What She Ate

by Laura Shapiro

  Of course, there was never a shortage in England, or in Pym’s fiction, of some of the world’s worst cooking. Elizabeth David once described staying in a household where the same Sunday dinner appeared every week: overboiled potatoes, overboiled sprouts, overboiled cabbage, and overdone meat. She managed to slip a glass of wine into the gravy one week, but her hostess was so distressed that the experiment didn’t happen again. Barbara ran into dreary cooking like this on innumerable occasions over the years, and she had no intention of ignoring it when she wrote. In houses, flats, cottages, and bed-sitters throughout the books, we find characters opening tins, making Nescafé, putting out a store-bought cake for tea, and heating up frozen peas—“like Americans,” Ianthe reflects guiltily in An Unsuitable Attachment. In No Fond Return of Love, Dulcie visits an aunt and uncle whose cook, Mrs. Sedge, sends up a dish known as “boiled baby”—“mince with tomato sauce spread over the top”—to be followed by semolina pudding. “Mrs. Sedge, who had come to England twenty years ago from Vienna, had apparently retained little knowledge of her country’s cuisine, if she had ever possessed it; Dulcie was always surprised at the thoroughness with which she had acquired all the worst traits of English cooking.”

  But if there’s a culinary moral in these books, it’s that good food can be found anywhere. Certainly it’s not reserved for the sort of people who consider themselves gourmets. Barbara didn’t feel she had to send a heroine to France and sit her down at a café table with a glass of wine just to prove she was capable of enjoying life’s riches. Where we find a Pym heroine is at home, in comfortable shoes, turning the pages of a nineteenth-century housekeeping manual while she has some decent cheese and a couple of tomatoes from the garden. This is a good life, Barbara is saying; this is luxury; this is genuine contentment.

  • • •

  Barbara herself had a relaxed and wide-ranging appetite that was open to just about everything. “How would she eat when alone?” Barbara wondered while she was working on the character of Dulcie in No Fond Return of Love. “Half a lobster and a glass of chablis at Scotts—or baked beans on toast and Coca Cola in the Kenbar cafe at Barkers.” She left out the question marks when she made this note, perhaps because both choices appealed to her, and not just for their literary qualities. Barbara’s meals and snacks ranged up, down, and across most of the possibilities at hand for a middle-class woman living within easy reach of London or Oxford. One day it was a poached egg at the Kardomah, another day there was nothing available except “a dry sausage roll” in a train station; she had a “delicious creamy cake tasting of walnuts” at the Wimpole Buttery, and she had a memorably all-brown lunch at Lyons (“Macaroni Bolognaise with a brownness of meat in the middle, browny soup and coffee, dark brown chocolate trifle”). With a friend at an Italian restaurant she had “Tio Pepe, ravioli, salad, sweets, coffee”; more opulently she dined at Simpson’s, famous for “gorgeous roast beef . . . and here a woman is given as much as a man.” Lunches with publishers always took place at London’s better restaurants, and when Macmillan accepted Quartet in Autumn she was taken to Terrazza Est on Chancery Lane. “We had much congenial talk and ate smoked salmon, bits of veal in a buttery sauce, straw potatoes and courgettes (for me) and profiteroles. JW [James Wright, her editor] and I had some white wine,” she wrote. “All the other diners in the room seemed to be men.”

  At home she seems to have cooked quite simply, according to the shopping lists and a few menus she wrote down. Most often she cooked from scratch: “I am writing this rather hurriedly before lunch with an Irish Stew bubbling on the cooker and a blackberry and apple tart for afters (made with free apples from neighbours and blackberries from ‘Nature’s supermarket’!).” But she showed no aversion to frozen “fish fingers”; and although she bought mayonnaise, she considered giving “Miracle Whip??” a try at least once. Margarine shows up on her list, a classic economy purchase; and so does olive oil, a classic good-cooking purchase. Brown sugar, white sugar, and self-rising flour signal the baking she liked to do—recipes for Victoria sandwich cake and a date loaf turn up—and the numerous bottles she brought home attest to a fair amount of convivial drinking, including vermouth, sherry, “Vin rouge,” and “Coke, Beaujolais.”

