by Luke Ryan
But he let me keep the proofs. And a week or so later, I slid them under the door of Arthur and Ginger’s house, where I like to think they enjoy pride of place alongside all of the other originals on their walls.
FIONA SCOTT-NORMAN
Good English Stock
❛Everything was clotted and rich, pan-fried and creamy, crispy on the outside, moist on the inside, and unapologetically saturated with animal fat and brandy.❜
The happiest memories I have of Dad are from when he had one hand up inside a dead bird’s cavity. Good gravy, he lived to cook. That wouldn’t surprise if the Scott-Normans had been Italian, Jewish, or any of those enviably demonstrative cultures where people speak with their hands, hug regularly and express love via a groaning table and the phrase ‘Eat! Eat!’ But the Scott-Normans are from good English stock. And England is a nation that expresses love by silently delivering you a cup of tea, struggling facially with its emotions, and then withdrawing apologetically.
Not even on a good day is England renowned for its cuisine. In the 1970s, when Arthur Scott-Norman was at the height of his powers, the apogee of British haute cuisine was the shrimp cocktail. No one ever says, ‘Let’s go out for an English.’ Well, they do, but only inasmuch as the most popular dish in Britain today is Indian. Chicken tikka masala was reputedly created in Glasgow in 1971, by adding leftover tomato soup to a curry that a disgruntled bus driver had complained was ‘dry’. It’s hardly the stuff that dreams and Michelin-starred restaurants are made of.
For the lion’s share of the 20th century, the English diet consisted of soggy brussels sprouts; reimagined offal; steamed swede; boiled turnip; creamed fish pie; a scrape of dripping on toast; and baked beans, spam, fried eggs, spam, chips, spam and spam. Whatever spam is. [Insert emoticon for shrugging right here.] Britain’s love affair with the whodunnit probably springs from its surfeit of mystery meats: haggis, luncheon meat, black pudding, brawn, chitterlings, meat paste and faggots. Yes, faggots are a thing. Yes, Dad loved them.
Even today, despite the best efforts of nutrition crusader Jamie Oliver, the historical reputation of British cooking still lingers dismally in the air, like the smell of boiled cabbage in a seaside B&B. Judge not, though. The UK had a solid four decades of war effort, belt-tightening and privation to deal with. There’s not much chef-tastic triumph to be had when your pantry is bare but for a pig lung, stale bread, no herbs and powdered egg. A Masterchef World War II mystery box challenge; now there’s something I’d watch.
That my dad rose like a culinary phoenix from the poverty cuisine of war rationing is a testament, really, to the human spirit. I imagine him standing in the midst of Blitz-torn London – a time when the only item with nutritional value not already rationed was dirt, and bread could only be sold a day old so that people weren’t encouraged to eat it – shaking his fist at the sky, a latter-day trans-Atlantic Scarlett O’Hara, crying, ‘As God is my witness, I will never go hungry again!’
Dad’s lifelong quest for good mouthfeel and fine ingredients was also spurred by his service in the RAF as a crash site investigator, an experience that left him deeply scarred and permanently phobic about carrots.
The story, as family legend has it, goes something like this: there came a time during World War II when the Brits had a breakthrough with radar. All of a sudden they were shooting down masses of German planes, and felt it would be smart to send Jerry off in another direction. So RAF personnel – all of them – were fed carrots at every meal, morning, noon and night, and ordered to eat them. The implication was that the high doses of Vitamin A gave the pilots such extraordinary vision that they could down a Focke in the dark with the naked eye.
A contemporary nutritionist might note that carrots boiled for half an hour have all the nutritional value of wind, but the German high command was confounded for a while, certainly long enough for Dad to consume his lifetime supply of carrots. Never ate another one – and he lived to eighty-nine. He was a man of his convictions, my father. He also went to the grave having refused to ever watch a single American film or TV programme, because he was disgusted with them for taking so long to enter the war. Say what you like about Arthur, but he could hold a fucking grudge.
He could also, excuse my French, fucking cook. In today’s parlance, Arthur owned the kitchen, and what came out of it was nearly always delicious. (Nearly – I’ve never forgotten nor forgiven tripe-and-onion-gate, when my refusal to eat a rubbery mess of bleached cow’s stomach for dinner led to it being served up cold for breakfast.)
