An Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David
I don’t think there’s anything I can say about Elizabeth David that has not already been said; by contemporary food writers, by reviewers, by columnists, by documentary makers or by the dramatists who depicted her as a sex-obsessed high society maverick who was careering around the restaurants of the continent while our mothers all ate powdered egg.
What I can say is that as an introduction to the works of someone so widely influential - in fact often cited as the most influential food writer of the 20th century - expressive and historically important to the culinary heritage of Britain, I can heartily recommend this book. It is charming, amusing and fascinating. It transports the reader through her life and offers a flavour of British society at the time. Michelin starred restaurants feature along with smaller family-run cafes. Her tone may seem imperious at times but Elizabeth David was no food snob.
This is a collection of articles from publications which had an upper-middle class, affluent and right of centre following - The Spectator and Vogue mostly - and as such, the writing would not jarr so much with her original following as they do today. At once, David is honest and occasionally disparaging but always entertaining. My favourite passage comes early on in the book when she describes numerous trips to a French restaurant in a well-to-do neighbourhood of London. It makes you realise how bad eating out must have been in England at the time if this hotch-potchof factory-made pate and salad garnish with flashing moments of sincerity (peppered with moody service) is a place she liked revisiting over and over;
“Investigation of other local resources has produced the Beau Geste, an establishment situated on ther Kensington-Fulham-Chelsea borders. In France, you would not go into this restaurant, but in London SW3, you do. The pate is of M.Pigeon’s own confection. It is not discreditable. The red wine sauce with escalope is. It is a thick brown paste. A fork would stand upright in it. The escalopes could be veal. They could just as esily be the bedroom slippers I threw away last week. ” Through all this our author manages to see charm, civility and honesty. Her Francophilia does border on blind madness at points, but as a counterpoint to any prevailing anti-continentalism there might have been at the time, it must have been quite refreshing to her enlightened readers.
Just as Mrs Beeton was not the pinny-wearing straight-lacer that many of us have at some point imagined her to be, David was something of a loose-cannon herself. Her seemingly perpetual tours of Europe were with a married man under the funding of her irritated family - and all this before WWII. I read this book to see if I could understand something of the influence behind our modern attitudes to food. I feel now as if I have struck gold. Ever since my local butcher told me to “ignore your Jamie and Nigella- they all nicked it off of Elizabeth David” a couple of years ago, I have been intrigued. As soon as you start reading, you can see where contemporaries like Nigel Slater might have found inspiration. The similarity in terms of mixture is uncanny - one part recipe, three parts subjective description with a liberal dusting of strongly-held opinion about the purpose and value of food.
“It does seem to me that with so much talk about art vs fine ingredients somebody might mention that there is also the art, or the discipline, call it what you like, of leaving well alone”. This compares very closely to the opening sentence of one of Slater’s recent bestsellers. Simplicity is a golden thread which both these sumptuous food writers relish in and try to impart on their readers.
It now all seems so very innocent. Descriptions of French hotels, cafes, portly ladies cooking and the superiority of the boulangerie over the sliced white loaf which we favoured so heavily in this country for so long - just all seems so obvious today. You only have to take a turn around any supermarket to see the flourishing stock-lines of Taste the difference pain rustique to realise that we are much further away from le sliced white than we were twenty years ago. But when you begin to imagine what eating in Britain must have been like then, this book takes on a life beyond mere travel writing - it is historicaly important.
A large part of why she was so influential must lie in the backdrop of rationing at the time - that and the emergence of the middle classes for whom the kitchen was a visible part of the home. She came up with ways of glorifying the mechanics of cookery to our guests, rather than hide them away. Again, while this may seem obvious to us t0day (have a french farmhouse table in your kitchen for earthy, intimate soirees which hint at your honest aproach to food), she was suggesting we be more continental in post-war Britain. When the continent was war-ravaged and being viewed with suspicion.
