And in the end...

In my introductory post I decided my first aim was “to gain insight into food cultures of the past.” I think I achieved this, for example by touching on the importance of home cooking in wartime Britain (note how the solution to Grandma’s mum not cooking was not to get a ready meal from the supermarket, as someone in a similar situation might do today, but to have another relative travel cross country in order to cook), by looking at the effects of rationing and by exploring attitudes towards foreign food.

However, I feel my main discovery is that although the wider food culture does touch our kitchens, these places are first and foremost deeply personal, and relational. And now, having written that sentence, I realise that it isn’t really a discovery at all – it’s exactly what motivated me to begin with; fond memories of Grandma preparing food for me, and the knowledge that this comforted me.

I set out to write about food itself but ended up writing about how Grandma and I feel about food, and about family and advocates outside the family. Ironically, only when I set out to write about feelings about food (the previous post re spag bol), the food itself took centre stage.

"It's nice. It's a nice change. And it's nice to wriggle around."

Ellen Castelow writes on the Historic UK website: “By the late 60s and early 70s dinner parties had become very popular, featuring the new fashionable ‘foreign’ dishes like Spaghetti Bolognese.”

Spaghetti Bolognese cropped up in a conversation I had with my mum. I was telling her about this project and she said that Grandma cooked spaghetti Bolognese at home when none of her friends’ mothers did. 

I ask Grandma about her culinary trailblazing and why she decided to cook food that isn’t British in origin.

“Because I think it’s nice. It’s a nice change. And it’s nice to…” Grandma mimes twirling spaghetti around on a fork, “to wriggle around.”

We laugh at this. “Yeah,” I say, agreeing. Spaghetti is fun to eat.

It’s a wonderfully simple answer. I’d been thinking about what it might mean for a British family to be eating non-British food in London in the 60s and 70s, about the kind of issues we discuss in my Writing Multicultural Britain class and how food intersects with racism, integration, appropriation. I was thrown by the idea that it could simply be fun.

Nigella demonstrating that spaghetti is fun in my copy of Nigella Express. 

The other thing is that mince is a relatively cheap form of meat, and so Bolognese sauce specifically is a way of eating interesting food on a tight budget.

Grandad chips in, “But there was that song, do you remember? About this foreign food…‘macaroni, spaghetti’ and all this sort of thing and then ‘give us a bash of the bangers and mash me mother used to make.’”

I found the song on YouTube, braced myself for the inevitable xenophobia, and had a listen. I was pleasantly surprised. My initial reaction is that the xenophobia isn’t as strong as the misogyny, and even that’s fairly tame. Peter Sellers’ character, Joe, says of his fictional Italian girlfriend, sung by genuine Italian Sophia Loren, “I brought her back to Blightly just to show me mates.”

The song follows that Joe hasn’t “had a decent meal since 1944” because his Italian partner only cooks him Italian food, which he views as inferior. This superiority is, of course, uncomfortable but the song has a jocular, affectionate tone. The conflict is more like banter. It’s interesting to me how it presents British and non-British food as opposing one another, as if you have to pick one rather than appreciating both by alternating the two, like Grandma did and does for “a nice change.”

In the introduction to her recipe “Spelt Spaghetti with Spicy Sesame Mushrooms,” Nigella Lawson writes:

“Wholemeal pasta holds no charms for me, but I co-exist very amicably with spelt spaghetti. Here it acts as a rather more robust form of soba noodle, which makes perfect sense since the sauce that dresses the pasta is Asian-influenced rather than Italian. In this vein, leftovers make an instant noodle salad.” (44)

Here, there's no attempt to set boundaries between the foods of certain nations or to pit them against each other. There's also an assumption that the reader knows what spelt and soba noodles are (probably a fair assumption of Nigella-readers). Spaghetti is one of the ‘least foreign’ aspects of this recipe, being now as familiar to Britons as bangers and mash.

Bibliography

Castelow, Ellen. “Food in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s.” Historic UK, http://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Food-in-Britain-in-the-1950s-1960s/. Accessed 9^th March 2018.

Lawson, Nigella. At My Table. Chatto & Windus, 2017.

"You're getting on rather well with the examiner!"

“We had to learn to do silver service [at catering college]. I remember the exam. My tutor was standing by the door and I’d been talking with the adjudicator because you had to stand and wait, and he started to talk to me, about me, and…I can’t remember, just chatting. So, anyway, when I went past the tutor he said, ‘You’re getting on rather well with the examiner!’ And, of course, I got the highest marks, didn’t I?” We both laugh. 

“Were you nervous?”

“Well, I think because the examiner started talking to me, I wasn’t a bit nervous! And also, I knew the people I was serving because they were lecturers from the college itself. They were always very pleasant with us and especially when you were doing an exam.”

Grandma rushes off to the kitchen and returns with an oversized spoon and fork.

“You’d have a couple of things like this…” Grandma says, manoeuvring the implements in one hand so that the concave sides face each other, and demonstrates clamping them shut around a satsuma from the fruit bowl in front of us. “So, you’d have potatoes, cabbages, the lot…” Grandma moves the satsuma from the fruit bowl to the surface in front of her and back again.

“It’s almost like chopsticks, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s right, yes.”

The inside of the recipe book Grandma was given
as a prize for being the most skilful waitress.

“I remember the first time you told me about this,” I say, “You said you were all hoping you didn’t have to serve spaghetti, because that’s the hardest thing, but then it was spaghetti.”

“Yes, yes, but the girls in the kitchen,” Grandma says with a laugh in her voice, “who cooked for us – they were also students – they made sure that it wasn’t too long!” We both laugh. “They cut it up! So, you only had to lift it up a little bit. It was really nice, because they were all on our side. Yes, it was fun.”

I ask if there were any eyebrows raised over this short cut, as it were.

“The teachers were on our side, too. They didn’t mind.”

I adore this story. I love how absolutely everyone – the teachers, the kitchen staff, the people she was serving and even the examiner – were all willing Grandma (then teenage Imogen) to succeed. The sole antagonist was the spaghetti.

Pasta is also an antagonist in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Fillia’s Manifesto of Futurist Cooking (1930) as the authors blame pasta for diminishing the vitality of Italian men. Reading the text, it becomes clear that Marinetti and Fillia don’t expect readers to actually create the recipes; this cookbook is more conceptual than instructional (quite a stretch of the genre).

They write, “we Futurists disdain the example and admonition of tradition” (32). But despite their overt focus on the future – “the aesthetics of the machine” – the authors present an ancient, pre-domestic, Darwinian ideal, stating that, in the future, “those who are most agile, most ready for action, will win” (33).

Marinetti and Fillia suggest that their readers “cut a perfect cube of beef [and] pass an electric current through it” (137), thereby using the language of science rather than domesticity. They continue with instructions for how this meal is to be eaten: “Each mouthful is to be chewed carefully for one minute, and each mouthful is divided from the next by vehement blasts on the trumpet blown by the eater himself” (138). This is noteworthy not only because it’s ridiculous but because Marinetti and Fillia reject the idea of comfort being part of the eating experience. The futurists imagine dining as dynamic rather than sedate and pleasant – the opposite of a silver service experience.

By throwing out domesticity, the futurists also do away with the notion that food and cooking can be a way of nurturing others, and instead approach cooking as a way of impressing others.

I love Grandma’s exam story because it’s subversive in its gentleness. On paper, it’s a competition – which Grandma won – but, to me, the story wins by rejecting competitiveness.

I didn’t expect to draw this conclusion. I’d imagined silver service as poncey but now I think it too is an extension of the food/nurturing concept. I mean, the waiter puts the food on the eater’s plate for them. The parent/child dynamic is glaring, no?

© World Skills

The story epitomises a theme which runs throughout Grandma’s narrative – the importance of the relationships she built with people. Grandma went to catering college because, as she says:

“I got on very well with Miss Moore [Grandma’s cooking teacher in school] and she encouraged me a lot and, ugh, I wasn’t very good on the English and maths and that sort of thing, and so she encouraged me to go to catering college.”

“When it came to staying on to do O Levels, they looked at ‘Imogen’ and they said,” Grandma sharply draws in breath and says in a low voice, “‘nooo.’ I was really a bit too young to go onto this college but they made an exception for me and I was told I’d have to work very hard and I did. I worked very hard. And I got a prize for waiting!” 

Bibliography

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. The Futurist Cookbook. Penguin, 2014.

"Those flying saucer things...they're tasteless."

“Some things were off-ration though,” Grandma explains, “so they were not very nice things – like those flying saucer * things. I think I still see those.”

“Ohhh, yeah,” I say in recognition.

“They’re tasteless.”

“I’ve never, ever had one before,” I say, “because they look horrible. They don’t look like sweets.”

I think of the lurid, papery discs. The dryness of that word – discs – fits them so well. I can only imagine what they’re like in the mouth. I think they’d cleave to my tongue like Velcro.

© Keep It Sweet

“Well, we liked them because they looked so nice,” Grandma says and we both laugh.

Reflecting on this now (following a class discussion on how, in its heyday, the artificiality of Arctic Roll lent to its mystique) I think the very thing that’s frightened me off flying saucers – that they look inedible – was precisely what made them exciting to children raised on vegetable stew rather than desensitised to artificiality via daily exposure to fluorescent orange crisps.

The distain with which Grandma described the flying saucers as “tasteless,” as if this were a moral failing on their part, and my own reaction to flying saucers, got me thinking about a couple of things.

1) For a while I've felt that people's opinions about individual flavours is less interesting than their preference for strong or weak flavours. For example, a lot of my favourite tastes are potent: Marmite, blue cheese, dark chocolate, but I have a friend who is, by her own admission, obsessed with “plain” flavours: bread with unsalted butter, Gouda, white potatoes. I wonder if some of this is cultural. Said friend is German and tells me there’s a German word for bland food that has a positive connotation. I can’t think of an English equivalent. “Is everything okay with your food?” “Yes, waiter, this sauce is mouth-wateringly insipid.” I suppose “mild” comes close, but it’s never the mildness in itself that’s appealing. For example, no one gets excited about a korma because it’s mild (although they may order it because they dislike spicy food), but rather they like it because it’s sweet.

2) Food thought of as not-food is almost always done pejoratively. I dislike the idea of flying saucers because I think they’d be like paper (not too strange an idea considering they’re made out of a substance – “rice paper” – that admits as much). A fantastic example of this appears in Toast in a chapter entitled “Milk Skin” (93):

"Skin. Even the word sends shivers down my spine. This is the stuff that you peel off your chest when you have sunburn; it’s the flat left hanging when you cut yourself that catches on everything; it’s the transparent sheath left behind by an emerging snake. Skin is the word I link automatically with grazed shins or something mummified. So what is it doing floating on my cocoa?"

Having said that, this device is often used unconventionally in Toast (unconventionality is something I’ve come to expect from Nigel Slater). For example, Slater describes Heinz Sponge Pudding as smelling of “sweet cardboard” (51) while also saying he loves it. Nevertheless, this passage makes clear that Heinz Sponge Pudding, although enjoyable, is not the pinnacle of culinary possibility: Slater details how the pudding is prepared by boiling it in its tin. In fact, it is the convenience desserts which Slater enjoyed that are usually described pejoratively with reference to non-food: Butterscotch Angel Delight is “magic in the way it managed to taste of both sugar and soap at the same time” (30-1).

The Milk Skin passage aligns with Mary Douglas’ assertion that dirt is “matter out of place” (44). The skin is disgusting because it doesn’t belong on cocoa. So, what’s going on the in passages in which “matter out of place” is somehow appealing? My theory is that the disorientating effect of this echoes and enhances the disorientating experience of the narrative as a whole, and the way in which Slater flouts definitions and boundaries in his presentation of his sexual experiences and identity, as if he refuses to assign things a place for them to be out of.

* Flying saucers were only available in Britain from the beginning of the 1950’s, and rationing ended in the UK in 1954. This may account for why Grandma remembers them as being “off ration.”

