Omelette and a Glass of Wine (3 page)

I do not forget to thank also my readers, especially the many who over the years have troubled to write to me, even when occasionally their letters were furious, rude or sarcastic. Grumpy letters often reveal more about current attitudes to food and cooking than appreciative ones. Useful things are to be learned from those who tell you what you’ve done wrong. That is not to say that I harboured particularly charitable thoughts about the retired French professional chef who wrote regularly, not to me, but to trade publications, denouncing in almost paranoiac terms, me, my contemporary colleague on the
Observer
, and indeed all cookery writers since Escoffier, as frauds. Today’s friendly cooperation, free exchange of ideas, and cordial relations generally between top-flight professional chefs and cookery journalists would scandalise that angry old man. It would never have occurred to him that mutual respect between the two categories of professional might be of benefit to the public, as well as to each other. In those days professional chefs were often very limited and narrow in outlook and education. There were of course many shining exceptions, but some knew only what they had been taught during their apprenticeships and were unbelievably bigoted. I well remember one French chef at a respected West End restaurant who, when asked to include a certain mushroom soup, for which the recipe appears in
French Provincial Cooking
, in a dinner to be organised by André Simon in honour of the book, refused point blank. The poor man emerged from his kitchens fairly fuming. ‘A soup thickened with bread? No Frenchman has ever heard of such a thing. Ah non’. That couldn’t or at any rate wouldn’t happen today. The professionals all collect cookery books. Some actually read them and adapt ancient recipes. Others talk a good deal about using
trucs de bonne femme
, by which they
mean their great aunts’ or their great grandmothers’ cousins’ cooking methods, which of course would have to include thickening their soups with bread. These men would be ashamed to reveal ignorance and intolerance such as were demonstrated by the older chefs mentioned above. I’ve forgotten both their names, so I suppose neither of them was really a top flier, and not comparable with the stars of today’s gastronomic firmament. I’m glad to think that in that particular cooking world there are many things which have changed very much for the better.

June 1984

1.
Modern Cookery for Private Families
, a landmark in English cookery writing, and a work heavily borrowed from by Isabella Beeton.

1
The American magazine
Gourmet
.

1.
Readers may be amused to learn what Bill Bryson, author of
The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words
, 1984, has to say on the subject: ‘The question of whether to write
firstly … secondly
or
first … second
constitutes one of the more bizarre and inane but most hotly disputed issues in the history of English usage.’ The admirable Mr Bryson sends us back to Fowler, ‘ever the cool head’ and thinks he should have the last word in the matter. ‘The preference for
first
over
firstly
in formal enumerations is one of the harmless pedantries in which those who like oddities because they are odd are free to indulge, provided that they abstain from censuring those who do not share the liking.’

2.
That was thanks to Anne Scott-James, my first editor at
Harper’s Bazaar
.

John Wesley’s Eye

In a brief and neatly-worded letter to the
Guardian
some three weeks ago Mr George Mikes expressed the view that we shall need no independent deterrent so long as we have English provincial cooking. I am not arguing with Mr Mikes. I simply wonder if he, as an old inhabitant of these islands and, I take it, a man of resource, was really making his way about our provinces unprovided with the wherewithal to sustain life without resort to hotel meals. Myself, it wouldn’t occur to me to do such a thing. Once, I was involved in such a venture, and very odd consequences it had.

It was the winter of 1946–47. In the late summer of 1946 I had returned to England after some years spent in the Middle East and a brief period in the Farther one.

After years of enjoying comparative plenty, rationing was a challenge. Everyone else had hoards of things like powdered soups and packets of dehydrated egg to which they were conditioned. I started off untrammelled; an empty cupboard was an advantage. With whatever I could get I cooked like one possessed. The frustrations were great. All the same one managed some entertainment. Nobody ever came to a meal without bringing contributions. Unexpected ones sometimes. A wild goose. Snails from Paris. Mock liver pâté from Fortnums. British Government-bought Algerian wine. One of my sisters turned up from Vienna with a hare which she claimed had been caught by hand outside the State Opera House.