In a short article called Waiting for lunch, written in 1984 but never published, she extolls the virtues of a bruschetta-style dish of warm bread rubbed with garlic and served with salt and tomatoes. David is sure this will never catch on over here. Her disappointment in the British public’s uptake of frozen and convenience foods is tangeable too as she remarks after this that if this dish were translated by the English, “there would be a curry version and a cheese variation and a super-gigantic one with bacon, lettuce, onion rings and radishes”. I’m not sure about the radishes (maybe in 1984), but you can certainly see her point.
The book also has its practical virtues, despite not existing as an instructonal book. The ‘Ommelette’ of the title was in fact one of the things that attracted me - as I hold the cooking of a good omelette to be core to enjoying cookery. If you can take your favourite pan and whip-one-up without more than a few minutes fuss and produce something wholesome and tasty, then maybe you can see the same joy in life that David saw in life.
This is a lovely book with real moments of character and seems to represent the tip of the iceberg where David is concerned. The next time I’m asked that question about who I’d invite to my perfect dinner party, there would be no contest. The only question would be whether she’d be happier at the table or in the kitchen.
Recipe Roadtest: The Proof of the Pudding. . .
If you have read Part One, you’ll know that I have been troubled recently; suffering from cake envy. After my last poor attempts to make one, every time I eat someone else’s sponge creation, I slather and chomp but with an underlying niggle that I wish I could do the same for others. Nigel Slater’s guidance failed to see me cross the finish line so I turned to Delia to add some lift in my mixture.
The result? A Victoria sponge made up of two separate halves with a layer of whipped cream and raspberries in between where the main purpose of the mixture was to level-up the tessellating wonkiness of the sponge discs. The good news was that is looked okay, and didn’t taste too bad either. It had the texture a nd appearance of an actual cake. The making of it was a different story, in fact a scene of semi-carnage, lacking the sense of control I normally enjoy in my cooking. It was a good advert for the reintroduction of a more rigorous home-economics programme in our schools.
Having turned to Delia’s How to Cook Book One, I sifted flower, holding the sieve high above the mixing bowl to bring as much air into the mixture as possible - creating a snowy beauty that your average downhill skiier would have been honoured to carve-up. All good so far. Introducing the other ingredients, things were looking all too easy. Then I ‘mixed them together with an electric hand whisk’. At this point, it started flying up the walls, over the hob, onto my apron, and generally everywhere except where I had hoped it would be. Enough remained in the bowl to make a cake. Such excellent news. It was at this point that I wanted to raise my hand. Food instruction in writing is all very well but it does rely on a certain amount of trial and error. A teacher would definitely have been useful, there to give me that sour-faced look of disapproval mixed with the same useful tip she’d just given all the other egg-covered pupils. I styled-my way through the whirling dervish of cream-coloured ooze I found myself in, using the classic wooden for an old-school rescue.
I placed the spring-form tin containing half the mixture firmly to one side of our unevenly heated fan oven. At thirty minutes, it had risen. Not prettily or as evenly as I had distributed my mixture but it had risen but this was marked improvement from Nigel’s all-butter lead-cake.
I improvised the construction phase, spreading a layer of jam on the two halves, adding whipped cream and fresh, halved raspberries. The result was a slightly uneven but moist and fluffy cake which looked solidly cake-like. Delia’s instructions had been clear, precise and even gave tips on how to improvise with the mixture’s consistencies. I forewent the passion fruit and mascarpone filling because I have a belief about making a sponge cake - hence my obsession with making one. That it should be simple and that it should not cost the earth. There is nothing more homely than cleverly making a thrifty cake for friends with your own hands, then sitting around enjoying it with some chat.
In this case, it is with a cup of Sunday morning coffee and a musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Well, each to their own.
My next ambition in this pursuit is to follow a recipe in Eliza Acton’s recipe book of 1854 entitled Modern Cookery for Private Families.The language may be slightly impenatrable and they are referred to as “sweet poisons” but if there’s one area of British cookery which hasn’t shifted much in the last century and a half, it’s a nice cake.
Levi Roots’ Reggae Reggae Cook Book
I’m not a huge fan of celebrity chefs. In fact I’m not a huge fan of celebrity. To me, the recognition that the bloke in that film we’re watching was also in that other thing we saw at the cinema, (and I think he’s married to that other girl who was a child actress and was maybe in a couple of episodes of The Bill once - yes, really!) registers pretty low on my radar of stuff that really matters.
But Levi Roots, I have time for. He is not a grasper of the limelight. He does not love the sound of his own voice (except of course when he’s singing in one of his many musical incarnations). No, this man has lived - I mean really lived. He’s crossed the world, been inside, been nominated for a MOBO, brought up a family, been a fixture of the Notting Hill Carnival and of course he’s been on BBC2’s Dragon’s Den with his guitar and subsequently launched his own range of cooking sauces which are now supermarket bestsellers.
So given the similarity between the cover of this book and a bottle of his famous Reggae Reggae sauce, isn’t this book just another cynically executed phase in the commercial plan masterminded by Dragon’s Den Dragon Peter Jones? Well yes and no. Yes - in that it is a paint-by-numbers exercise in which Levi’s child-like style of writing is invoked to bring us his brief autobiography which is then woven quite clumsily throughout the book with sections of Caribbean recipes with bright photographs on colourful pages. Be warned though that the prose themselves are reminiscent of Roger Red Hat, and when recipes don’t fill up a page, a jaunty creole saying - with much-needed English translation - is slapped on in there to keep you going. If you understand them all on first reading, you’re a better man than I, as in ”When yuh neighbour beard catch fire, tek water wet fe yuh - Learn from others’ mistakes”.
And no - in that despite its obvious commercial motivation, I really like this book. It is bright, colourful, inspiring and unyieldingly happy. It gives a simple introduction to Caribbean cookery, which as Levi (real name Keith in case you’ve always wondered) highlights has not really permeated wholesale into British culture. I live in South East London near to Brixton (where he lived with his parents and was caught in the crossfire of the Brixton race riots) and Peckham where every day of the week, shop-fronts are opened-up and piled-high with yams, okra and sweet potato. And yet I have bought more bottles of RR sauce from Sainsbury’s than I have bought rice n’ peas or Jerk chicken from one of those stalls. So in my eyes, he has already made it more accessible by his sauce to us supermarket-shopping whiteys than previous generations were exposed to. It may only be a sauce but it’s a start.
I don’t think Caribbean cooking has really made its way into the culinary heart of our nation. When wondering exactly why, I am brought to mind of an episode of the 90s sit-com Chef with Lenny Henry in which he, for one episode, turned his talents as Head Chef away from the French-influenced modern European cuisine in which he specialised to the dishes of his motherland. In particular, when he produced a spread which included Caribbean favourite ‘cow-foot and bean’. Needless to say it didn’t go down all that well with is wife. Indeed in this book are recipes for cornmeal porridge, Rasta pasta and special coleslaw which don’t feel that inviting to me - but the majority of it looks good. Warming, gentle spices which originated mostly from India are blended with goat, beef, lots of chicken and preserved fish (including the intriguing blocks of saltfish which came about through the necessity of having to preserve food in the hot climes of the Carib). I am looking forward to trying a cook-up of rice n peas with curried goat when the weather warms a little more into BBQ season.
If you want a fun cookbook that will walk you through the basics of rasta-style cookery, I cannot think of one which could do it with more zest for life, enthusiasm or simplicity. It brings a lot more than that though - this is more inspiring in terms of the life story it tells, allbeit demolishable to the average reader in about twenty minutes. Levi’s unsquashable, entrepreneurial spirit should be inspiration to us all and it permeates through to every page. Cheesy at times and occasionally repetitious (with the phrase ‘dragon-slayer’ making a few appearances too many for my liking - we get the pun Keith and it was clearly Peter Jones’s idea to say that anyway), you cannot help but feel encouraged in your daily life by the fact that he used his last tenner to get a cab to the filming of an episode of Dragon’s Den which was to change his life so dramatically. After what had gone before, it sounds like he deserved a break.
If all celebrities were as interesting, full of life, happy and downright hungry for it all as Levi, I might even start reading OK magazine.