Omelette and a Glass of Wine (21 page)

‘For Liz. Farewell to Capri,’ Norman wrote in the copy of
Late Harvest
¹
which he gave me when I said goodbye to him on 25 August 1951. For me it was not farewell to Capri. It was farewell to Norman. On a dark drizzling London day in February 1952 news came from Capri of Norman’s death. When, in the summer of that year, I spent six weeks on the island all I could do for Norman was to take a pot of the basil which was his favourite herb to his grave in the cemetery on the hill-road leading down to the port. I went there only once. I had never shared Norman’s rather melancholy taste for visiting churchyards. A more fitting place to remember him was in the lemon grove to be reached only by descending some three hundred steps from the Piazza. It was so thick, that lemon grove, that it concealed from all but those who knew their Capri well the old Archbishops’ palace in which was housed yet another of those private taverns which appeared to materialize for Norman alone. There, at a table outside the half-ruined house, a branch of piercingly aromatic lemons hanging within arm’s reach, a piece of bread and a bottle of the proprietor’s olive oil in front of me, a glass of wine in my hand, Norman was speaking.

‘I wish you would listen when I tell you that if you fill my glass before it’s empty I shan’t know how much I’ve drunk.’

To this day I cannot bring myself to refill somebody else’s glass until it is empty. A sensible rule, on the whole, even if it does mean that sometimes a guest is obliged to sit for a moment or two with an
empty glass, uncertain whether to ask for more wine or to wait until it is offered.

In the shade of the lemon grove I break off a hunch of bread, sprinkle it with the delicious fruity olive oil, empty my glass of sour white Capri wine; and remember that Norman Douglas once wrote that whoever has helped us to a larger understanding is entitled to our gratitude for all time. Remember too that other saying of his, the one upon which all his life he acted, the one which does much to account for the uncommonly large number of men and women of all ages, classes and nationalities who took Norman Douglas to their hearts and will hold him there so long as they live. ‘I like to taste my friends, not eat them.’ From his friends Norman expected the same respect for his privacy as he had for theirs, the same rejection of idle questioning, meddling gossip and rattling chatter. From most of them he knew how to get it. The few who failed him in this regard did not for long remain his friends. Habitually tolerant and generous with his time, especially to the youthful and inexperienced, he had his own methods of ridding himself of those who bored him. I once witnessed a memorable demonstration of his technique in this matter.

In the summer of 1951 there was much talk on Capri, and elsewhere in Italy, of a great fancy-dress ball to be given in a Venetian palace by a South American millionaire. The entertainment was to be on a scale and of a splendour unheard of since the great days of the Serene Republic. One evening Norman, a group of young men and I myself were sitting late at Georgio’s café in the Piazza. Criticism of the Palazzo Labia ball and the squandered thousands was being freely expressed. Norman was bored. He appeared to be asleep. At a pause in the chatter he opened his eyes. ‘Don’t you agree, Mr Douglas?’ asked one of the eager young men. ‘All that money.’ He floundered on. ‘I mean, so many more important things to spend it on …’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Norman sounded far away. Then, gently: ‘I like to see things done in style.’

And he stomped off. Evaporated, as he used to put it. The reproof had been as annihilating as any I ever heard administered.

In Graham Greene’s words ‘so without warning Douglas operates and the victim has no time to realize in what purgatorio of lopped limbs he is about to awaken, among the miserly, the bogus, the boring, and the ungenerous’.

It was when Norman Douglas was in his very early fifties that,
one night after a convivial dinner, he ‘was deputed or rather implored’ by those of his companions who had been bemoaning their lost vigour, ‘to look into the subject of aphrodisiac recipes and the rejuvenating effects of certain condiments and certain dishes’.

