Omelette and a Glass of Wine (2 page)

Every now and again, during my joyous
Spectator
years, there would be a threat of trouble. Once Messrs Walls cut up a bit rough when I reported that, proffered a slice of their packaged chicken and veal pie, my cat had waved a disdainful tail and walked off. When I pointed out that cats were habitually more fastidious than humans, but like humans variable in their tastes, everyone calmed down. On another occasion I quoted a wartime recipe for a corned beef pudding contributed by a famous Mayfair restaurant to a Kitchen Front-type collection published in 1942. The enraged wife of the owner of the restaurant wrote defying me to prove that the recipe had ever existed. That was unwise of her. Chapter and verse were there, in print. If the recipe had been libel in the first place why had she and her husband not done something about it sooner? Then there was the time I criticised a terrible restaurant owned by Lyons. The trouble was that the owners weren’t owning up to owning it, and I had rumbled them, hardly a great feat of detection. My
punishment was to return to the same restaurant for dinner with one of the directors, or was it their public relations officer? A genial host, but he couldn’t make the food any better. However, the evening was nothing like the ordeal I had suffered after publishing a derogatory article about British sausages in the
Sunday Times
. A guided tour of the Walls factory had been followed, first by lunch with the directors – we ate sausages, of course, but at least I wasn’t eating my words – and during the ensuing weeks by a bombardment of sample after sample of their products. No doubt the public relations people at Walls were just doing their jobs. They can’t really have thought that a few free sausages were going to convert me into a Walls sausage enthusiast.

It must have been at about this time that a fellow guest at a small private dinner party given by a wine merchant friend at Prunier’s restaurant leant across the table and said to me, ‘It must be awful to be you. Always criticising everything, enjoying nothing.’ Well, if a food writer does not exercise his or her critical faculties to a high degree and with a backing of informed experience, he or she is not doing his or her job. He or she is a sham or, as would be said nowadays, a pseud. What, I wonder, would the person who made that remark to me have had to say if our host had not troubled to choose his wines with as much critical care as indeed Madame Prunier had exercised in the choice of her menu? Does a theatre critic offer his readers indiscriminate praise of every play or of the performances of every actor he has seen during the week, a music critic of every concert or opera he has attended? To be attacked for declining to say, whether in private or in public, that in the world of gastronomy, French, English, or any other, all was always for the best, and that that world was the best of all possible ones, seemed to me illogical, ignorant and thoroughly philistine. But lest it be assumed by anyone taking a superficial look at the essays assembled in
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine
that these consist wholly of carping criticism and unconstructive send-ups, I should point out here that, on the contrary, the majority of them are about benefits and pleasures, about good food, good wine, good cookery books. Those pleasures I did my best to express to my readers in lively terms. A delightful meal in a modest restaurant deep in Provence was the subject of one of my very early articles for the
Spectator
. True enough, I finished the piece with a plea to British restaurateurs of similar scope to refrain from the addition of redundant elements to every one of their dishes, to leave well alone if and when well was
what they could do. Governessy, if you like, but at the time it was something which really did need saying. It still does, although quite frequently in a reverse sense. Today’s young restaurant chefs, amateurs usually, tend to imagine that they can with impunity take some recently evolved
style moderne
recipe, omit one of only two key components, and with a flourish present a customer with nothing more than one and a half mushrooms and one small croûton in the centre of a vast expanse of otherwise empty plate. The descriptions of the mushroom as ‘wild’, and of the croûton as ‘le brioche de notre pâtissier’ do nothing to mitigate the ludicrous effect of the presentation, particularly when you know perfectly well that the ‘wild’ mushrooms have been brought by lorry from Rungis market, to where they had been conveyed in the first place from a Dutch mushroom farm, and that ‘notre pâtissier’ is a Camden Town bakery. It is the kind of place where if you read
salade de foie de volaille
on the menu, it isn’t due to a fault of written French but is the literal truth, salad of one chicken liver. The London
style moderne
restaurants become ever more reminiscent of that old music hall song in which the chorus line was something about one meat ball.

To return to the France of the old style 1960s, about four years after that Provence excursion of
Letting Well Alone
, a primitive but strikingly enjoyable lunch in an indescribably scruffy café somewhere close to the Loire was the starting point for a
Nova
story called
Pleasing Cheeses
. In those days so agreeable a surprise meal had already become a very exceptional happening in the French provinces. Could it ever happen again?

In February 1962, for the tenth anniversary of the death of Norman Douglas, I wrote about the times I had first met him in 1939, in Antibes, and again twelve years later in Capri. It was then 1951, the last year of his life. The piece had been very difficult to write, but appreciative letters from some of Norman’s old friends were gratifying. Later, I expanded the original article, and that second version, taken from another publication,
¹
reappears here. In the autumn of 1962, with assistance from a delightful lady at the French Embassy called Mademoiselle Bologna, I arranged a visit to Nantes to meet some of the people involved in the sardine industry and to find out how the sardine got into the tin. I had always wanted to know, and now I do.
Spectator
readers were pleased and interested,
even the one who took the trouble to write from Canada saying that I wrote like a hairdresser – I had used that furiously disputed word
firstly
instead of
first
¹
– and he remained dear modom mine sincerely. A by-product of my Nantes visit was the discovery of the beauty of the fish in the market there and of the towering heaps of tiny, sweet, briefly cooked mussels to be found in the humbler restaurants of the city. So
Fruits de Mer
came out of Nantes as well as
Oules of Sardines
. The following autumn, 1963, after a disruptive illness, I went on a short trip to Turin and Alba, to see an exhausting exhibition of Piedmontese baroque at Stupinigi, the former palace of the royal house of Savoy, and more enjoyably, to eat white truffles and
fonduta
, white truffles with risotto, white truffles and scrambled eggs, white truffles spread on bread and butter. My article,
Trufflesville Regis
, was written rather hurriedly for the
Spectator
, and contained any number of Italian spelling mistakes. Nobody complained except the Italian friend I had been with on the trip. In due course she corrected them for me, and a second version of the article was published by Cyril Ray in his
Compleat Imbiber
. That is the one which appears here. Another happy autumnal article,
Para Navidad
, emerged from South East Spain in November 1964.

I suspect that there will be a few readers who will think what a lovely time I had going on all those trips with everything paid for by the paper. So I did have a lovely time, but nothing was paid for by anyone other than myself. It was only in one or two of my
Vogue
years that I had been allowed the princely sum of
£
100 by Condé Nast to cover expenses, hotels, restaurant meals, petrol, when I went on the occasional ten to fourteen day trip to France. During my
Spectator
period I didn’t ask for expenses and didn’t expect them. The pay was nothing to sing about either but because I retained all my copyrights, as indeed I have done ever since I started in journalism,
²
I was able to republish my articles in other forms and publications and thus earn the extra money which would eventually
cover my expenses on trips such as the
Trufflesville
one. Many of my
Vogue
contributions published between 1956 and 1959, as also some of my
Sunday Times
articles, were eventually incorporated into
French Provincial Cooking
and earned their pay that way.

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.