Is There a Nutmeg in the House? (2 page)

With very few exceptions, none of the material in
Is there a Nutmeg in the House?
has appeared in book form before. The notable exceptions are the essays on yogurt making, mayonnaise
and poached eggs which she contributed to a little book called
Masterclass
, published in 1982 and long out of print.

Elizabeth’s recipes were written as a text to be read, not as is currently the norm, a list of ingredients in the order to be used followed by a list of instructions. Usually the ingredients and quantities were given in the first paragraph, with the most important ones, and those for which you would need to go shopping rather than look in the cupboard or refrigerator, first. A short, straightforward recipe might simply begin with a combination of ingredients and instructions: ‘Soak ½ lb of beans overnight. Drain them, put them in the jar with a half onion, a piece of celery, a clove or two of garlic, two or three leaves of fresh sage…’ (Fagioli alla fagiolara toscana,
page 75
). No metric measurements were included in recipes written before the 1970s. When working on
English Bread and Yeast Cookery
Elizabeth decided that both metric and imperial measures should be used and her recipes have a paragraph of imperial quantities followed by one of equivalent metric quantities. For the metric measures the quantity was given after the ingredient. This follows the style of Eliza Acton in
Modern Cookery for Private Families
. Miss Acton wrote her paragraphs of ingredients and quantities at the end of her recipes after explaining the method. In recipes written in the late 1970s and 1980s or those translated and adapted from other sources Elizabeth adopted the same procedure. The recipes from that period included here have been edited to put the ingredients before the method for the sake of consistency.

I have tried to give approximate dates of writing for unpublished pieces and recipes, based on recollections of what Elizabeth was working on at different periods, on the style of writing, on whether or not she included metric measurements, and even on the appearance of the typescript (which often gave a clue to who had typed it).

Now that all our food is purchased in metric quantities I have given metric measures first in the recipes, and since we buy in quantities of 500 g or 1 kg, for ease of shopping I have used these measurements as the basis for conversion rather than the more usual (and accurate) 450 g to 1 lb. For the recipes in this book, the extra few grams is unlikely to make any difference to the success of the dish.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am very grateful to Jack Andrews, Gerald Asher, April and Jim Boyes, George Elliot, Johnny Grey, Rosi Hanson and John Ruden who gave me ideas and encouragement, sent me cuttings of old newspaper recipes and copies of letters, notes and recipes they had received from Elizabeth. Jack Andrews also gave me copies of papers from the Estate of the late Lesley O’Malley. Elizabeth’s nephew Johnny Grey also gave permission to use the plan and photographs for Elizabeth David’s ‘dream’ kitchen.

Special thanks to Paul Breman for help with the organisation and selection, for typing almost unreadable photocopies of old newspaper cuttings and compiling the index, and to Jenny Dereham for her constant support and helpful suggestions and for her thorough and painstaking editing of a messy and complicated typescript.

Unless otherwise indicated, the drawings are by Marie Alix for
107 Recettes ou Curiosités Culinaires
, edited by Paul Poiret, published by Henri Jouquières et Cie, Paris, 1928.

Jill Norman, June 2000

Kitchens and their Cooks

The old brick-floored kitchen of the Sussex manor-house where I grew up with my three sisters is not a place I look back on with nostalgia. The cook and the kitchen staff had a hard enough time without small children running in and out getting under their feet, so if we were unwelcome there, that was understandable. Every day there were four separate sets of meals to prepare. For the dining-room, there was breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. For the nursery, lunch and supper (breakfast and tea were made by Nanny and the nursery-maid); for the schoolroom, lunch, tea and a supper tray for the governess; for the servants’ hall, breakfast, lunch, tea and supper. Everything was cooked on a coal-burning range, vegetables were prepared in the scullery, and throughout the day a massive black iron kettle was kept with water on the simmer for the cups of tea to be administered to any outdoor staff, such as the gardener bringing fruit and vegetables, or a stable boy who might drop in. There would also be a succession of van drivers delivering groceries and household stores from the town seven miles away, the baker and the butcher bringing bread and meat from the village three miles down the road, the postman with parcels, a telegraph boy with telegrams from the village post office. All would be offered tea, biscuits, bread and cheese, cake.

How, I wonder now, did anything at all in the way of formal meals get cooked in that kitchen, busy as it was all morning and afternoon with non-cooking activities? The answer, I think, is that, picturesque though it may all sound, most of the food which emerged from it was really very basic. We ate a lot of mutton and beef plainly cooked, with plain vegetables. The boiled potatoes were usually put through a device called a ricer so that they came up to the nursery in dry, flaky mounds. Vegetable marrows were yellow, boiled and watery. There were green turnip tops, spinach, Jerusalem artichokes, parsnips. I hated them all. Puddings weren’t much better. Junket was slippery and slimy, jam roly-poly greasy, something called ground rice pudding dry and stodgy, tapioca the most revolting of all, invented apparently solely to torment children. The obligatory mugs of milk at breakfast and tea time
were a penance, although hardly one to be blamed on the cook or any of the kitchen staff.

Presumably my mother, in league with Nanny, decreed those mugs of hated milk, and also chose to ignore the odious puddings and vegetables dished up for her daughters. Yet, as each of us in turn grew old enough to be promoted to grown-up tea, we discovered a rather different world. True to English country house usage at the time, tea at five o’clock was presided over by my mother sitting at the head of a long table, the silver hot water urn set over a spirit lamp and the silver teapot in front of her. There was a jug of milk, of course, but that was for visitors, because once we were out of the nursery my mother, who was nothing if not inconsistent, considered that it was wrong to put milk, not to mention sugar, into her fine China tea. Lemon, yes, but nothing else. I can’t answer for my sisters, but I at least was more than thankful for release from the odious tea-time milk. Five o’clock food was nice too.