  For a short time in 1956, Barbara kept a record of what she cooked for company. The notes are abbreviated, she just jotted down the three courses and the initials of the guests (except for “Hazel,” perhaps her good friend and later biographer Hazel Holt), but these brief menus offer a glimpse of how she liked to entertain. For the most part she chose honorable dishes from the best-tablecloth tradition of British cookery, including potted shrimps, “veal escalopes,” salmon timbales, and lamb chops, with summer pudding and “Strawberries & Cream” among the desserts (as well as something called “Coffee marshmallow,” which sounds more ominous). On her occasional travels in France, Italy, and Greece she always enjoyed the food, and there’s a recipe for “Pesto Alle Genovese” in a late notebook. But what she really liked were the flavors of home. In 1977 she had the chance to entertain the poet Philip Larkin, a longtime friend and strong supporter of her work whom she rarely got to see, and afterward described what she and Hilary had served. “We ate kipper paté then veal done in a casserole with peppers and tomatoes—pommes Anna and celery—cheese (he didn’t eat any Brie and we thought that perhaps he only likes plain food?) then summer pudding.” Nothing in this meal would have been out of place in the menus she had recorded twenty years earlier. It was her favorite festive cookery.

  Around the same time as the Larkin lunch, Barbara happened to write down a week’s worth of more pedestrian menus, the dinners she and Hilary shared on ordinary nights at home. Most of these, like the earlier company menus, were so timeless they could have been drawn from pretty much any week in her life. She omitted Sunday’s main meal, but a glance at the rest of the week suggests roast lamb.

  Sunday—eggs and bacon

  Monday cold lamb & salads

  Tuesday sausages & apple rings

  Wednesday Curried lamb & rice

  Thursday Gourmet fish fingers w/peas

  Friday Macaroni cheese w/peas

  Saturday Peppers stuffed mince-rice

  “Gourmet” fish fingers probably referred to the name of a recipe she found in a magazine—it was not a word she used except while rolling her eyes—and the curried lamb was surely more English than Indian, though she did buy basmati rice. (Two years later, Hilary returned from a trip to India with an assortment of spices, and Barbara assured a friend that “our Indian cooking has taken on a subtler more authentic flavour.”)

  Perhaps the most vivid aspect of these menus, especially cold-lamb week but also the more elevated cooking she did for guests, is a certain quality of the eternal. How many plates of bacon and eggs were set on the supper table, at Barbara’s house and across England? How many apple rings? Barbara once remarked on what she called “all those Sundays after Trinity”—summer’s uneventful church services, week after week of them, with nothing on the horizon but a speck in the distance that was All Saints’ Day. She didn’t mind saying she was bored, sometimes, in church; but she was never bored by the food in her life. Nor did she ever show signs of outgrowing her usual preferences, with the possible exception of livening up the spices in the curries. Food captures our aspirations as well as our appetites, and Barbara was deeply content with what she knew best. If she was ever startled by the hodgepodge of class and cultural implications that sprang from her shopping lists—avocados, Marmite, “Tin fruit Garlic Vino,” beetroot, “Steak, etc.”—she never said so.

  • • •

  One of the best fictional meals Barbara ever prepared—best by today’s standards, at any rate—takes place in Jane and Prudence, and it’s served in a restaurant on the day that Prudence must mend a broken heart. A young woman working in London at a vague editorial job, Prudence has just learned that her current swain has become engaged to someone else,
and although she didn’t like him all that well, she is giving the end of the romance a full dose of sweet sadness. Normally she spends her lunch hour at nondescript cafés, but on this day she takes herself out to an expensive restaurant.

  Here, she knew she could get the kind of food she deserved, for she must be more than usually kind to herself to-day. A dry Martini and then a little smoked salmon; she felt she could manage that. . . .

  “And what would you like to follow, madam?” asked the waitress. “I can recommend the chicken.”