Dad was of medium height, handsome when young, and, from mid-life on, as stout as the proverbial barrel of ale. He cut an old-fashioned figure: think Friar Tuck or Henry VIII; a man of means, of appetites, of substance. His bulk lent him gravitas, and, later in life, when coupled with his white beard and penetrating blue eyes, allowed him to play Santa with zero preparation and a high degree of credibility. I’d chide him about his stomach, which was large enough to exert a degree of gravitational pull, and he’d pat it unrepentantly and say, ‘It’s all paid for, Fiona.’
A safety engineer by day, by night Dad was a comfort-food black belt in the Two Fat Ladies tradition, complete with grease-smeared fingers and blue-and-white striped chef’s apron. Everything was clotted and rich, pan-fried and creamy, crispy on the outside, moist on the inside, and unapologetically saturated with animal fat and brandy. After we moved to Australia, where the climate screams for salads, I stopped asking him for recipes because every single one, including bread, began with, ‘Take a walnut-sized lump of lard.’
But in England in the 1970s, when everyone else was charring their chops to leather and sieving the grey lumps from their mashed potato, I grew up with bloody steaks and bright minted peas. I didn’t know bad food existed until I went to boarding school. At home on Sunday mornings, Dad would serve up fizzing Pimm’s No. 1 augmented with Cointreau in chilled pewter tankards, and Mum, Dad and I would get thoroughly sloshed en route to the roast. Which was, by the way, always outstanding. Leg of lamb with homemade mint sauce, rare roast beef and horseradish, chicken with sausage and chestnut stuffing. Not that our family had ever been church-goers, but our Sundays were a pretty sweet alternative to a hard pew and Protestant service.
Every meal, in Dad’s hands, was a banquet. Mum was an excellent cook, but Dad pushed the boat out. Kippers poached in milk and butter, mushrooms sautéed in cream, lobster smothered in cheese. Fillet steak with pâté on top. Or stuffed with oysters. Or both. Stilton and port for dessert. Irish coffee. I did a gig a while ago at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Club, one of those conservative men’s clubs with a doorman, exclusive membership and clusters of stuffed leather armchairs where world domination is discussed in hushed tones. The menu in the dining room whooshed me back thirty years. I sat there sipping game broth with a dash of sherry – my bowl correctly tilted away, dozens of Len Deighton and John Le Carré novels eyeing me from the bookshelf – all the while thinking how very ‘Dad’ it was. And how no one else I knew would truly appreciate the intoxicating proximity of power and well-hung venison.
Unfortunately, sharing good times was never Arthur’s long suit. He had what you could generously call ‘a chef’s temperament’, which I would less romantically characterise as ‘shouting all the fucking time’. I wonder now if he had PTSD, or was a teeny bit on the spectrum. Probably PTSD. He did, after all, spend the war digging up flash-burned body parts. As Mum, who served during the war as a nurse, once told me matter-of-factly, ‘We didn’t have therapy back in our day, Fiona. Some nights we still both wake up screaming.’
It was a rare meal that wasn’t interrupted by Dad – bless his frustrated, high blood-pressured, impatient heart – losing his temper somewhere between boning the chicken and spooning out the gourmet ice-cream, topped with just a dribble of Frangelico. Ironically, he cooked to relax, and the mind boggles to think what he would have been like without it. The first Christmas after he died, I busted Mum out of the nursing home for the day and cooked wi
thout Dad glaring over my shoulder. It was also, it transpired, the first Christmas we’d ever had that didn’t involve significant quantities of yelling. ‘High five,’ said Mum, raising her arm to celebrate having no need to flinch.
This was the fundamental paradox in Dad’s nature. On the one hand: a generous host, a compulsive over-caterer and someone who saw hospitality as a sacred charge. On the other hand: deeply antisocial. Loved feeding people, couldn’t stop shouting at them.
He had learned to make curry when he was the fire chief of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in the late 1940s, and in my teenage years he would cook feasts from scratch (note: no tomato soup here) for up to twenty admiring guests. Arthur’s curry lunches were legend, and invitations were sought-after. But after a few hours of beer, bonhomie and playing the host, he’d inevitably end up aggravated. We knew the party was over when he’d put on a bagpipe-heavy military band record and start pumping up the volume. He’d turn it louder and louder, until the level was unbearable and everybody got the hint and went home. Subtle as a smack in the face with a wet haddock.