Some twelve years later Norman put his collection of recipes together in book form and wrote a preface signed ‘Pilaff Bey’. (On the spine of the present American edition ‘Bey’ appears as the author’s name. A circumstance which may lead to some confusion among booksellers and their customers.) As a frontispiece for the book Norman still had in his possession a drawing done some years previously by D. H. Lawrence. The spasmodic friendship, doomed, one would suppose, from the first, between these two men of almost ludicrously opposed temperaments, had ended in the pillorying in print of each by the other. The illustration Lawrence had done for the aphrodisiac book was so perversely hideous, so awful an example of Lawrence’s gifts as an artist that Norman thought it a good joke. He decided to use it. When, eighteen years later, the book at last was published Messrs Heinemann did at least respect their lately dead author’s wishes in the matter. In juxtaposition to the febrile drawings commissioned by the publishers the frontispiece looked startling enough. For those who had eyes to see it indicated also something of the tone of the book and of the intentions of the author. The preface, left as it was written ‘not later than 1936’ told them the rest. The book had originated as an exposition of the absurdities, the lengths ‘to which humanity will go in its search for the lost vigour of youth’. In spirit it was a send-up, a spoof. As such Norman intended it to remain. He was reckoning, for once in his life, without his publishers. He was reckoning, perhaps, without Death. With the present American publishers he could hardly be expected to have reckoned. In what spirit of prudery one can only guess, these worthies have relegated the Lawrence frontispiece (there would appear to be matter in it to interest the Warden of All Souls and other students of Lawrence-Mellors-Lady Chatterley mythology) to the last page of the book, facing the index. That, at least, Norman would have found a capital joke.

*

Recipes

YELLOW SAUSAGES

‘For every ten pounds of chopped lean meat of pork, take one pound of grated cheese, two ounces of pepper, one of cinnamon, one of ginger, one of cloves, one of grated nutmeg, and a good pinch of saffron. Season with salt. Put everything in a mortar and pound well. Now put it in a saucepan with a glass of old white wine and cook over a gentle fire till the wine has been absorbed. Have ready some pigs’ guts which you have washed first in hot water and afterwards in wine, fill them in with the above, tie them well at both ends, and when you want to eat them, just put them in boiling water for five minutes and serve hot.

‘Could not be better.’

Venus in the Kitchen

OYSTERS IN WINE

‘Heat the oysters in their shells. Open them, take them out, and collect their liquid in a pot. Put the oysters in a frying pan with butter, a sprig of garlic, mint, marjoram, pounded peppercorns, and cinnamon. As soon as they are lightly fried add their liquid and a glass of Malmsey or another generous wine. Serve them on toast.’

Venus in the Kitchen

PHEASANT À LA HANNIBAL

‘Choose a not too tender pheasant, put it in an earthenware pot with a veal marrow bone. Add water to cover it up to three fingers, and put also a whole piece of cinnamon, some pieces of dried apricots, prunes, cherries, pine nuts, saffron, cloves, and some chopped mushrooms. Boil with the cover well sealed, but before covering it add a glass of white wine, a little vinegar and sugar, and cook.

‘Simply delicious!’

Venus in the Kitchen

ON THE AUSTRIAN FOOD OF THE VORARLBERG

‘Prolonged and confidential talks with the innkeeper’s wife – his third one, a lively woman from the Tyrol, full of fun and capability – have already laid down the broad lines of our bill of fare. I must devour all the old local specialities, to begin with, over and over again; items such as
Tiroler Knödel
and
Saueres Nierle
and
Rahm-schnitzel
(veal, the lovely Austrian veal, is scarce just now, but she means to get it) and brook trout
blau gesotten
and
Hasenpfeffer
and fresh ox-tongue with that delicious brown onion sauce, and
gebaitzter Rehschlegel
(venison is cheap; three halfpence a pound at the present rate of exchange); and first and foremost, Kaiserfleisch, a dish which alone would repay the trouble of a journey to this country from the other end of the world, were travelling fifty times more vexatious than it is. Then: cucumber salad of the only true – i.e. non-Anglo-Saxon – variety, sprinkled with
paprika;
no soup without the traditional chives; beetroot with cummin-seed, and beans with
Bohnenkraut
(whatever that may be); also things like
Kohlrabi
and
Kässpatzle –
malodorous but succulent; above all, those ordinary, those quite ordinary,
geröstete Kartoffeln
with onions, one of the few methods by which the potato, the grossly overrated potato, that marvel of insipidity, can be made palatable. How comes it that other nations are unable to produce
geröstete Kartoffeln?
Is it a question of Schmalz? If so, the sooner they learn to make
Schmalz
the better. Pommes Lyonnaise are a miserable imitation, a caricature.’