Game was plentiful everywhere that year. Even if one didn’t actually catch pheasants in Kensington High Street one could buy them very cheaply in the shops. Wild duck, although distinctly fishy some of them, were not more than a shilling apiece. My landlady, living in the flat below mine, was saintly. Not once did she complain about the cooking smells, the garlic, the onions, those eternal bacon bones simmering in the stock … About the heating she was, with the best will in the world, powerless. Literally. And gas-less. By mid-January of that year the fire in my sitting room was reduced to a candle-splutter. Impossible to heat the water. My wardrobe, after so long in warm climates, was entirely inadequate. Clothes coupons went nowhere. At this moment somebody put into my head the idea
of going to stay, at reduced all-in rates, in a hotel at Ross-on-Wye. You may well ask … I didn’t. I just went.

I knew little in those days of English hotels. It was many years since I had been exposed to them. This one was adequately warm, and that was miracle enough. There was a fine coal fire in the public sitting room, a maid to bring hot-water-bottles and breakfast in bed. I had friends near by.

In Ross-on-Wye, I was told, there are more public houses to the square yard than in any other town in these islands. There seemed to be some truth in the claim. Many of them were cider pubs. Up and down that steep hill I went, sampling every kind and degree of Hereford cider, most of it rough, some very rough indeed.

On one of these outings I came on an interesting-looking antique shop. A very large shop, with immense windows. These were filled from floor to ceiling with a fantastic jumble of every conceivable kind of antique. Lamps, china, glass, chairs, bedsteads, curtains, Sheffield candlesticks, desks, pictures, books, bookshelves, bronzes, Georgian silver coffee pots, horse brasses, corner cupboards, whole services of dinner plates, soup tureens, sauce boats, statuary. The lady inside the shop was as unusual as her windows. I shall call her Miss D. If you asked to look at something she pulled it out from amid the morass, regardless. A chandelier would come rippling to the ground. A Biedermeier sofa standing on end would topple, upsetting a pile of Wedgwood.

‘May I look at that Leeds dish?’ Miss D. extracted it from underneath a ship’s decanter and an early Peter Jones painted waste paper basket.

‘There’s a pair to it somewhere. Do you want it?’

‘If you can find it.’

‘Oh, here it is. Broken with that lot that just came down. Can’t be helped.’

I took the bereaved Leeds dish and put it in my basket before Miss D. had a chance to knock it flying. The friend I was with rescued from under the lady’s foot, and gave to me, a frail white jug with black transfers of John Wesley’s head and a building called the Centenary Hall, dated 1839. As Miss D. took my cheque her elbow jogged the tap of a copper tea-urn perched on top of a model four-masted barque in a heavy box frame. It knocked over a solid silver clock representing General Gordon sitting on a horse, which fell against a scrap screen, a japanned tray and a tortoiseshell and silver-inlaid musical box. The guts of the little musical box cracked
out on to the floor. Miss D. was unshaken. ‘Take care how you go out,’ she said.

Visiting Miss D.’s shop became a compulsive occupation. Before I should myself acquire an abominable taste for cool, passionless destruction, I decided to be gone from Ross-on-Wye. Not so easy. By this time the West Country was devastated by floods. Ross was in the Wye rather than on it. The BBC news announcements had a Shakespearean ring. ‘Hereford’s under water, Ludlow and Mon-mouth cut off. Gloucester flooded.’ I was intending to go toward Bristol rather than back to London, so I stuck it out. It was an effort. By this time I was finding it very difficult indeed to swallow the food provided in the hotel. It was worse than unpardonable, even for those days of desperation; and, oddly, considering the kindly efforts made in other respects, produced with a kind of bleak triumph which amounted almost to a hatred of humanity and humanity’s needs. There was flour and water soup seasoned solely with pepper; bread and gristle rissoles; dehydrated onions and carrots; corned beef toad-in-the-hole. I need not go on. We all know that kind of cooking. It still exists. ‘War-time food made with 1963 ingredients’ as it was genially put to me by a friend lately returned from a scarring experience in an Eastbourne residential establishment.

