I was, myself, once inducted onto a panel, somewhat uncertain and disorganized, of ladies and gentlemen thought to be capable of presiding over a kind of gastronomes’ brains-trust at a certain English country food festival. Among the more resourceful worthies on the platform upon that memorable occasion was Mr Osbert Lancaster. A member of the audience demanded to be informed whether the panel considered good food to be possessed of aphrodisiac properties. And if so, what food in particular. A tricky question. The panel was silent. From the audience came shouts and derisive taunts. The whole meeting looked like breaking up in pandemonium. With faultless timing Mr Lancaster rose to his feet and boomed, in authoritative tones, that while he did not feel empowered to pronounce upon what food might or might not be prescribed for those in need of an aphrodisiac, he was prepared to commit himself to the point of declaring that if anyone wanted a sure-fire anaphrodisiac then it would be badly cooked food presented with a bad grace. An opinion with which Norman Douglas would have concurred.
‘Indigestion and love will not be yoked together.’ ‘No love-joy comes to bodies misfed, nor shall any progress in knowledge come from them.’ ‘A man’s worst enemy is his own empty stomach.’ ‘Be sober; let the loved one drink.’ ‘Good intentions – no … Gastritis will be the result of good intentions.’ ‘I have been perusing Seneca’s letters. He was a cocoa-drinker, masquerading as an ancient.’ ‘The longer one lives, the more one realizes that nothing is a dish for every day.’ ‘The unseemly haste in rising! One might really think the company were ashamed of so natural and jovial a function as that to which a dining-room is consecrated.’ ‘To be miserly towards your friends is not pretty; to be miserly towards yourself is contemptible.’
That last maxim of Norman’s was one he was particularly fond of enlarging upon when it came to a question of whether we could or should afford an extra treat in a restaurant or a more expensive bottle of wine than usual. It was a lesson from which I have derived much benefit. Eating alone in restaurants, as I have often in the pursuit of gastronomic researches been obliged to, I never fail to recall Norman’s words (a recollection which has resulted in a surprise for many a haughty maître d’hôtel and patronizing wine waiter, expecting a lone woman to order the cheapest dish and the most humble wine on the list). More important, to treat yourself to what you want, need, or are curious to taste, is the proper, and the only way, to learn to enjoy solitary meals, whether in restaurants or at home.
And let nobody waste his time looking into Venus in the Kitchen for advice on love-potions. Not once in the entire book does Norman suggest that he regards the idea of aphrodisiac recipes as anything more than a jovial diversion. A certain artichoke dish is ‘appetizing, even if not efficacious’. Salad rocket is ‘certainly a stimulant’. A ‘timid person is advised to sustain himself’ with ‘leopard’s marrow cooked in goat’s milk and abundant white pepper’. Pork chops with fennel seeds (an interesting dish. I know it well. Fennel seeds figure frequently in the country cooking of Tuscany) makes ‘a stimulant for sturdy stomachs’. A piece of loin of pork simmered in milk (a method of meat-cooking well known in certain parts of central and northern Italy) is ‘a good restorative’. Restoratives, stimulants, sustaining dishes, one notes. Why are they restorative, stimulating, sustaining? Because this is good cooking; interesting, well-seasoned, appetizing, fresh, únmonotonous. Nothing is a dish for every day … Certainly not that concoction of the intestines of a sucking pig stuffed with pieces of eel, peppercorns, cloves and plenty of sage (evidently an uncommonly grisly form of chitterling sausage) concerning which Norman is at his most teasing: ‘This is an extremely appetizing and stimulating dish. The eel goes very well with pork, because it is among fish what the pig is among quadrupeds.’ A simultaneous right and left to certain religious observances and to inherent prejudices with which he had no patience.
‘Anchovies have long been famed for their lust-provoking virtues’ is the piece of information appended to a recipe for anchovy toast. Ha! This recipe, which sounds a good one, consists of an emulsion of four ounces of butter and the yolks of four eggs plus one tablespoon of anchovy sauce and a seasoning of Nepal pepper. Hardly enough anchovy to provoke a mild thirst, let alone a lust. Anyone who hopes that Venus in the Kitchen is going to provide a roll on the dining-room floor would do well to reconsider. And to buy the book for a different kind of fun. For the fun, that is, of reading about the spices and wines and herbs, the fruit and flowers, the snails, the truffles, the birds, animals and parts of animals (the crane, the skink, the testicles of bulls) which went into the cooking pots of ancient Rome and Greece and of Renaissance Europe; for a glimpse, just enough to send us looking for more of the same kind, of the cinnamon and ginger and coriander flavoured game dishes, of the rose- and saffron-spiced sauces and meats, of the pistachio creams, the carnation conserves, the gentian and honey-flavoured wines, the Easter rice, the Sardinian pie of broad beans, the rolls of beef marbled with hard-boiled eggs and ham, the fennel and the almond soups which have all but vanished from European cooking.
To students of Venus in the Kitchen it may come as a disappointment to learn that Norman Douglas did not himself go in for the little extravaganzas he was fond of describing. Authentic food (if you can lay hands on a copy, see the passage in Alone describing his search in wartime Italy for genuine maccheroni, those maccheroni of a lily-like candour made from the correct hard fine white wheat flour), wine properly made, fruit from the trees he knew to have been well tended and grown in the right conditions – such things were his concerns. Gourmets’ solemnities and sippings were not for him.
His tastes in food, in his last years, had become more than a trifle idiosyncratic. His explosive denunciations concerning the fish of the Mediterranean waters were familiar to all his friends (and to readers of Siren Land). ‘Mussels? Of course, if you want to be poisoned, my dear. You know what happened to the consul in Naples, don’t you? Palombo? No fear. But have it your way, my dear, have it your way. If you care to eat shark …’ Then there was that business of the saffron. ‘Liz, now take another glass of wine, and go into the kitchen; just see that Antonio puts enough saffron into that risotto. A man who is stingy with the saffron is capable of seducing his own grandmother.’ From his pocket would come a brilliant yellow handkerchief. ‘When the rice is that colour, there’s enough saffron.’ Enough! I should say so. For me the taste of saffron was overpowering long before the requisite colour had been attained. Just another of Norman’s kinks, like his mania for hard-boiled eggs, of which he ate only the whites. How many discarded hard-boiled egg yolks did I consume in those weeks spent with him on Capri during the last summer of his life?
‘For Liz. Farewell to Capri,’ Norman wrote in the copy of Late Harvest1 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 a
m 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.
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine Page 15