Among the Bohemians (34 page)

Although gas cookers were generally available at the turn of the century, only better-off households could afford one.
The studio dweller was more likely to cook over a single gas-ring (Kathleen Hale’s was situated at floor level, not a practical position for cooking), while houses in the countryside had to make do with open fires, solid fuel ranges or paraffin stoves – all of these being dirty, hard to control and laborious to maintain.
Electric cookers didn’t come in until the late 1920s.

Water too, was very often not piped into homes, and had to be drawn, fetched or back-breakingly pumped by hand from the water supply to the tank.
In Ditchling the Gills drew all their water from a pump.
Mary Gill cooked over open wood fires, and visitors might wait for hours for a meal while the damp logs failed to catch, tummies vainly rumbling as they watched a Gill child attempt to blow up a blaze with the bellows.
Keeping food fresh was a headache.
One could prevent the butter from melting by putting it in an insulated box containing ice, which was bought from the horse-drawn cart of an ice-vendor.
Refrigerators were deluxe innovations.
Clive Bell, who enjoyed such extravagances as ice in his gin, provided the Charleston household with one in the late 1930s.
Until that time the cold larder was the only repository for fresh food or leftovers.
Getting dinner on the table in these circumstances was a very hit-or-miss affair, and one can only marvel that people managed it at all, let alone made food that anyone actually wanted to eat.

In the days of Carrington’s romance with Mark Gertler the pair were living a few notches above subsistence level, so Carrington attempted soup.
Did she sieve it, I wonder?
It appears to have been a success since, away from London, she wrote to Gertler ‘Do you miss my soups?’ But she continued eager to extend her repertoire.
Not long after she was writing: ‘I am going to learn to make some puddings & good dishes to cook for you when I come back, as I am sure in time we will get tired of eggs on plates.’ Gertler was unimpressed, but recognised the point that preparing good food left no time for more creative activities: ‘You certainly ought to learn something about cooking.
I should always prefer my girl friends to be better cooks than artists.
Don’t let this annoy you.’ Gertler had grown up with the assumption, not uncommon in a working-class Jewish household, that it was the woman’s job to provide meals for her man.
In the event Carrington’s efforts went unrewarded, for Gertler managed to persuade his landlady to feed him for two shillings a week.
For this she cooked him a large Sunday lunch, but to his dismay it didn’t include dessert.
Like a thwarted child, Gertler sulked horribly at this oversight:

After the first course I waited and waited and nothing else came.
Now, I simply must have sweets.
After waiting for about fifteen minutes I gave my mouth a final wipe, got up and walked off in despair.
What if I never get sweets!
I sat and brooded all the afternoon about it and couldn’t work.

He might have done better to accept Camngton’s kind offer of puddings.

*

Necessity first propelled Carrington into the kitchen but, once there, she gradually developed an enthusiasm for all things culinary.
Being forced to cook could be surprisingly pleasurable.
Ida John, stranded with two toddlers in Essex, unable to paint, and with Augustus largely away in London, found respite in the kitchen.
Cookery was so much more relaxing than childcare, which she increasingly delegated to their servant Maggie:

I have begun to learn to cook, and can make several puddings and most delicious pastry…

I have been cooking and cooking and cooking – and have been so successful.
1 want to try and make Maggie nurse, and be cook and odd woman [myself]… And cooking is so charming…

Bohemian foodies even in the days of their poverty, Stella Bowen and Ford Madox Ford creatively braved the inadequacies of their ramshackle cottage kitchen.
‘Ford was one of the great cooks…’ Stella remembered:

And if the cook-house was a primitive hovel and the oil-stove a little horror, if the kitchen shelves were wobbly, the table a packing-case and the sink non-existent, it was nevertheless in these surroundings that I received my first – and how valuable!
– instructions on the importance of food… Of course [Ford] was utterly reckless with the butter and reduced the kitchen to the completest chaos… But he did not mind how much trouble he took, and he never wasted scraps.
Every shred of fat was rendered down, and every cabbage stalk went into the stock-pot which stood eternally on the living-room fire.