Together, 1923
. Penguin Books, 1945

RED MULLET

‘Of those sauces and pickles for fish so beloved of antiquity there is no mention save in two enigmas (14, 23 and 36) and who would guess that the following means a fish served up in a sauce consisting of the blood of other fish? “Bitter is my life, my death is sweet, and both are water. I die pierced by bloodless spears. But if anyone will cover me, dead, in a living tomb, I am first drenched in the blood of kinsmen.” This strange and excellent recipe survives today in the islands where, if the fishermen cook a number of common fish together, squeeze the juice out of their bodies and then boil you, in this liquid, a red mullet.’

Birds and Beasts of The Greek Anthology
, Chapman & Hall, 1928

Wine and Food
, Autumn 1964

1.
Heinemann, 1952.

2.
McGraw Hill, 14s. Available from Sandoe Books, 11 Blacklands Terrace, London, S.W.3, and Johnson & Son Paperbacks, 39 Museum St., W.C.I.

1.
Lindsay Drummond, 1946.

The Englishman’s Food

The Englishman’s Food: Five Centuries of English Diet
, by J. C. Drum-mond and Anne Wilbraham; revised and with a new chapter by D. F. Hollingsworth (Cape, 36s.).

The Arcadian picture of long-lost peace and plenty, of a land overflowing with wholesome home-grown food, which we like to evoke when exasperated by today’s hygienically processed and synthetically flavoured food-stuffs, is singularly absent from the late Sir Jack Drummond’s detailed study of the Englishman’s food during the last 500 years.

Lucidly, with great learning and a nice dry wit, he analyses the diets and the eating habits of our ancestors. Our own complaints, however justifiable, move into a slightly different perspective as Sir Jack recreates a past in which the adulteration, often injurious, of nearly every kind of food and drink was common practice and could not be prevented owing to the lack of reliable tests; in which food prejudices and superstitions hampered medical learning for centuries; in which salt meat was so hard that sailors could use it for making carved snuff boxes, and in which, according to Smollett, unspeakably dirty milk was hawked in the streets of London by verminous drabs masquerading under the ‘respectable denomination of milkmaid’. There is no reason, Sir Jack adds, to suppose that Smollett was exaggerating.

Butter was certainly cheap, but nearly always rancid, at any rate until towards the end of the seventeenth century; although it was thought by many to be injurious to health it was eaten in large quantities by the poorer classes, while the rich used it only for cooking. By the time the value of green vegetables came to be understood the wheel had turned and butter was a luxury. English cooks grew accustomed to boiling all their vegetables in water, and to this circumstance Sir Jack attributes the deplorable methods which have made our vegetable cookery a byword.

This absolutely engrossing book has been a valuable work of reference for food historians and students of the science of nutrition ever since it first appeared in 1939. It should now find a much bigger public, for there is an immense amount in it for everyone seriously concerned with what they eat, and why.

The Sunday Times
, 1958

Home Baked Bread

In the summer of 1955, following the publication of
Summer Cooking,
Leonard Russell, the then Literary Editor of the
Sunday Times,
offered me a weekly cookery column in the paper. In 1956, when I had been writing for the paper for about a year (it was in those far-off days before the Colour Supplement), Leonard asked me if I would review a little book called
Home Baked,
written by George and Cecilia Scurfield, published by Faber. I declined, on the grounds that I knew little about bread-making, even less of book-reviewing. Leonard proceeded to cajole, coax, persuade. Although it is difficult to describe an editor’s technique when he has made up his mind that a contributor will do something which that contributor would prefer not to do, every journalist will recognise it, and will appreciate that in the end I applied myself to studying the book and writing the review
.

The book was a sympathetic one, and a little research into the history of English bread-making proved instructive
.

On the Sunday fortnight following the appearance of my review, the paper’s
Atticus
column contained an item headed ‘Who sells books?’ from which it emerged that within the two weeks my notice had sold 1,000 copies, half the first print order of
Home Baked.
This news item, it turned out, was a retort to the rival Sunday paper, which had made, apparently, a claim that its reviewers sold more books than those of any other national newspaper
.