He did not teach me to cook, in much the same way that he didn’t teach Mum to drive. A few sessions of ‘Jesus Christ, Norah! What the hell are you doing?’ turned a nervous beginner into someone who walked away from cars for a lifetime. I couldn’t stand the heat, and I stayed well out of the kitchen. Look, I eventually taught myself the basics, and he gave me his recipe for spag bol and taught me how to flip a pancake, but that was it. It’s been said that when an old man dies, a library burns. Well, when Dad went, it was the Great Cooking Library of Alexandria that was razed to the ground.
I did inherit sheaves of handwritten traditional sausage recipes, which all require the rinsing of many feet of sheep gut in salt water, and contain ingredients now banned by the Food Safety Authority. But the one tenet I absorbed whole-heartedly was that having guests means feeding them rich food until their livers turn to pâté. I utterly equate hospitality with love; I know it’s the best he could do.
Ultimately, among other health issues, Dad predictably developed diabetes, which he was supposed to control by diet. Ahahaha. He complied by hiding packets of biscuits around the house, and Mum, bedridden with her dicky spine, would hear a tell-tale crinkle crinkle emerging from the lounge room. His other technique was to buy boxes of chocolates ‘for Norah’, which she rarely got to eat. ‘Who’s been browsing?’ she’d call out, after going for a Quality Street and again finding a handful of wrappers and tinfoil.
Early talk about Dad joining Norah in the nursing home evaporated when he saw what she was getting fed. I can’t blame him. He saw boiled carrots in his future and put his foot down. He even lied about having applied, and sat there nodding when Mum fretted about how long it was taking to process the paperwork. A man has one great passion in his life, and with due respect to my Mum, Dad’s was food.
The first date Dad took Mum on was to harvest brussels sprouts in the snow. Their honeymoon was a bust because Mum came down with something, and Dad went to the pub on his own each night and would totter back to their houseboat smelling amorously of pickled onions.
He’d drive Mum bonkers, in a ritual that neither of them had the capacity to escape, by asking her at the end of every meal what she wanted for the next one. Three times a day he would ask, and three times a day she would reply, ‘Arthur, I’ve just eaten, I can’t think about food right now.’ Three squabbles a day, like clockwork.
Soon after he died, I visited Mum and noted that Two Fat Ladies was coming up on the telly. I figured she’d be keen to watch, but was met with a raised eyebrow and a firm headshake. ‘Thank goodness,’ she said, ‘that I never have to watch another damn cooking show.’
Dad stood indomitable for years, holding a catalogue of ailments at bay through sheer crankiness and pottering round the kitchen. He was easy to please and a pleasure to buy for. When I flew to visit them in Toowoomba, I’d bring him hipster treats: artisanal pork pies from the farmer’s market, dark chocolate, a jar of organic mango chutney. I knew he was really dying when he began to let me cook, and when I found a packet of instant mash in the pantry.
I hand-fed him his last meal in the hospital: some deep-fried cod roe, and a glass of Piper-Heidsieck bubbly, which I decanted into his hospital sippy cup. We toasted. The received wisdom is that hearing is the last sense to go, but for Dad I’d swear it was taste. Apart from anything else, he’d been deaf for years and was resolute in not turning on his hearing aids. (This meant he couldn’t hear what we said, which made him cross, which meant he was justified in a bit of shouting. It was kind of genius.)
Clearing out the house, I found mounds of tinned food stockpiled in every cupboard, up to and including the master wardrobe. Dad shopped as though he was still hosting dinner parties for twenty. As though he were still on rations. There were cans of escargot, artichokes and water chestnuts. Lobster bisque and mandarins. Asparagus (green and white), Scotch broth and lychees, foie gras and crab meat. All bought can-by-can by a gourmand on a pension. All out of date.
I shop like Dad. Maybe even for him. I poke meat, squeeze avocados, tap melons, sniff tomatoes. I used to think he was a wanker for greeting restaurateurs by name. Now I do the same. I feel deeply uncomfortable if I don’t have a pantry surplus, and I have a tin of Lyle’s Golden Syrup that I’ve been meaning to put in a treacle tart for five years. Ten, maybe. Fortunately that gear does not go off.