Soon Ford was able to trust Stella in the kitchen, and there, while he retreated upstairs to find inspiration with a new manuscript, she would prepare their meals and await his judgement.
Over a late dinner (he was usually oblivious when summoned to eat until overcome by hunger) they would relish the food and enthusiastically discuss his novel and the progress of her cooking.
Those were happy, self-sufficient days.

People like Carrington, Ida John, Stella Bowen and Ford Madox Ford discovered the joy and artistic satisfaction to be had in the kitchen.
They were natural cooks for whom making food was a complement to their creativity.
For cookery is, of course, an art form.
The plate corresponds to the canvas in its composition, its colour, its appeal to the senses, and the revelations to be experienced from unexpected combinations.
With a little imagination an orange jelly can become a surrealist experience, while baked apples eaten at midnight are somehow more profound and poetic than served with custard for lunch.
Munching sardines on the Downs in a thunderstorm has an epic quality.
Roast flamingo has unconquerably romantic resonances, and grilled mouse on toast (the creation of Epstein’s model Betty May) has all the shock of the new.
For Arthur Ransome even selecting a filling for his sandwich is transformèd into a work of virtuosity:

Veal, potted liver, chicken artfully prepared,
pâté de foie gras…
tongue spiced and garnished… lobster paste, shrimp paste, cockle paste, and half a hundred other luscious delicacies, wait in a great circle about you, like paints on a palette; while you stand hesitating in the middle, and
compose
your sandwich…

The stallholder, meanwhile…

… does the rough handiwork, and executes your design, often, like the great man of the art school, contributing some little detail of his own that is needed for perfection, and presents you finally with the complete work of art, cut into four for convenient eating, for sixpence only, an epicurean triumph…

Next to such masterpieces, pouring rice pudding into the stockpot sounds less like self-expression and more like a botch-up – as it was for Duncan Grant, who meant well, but was quite clueless in the kitchen.
Carrington commented wryly on the chaos she discovered at Asheham House where she was staying in 1915.
Her fellow guests, Duncan, the Bells and Lytton Strachey muddled their way through the catering with pathetic ineptitude.
‘They were astounded,’ she reported ‘because I knew what part of the leek to cook!’ and ‘the vaguest cooking ensued’.
It was often the case that middle-class women – and men – who were also artists found themselves floundering in the kitchen, for the mysteries of domesticity could seem impenetrable to all but the initiate.

Being in charge of a household was daunting.
There was so much the lady of the house was expected to know.
Dealing with servants and tradesmen was only the start.
She needed to be versed in everything from the household
accounts, to how to tell if a herring is fresh, to the price of a stone of flour.
True, shopping for food was in some ways easier than it is today.
The corner shop – fruiterer, butcher or fishmonger – was still all-important.
Groceries were generally delivered, even in rural areas, by establishments who took orders by postcard.
In some cases the proprietor himself would attend the mistress of the house once a month and take instructions in the drawing room over sherry and macaroons.
But there was a mystique and formality about this way of doing things that seemed archaic to the newly emancipated women of the early twentieth century.

The dilemma lay in having to give thought to meals, having to purchase provisions, when what one really wanted to be doing was composing poetry or painting.
What was the difference between pork and veal?
How many potatoes were there in a pound?
Julia Strachey had no idea.
Dorelia had to find out the hard way that the giblets are supposed to be removed from a chicken, not roasted inside it.
How long does one cook a cutlet for, and how hot should the gas be?
Naomi Mitchison burned cutlets whenever she attempted to cook them.
How does one keep a stove hot anyway?
And how do you tell when sweetcorn is cooked enough?
Laura Riding found that beyond her.
And is that pepper or Keating’s Insect Powder?
If one wasn’t accustomed to making daily meals such imponderables could seem very trying.

Dorothy Brett’s biographer tells us that she complained to her dying day of never having been taught to cook, and guests to her home in New Mexico confirmed the dismal state of Brett’s kitchen.
One friend had to tip a festering stew out of the window before tactfully suggesting they dine in a restaurant, while another was received for a week’s visit with the bleak news that they had just one tin of Spam to sustain them for the duration.

