An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

by Elizabeth David

  Subsequently, in war-time Egypt, I found, in spite of the comparative plenty and variety and the fact that in Greece I had often grumbled about the food, that the basic commodities of the Eastern Mediterranean shores were the ones which had begun to seem essential. Alexandrians, not surprisingly, knew how to prepare these commodities in a more civilized way than did the Greek islanders. The old-established merchant families of the city – Greek, Syrian, Jewish, English – appeared to have evolved a most delicious and unique blend of Levantine and European cookery and were at the same time most marvellously hospitable. I have seldom seen such wonderfully glamorous looking, and tasting, food as the Levantine cooks of Alexandria could produce for a party. And yet when you got down to analysing it, you would find that much the same ingredients had been used in dish after dish – only they were so differently treated, so skilfully blended and seasoned and spiced that each one had its own perfectly individual character and flavour.

  In Cairo the dividing line between European and Eastern food was much sharper. It was uphill work trying to make English-trained Sudanese cooks produce interesting food. Most of them held a firm belief that the proper meal to set before English people consisted of roast or fried chicken, boiled vegetables and a pudding known to one and all as grème garamel.

  My own cook, Suleiman, was a Sudanese who had previously worked only for Italian and Jewish families. He was erratic and forgetful, but singularly sweet-natured, devoted to his cooking pots and above all knew absolutely nothing of good, clean, English schoolroom food.

  I used occasionally to try to teach him some French or English dish for which I had a nostalgic craving, but time for cooking was very limited, my kitchen facilities even more so, and on the whole I left him to his own devices.

  So it came about that for three or four more years I lived mainly on rather rough but highly flavoured, colourful shining vegetable dishes, lentil or fresh tomato soups, delicious spiced pilaffs, lamb kebabs grilled over charcoal, salads with cool mint-flavoured yoghurt dressings, the Egyptian fellahin dish of black beans with olive oil and lemon and hard-boiled eggs – these things were not only attractive but also cheap and this was important because although Egypt was a land of fantastic plenty compared with war-time Europe, a lot of the better-class food was far beyond the means of young persons living on British Civil Service pay without foreign allowances, and tinned stores were out of the question because there was no room for them in the cave which my landlord was pleased to describe as a furnished flat.

  What I found out when I returned to England to another five or six years of the awful dreary foods of rationing was that while my own standard of living in Egypt had perhaps not been very high, my food had always had some sort of life, colour, guts, stimulus; there had always been bite, flavour and inviting smells. Those elements were totally absent from English meals.

  As imports came slowly back, I found once more, and still find, that it is the basic foods of the Mediterranean world which produce them in the highest degree. And it is curious how much more true variety can be extracted from a few of these basic commodities than from a whole supermarketful of products, none of which really taste of anything in particular.

  So long as I have a supply of elementary fresh things like eggs, onions, parsley, lemons, oranges and bread and tomatoes – and I keep tinned tomatoes too – I find that my store cupboard will always provide the main part of an improvised meal. If this has to be made quickly it may be just a salad of anchovy fillets and black olives, hard-Boiled eggs and olive oil, with bread and a bottle of wine. If it is a question of not being able to leave the house to go shopping, or of being too otherwise occupied to stand over the cooking pots, then there are white beans or brown lentils for slow cooking, and usually a piece of cured sausage or bacon to add to them, with onions and oil and possibly tomato. Apricots or other dried fruit can be baked in the oven at the same time, or I may have oranges for a fruit salad, and if it comes to the worst there’ll at least be bread and butter and honey and jam. Or if I am given, say, forty-five minutes to get an unplanned meal ready – well, I have Italian and Patna rice and Parmesan, spices, herbs, currants, almonds, walnuts, to make a risotto or a pilaff. And perhaps tunny, with eggs to make mayonnaise, for an easy first dish. The countless number of permutations to be devised is part of the entertainment.

  The Spectator, 9 December 1960

  The True Emulsion

  With the mayonnaise season in full blast, once more the familiar complaints about bottled mayonnaise and salad creams are heard in the land. Perhaps there is less cause for grumbling, thanks to the advent of the electric mixer combined with the whackings of the Postgate guide, than there used to be. The defence, when complaints are made, can no longer be that kitchen labour is lacking; it is simply the old one about the majority of customers preferring the synthetic product to the real thing. I am sure that this is very often perfectly true. Why?

  Partly, the trouble lies in the characteristic English custom – which in some degree we share with the Swiss – of appropriating the names of established French and other foreign dishes, even of our own traditional ones, and attaching to them recipes of our own devising, often with the most carefree disregard of the ingredients and methods of cooking which made these dishes famous. The caterers, the manufacturers and the recipe-hashers employed by public relations firms to help sell factory products may reply that as long as a dish is found acceptable and sells it surely doesn’t matter what it is called. Maybe these operators don’t realize that what they are doing is fraudulent; legally it isn’t. There is no international patent or copyright law to protect the names or the recipes of recognized traditional and classic dishes. While nobody in this country can now, say, label any wine champagne that is not champagne or pass off margarine as butter without risk of prosecution, anybody depraved enough to invent a dish consisting of a wedge of steam-heated bread spread with tomato paste and a piece of synthetic Cheddar can call it a pizza; for that matter they could sell a pizza as a Welsh Rabbit and a Welsh Rabbit as a Swiss fondue or a quiche lorraine; they can publish recipes for a soup called vichyssoise containing everything and anything but what its creator actually put into it – leeks and potatoes. At the time the deceptions seem just sad or silly, but the consequences can be far-reaching.

  In the case of mayonnaise the damage may have been done by the commercial firms and their bottled products which were already on sale by the mid-1880s, but the cookery advisers and experts certainly helped the public to accept the name ‘mayonnaise’ as applied to a cooked custard-type sauce made of flour, milk, eggs, and a very high proportion of vinegar. Plenty of relevant recipes are to be found in cookery books and other publications of the period. Two examples will suffice. In the November, 1895, issue of the Epicure magazine, under the heading ‘New Recipes’, Miss Ida Cameron, principal of the Earls Court Cookery School, contributed a recipe for what she called cornflour mayonnaise. The lady explained that in this cooked mixture the cornflour ‘does for thickening the sauce instead of salad oil’. Presumably this is what she was teaching her pupils. Herman Senn, a professional of very high standing, at one time chef to the Reform Club, author of countless cookery books, honorary secretary to the Universal Food and Cookery Association, editor of that body’s magazine and promoter of a number of commercial products including one called Hygienic Caviar, was employed by Ward, Lock and Co. to edit the gigantic 1906 edition of Mrs Beeton. This edition contains two mayonnaise recipes. (Mrs Beeton’s own original formula which had been left untouched for over forty years was dropped, one might think none too soon. It specified four tablespoons of vinegar to six of oil.) One of Senn’s recipes was the authentic one, but called for a pint of olive oil to two eggs, an unnecessarily large allowance, tricky to work; and in view of the national English fear and dislike of olive oil, to which every cookery writer of the period refers and which was certainly a factor in the public’s easy acceptance of the custard-type dressing in place of true mayonnaise, rather
tactless. The second recipe Senn called ‘cooked mayonnaise’. With his training he should surely have known that mayonnaise, whatever the origin of the word, had long been accepted in France, Spain and Italy as denoting an emulsion sauce of uncooked egg yolks and olive oil, and that the term ‘cooked’ used in conjunction with mayonnaise was contradictory.

  As things turned out, the recipes from this 1906 edition were the ones which were finally established and accepted as Mrs Beeton’s. From 1906 until the mid-1950s they were current – and of course much copied by other writers. During long periods of that half-century it is obvious that desperate shortages made Senn’s pint of olive oil (one sees how it was that poor Mrs B acquired her reputation for reckless extravagance) as ordered for the genuine recipe quite unpractical. And then, when even milk was scarce, why bother with the cooked version, which orders a quarter of a pint of vinegar to half a pint of milk when it isn’t all that much of an improvement on the mayonnaise or salad cream of commerce? (Although of course the ingredients of these products are not exactly as straightforward as Senn’s were.) One has to remember that all this took place at a time when plain English cooks reigned in the majority of English kitchens. They followed plain English recipes and chiefly those from the Mrs Beeton books or their derivatives. Few of them or their employers experimented or questioned what the books said. By the thirties there was already a vast public brought up in the belief that mayonnaise was a sauce which could only be produced in a factory, which contained no olive oil – and tasted mainly of acetic acid. And that is what, by the sixties, when they see mayonnaise announced on a menu, the great majority of people expect. It is not unnatural that they should be suspicious and indignant when confronted with the authentic sauce. Like most tastes, that for olive oil and mayonnaise made with it is an acquired one. Those of us who have acquired it, and hold that the original version of mayonnaise is the only true one, also feel that we should be entitled to accuse the caterer who offers us something totally different, under the same name, of fraudulent practice. The caterer is the inheritor of the confusions created by our own indifference to the composition of any given dish so long as it bears an attractive name.

  The Spectator, 3 August 1962

  Lucky Dip

  I am going away and it is time for a turn-out of the dresser drawer which houses my supply of tinned goods, emergency division. Underneath the top layer of Arist-o-Kat and Dum-Chum is revealed a modest assortment of products. Some of these have been sent by the manufacturers or their public relations agents, and some of them have been there a long time. The fact is that the emergency in which I find myself obliged to offer a tin of say Walls’ Chicken and Veal Pie to that nomadic and marauding tribe known to every reader of magazine cookery as Unexpected Guests, although a recurring dream of mine, is one that has never yet actually come about; and thankful I am for it, because in my dream I can see that those people are beginning to turn ugly as soon as they see me reaching for the tin-opener. I wish a dream-interpreter would tell me how they come to be so sure I’m not going to open a tin of truffled foie gras. True, I did once offer the filling of one of these pies (chicken, veal, flour, edible fats, seasoning, milk powder, flavouring, phosphate. Preheat oven to a hot condition. Remove lid of can) to my cat, and whether it was the chicken and veal or the flavouring or the phosphate, or was it just that I hadn’t got the oven to the sufficiently hot condition, she took to it no more than she did to that pair of frankfurters which arrived in the post one early morning after they’d spent a long weekend at the offices of the magazine for which I was then writing, and were thoughtfully packed with a tube of mustard. Come to think of it, it was the mustard they were pushing, not the sausages. That very same post brought, if I remember rightly, a jar of crab paste and a chromium-plated fork for creaming synthetic lard. That was a change, because the postman’s load is usually more spread out. The lard to go with the fork arrived, for example, at 8.15 a.m. two days later, and the thermometer for testing frying temperatures for chips had already got me springing out of bed a week previously. Taking delivery of a Christmas card two feet by four from the Amalgamated Cooking Fats Board was a separate treat again – or am I confusing that occasion with the day I abandoned my Béarnaise to admit a package containing photographs of two dishes called Upsidedown Top Hats and Princess Anne’s Muff?

  *

  Now what else is in the bran-tub? A bottle of Horseradish Relish. Fresh horseradish, spirit vinegar, flour, sugar, salt, mustard, skim milk powder, tragacanth, flavouring. Oh, come now, what earthly flavouring could compete with mustard, horseradish, spirit vinegar? Whatever it was, it nearly blew my head off when I unscrewed that cap. I’m just thinking, perhaps if I have that jar handy when I answer the door to the uninvited, the pillaging horde, they will go away quietly …

  There is a packet of Instant Bread Sauce. What is it doing here? Its place is in the bean jar with the ice-cream powders and the envelopes of Country Vegetable Soup and White Sauce which I’ve been meaning to try out for years and years. ‘Dear Madam,’ a Leicestershire manufacturer of poultry stuffings and packet crumbs and herbs wrote to me after an adverse comment of mine on factory bread sauce had been quoted in a Sunday paper, ‘you evidently have never made bread sauce, for if you had you would know that to make it properly there is a considerable amount of work involved.’ There’s a juggins for you. If bread sauce is really the product of a kitchen genius with an infinite capacity for taking pains, am I going to be so easily persuaded that it can be produced just as well in a couple of minutes from a bag of shrivelled breadcrumbs and a cup of milk?

