Among the Bohemians (32 page)

The English squirearchy traditionally distrusted the lurid sexiness of foreign food, whose fancy sauces and seasonings seemed artfully to mock the ungarnished honesty of good plain British beef.
But the socially ambitious middle classes were eager to display
bon ton
through their consumption of ‘French’ dishes.
An aspirant quality emerges from Mrs Beeton’s recipes: mince patties are ‘croustades’, poached eggs are ‘oeufs pochés’, beetroot salad is ‘Salade de Betterave’, and so on.
Yet the real France had not
penetrated.
Suspicion lingered around ingredients perceived as ‘common’ or ‘unsuitable’ – steak, tomatoes, even lemons.
Mrs Beeton is clear that garlic is a bulb whose ‘flavour, unless used very sparingly, is disagreeable to the palate’.
Coffee was considered to be ‘not quite nice’ – wine was ‘tabu’.
It would seem that the Frenchification of English food was barely skin deep, the nation at large clinging xenophobically to its roasts, hashes and ‘Pouding au Riz’.

*

It is shaming to reflect what a dismal story our food betrays to the world outside.
For whether we like it or not, our eating habits – from banqueting hall to fast-food outlet – reflect the emphasis we place on relationships, hierarchies, and conventions.
The table is an ingrained symbol of society in miniature.
What we place on it tells the world how we see ourselves, and Victorian and Edwardian England was a place where respectability ruled.

No dinner-table will
ever
look well unless neatness and refinement are displayed in the minor details…

declared Lady Colin Campbell in
Etiquette of Good Society
(1898).

Very much depends on there being a fine white linen damask cloth, without crease or crumple, placed very exactly on the table.
You cannot be too formal or too prim in laying out a table.

Never mind the quality of the food you place on it.
To entertain a party of twelve, Lady Colin Campbell lists forty-six essential categories of cutlery, glass and napery, from sauce ladles to grape scissors, from decanters to doilies.
The expectations of guests placed in such a formal setting were that they would comport themselves with the utmost correctness.
Woe betide the diner who ate or drank noisily, took large mouthfuls or fiddled nervously with their cufflinks.
These were ‘unforgivable awkwardnesses’.

*

Such restraining expectations and observances were enough to make any self-respecting Bohemian revolt.
One was bound to protest against such idiocies.
Those prim tables with their cloths, napkins, plate and china, silver, candelabra, boiled potatoes and soggy greens were just waiting to be
overturned.
Fancy food and faddy manners were for the finicky, not for the free spirit.

Emphatically independent, Bohemia now turned and bit the hand that fed it, spurning the worthies and matrons of Middle England and all they stood for – their fish forks and coasters, their vile prunes and custard, their miserable jugs of water.
Spitting out the unappetising meal placed before them, Bohemians and their fellow-travellers set out in pursuit of a diet that answered not only to their tastes but also to their ideals – art, truth and anti-materialism:

We were full of experiments and reforms [remembered Virginia Woolf).
We were going to do without table napkins… we were going to paint; to write; to have coffee after dinner instead of tea at nine o’clock.
Everything was going to be new, everything was going to be different.
Everything was on trial.

Now, as the art world started to look to Matisse, Cézanne and Derain for its role models, so at mealtimes the cooks of Bohemia were starting to re-create the
daubes,
the
pasta al sugo,
and the
potages bonne femme
remembered from their continental travels.
‘I am having a glorious time, living a somewhat bohemian life and eating bohemian spaghetti,’ Iris Tree wrote home from Florence.
The discovery of continental tastes was indeed a joyful one for many who had been brought up to regard food merely as fuel.
Fifty years before Elizabeth David transformed the British palate with revelations about Mediterranean cookery, women like Vanessa Bell, Stella Bowen, Helen Anrep, Carrington and Dorelia brought the flavours of France and Italy on to the tables of Bohemia.
French food was the chief model to which all aspired.
For Vanessa Bell the delicious bread, the wonderful wines, the mustardy mayonnaises were as much evidence of French excellence as the nation’s art and literature.

Simple dishes – a thick steak or a perfect purée – sent her into raptures.
‘Fancy French food’ – paupiettes, timbales and mousses, however chic – gave off all the wrong messages for people like Vanessa Bell.
The bourgeois cooking of the French provinces, with its excellent ingredients, its hearty simplicity, its economy and robust use of flavourings – garlic, a bunch of herbs, a rind of pork, the last inch of a bottle of
vin de table
– appealed strongly to the Bohemian consciousness of themselves as liberated, sensual, experimental individuals.
For these artists the countries where olive trees grew were a paradise of the senses.
After struggling to keep dry and warm through a Sussex winter Stella Bowen and Ford Madox Ford moved out to
sunny Villefranche on the French Riviera.
Let loose in Toulon market, Stella almost hyperventilates with excitement:

What flowers!
What oranges, lemons, and tangerines!
And what vegetables!
Fennel, and pimentos, and courgettes and herbs and
salade de mâche
and aubergines.
And in the fish market, sea-urchins and octopus and langoustines and mussels, as well as all the serious fishes, and everything you could want for a bouillabaisse, even to the
rascasse.
A shop nearby sells nothing but olive oils, which you will taste from a row of taps, on a piece of bread, whilst next door is a noble selection of sausages and cheeses and a choice of olives.
Daily life has richness and savour here…

Even more lyrical, the poet Roy Campbell evokes an outdoor meal overlooking the ‘limitless sweep of the Crau, the Camargue and the sea, under a crimson and violet sky with the stars coming out and the crickets relieving the cicadas’.
Campbell and his comrades roast a haunch of herb-fed lamb over a fire of vine prunings.
As they wait for it to cook they eat fennel-flavoured green olives with bread and
‘poutargue’
– cured mullet’s roe – washed down with bottles of Châteauneuf du Pape.
The cattle graze, the light fades, the embers smoulder.
We are in the land of eagles, lovers and troubadours.
For Campbell, such meals were sacred.
His recipe for bouillabaisse (somewhat edited) is an initiation ceremony into the mystery of one of the great Provencal dishes:

The pot is first of all lined with onions and tomatoes, a few sprigs of fennel and bay leaves, which grow every ten yards of the way up through the pines: some bits of garlic: a little olive oil.
This is all fried together.
In go six or seven big rascasses, three big crayfishes and crabs, with a few grey mullet; a big silver bream; and water, up to the brim.
You put the pot on the fire now and start grinding your pepper, and the dried anthers of the crocus-flowers, which is the chief flavouring and colouring of the bouillabaisse.
The colour is a brilliant saffron-yellow tinged with tomato.
You salt it, throw in the pepper and saffron, and remove it the second it boils.
The bouillabaisse consists of four simultaneous parts: I.
La Soupe (soup).
2.
La Rouille (the ‘rust’).
3.
Le Pain (bread).
4.
La Friture (the fried stuff).
The rouille is the Soul of the bouillabaisse.

The rouille is made in a big stone mortar: four or five quarters of garlic and one whole redhot chillie are pounded up in it, and then it is filled with soup from the main pot… No decent fisherman will eat bouillabaisse without the
rouille,
which is the spur and rowel both of one’s thirst and one’s appetite…

The friture
is supplied by the net-and-trawl fishers; it consists of bass, silver-bream, golden-bream, sole, and slices of red tunny, fried crisp in olive oil…

But, first, we open the big illegal bonbonne of strong home-distilled pastis and drink a few apéritifs… We sit back on the crisp springy cushions of wild sage, rosemary and thyme with which the ferigoulet is thickly mattressed… With the pines waving overhead… one passes the afternoon of the bouillabaisse in perfect bliss, sipping coffee and vieux marc.
Then after a siesta, the group returns to the town arm in arm, women and men, to join in the farandoles and the dances.

Back in London, such travellers tried to recapture the aromas of France.
Helen Anrep, who had spent much of her youth there and had experienced the heady scents and flavours of Provence, encouraged her cook to make
ragoûts,
veal and
coq au vin.
The writer Mary Butts was fall of contempt for the British joint blanketed in opaque gravy.
Her aromatic leg of lamb, its crisp skin basted with herbs and olive oil, was cooked the way she had learnt in France.
Theodora Rosling, having discovered Paris young, continued a lifelong culinary celebration of the French capital, becoming the well-known cookery writer Theodora Fitzgibbon (after she married Dylan Thomas’s friend Constantine).
Her
A Taste of Paris
(1974) is as much a paean to the culture and art of that city as to its food.
For Theodora there was something irresistible about ‘the strong sweet-sour smell of Paris; the aroma of garlic and olive oil; the taste of Pernod; the gritty feeling of French cigarettes between one’s lips; the vitality and realism of the people’.