I saw Dad truly happy three times. Once was watching me do comedy; from the stage I could see him doubled-up and hooting. The second time was in a photograph taken before I was born, crouched in front of the seven salmon he’d caught fishing that day in Canada. His face was lit up like Christmas, and Mum said, hands down, it was the happiest day of his life.
The third time was in Perth, in 1979. Dad had a new job with Woodside Petroleum, and he’d moved us to Australia. While my parents looked for a house, Woodside put us up at the Sheraton, which was, by Perth in 1979 standards, very, very fancy. One night at the bistro, Dad’s lobster thermidor did not come out as God intended. So he did what absolutely no one does ever in a five-star hotel restaurant, which was pick up his plate and disappear for thirty minutes.
When he returned, he had a lobster thermidor, as per the book, steaming in his hands, and the kind of transcendent smile you get when you’ve bustled your way into an international hotel’s kitchen, told the chef he’s an idiot, AND COOKED YOUR OWN MEAL. Happiest. Man. In. The. World.
Oh, and one more thing I inherited. If a meal’s substandard, back it goes. Boom. Thanks, Dad. Love you.
TONY MARTIN
Follies
❛The drinks arrived, and Batman sipped daintily, yet menacingly, through a long, spiralling straw.❜
The Dark Knight Triumphant in Classic Cooney Farce
It’s hard to know what was going through Batman’s head when he accepted the lead in the much-anticipated revival of Run for Your Wife at the Old Gotham Playhouse.
It had all started one evening at a benefit dinner for the Wayne Foundation. No one was too surprised when the event was gatecrashed by the Riddler; as usual, he’d been unable to resist pre-empting his appearance with a series of transparent and unfunny brain teasers posted on riddlemethis.com. As soon as the Riddler arrived, bursting from a suspiciously large cake in a flurry of puns, Batman rappelled down from a skylight and beat him yet more senseless before he could effect the advertised kidnapping. The target was Sir Marmaduke Pfogg (no relation), the famous theatre director who was fresh from a series of triumphs in Londinium’s West End. Pfogg was quick to offer the caped crusader both his profound gratitude and the lead in his new play.
To change out of his bulky night-vision suit, Batman would have had to get to Bruce Wayne’s office on the 915th floor. But as it was raining out, and he was facing an elaborate series of high-altitude swoops and at least one somersault through a plate-glass window, he decided to accept Pfogg’s offer of a drink instead. Trailing his enormous, scissoring hang-glider w
ings, he repaired awkwardly to the cocktail bar. ‘I’ll have whatever you’re having,’ he rasped to the flamboyant director as the pair perched themselves on tall stools and surveyed the laminated bill of fare.
‘Two Cocksucking Cowboys,’ Pfogg barked at the barman, who plonked a folded napkin and a dish of complimentary nuts before the dark knight.
‘Listen, Pfogg,’ said Batman, maintaining his threatening croak, even as he suavely flipped cashews into his mouth. ‘Why would I want to do Run for Your Wife?’ And then, after a suitably dramatic pause, ‘I’m Batman.’
The drinks arrived, and Batman sipped daintily, yet menacingly, through a long, spiralling straw.
‘I know you are,’ said Pfogg, placing a reassuring paw on Batman’s gloved and clenched fist. ‘But I think you can be so much more.’
The crusader looked unconvinced. Pfogg leaned in closer. ‘You saw what I did with the Green Lantern in Not Now, Darling.’
Batman allowed himself a tight smile. Darling had been a smash. ‘In brightest day, in blackest night … get ready to split your sides!!!’ the headlines had screamed. ‘Let those who worship evil’s might, watch this crazy farce take flight!!!’ The Lantern had stayed pretty much on-script until the finale, only using his power ring to sort out a mix-up with the hotel reservations. Equally crowd-pleasing was the Flash in No Sex Please, We’re British; the various near-miss entrances and exits had never been executed with such lightning speed. And at the Justice League AGM, they were still talking about the Elongated Man’s across-the-drawing-room brassiere removal in Move Over, Mrs Markham, Pfogg’s most recent West End hit (‘Season stre-e-e-e-e-e-etched to record twentieth week!!!’). Maybe a spell creeping the boards wasn’t such a bad idea. The crowds had loved him that time he’d run for mayor against the Penguin (laughably but memorably dramatised in Hizzoner, Dizzoner).