  Here are some old friends. Half a dozen tins containing divers sorts of mysterious clams called almejas, and mussels and inkfish brought to me from Spain; moderately acceptable in an improvised paella or risotto, and so was that tin of the Italian version of clams called vongole in brine (and so it could be at 4/6d.), and there is a jar of cranberry sauce named Nora (cranberries, sugar, pectin). Not talkative, Nora; she or it was given to me by some Norwegians and looks rather sparkly and pretty, although I don’t know when I shall use it or what for, I don’t really think it’s good with turkey. And how ever did I acquire that bottle of diluted tomato soup which must be a sauce for prawn cocktails? Was it sent to me on behalf of prawns or tomato soup? Oh, neither, the label says True French Dressing. Well, I never. That packet of English-made spaghetti with a built-in tin of Sauce Bolognese gives me a guilty pang. I would have liked to compare the whole outfit with the Pizza Mix which included a reconstitutable filling, but I gave that away to some children, proper little dustbins they were, they took my cuckoo clock too, sent direct from a Swiss firm and made up of triangles of foil-wrapped processed cheese. Well, it doesn’t do to hoard, so perhaps I had better get rid of the whole lot, including that tin of walnut glyka, which, I hope, is the kind of syrupy conserve which the Greeks give you as a gesture of hospitality, on a little saucer, with a glass of water and a cup of coffee and which you mustn’t refuse. An impulse buy, that walnut jam, it’s been there these two years and more. On second thoughts it had better stay. Not that there has been any indication of it in my dreams, but the unexpected guests could quite well have come all the way from Greece, couldn’t they?

  The Spectator, 29 June 1962

  Summer Holidays

  August rain swishes down on the leaves of the wild jungly tree which grows, rootless apparently, in the twelve inch strip of gravel outside my London kitchen. I am assured by a gardener that the plant originated in Kamchatka, but now it looks more like something transplanted from the Orinoco. Staring out at it, hunched into her bumble-bee-in-a-black-mood attitude, my cat suddenly jumps up, presses her face to the window, doesn’t like what she sees, comes back, wheels round, washes her face, re-settles herself on her blanket, stares out again. I feel restless too. Remembering other rain-soaked Augusts, English holiday Augusts, I am melancholy, I have a nostalgie de la pluie. North Cornwall and its leafy lanes dripping, dripping; the walk in a dressing gown and gum
boots through long squelching grass to the stream at the end of the field to fetch water for our breakfast coffee. At the nearest farmhouse they can let us have a pint or two of milk every day; no, not cream, and no eggs or butter, these come out on the grocery van from Penzance. Will there be any pilchards? How lovely to eat them grilled like fresh sardines, except we have only a primus in the kitchen, no grill or oven, so I don’t know how we’ll cook them; in the bent tin frying pan I suppose. The question never arises though, it isn’t the season they say, it’s too early, too late, too rough, too cold, too warm. Shopping in Penzance we run to earth what we think is a Cornish regional speciality. At Woolworths. Gingery biscuits, bent and soft, delicious, much nicer than the teeth-breaking sort. (Years later, I find tins of biscuits called Cornish Fairings at my London grocers, and buy them, hoping they are the same. They are meant to be, I think, but they are too crisp. I like the squadgy ones, I expect the recipe is secret to the Penzance Woolworths.)

  In one of the grey, slatey villages – St. Just in Roseland – we buy saffron buns, dazzling yellow, only the dye doesn’t seem to go quite all the way through, and I think it must be anatto not saffron, anyway there is no taste and the buns are terribly dry. Next day the children take up with a fisherman on the beach and he has given them a huge crawfish. How I wish he hadn’t. We can’t leave the thing clacking round on dry land. Dry – well, everything is relative.

  D. says she will take the girls out for the afternoon to look for Lands End (yesterday it was curtained off by rain, she pretends to think perhaps it will be different today) and leaves me to the grisly task of cooking the crawfish. The only advantage of being the Expedition’s cook is that I am entitled to stay indoors. Our largest cooking vessel is a 2-pint earthenware stew-pot, so I have to boil the lobster in the water bucket. The RSPCA pamphlet says the most humane way to cook lobsters and their like is to put them in cold water, and as it heats the animal loses consciousness and dies peacefully. I never met a fisherman or a fishmonger or a chef who paid any attention to this theory, and few who had even heard of it. I like to believe in it, and also I think that given the right conditions the system produces a better-cooked lobster, less tough than the ones plunged in boiling water, but a bucket of water takes a powerful long time to heat up on a small primus stove, and that animal would be lying in its bath for a good hour before the water boils – and suppose you have to take it off and re-charge the primus in the course of the operation?