It was not feasible, in 1947, to go out and buy food as nowadays I would. When you stayed more than a night or two in a hotel you gave them your ration book, retaining only coupons for things like chocolate and sweets. Those didn’t get you far. And of course all that rough cider was inconveniently appetite-rousing.

Hardly knowing what I was doing, I who had scarcely ever put pen to paper except to write memos to the heads of departments in the Ministry which employed me during the war, I sat down and, watched over by John Wesley, started to work out an agonized craving for the sun and a furious revolt against that terrible, cheerless, heartless food by writing down descriptions of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cooking. Even to write words like apricot, olives and butter, rice and lemons, oil and almonds, produced assuagement. Later I came to realize that in the England of 1947, those were dirty words that I was putting down.

To people who have sometimes asked how it was that in 1949, when such words were still very dubious, I came to be writing them so freely, this is at least partly the answer. Any publisher less
perceptive than mine (he was John Lehmann) would have asked me to take them all out when in that year he accepted the cookery book of which those original notes had become a part.

The Spectator
, 1 February 1963

Fast and Fresh

It isn’t only the expense, the monotony and the false tastes of the food inside most tins and jars and packages which turn me every day more against them. The amount of space they take up, the clutter they make and the performance of opening the things also seem to me quite unnecessarily exasperating. However, even cookery journalists who spend most of their lives with a saucepan in one hand and a pen in the other can’t dispense entirely with the kind of stores from which a meal can every now and again be improvised. What I personally require of such things is that there shall be no question whatever of their letting me down or giving me any unwelcome surprise. Out with any product which plays tricks or deteriorates easily. And out also with all the things of which one might say they’ll do for an emergency. If something isn’t good enough for every day, then it isn’t good enough to offer friends, even if they have turned up demanding a meal without notice.

Twenty years ago, during the war years, which I spent in the Eastern Mediterranean, I became accustomed to planning meals from a fairly restricted range of provisions. Now I find myself returning more and more to the same sort of rather ancient and basic foods. They suit my taste and they are the kind of stores which will always produce a coherent and more or less complete meal, which is just what haphazardly bought tins and packages won’t do. What happens when you have to open four tins, two jars and three packets in order to make one hasty cook-up is that you get a thoroughly unsatisfactory meal; and the contents of half-used tins and jars have got to be dealt with next day – or left to moulder in the fridge. Or else, like the surburban housewife in N. F. Simpson’s
One Way Pendulum
, you’ve got to pay somebody to come in and eat the stuff up.

The only stores I had to bother about when I lived for a time in a small seashore village on an Ægean island were bread, olive oil,
olives, salt fish, hard white cheese, dried figs, tomato paste, rice, dried beans, sugar, coffee and wine.

With fresh fish – mostly small fry or inkfish, but occasionally a treat such as red mullet or a langouste to be obtained from one of the fisher boys, with vegetables and fruit from the garden of the tavern-owner, eggs at about twopence a dozen, and meat – usually kid, lamb or pork – available only for feast days, the diet was certainly limited, but at least presented none of the meal-planning problems which, as I have learned from readers’ letters, daily plague the better-off English housewife.

Subsequently, in war-time Egypt, I found, in spite of the comparative plenty and variety and the fact that in Greece I had often grumbled about the food, that the basic commodities of the Eastern Mediterranean shores were the ones which had begun to seem essential. Alexandrians, not surprisingly, knew how to prepare these commodities in a more civilized way than did the Greek islanders. The old-established merchant families of the city – Greek, Syrian, Jewish, English – appeared to have evolved a most delicious and unique blend of Levantine and European cookery and were at the same time most marvellously hospitable. I have seldom seen such wonderfully glamorous looking, and tasting, food as the Levantine cooks of Alexandria could produce for a party. And yet when you got down to analysing it, you would find that much the same ingredients had been used in dish after dish – only they were so differently treated, so skilfully blended and seasoned and spiced that each one had its own perfectly individual character and flavour.