Caitlin Thomas was a capable cook, whose
pot-au-feu
were among the best, but Dylan’s rare sorties into the kitchen did not encourage her to make it a regular event:

The most he ever attempted was a super fry-up of all the leftovers: spattering, in the process, the walls, the floor, and even the ceiling with flying scalding fat; producing in the end, as he invariably forgot it to go on with his book, a black, charred pulp which he smothered in ‘DaddieY sauce, and swilled down with fizzy cyder for breakfast.

The male artist was adept at avoiding domestic duties.
Dylan’s culinary incompetence gave him the excuse he needed to back out of any kind of domestic contribution.

Inexperience in the kitchen has a comic function in
I Capture the Castle
(1949), Dodie Smith’s fanciful novel about a Bohemian household surviving on nearly no money.
The family are reduced to a bread-and-marge diet (margarine as a butter substitute was horrible enough, but ‘thank heaven there is no cheaper form of bread than bread’) while waiting for the eccentric father, James Mortmain, to complete his never-ending experimental novel.
However a chance encounter with a pair of rich and romantically inclined Americans restores the family fortunes, and our heroine Cassandra now discovers that they can afford to eat rather better.
The problem is the cooking:

In those days we lived mostly on bread, vegetables and eggs; but now that we can afford some meat or even chickens, I keep coming to grief.
I scrubbed some rather dirty-looking chops with soap which proved very lingering, and I did not take certain things out of a chicken that I ought to have done.

The novel also highlights a highly significant social development: convenience food.
Daunted by the complexity of cooking, Cassandra falls back with relief on the delights of canned baked beans – ‘What bliss it is that we can now afford things in tins again! I had bread-and-butter, too, and lettuce and cold rice pudding and two slices of cake (real shop cake) and milk.’

Tinned food – so fervently welcomed back by Cassandra Mortmain –steadily increased in availability through the twentieth century and, along with packets and powders, made feeding oneself a much more realistic proposition.
Porridge took only two minutes with Quick Quaker Oats, and housewives soon succumbed to the copywriters’ pleas to buy ‘Creamola Custard – the Queen of Custards’ or to make ‘better pastry with Krusto’.
Baked beans, Jello, tinned pineapple cubes and jars of bloater paste began to seem like the answer to a prayer.
Purists were appalled.
Ford Madox Ford deplored mass-produced food, while for Eric Gill, Bird’s Custard Powder was little short ofblasphemous; but these men could afford to scorn short cuts.
They both lived with diligent women who were good cooks.
Marooned at Ham Spray after a hurricane, with the telephone broken down, even Carrington was grateful for a supply of tinned herrings until the line was restored.

But even real shop cake and sardines weren’t disaster proof.
The end of the First World War left Lieutenant Osbert Sitwell of the Grenadier Guards ill and emaciated.
After his discharge from military hospital he ran into Roger Fry in the street who, much struck by his starveling appearance, kindly invited him to lunch at his Fitzroy Street studio.
This studio had a
gas ring but no kitchen, which was, it is true, somewhat limiting.
No doubt Roger meant well, but it would appear that his skills with toasted cheese and chicken stew had, on this occasion, deserted him.
Osbert arrived to find a table laid for two, and there amid the clutter of turpentine and brushes found that his host had extravagantly provided a starter of oysters:

As I tasted the first, a horrible doubt assailed me… Waveringly, I began:

‘What
unusual
oysters these are, Roger!
Where did you get them?’

‘I’ m glad you like them,’ he replied, with the spirit and intonation of the quarter.

‘They come from a charming, dirty little shop round the corner!’

After that, I somehow curbed my hunger, and hid the oysters under their shells.

As he cleared away the plates, he took a tin out of some steaming water, and said, ‘

And now we will have some
Tripes à la Mode de Caen.’

Setting my jaw, I ate on.

Perhaps Roger Fry could have done with a copy of Mrs J.
G.
Frazer’s invaluable work
First Aid to the Servantless
(1913), which demonstrated with irrepressible cheeriness how easy it was to prepare meals without short cuts or domestic help.
After all, ‘a good dinner… can be prepared in two hours, including the setting of the table.
Two hours and a half at most are needed for any dinner.’ ‘Mr Smith’ comes home and finds his ‘Lucy’ still fresh from the kitchen: