Virginia Woolf? Yes. Although otherwise an indifferent cook, Virginia could certainly knock you up a lovely cottage loaf. You bet. This strikes me as just the sort of pretentiously frivolous and dilettantish thing a Bloomsbury would be good at – knowing how to do one, just one, fatuously complicated kitchen thing and doing that one thing well enough to put the cook’s nose out of joint. ‘I will come into the kitchen, Louie,’ she said to this young employee of hers, ‘and show you how to do it.’
This attitude of the dedicated hobbyist reveals the essential marginality of the activity. David manages to turn the honourable craft of the baker into a nice accomplishment for refined ladies. Bread is put in its place; it is a special kind of art-object.
Hers is, furthermore, the bitter-sweet bread of nostalgia, summoning up a bygone golden age of golden loaves, before Garfield Weston, of Allied Bakeries, the demon king in the real-bread scenario started buying up British bakeries in the Fifties and smirching with his filthy profane Canadian hands the grand old English loaf.
Although her book is full of quotations – Thomas Traherne, Keats, Chaucer – she does, however, let the heavy freight of symbolic significance borne by bread in our culture severely alone except, oddly enough, for a seventeenth-century French recipe for consecrated bread. This, she claims, sounds like brioche, which suggests it might have been used for a rather Firbankian mass. What can they have put in the chalice?
It is appropriate she leaves religion alone since English Bread and Yeast Cookery is already proving to be something like the holy book of the cult of the True Loaf, in which the metaphoric halo surrounding bread is turned back on itself, the loaf becomes not foodstuff nor symbol but fetish.
(1987)
• 18 •
Patience Gray: Honey from a Weed
I bought my first cookery book in 1960, as part of my trousseau. It was called Plats du Jour, or Foreign Food by Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd, a Penguin paperback with a seductive pink jacket depicting a large family at table – evidently not a British family, for its members, shirt-sleeved, aproned, some of them children, were uncorking bottles, slicing bread, eagerly tucking their napkins under their chins, faces aglow with the certain knowledge their dinners would not disappoint, which was, in those days, extremely rare in this country.
My copy of Plats du Jour now gives forth a mellow smell of old paper; the pages are crisp, brown, and dry as Melba toast. But it has outlasted the husband for whose pleasure I bought it by some eighteen years, proof positive of the old saw, ‘Kissin’ don’t last, cookin’ do’. And now it is a historic object, a prototype of the late twentieth-century British cookery book, a book to browse in as much as to cook from, its prose as elegant as its plentiful line-drawings. And, oh, that easy, graceful cosmopolitanism! Tor anyone who has eaten a well-prepared Gulyas in one of the little restaurants on the Buda side of the Danube, overlooking the lantern-threaded bridges and the electric glitter of Pesth on a warm summer night before the war . . .’ The nascent genre infected an entire generation with wanderlust.
Patience Gray helped to instigate the concept of the cookery book as literary form – part recipes, part travel book, part self-revelation, part art-object. Now, some thirty years on, she has assembled what may be its culmination. Honey from a Weed is less a cookery book than a summing-up of the genre of the late modern British cookery book. It is a book like very few others, although it has some of the style of the seventeenth-century commonplace book, replete with recondite erudition and assembled on the principle of free association, as when Mrs Gray lists uses for goose fat. In a cassoulet. In soups. On bread. On toast. ‘On your chest, rubbed in in winter. On leather boots, if they squeak. On your hands if they are chapped.’
Above all, it is a book about a particular sensibility – a unique and pungent one – that manifests itself most characteristically in the kitchen. That is what the genre is all about. M. F. K. Fisher had pioneered the culinary autobiographical novel in the US years before the Penguin school of cookery writers found its greatest star in Elizabeth David in the late Fifties and early Sixties. For these writers, and for Patience Gray, cookery is what the open road was to Cobbett or the natural history of Selbourne to Gilbert White. There is, however, a difference: these are women to whom food is not an end in itself but a way of opening up the world. And, indeed, they are all women: this is, at the highest level, a female form.
It is unique to Saxon culture, to my knowledge, that the ability to cook well is a sign of a woman of the world. Traditional plump home-bodies may deliver the goods in France and Spain and Italy, but in Britain and the US the classic cooks are awesomely sophisticated, aristocratically beautiful and often connected with the arts. Elizabeth David, friend of Norman Douglas, is eternalised in the lovely icon of John Ward’s drawing, the epitome of chic in her companionable kitchen. M. F. K. Fisher is just as beautiful. Her most beloved husband was a painter, and her books are so instinct with upmarket bohemianism that it is no surprise to find her in a cameo role in the autobiography of the painter and photographer, Man Ray, in which a starring part is allotted to Lee Miller, the universal muse of the surrealists, who herself became a famous practitioner of gourmet cookery.
Patience Gray belongs to this nexus of cookery and the arts, although she has an earthy, hands-on approach to the real lives of the predominantly peasant communities in Southern Europe where she has chosen to live, and to the arts: she works in silver and gold, making jewellery, and lives with a stone-carver whom she calls the Sculptor (she is refreshingly free from irony). Her book recounts their wanderings during a shared life dominated by the Sculptor’s quest for suitable stone. Glamorous as this way of life may seem, it is no easy option. Patience Gray’s kitchens have been exceedingly sparsely equipped. The hand-pump over the marble sink of one particular Etruscan kitchen did not work: ‘I got the water in a bucket and lowering it into the outdoor cistern had a marvellous view of the glittering Monte Sagra and the Apulian Alps on one side and on the other a view to the Tyrrhenian.’
This combination of material asceticism and passionate enthusiasm for the sensuality of the everyday is at the core of the tradition from which Mrs Gray springs, with its obvious affinities to the style of Bloomsbury, where it was a moral imperative that the beautiful should always take precedence over the comfortable. Though ‘beautiful’ is not quite the right word – it is a kind of authenticity which is invoked here, as though water is more authentic, more real, wetter, drawn from an open-air cistern than from a city tap.
The metaphysics of authenticity are a dangerous area. When Mrs Gray opines, ‘Poverty rather than wealth gives the good things of life their true significance’, it is tempting to suggest it is other people’s poverty, always a source of the picturesque, that does that. Even if Mrs Gray and her companion live in exactly the same circumstances as their neighbours in the Greek islands or Southern Italy, and have just as little ready money, their relation to their circumstances is the result of the greatest of all luxuries, aesthetic choice. ‘Poverty’, here, is sloppy language – a rare example of it. Mrs Gray isn’t talking about a pavement dweller in Calcutta, or a member of the long-term unemployed in an advanced, industrialised country; not about poverty as such, but about a way of life which has a dignity imposed upon it by its stoicism in the face of a nature on which it is entirely dependent. The Japanese created an entire aesthetic, and a moral philosophy, out of this stoicism and this intimate relation with natural forces; as soon as they had a bob or two in their pockets, of course, they binged on consumerism, but the hard core is still there.
Then again, Mrs Gray and her companion are not too perturbed about the absence of piped water. Her companion, when pressed, expresses a preference for shitting beneath a fig tree, rather than in a flush toilet. When workers recruited from Southern Italy moved into subsidised housing in Turin, people used to say: ‘No use giving them baths, they’ll only grow basil in them.’ Mrs Gray would think that was an eminently sensible thing to do with a bat
h. After a couple of days of toting buckets, my own appreciation of any view would have waned, somewhat. But arduous circumstances never diminish Mrs Gray’s rapt sense of wonder, and her book is dedicated to genuine austerity, an austerity reflected in many of the recipes she includes in her text. The section titled ‘Fasting on Naxos’ describes just that: ‘The four weeks of the Advent fast and the six weeks of the Lenten one correspond with moments when on Naxos there was hardly anything to eat.’
She describes the harsh life of these Greek islanders without sentimentality, if with a degree of romantic awe, in a prose that will suddenly, effortlessly, fall into the very cadences of Sir Thomas Browne: ‘In Homer’s time, a King could go out to plough his land and build his bed of giant timbers.’ Her prose is usually ravishing, sometimes breathtaking. The entire section titled ‘Pasticceria and the Apulian Baroque’ is composed according to the principles of the startling architectonics she describes:
The city [Lecce] within the walls calls to mind the Bourbon Kings of Naples, who once a year ordered the construction of castle edifices made of stout edible materials – gigantic hams, cheeses, enormous mortadelle, and the fore and hindquarters of deer and Indian buffalo, in order then to gloat at the spectacle of the starving Neapolitans – admitted at the moment of completion – vociferously and violently vying with each other, to the accompaniment of martial music and gunpowder explosions, in their destruction.