I don’t remember anything spectacular, but there was always a spread of simple wholesome things, like thin bread and butter, scones, home-made jelly – crab apple, quince, or blackberry – cucumber sandwiches, a sponge cake. For special visitors there was usually a cake with a delicious orange-flavoured icing, one which must have been a house speciality, passed on from cook to cook. At any rate, I have memories of it all through my childhood and school holidays.

Today it is still a source of wonderment to me that anyone contrived to cook such faultless and delicate cakes in the oven of that old coal range, and for that matter how a cook could with one hand, so to speak, produce the abominable vegetables and repulsive puddings of our nursery days and with the other the refined cakes and beautiful jams and jellies. Looking back, I suppose that the simple explanation is that our nursery food must have been left to the kitchen maid, while the cook herself made the preserves and the cakes.

The orange cake wasn’t the only good one I remember. There was a cherry cake and a chocolate cake – my mother was all her life a great chocolate fancier – and on one unhappily memorable occasion the family’s golden retriever found his way into the larder and was discovered gobbling down the remnants of what had been an entire chocolate cake, fresh from the oven. Who had left the larder door open? Recriminations and arguments
raged for days, the younger children were, as always, suspected, and the kitchen regions were more strictly than ever out of bounds to us.

Frankly, then, the kitchen of my childhood and the food it produced left few glowing memories. Another matter altogether is the illicit cooking that went on in the nursery. A sort of sticky fudge, which we called ‘stuff’ – it now sounds like some addictive drug – was one of Nanny’s specialities. She cooked it over the nursery fire and gave it to us in spoonfuls out of saucers or soap dishes. Then there were mushrooms, gathered in a field close to the house – as children we knew very well where to look for the best ones – and carried back to the nursery for breakfast. Nanny cooked them in the good, thick cream which we had in abundance, and no mushrooms since have ever tasted quite so magical. In high summer there was the best treat of all, big fat red gooseberries, redcurrants and raspberries from the garden which Nanny used to throw into a saucepan with sugar, heat quickly over the nursery fire, and give to us then and there. This hot fruit salad somehow embodied the very essence of summer, and as everyone knows, the summers of childhood are longer and sunnier than those of later life.

When I was eighteen I left home and joined the Oxford Repertory Company as a student, sweeping the stage, making the tea (somebody had to show me how), occasionally taking small parts, understudying the bigger ones, and scouring the town for unlikely props such as the famous hatbox in Emlyn Williams’
Night Must Fall
(it contains a severed head, or so the audience is led to believe). I lived in digs in various parts of Oxford, including the Banbury Road, Beaumont Street, and I forget where else, but in the two years I stayed there it was scarcely possible to cook. Anyway, digs seldom included anything you could rightly call a kitchen.

I suppose I was over twenty when I moved to London to work in the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park. After a spell in an aunt’s house in Chester Gate I rented rooms – not a real flat – in a big house on Primrose Hill. I had an immensely large living-room with huge, high windows, a rather cramped bedroom, a bathroom, and a kitchen improvised out of what was really a landing. There I installed a gas cooker, one of those old food safes with perforated metal sides which nowadays you see only in junk shops, and eventually a biggish refrigerator,
bought with a generous twenty-first birthday cheque from an uncle. What a funny way to spend all that money, friends said. I thought then, and I think now, that it was a perfectly rational way to spend it. I couldn’t see that a refrigerator was anything but a necessity, even if the immediate use I put it to wasn’t very laudable. Ready-cooked food was what I filled it with, although as things turned out, not for long.

It was opening an account at Selfridges that went to my head. I had only to pick up the telephone for roast chickens, smoked salmon, butter, fruit, cheese, cream, eggs, coffee to be delivered next day. It wasn’t until the monthly accounts seemed to be adding up to much more than I could afford that it dawned on me that having a roast chicken always handy in the fridge was a rather extravagant way of entertaining friends. And that anyway, bought food, although an improvement on the horrors of nursery and school meals, and the post-rehearsal high teas with tinned fruit salad at the Cadena Café in Oxford, was not exactly comparable with the fine cooking I had recently sampled in the Paris household I’d lived in for nearly two years while at the Sorbonne. (This food I described in
French Provincial Cooking
, published in 1960, so I will not repeat the description here.)

There had also been the six months with an aristocratic Munich family who employed an Austrian cook, where I had encountered many delicious and unfamiliar things such as sweet buttery bread for Sunday breakfast, a marvellous chocolate confection called
Mohr im Hemd
or moor in a nightshirt, a rich chocolate and almond cake covered in thick, soft white cream, venison with a mysterious wild red berry sauce, apricot and plum dumplings like tiny, very superior doughnuts… Would I ever be able to cook such things for myself?

At about that time I saw in Selfridges (a store which played a big part in my youth) a towering pile of copies of a book called
Recipes of All Nations
by a Countess Morphy. It was a thick book, priced at 2s 6d, or 3s 6d for a version with a thumb index. Bound in shiny covers in a choice of colours, yellow, pale blue or red, the book seemed amazing value for money. One day I carried a copy home with me on the bus and began reading it. It was fascinating – it still is – but Countess Morphy, whose ‘all nations’ did indeed extend across the five continents, threw little light on such matters as quantities, timing, temperatures and other technical details. Still, with the help of Mrs Hilda Leyel’s
The
Gentle Art of Cookery
, given to me by my mother, I began to teach myself to cook nice food. Mrs Leyel’s book, it has to be said, was appealing in its imaginative approach to cooking, but almost as notably deficient in technical instruction as Countess Morphy’s. Had I known how huge was the gap between the urge to cook and the instruction necessary to achieve satisfactory results, perhaps I wouldn’t have embarked on so perilous a course of action. As things were, I blundered on, not much daunted by mistakes.