Greece and of Renaissance Europe; for a glimpse, just enough to send us looking for more of the same kind, of the cinnamon and ginger and coriander flavoured game dishes, of the rose- and saffron-spiced sauces and meats, of the pistachio creams, the carnation conserves, the gentian and honey-flavoured wines, the Easter rice, the Sardinian pie of broad beans, the rolls of beef marbled with hard-boiled eggs and ham, the fennel and the almond soups which have all but vanished from European cooking.

To students of
Venus in the Kitchen
it may come as a disappointment to learn that Norman Douglas did not himself go in for the little extravaganzas he was fond of describing. Authentic food (if you can lay hands on a copy, see the passage in
Alone
describing his search in wartime Italy for genuine
maccheroni
, those
maccheroni
of a lily-like candour made from the correct hard fine white wheat flour), wine properly made, fruit from the trees he knew to have been well tended and grown in the right conditions – such things were his concerns. Gourmets’ solemnities and sippings were not for him.

His tastes in food, in his last years, had become more than a trifle idiosyncratic. His explosive denunciations concerning the fish of the Mediterranean waters were familiar to all his friends (and to readers
of
Siren Land
). ‘Mussels? Of course, if you
want
to be poisoned, my dear. You know what happened to the consul in Naples, don’t you?
Palombo?
No fear. But have it your way, my dear, have it your way. If you
care
to eat shark …’ Then there was that business of the saffron. ‘Liz, now take another glass of wine, and go into the kitchen; just see that Antonio puts enough saffron into that risotto. A man who is stingy with the saffron is capable of seducing his own grandmother.’ From his pocket would come a brilliant yellow handkerchief. ‘When the rice is that colour, there’s enough saffron.’ Enough! I should say so. For me the taste of saffron was overpowering long before the requisite colour had been attained. Just another of Norman’s kinks, like his mania for hard-boiled eggs, of which he ate only the whites. How many discarded hard-boiled egg yolks did I consume in those weeks spent with him on Capri during the last summer of his life?