The book moves among its venues at the whim of memory, according to no precise chronology. With Mrs Gray, we eat dried beans cooked a variety of ways in a variety of places. We eat potatoes and green beans boiled together, potatoes with alliums (the common name of the onion family) and olive oil, potatoes cooked in the oven with streaky bacon. Some of her recipes would certainly ease the plight of the long-term unemployed in advanced, industrialised countries because, even here, the ingredients cost so little. Then again, Honey from a Weed is a very expensive book. Such are the ironies of the politics of romantic austerity.
We make, with her, salads of hedgerow greens and boil up delicious weeds to eat hot with lemon juice – dandelions, comfrey, wood sorrel, field sorrel, wild fennel, fat hen, tassel hyacinth, purslane, field poppy. (When gathering your weeds, watch out for pesticides.) A meal may be made – has to be made – from whatever is to hand. M. F. K. Fisher’s wolf (‘How to cook a wolf’, included in The Art of Eating) was metaphorical. Patience Gray ‘met a number of people around Carrara not at all averse to cooking a fox’, and tells you how to make fox alla cacciatore (with garlic, wine, and tomatoes). ‘Exactly the same method can be applied to a badger . . .’
A connoisseur of free food, she waxes lyrical on snails, especially the Helix operta, oval in shape, golden brown in colour, ‘with a beautiful logarithmic spiral structure’. Surely, of all the creatures we eat, we are most brutal to snails. Helix operta is dug out of the earth where he has been peacefully enjoying his summer sleep, cracked like an egg, and eaten raw, presumably alive. Or boiled in oil. Or roasted in the hot ashes of a wood fire. In Catalonia, vineyard snails are laid out in rows on a bed of straw. ‘The straw is set alight and the snails are retrieved from the ashes by jabbing them with sharply pointed sticks.’ If God is a snail, Bosch’s depictions of Hell are going to look like a vicarage tea-party.
Mrs Gray does not conceal the fact that the traditional communities she describes are now in the process of violent change. Her twenty years of wandering the limestone margins of the Mediterranean have coincided with the breakdown of ancient forms of village life:
It sometimes seems as if I have been rescuing a few strands from a former and more diligent way of life, now being eroded by an entirely new set of values. As with students of music who record old songs which are no longer sung, soon some of the things I record will also have vanished.
This is partly what makes her book so valuable, and gives it an elegiac quality that sometimes recalls the recent work of a writer, John Berger, with whom she might seem to have little else in common except a respect for philosophical anarchism: Berger’s majestic stories of peasant life, Pig Earth, invoke the awesome severities and orgiastic celebrations of a past as recent as yesterday and already as remote as the Flood.
The point is, dammit, that they did have, as Iago griped about Othello, a daily beauty in their lives that makes ours ugly. In one of the stories in Pig Earth, a little old peasant lady goes out and gathers wild things in the mountains – wild cherries, lilies of the valley, mushrooms, mistletoe – and takes her booty into the city, where she sells it in the market for vast sums. She is selling not only delicious wild produce but glimpses of some lost greenness. She is the last remaining vendor of wild things, she is a kind of ghost. Mrs Gray describes Carrara twenty years ago:
The feeling of the mountains was never far away: retired quarrymen sold bunches of herbs they had gathered there. In summer great baskets of bilberries and wild strawberries appeared. In autumn fresh cranberries, fungi and chestnuts were brought down from the Spanish chestnut woods. In this way a dialogue between town and country was maintained . . . In those days it was still possible to feel that the Carraresi were definitely in touch with the ‘earthly paradise’.
If transplanted Calabrians do grow basil in their shiny new bathtubs, perhaps they know what’s what.
Mrs Gray has taken the form of the late-modern English-language cookery book to its extreme in Honey from a Weed, producing a kind of baroque monument of which all the moving parts work (the recipes are very sound).
(1987)
HOME
This precious stone set in the silver sea . . .
William Shakespeare
• 19 •
Hanif Kureishi: The Buddha of Suburbia
The narrator of Hanif Kureishi’s ebulliant, dismayed farce introduces himself thus: ‘My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost.’ Karim, a.k.a. ‘Creamy Jeans’, is a child of Empire. When we first meet him, he lives with his Indian father and his English mother on the distant outskirts of London, enduring the last of school and the last of flower-power, in a state of near-terminal late-adolescent angst.
But Karim’s story will prove to be most English in its heritage – that of the glorious, scabrous, picaresque, savage, sentimental tradition of low comedy that stretches from Chaucer to the dirty postcards on Brighton Pier. The Buddha of Suburbia is also as much an up-yours for our times as Lucky Jim was for the Fifties, and Kureishi himself offers another signpost in Chapter One, when Eva, Karim’s father’s lover, gives the boy a copy of Candide.
But, in some respects, Candide had it easy compared to Karim. ‘I was sick of being affectionately called Shitface and Curryface.’ Jamila, militant feminist, black radical, and his best friend, defines the problem: ‘The thing was, we were supposed to be English, but to the English, we were always wogs and nigs and Pakis and the rest of it.’
Karim’s world is soon turned upside down. His father, Haroon leaves his sweet, downtrodden wife to live with sexy, trendy Eva and practise as a guru. (He is the Buddha of the title.) Jamila, to her fury, is bullied and cajoled into an arranged marriage with the aimiable buffoon, Changez, who demands, as part of the dowry, a complete set of the works of Conan Doyle. Karim moves to the big city. Life opens up. He starts a career as an actor, his first role, to Jamila’s disgust, Mowgli, in what she dubs The Jungle Bunny Book. Punk happens. Charlie, Eva’s son, turns into a successful pop singer, although Karim is keen to assure he is a very bad one.
Karim is worshipfully in love with Charlie; by the novel’s end, he has grown out of it. But The Buddha of Suburbia isn’t so much a coming-of-age novel as a coming-to-terms novel, coming to terms with a world in which nothing, neither pleasure, nor politics, nor power, can be taken on trust. Not even violence. When a girl-friend’s father turns his dog on Karim, expectations are reversed with a vengeance: ‘I knew by now what the dog was up to. The dog was in love with me – quick movements against my arse told me so.’
The sexual bl
ack comedy of this episode is cruel, hilarious and desperate; Karim is training himself rigorously to see the funny side. Irony is his defence and his weapon. The ribald subject-matter is exquisitely set off by the louche prissiness of Karim’s diction: ‘I contemplated myself with and my wardrobe with loathing and would willingly have urinated over every garment.’ When I say The Buddha of Suburbia is wonderfully well written, I mean it is continually tasty and interesting and full of glee. It is not like Penelope Fitzgerald.
In fact, it may be the first novel in what I trust will be a rapidly growing and influential genre – the novel designed on purpose to exclude itself from the Booker short-list. There’s not only the richly vulgar vein of body comedy – Hanif Kureishi finds every aspect of physicality from mastectomy to anal intercourse ruefully mirthful – but he remains wonderfully Right On, politically, and lets the middle classes play little if any role in this world of squats and anti-racisim and dishevelled integrity.
He can’t find a bad word to say about women, either, which is a lovely thing in this period of fashionable misogyny, but it does mean that Jamila and Eva and poor old Mum are touched with a little bit of unexpected sugar. And if some minor characters – such as Uncle Ted, the central heating engineer and part-time football hooligan – spring at once to pulsing life, others, like Jamila’s mother, now a grocer, once a princess, haven’t got much to do except stand round looking picturesque.
The novel ends with a wedding announcement – Haroon and Eva’s – and a party. Karim ponders how things have been a mess but soon will go better. There’s a sting in the tail; it is election night, in the fatal year of 1979.
A radical feminist I know paid My Beautiful Launderette, the movie scripted by Hanif Kureishi, her ultimate accolade: ‘It almost made me like men.’ His first novel almost made me nostalgic for that messy but on the whole optimistic decade, the Seventies. It is a wonderful novel. I doubt I will read a funnier, or one with more heart, this year.
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