An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

by Elizabeth David

  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.

  Now the book in question was a cheap one – 6/6 at the time – my review, written in perfect innocence, was enthusiastic, it had been given space which in the ordinary way such a book would not have been accorded, and the subject was one which as my Literary Editor well knew – although at that time I did not – never fails to touch a sensitive spot in the minds of English newspaper readers. It would have been foolish to resent unduly the little confidence trick which had been played upon me. It was a good example of something right done for the wrong reason. The book’s success was deserved, it has gone into many editions since, is still in print as a paper-back, and must have helped thousands of readers to learn how to make their own bread. For me, the book eventually opened up a whole new field of study and of cookery.

  Reproduced below is that Sunday Times review.

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  Home Baked, by George and Cecilia Scurfield (Faber, 6s. 6d.).

  For at least 250 years the bad quality of English bread has been notorious. Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, long before the invention of roller mills put white flour within the reach of all, the bakers and the millers were periodically accused of almost every possible fraud upon the community.

  The adulteration of flour with alum to make it white was a common practice. One pamphleteer even went so far as to accuse the bakers of mixing their flour with ground-down human bones. According to Smollett the bread in London was ‘a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum, and bone-ashes; insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution’ (Humphry Clinker, 1771). ‘Que votre pain est mauvais, said a French friend to Eliza Acton, who observed in her English Bread Book (1857) that our bread was noted, ‘both at home and abroad, for its want of genuineness and the faulty mode of its preparation’. Some thirty years later we have Sir Henry Thompson, an eminent doctor and writer on diet, complaining that bakers’ bread was unpalatable and indigestible; he did not suppose any ‘thoughtful or prudent consumer would, unless compelled, eat it habitually’.

  The authors of this new book on breadmaking at home are even more blunt. ‘We got fed up with shop bread.’ Who has not? But it is useless to rage against the bakers and the bread manufacturers. So long as our ancient obsession with ever-whiter and whiter bread persists, the bakers will be delighted to sell it to us steam-baked, sliced, and hygienically wrapped. The only remedy for those who want genuine wholesome bread, and surely the wish is not a cranky one, is the same as it has always been. It must be made at home. And why not? In one of the most reassuring sentences to be found in any cookery book Mr and Mrs Scurfield sweep away all misgivings. ‘The great thing about baking with yeast,’ they say, ‘is the difficulty of failure.’ Exact measurements are not important, a draughty kitchen is no deterrent. No mystery is attached to the kneading of dough.

  It is elsewhere that the rub lies. To get the full benefit of home-made bread it should be made with stone-ground wholemeal flour. You may have to go to some trouble or to some distance to find it. Quite apart from the extra burden of heavy bags of flour in the shopping basket, it will be expensive unless bought in large quantities. City dwellers scarcely have the space to keep ‘a small dustbin’ (mouse-proof) in which to store five stone of flour. Yeast is not always easy to come by, either. But the difficulties are not insurmountable.

  Even bread made at home with ordinary white flour from the grocer is superior to manufactured white bread. The brown scone meal sold under the name of Scofa doesn’t even need yeast to turn it into an excellent loaf. The Scurfields give recipes for a half white and half wholemeal loaf and for sourdough rye bread which should be useful, and I shall certainly try their method for French bread; but I wouldn’t myself care for a fresh-baked Swedish coffee twist for breakfast, a fresh-baked cinnamon ring with coffee after lunch, and fresh-baked fruit and nut buns for tea, all made from the same batch of dough.

  We have become a very food-conscious people during the past few years. Ever more cookery books pour from the presses, millefeuille pastry and shark fin soup, crêpes suzette and bœuf Stroganoff, quiche lorraine and bouillabaisse and Linzertorte no longer hold any mysteries for us. How about putting the horse in front of the cart and having a crack at baking a decent loaf of bread?

  The Sunday Times, 25 March 1956

  West Points

  In 1952 we were still in the grip of rationing in this country. Few cookery writers or publishers had the nerve to tantalize the public with recipes calling for steaks and wine, joints of pork and veal, pheasants and cream, chickens cooked in butter, sauces made with eggs and olive oil, and meat stock for soups and stews. The flow of new cookery books which in the late fifties turned into a flood had barely started, and I suppose this explains the fact that while during the past few years some really very pointless American publications have been taken up over here – and often launched on the English market without the slightest acknowledgement of their transatlantic origin – one of the most entertaining and illuminating of cookery books from the United States was overlooked. />
  Helen Brown’s West Coast Cook Book, now in its fourth printing, was first published (by Little, Brown & Co., Boston) in 1952, and I wish it had come my way long before now, for Mrs Brown throws light on scores of points about American ingredients and American cooking which, in my ignorance of the American continent, have always to me seemed most mysterious. The recipes, says the author, are the regional ones of the three Pacific States – California, Oregon, and Washington. Some, brought from all over Europe, originated with the early settlers, and proving suitable to the new world, settled in as native dishes. There were the foods and the recipes introduced by the Spaniards and the Mexicans; others were brought across the plains by the pioneers of the Oregon Territory and have, Mrs Brown says, a Yankee flavour. In many of the dishes there are Chinese, Italian or French influences; and dishes one often reads about in cookery books without being given a clue as to their origin – Cioppino (a sea-food ragoût), Olympia pan roast (olympia is an oyster) and Green Goddess dressing (created at the Palace Hotel, San Francisco, in honour of George Arliss) – turn out to be entirely local inventions.

  Nearly all the recipes make convincing reading and probably delicious eating; Mrs Brown makes short work of substitutes, makeshifts and synthetics and her lists of ingredients, easy on the eye and the mind, are very far removed from those interminable recipes of American magazine cookery which call for one half-cup or one quarter-teaspoon of everything but the washing-up water. For English readers, though, the most valuable parts of the book are the notes on West Coast ingredients, the fish, the flora, the fauna. Mrs Brown explains abalone, albacore, barracuda, white sea bass and black sea bass which ‘grows as large as six hundred pounds so we seldom cook it whole’, tells us that there are thirty-five kinds of clam on the West Coast and describes the razor, the pismo, the mud, the gaper, the empire and butter clams, and also a gigantic freak called geoduck – about which it seems there are aspects not entirely polite so that ‘ladies of an earlier day stayed at a discreet distance when their men went hunting them’. With one of quite a few poker-faced digs at her own compatriots’ passion for gimmicky names and their carefree debasing of recipes, Mrs Brown remarks of a dish called Coos Bay Clam Cakes that ‘this could be stuck in a split buttered bun and called a clamburger, but let’s not.’

  Reading of the extraordinary variety of the wild berries and fruits of the West – Oregon crab-apples, wild cherries, plums, elderberries, blackberries, barberries, grapes, gooseberries, huckleberries, cranberries – one begins to understand the origin of the preponderance of recipes for pies and fruit desserts which one finds in American cookery books, and also the American taste for eating fruit jellies and preserves with meat and poultry.

  As for those mixed-up fruit, vegetable and cheese salads which many people, excusably, appear to think form the staple diet of America, Mrs Brown doesn’t bother too much about them; her explanation of the tendency to fling all and sundry ingredients into the salad bowl is that ‘this everlasting green salad tossing is becoming something of a bore. So – to vary it – we make it in the classic manner but toss in other ingredients at will – nuts, cheese, olives, croûtons, slivers of orange peel or anchovies …’ I don’t altogether agree that a plain green salad ever becomes a bore – not, that is, if it’s made with fresh well-drained crisp greenstuff and a properly seasoned dressing of good-quality olive oil and sound wine vinegar. But I do agree that all this talk about ‘tossed salads’ is a bore; it seems to me that a salad and its dressing are things we should take more or less for granted at a meal, like bread and salt; and not carry on about them.

  But when you go, as a friend of mine did last week, to the restaurant of a big West End department store, order something called an egg salad costing 3s. 9d. which turns out to consist of outside lettuce leaves laid on a flat plate with a little dollop of grated carrot, two of diced beetroot and two halved hard-boiled eggs, and quite devoid of seasoning or dressing but plus – separately – a teeny pottikin containing two teaspoonfuls of what appeared to be slightly thinned-down commercial salad cream – well, boring though it may be, how can we stop going on about salads?

  The Spectator, 8 December 1961

  If You Care to Eat Shark

  ‘I think I will try some of that palombo’

  ‘Of course my dear. If you care to eat shark’.

  I wish that at the time I’d known more about that so-called shark. The place was a Capri tavern, my informant, up to his favourite trick of warning one off almost any fish which happened to be on the menu of the day by recounting something untoward about its feeding habits and the way it was caught, killed or cooked, was Norman Douglas.

  ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Let me tell you what happened to the vice-consul’s wife in Naples. Ha!’

  Before he had had time to invent some preposterous tale of how the vice-consul’s wife in Naples had discovered a human nose inside a palombo I had found out for myself that there is nothing extraordinary about that fish except its dullness. Dogfish, that’s all that shark turns out to be, and smooth dogfish at that, but at least not a man-eater. It feeds, I learn, upon ‘crabs, lobsters etc’ (ha! Norman would scarcely have missed the opportunity of making something of that etcetera) ‘its smooth pavement-like teeth being adapted for crushing shells rather than for seizing and holding active fish… the Irish call it stinkard, Devon fishermen Sweet William’.

  This beguiling information I find almost on the very first page of a publication called Seafish of Tunisia and the Central Mediterranean, which is further described as a handbook giving the names of 144 species in five languages (actually six, Latin, English, French, Italian, Tunisian Arabic and modern Greek), with a list of molluscs, crustaceans and other marine creatures, and notes on cooking. The compiler is Alan Davidson, an official at the British Embassy in Tunis, who as an entirely unofficial activity, has made a serious attempt to classify and illustrate the local edible fish, a task originally undertaken, as he explains in his introductory note, simply to enable his own household, newly arrived in Tunisia, to use both the fish and their cookery books to the greatest advantage. Now as any amateur who has ever attempted to identify so many as a couple of dozen varieties of the fish for sale in any Mediterranean market from Barcelona to Alexandria, and from Marseille to Malta, Genoa, Venice and the Piraeus will know, Mr Davidson could, working on his own, have gone quickly and quietly raving mad – or have produced a volume adding to rather than clearing up the existing confusion in the minds of all those who deal in and buy, sell, or write about fish for the kitchen. Fishermen naturally suffer much less from this confusion. They see the fish in life, understand their habits and know the small differences in characteristics between several varieties of one fish. By the same token it is often the fishermen who have helped to create the confusion by bestowing their own private and local names upon each one of a tribe of fish to them possessed of obvious differences very often not easily distinguishable by the time the fish reach the buyers, let alone the cooking pots. Names then get transferred from one fish to another and confusion is rampant.

  To help him sort out the appalling problems attendant upon his search Mr Davidson sensibly sought professional assistance and found it – he could scarcely have found better – chiefly in the person of Professor Georgio Bini, compiler of the marvellous Catalogue of the Names of Mediterranean Fish issued in 1960 by the General Fisheries Council for the Mediterranean, attached to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation in Rome. (This impressive work of research, carried out primarily with a view to the establishment of one standard nomenclature for each fish in every Mediterranean language – and also in English – is at present unobtainable.) Professor Bini’s work is the model on which, as Mr Davidson makes clear, he has based his own. His diagrammatic drawings and much of the material come, indeed, straight from the FAO publication, and none the worse for that.

  As we know, a great many Mediterranean fish are by no means unique to the Mediterranean. We could do with knowing muc
h more than we now do about creatures such as the delicious John Dory, a fish often dismissed as wasteful and expensive because of its huge head. Of course it is wasteful if you throw away that head, and the carcase; keep these pieces of fall-out for fish broth or soup for which they are especially good and suitable, and the John Dory becomes an economical proposition. Brill, another fish which to my taste is much superior to the absurdly over-rated sole, the mullets red and grey and the gurnards ditto, the rays, the inkfish tribe, the bass, and even I believe the angler fish, the lotte or baudroie of the French, of which again only the tail is eaten could all be more generally available in England if only people were not frightened to buy fish with which they are not familiar. The simple remedy is for us to become familiar with them, and if eventually works such as Mr Davidson’s could be published here we should be getting somewhere. In any case Mr Davidson has a gift for conveying memorable information in a way so effortless that his book makes lively reading for its own sake. Who could not find it entertaining to know that there is a fish called, in Latin, boops boops or box boops, that boops signifies big eyes – well of course Betty Boops – that in English and French this fish is known as bogue, and that alas ‘bogue is not particularly good’. Or that in Venice you may insult someone by calling him a picarel-eater, and that this same picarel, a fish of the centracanthidae family is known at Port-Vendres as the mata-soldat or kill-soldier? One is glad too to find out at last that the dentice so beloved of the Italians is identical with the synagrida equally beloved of the Greeks, that the English name for brème de mer is Ray’s bream, that it is a deep water fish, and uncommon, that its face is that of a petulant old baby, that the fish we call sea-bream the French call pagre (I know it as pagel – or is that another one?) and that the daurade or Italian orata should properly be called in English the gilt-head bream, and that, en passant, it is a hermaphrodite.