  “Well,” Prudence hesitated, “perhaps just a slice of the breast, and a very few vegetables.” No sweet, of course, unless there was some fresh fruit, a really ripe yellow-fleshed peach, perhaps? And afterwards, the blackest of black coffee.

  Barbara put this meal on paper sometime between 1950, when she started working on Jane and Prudence, and 1953, when it was published. Few people today reminisce lovingly about restaurant meals in London in the early 1950s. Yet here is a lunch so simple and apparently seasonal that it could have been designed by Alice Waters, mastermind of California cuisine and the food revolution. (Depending, of course, on how the side dishes were prepared, but considering how fussy Prudence is about the peach, it seems unlikely that she will put up with soggy vegetables.) Not every delicious meal in Barbara’s books leaps directly to our own time the way this one does, but she began sending her characters to fine restaurants as early as Excellent Women, and they continued to eat out very well for the next thirty years. Most often, of course, we see her characters sitting in Lyons or in an overcrowded cafeteria that serves sausages and steamed puddings—the sorts of places where Barbara herself sat at lunchtime, eavesdropping. But her characters also go to little French and Italian restaurants in Soho, where lunch might start with a Tio Pepe and there’s always a bottle of wine. The high end shows up, too: Wilmet, in A Glass of Blessings, has a memorable lunch at Simpson’s, “where great joints were wheeled up to the table for one’s choice and approval,” and Leonora, in The Sweet Dove Died, has a post-opera supper at which she forgoes the Parma ham in favor of the avocado with shrimp. Dulcie, in No Fond Return of Love, whose zeal for people-watching matches Pym’s, spies on the guests in a hotel dining room one evening and can practically taste the scrumptious-looking turbot they’re being served.

  Was Barbara delusional on the subject of postwar British restaurants? Julia Child would have said so, vehemently; but Raymond Postgate might have taken Barbara’s side, at least in the early 1950s. Postgate was a left-wing journalist and gastronome who was so irritated by the sorry state of British restaurants that he once proposed organizing a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Food. Instead he founded the Good Food Club, a kind of consumers’ crusade aimed at raising the standards of public dining across Britain. Anyone could participate, simply by sending in a report on a restaurant he or she had visited recently. All visits were supposed to be anonymous; all meals had to be paid for; and contributors had to sign a statement saying they were not financially involved in the restaurant. Postgate edited the reports himself, and the first issue of The Good Food Guide appeared in 1951. It’s still being published today.

  Looking through the reports that piled up in his office after he announced the project, Postgate was startled at the amount of praiseworthy food he was encountering. “The first picture that anyone has of British cooking, outside the home, is of dullness and incompetence,” he wrote in the 1951 Good Food Guide. “But this list makes it clear that there are literally hundreds of places of which [this picture] is totally untrue.” Fine cooks, painstaking proprietors, and notable dishes existed across the land, he added, though of course “this is not France and cannot be.” Since the point was to call attention to excellent eating places, not criticize bad ones, every report was positive in tone; but contributors were very clear about their personal standards. “Real cream” was often singled out, as well as “real coffee” and “real mayonnaise (hand made).” A traveler stopping at the Dixon Arms Hotel in Cheshire praised the “duckling which really is duckling and not an ancient drake,” and another who ate at the Greyhound, in Penrith, reported “home-cured mild sweet bacon, farmyard fresh eggs, and real thick cream on the porridge, with a bowl of fine sugar. . . . Own herd of Jersey cows for milk and cream; own poultry.” Many contributors welcomed “good, plain English cooking” when it was done properly, as at the Rope and Anchor in Lancashire: “For once in a blue moon, the vegetables were beautifully cooked, too—you could turn the plate upside-down and no waterfall would descend on the table-cloth.”

  Restaurants offering foreign food—it was not yet called “ethnic”—abounded in London, and contributors loved being able to praise the authenticity of their favorite dishes. Caletta’s was “the best place for ravioli in all London,” and upstairs at York Minster could be found “the authentic, best cuisine bourgeoise: for an hour or so you are back in a small Paris restaurant, for a cost of about 5/6. Specialties: Navarin printaniere, Pied de porc, Tete de veau.” In Soho, many Pym-type restaurants were noted, including the Blue Windmill (“Food rich, substantial and cheap; escalopes, steak and chips”) and Au Savarin, “an excellent little restaurant kept by an Alexandrian cook. Greek and other Mediterranean cooking.” All across town, moreover, restaurant-goers were tasting Burmese curries, iced cherry soup, a Danish “smorrebrod,” “Pekinese chicken noodle soup,” Tyrolean beef with dumplings, “Arroz alla Valenciana,” and “Apfel strudel in generous portions.” It was less than a decade after the war, but according to these food lovers, the restaurant scene in London was lively and enticing, and it continued to flourish, judging from the reports that came in throughout the 1950s and ’60s.

  Yet even Postgate found it hard to shake the preconceptions that had prompted the Guide in the first place. Preparing the introduction to the 1963 edition, he took a look at the original Guide published twelve years earlier and decided that less than half the hotel restaurants praised in that volume would have qualified for the current one. “They were only tolerable then because there was nothing better,” he declared. Most had earned their place in the first Guide merely because they produced food that was at a somewhat higher level than the usual “overcooked meat in tiny portions, sodden vegetables, and saccharined or tinned fruit with packet custard,” he asserted. And with that, he dismissed all those dinners that had delighted his first contributors—“roast woodcock with herbs and white wine,” “splendidly cooked chateaubriand with little vegetables,” “first-class French chef,” “delicious jugged hare, lovely light pastry, and an abundance of home-cured bacon.”

  Maybe, despite the praise, all those 1951 meals really had been mediocre. But I’m inclined to trust Postgate’s original impression—“unexpectedly high quality”—rather than the reverse nostalgia he was practicing in 1963. Styles change, tastes change, and he himself may have wondered how he ever could have enjoyed the earlier food, once he had tasted the more adventurous cooking that came later. Not to mention the fact that by 1963 the write-ups were becoming more intimidating. “First-class French chef” used to be high praise; now reviewers were casually mentioning that “only French butter is used for cooking.” No self-respecting gastronome was going to look back on the 1950s with anything except pity.

  • • •

  Barbara had been publishing steadily—six novels in thirteen years—when her longtime publisher, Jonathan Cape, abruptly rejected the seventh. Wren Howard, cofounder of the company, wrote the letter she received in March 1963: “Several of us have now read, not without pleasure and interest, the typescript of your novel An Unsuitable Attachment, and have discussed it at considerable length, but have unanimously reached the sad conclusion that in present conditions we could not sell a sufficient number of copies to cover costs, let alone make any profit.” He added that it was “distasteful” to him to have to tell her this, in view of their friendly relationship over the years. And that was it—he didn’t encourage her to revise the manuscript, a
nd he expressed no interest in seeing any future manuscripts. He was ejecting her from Jonathan Cape.

  Similar letters had been going out to other Cape authors, ever since a wunderkind named Tom Maschler had been made editorial director three years earlier at the age of twenty-six. When he arrived, Maschler told an interviewer years later, the company “was really run down.” He wanted the house to jettison its sleepy past, liven up the list, and start making money. “For my first seven years at Cape I was in sole charge of all book acquisitions,” Maschler wrote in a memoir. “Except for new books from Cape authors of the past (and there were very few of those), every book we published was brought in by me.” By the time the manuscript for An Unsuitable Attachment showed up on his desk, he was working with Joseph Heller, John Fowles, Ian Fleming, Thomas Pynchon, and John Lennon. A novel about a spinster who reads Tennyson and falls in love with a librarian would not have kept him avidly turning pages. Barbara’s books tended to sell around thirty-three hundred to six thousand copies each—enough to allow Cape to break even, but far from the kind of sales figures that would have impressed Maschler. Just as important, the modesty and good manners of her writing were wholly out of place on the provocative list he was rapidly assembling.