Memories of Italy and France helped Harold Acton to survive the rigours of school food.
He and his friend Brian Howard would indulge in escapist fantasies of foreign delicacies, in which Acton would attempt to conjure up for them both ‘the succulence of
ravioli al sugo
or indeed of any of the varieties of macaroni’.
Or bread rolls spread with white truffle paste, or Neapolitan pizza… But his finest flights took wing when he transported his friends into
marrons glacés
heaven:

[They were] of classical proportions, neither too large nor too small; they were neither too brittle nor too compact in texture; they just opened their luscious chapped lips and let their somnolent juices ooze within you, and the frosting of sugar melted gently down your throat, warming the red corpuscles so that they played gay tarantellas while you masticated, and even for some time after…

The glorious sensuality of these vigorous and delicious flavours knocked insipid English food into the background.
In the better-off establishments of Bohemia, like that of Dorelia and Augustus John, eating well could be a joy.
Away with the curried leftover fowl, mutton mould, and stale bread pudding… Alderney Manor was like the land of Canaan.
There was
copious honey from the bees which Dorelia kept, and the dairy provided butter and cream – a cream so rich it tasted of caramel.
She loved to cook pheasant in wine or trout with cream and saffron – ‘impossible to go wrong with such expensive ingredients’ marvelled Kathleen Hale.
The family and their guests feasted on sorrel soup, huge casseroles flavoured with garlic, cooked in olive oil, washed down with rough red wine.
The ‘disagreeably flavoured bulb’ was lavished on salads, which were prepared and served with fantastic rituals, the leaves being finally tossed with her bare hands by the senior virgin present.
When very small, the awestruck Romilly John would lurk at these dinners, hoping to go unnoticed behind his parents’ chairs:

Those were the days of our most unstinted liberality, before the war.
The table seemed to groan under the weight of dishes, and to be lighted by a hundred glittering candlesticks of brass.
Dorelia and John appeared, for the first time in the day, in their true characters and proportions; they were like Jove and Juno presiding over the Olympian feast… Once, when I was… ejected from my lurking-place behind Dorelia’s chair, I bitterly remarked, ‘You grown-ups have all the good things of the world to eat for supper, whereas I have nothing but a little dried froth.’

Like her friend Dorelia, Carrington was infected by a love for continental flavours.
Though she employed a cook at Tidmarsh and Ham Spray, she too enjoyed preparing food, and from the mouth-watering descriptions she gives in her letters, one can tell what a good and greedy cook she herself must have been.
There was
crème brûlée,
‘zambalione’
[sic],
rabbit casserole, lobster, velouté sauce and stewed wild mushrooms.
There was salmon with tartar sauce, and strawberries macerated in kirsch.
English food was not banished, but it was embellished; there was marmalade tart, home-made toffee, and a lovely steak and kidney pie flavoured with ‘rare spices’ which tragically had to be fed to the hens when it decomposed in hot weather, for there was no refrigerator at Ham Spray.

Carrington often illustrated her correspondence with playful drawings showing daily life at Ham Spray.

Carrington loved wine.
By the 1920s she was writing to Dorelia tempting her to visit with the prospect of ‘Chambertin for every meal’.
When I talked to the historian Noël Annan not long before his death, he pointed out that the literary and artistic generation reaching maturity before and after the First World War were, in his view, the first British people to drink wine at meals as a matter of course.
Not the minute glasses of sherry, champagne or vintage claret served at Victorian dinner parties, or the fine old port consumed by gentlemen after dinner – Bohemia quaffed
vin de table.
Dick Mitchison stocked the family cellar with inexpensive red bought direct from Ardennes vineyards, and the Bells returned from Cassis each year with barrels of their landlord’s Château de Fontcreuse.
Carrington ordered wine by the demijohn from France, and bottled it herself.
Parties at Ham Spray were carefree and convivial.
In September 1925 Carrington wrote to Lytton about the dinner she had served to Helen Anrep and her friends the Japps: