An Omelette and a Glass of Wine Read online

  With the launching of my shop in November 1965 my cookery writing came to an end, although as things turned out only temporarily, so a few of the pieces in Omelette are of relatively recent date. Three are from Alan Davidson’s Petits Propos Culinaires (although I am sometimes referred to in the press as sharing editorial responsibility for that publication, I do not in fact have any whatsoever. I am entirely lacking in the gifts requisite for such a task) and two of them were written before 1979 when Petits Propos was launched. At the time I had already embarked on research for an entirely new book, so no longer had much opportunity to engage in journalism, or indeed the taste to do so. From 1949 to 1979 was quite long enough. No more deadlines for me. But there is one minor aspect of my journalism which I have not mentioned here and feel that I should, particularly as it concerns the late Leonard Russell, for thirty years Literary Editor of the Sunday Times, who initially offered me the job as cookery columnist on the paper. It was Leonard who also first sent me books to review, appalling me with a task I had never before tackled. I don’t think he found me very good at reviewing, and given that among his regular reviewers were Cyril Connolly and Raymond Mortimer, it took some courage to accept even the few books he entrusted to me. As far as I remember all the reviews I wrote for him are included in this volume. With one exception, all the books involved were interesting and unusual, in one case a highly important one, and although I never had quite enough space to fill, Leonard was a considerate editor to work for and he taught me a lot about a journalist’s job. I have much cause to be grateful to him. On more than one occasion his intervention in the matter of Mrs Carter’s shears saved my cookery contribution from reduction to meaningless shreds. The piece called Pizza in the present collection was just such a case. I never did discover what Leonard had said to the lady, but the article appeared word for word as I had written it. All the same, in the end, the job became impossible. After several more such episodes, and after five years, I resigned from the Sunday Times sometime in 1960.

  There were other newspapers and many more periodicals to which I contributed during those decades. There were wine and food journals, and various publications put out by wine merchants who most agreeably paid for contributions in kind. At one time a few bottles of glorious white Burgundy from the cellars of Avery’s of Bristol would occasionally find their way into mine. They were the ones which came at the bidding of André Simon. Their arrivals were rare occurrences. ‘Interesting’, said André on the first occasion he had invited me to choose my wine, ‘women don’t often care for white Burgundy.’ I don’t know how on earth he had worked that one out, but doubtless he had his own reasons for holding such a very odd belief. What I do know is that today I’d have to write a couple of books before I’d earn a case of wine equivalent to the Montrachet André used to choose for me. There were also, in those years, house journals such as that of the B.P. Company, which paid generously and were straightforward to work for, and there was Housewife, a long-vanished monthly, whose editor, Joanna Chase, gave me a good deal of well-paid work, welcome because it provided valuable experience as well as a big audience and big cheques. At the time, the early 1960s, cookery writers were a little better paid than they were when I started. In 1949, I earned eight and a half guineas for a thousand word monthly article. By 1955 it was twenty guineas, and there were still editors who tried to tie you exclusively to one publication and to hang on to your copyrights, so unless you worked for one of the mass circulation weeklies, ‘better’ was a very relative term, and it was necessary to accept nearly everything you were offered. But not quite everything. On one occasion I was summoned to see the editor of a popular Sunday paper. Asked what I had been paid on the one I had previously written for and which had lately folded, I replied ‘forty guineas’. Forty guineas for a cookery article? The great man was apparently on the verge of explosion. ‘No wonder the paper’s gone broke.’ I made for the door. ‘Oh well, if that’s what you’ve been getting I suppose you’ll have to have it.’ ‘Thank you. I’m not going to work for your paper.’ I fled from the building as fast as I could go. I’d had enough of bullies.

  Although I was sacked by only one editor among the many I worked for, it was not my intention when I embarked on the writing of this Introduction to compose an essay on the theme of Some of my best friends are Editors, but journalism is after all inseparable from editors. When mine were good they were very very good. I, on the contrary, am not one of nature’s journalists. I am incapable of writing to order. Editors of the experience of Leonard Russell and of Audrey Withers of Vogue could and sometimes did persuade or cajole me into writing what I had thought I couldn’t, although never what I knew I wouldn’t. They were too intelligent to try, and too busy. From the very beginning, the travel writer Elizabeth Nicholas, editor of Go, gave me as much encouragement and support as I received later from the youthful Hugh Johnson who edited the Wine and Food Society’s Quarterly when André Simon retired, from Pamela Vandyke Price who eventually took over the editorship when the publication was bought by Condé Nast, and from Nova’s first editor, Harry Fieldhouse. Without these editors, and not a few others, I simply would not have had the impetus to produce enough journalism to fill a school exercise book, let alone a proper one between covers. I thank all those friends for their help and guidance.

  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 disp
uted 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 unwe
lcome 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.