Bibliography

“1954: Housewives celebrate end of rationing.” BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/4/newsid_3818000/3818563.stm. Accessed 3^rd March 2018.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. Routledge, 2013.

Oulton, Randal. "Flying Saucers." CooksInfo.com, 19 Dec. 2009; revised 07 July 2010, http://www.cooksinfo.com/flying-saucers. Accessed 3^rd March 2018.

Slater, Nigel. Toast. Harper Perennial, 2004.

Favourite sweet? "Anything that lasted a long time."

“On Fridays, Mum used to buy the sweets, and then she’d come home, and she’d have four saucers and she’d share them out,” Grandma explains. She was born in 1941, a year after rationing was introduced, and was the second youngest of four children. “Mum and Dad had chocolate. But we had boiled sweets and things. I suppose you could probably get about…eight or nine.”

Eight rhubarb and custards
(a bit stuck together because I put them in a draw
in September and then forgot about them).

This scarcity of sweets got me thinking about its opposite – abundance – and the role that plays in children’s literature in particular. The quintessential example of this is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) by Roald Dahl.

It is the quantity of sweets, as much as the sensory descriptions of them, that overwhelms the book: “There’s enough chocolate in there to fill every bathtub in the entire country! And all the swimming pools as well!” (79), “rows and rows of small white square-shaped sweets (125), “THE ROCK-CANDY MINE – 10,000 FEET DEEP” (140), “FIZZY LEMONADE SWIMMING POOLS” (141). It kinda puts Grandma’s saucer of lemon drops to shame.

In “THE INVENTING ROOM,” the children don’t just observe large quantities of confectionary but are completely enveloped in the sensory experience of its production:

"Charlie Bucket stared around the gigantic room in which he now found himself. The place was like a witch’s kitchen! All about him black metal pots were boiling and bubbling on huge stoves, and kettles were hissing and pans were sizzling, and strange iron machines were clanking and sputtering, and there were pipes running all over the ceiling and walls, and the whole place was filled with smoke and steam and delicious rich smells." (104)

Except, of course, that the most crucial of all senses is forbidden; Mr Wonka tells the children, “no tasting!” (103). Dahl’s prose is transparent in its tantalisation of the reader (who I’m sure can empathise with this particular form of torture - restricted access to sweets), and brings to my mind the wriggling children of the Stanford marshmallow experiment which was first conducted four years prior to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s publication.  

Some of Willy Wonka's harebrained schemes.

“What was your favourite sweet?” I ask Grandma

“I don’t know, really. I think anything that lasted a long time.” We both laugh at this.

“I used to be like that,” I say. “Even though I liked chewy sweets, I liked the boiled sweets…”

“Because they lasted,” we say in unison.

Dahl thought of this predicament too:

"‘Everlasting Gobstoppers!’ cried Mr Wonka proudly. ‘They’re completely new! I am inventing them for children who are given very little pocket money. You can put an Everlasting Gobstopper in your mouth and you can suck it and suck it and suck it and suck it and it will never get any smaller!’" (106)

Time drags when you’re a child, especially if it’s the time leading up to something you really, really want (e.g. Friday after school when you get sweets – a ritual observed by both Grandma and I – although I acknowledge that my Fridays were more bountiful).

The abundance of sweets and the concept of everlasting sweets speak to the same anxiety about prolonging this infrequent moment of gustatory ecstasy. I always think that taste – along with smell – is peculiar in its fleetingness. I mean, you can look at something – a painting, the view from your nearest window, the mug to your right – for hours. Likewise, you’re always touching something even if it’s only the ground beneath your feet. I can’t make a bar of chocolate last more than five minutes, maximum, and then the fun is over.

But if you have so many sweets that you could eat them for hours and hours and never run out – or one gobstopper than stops your gob definitely – then you’d be free from worries about the future. You wouldn’t have to exercise self-control or compromise on taste or texture for longevity. Your experience of the present would be intensified by the absence of anxiety about how long the present will last.

“I know that my sister was very good at spacing it out for herself during the week, whereas mine went in a couple of days,” Grandma says, and we both laugh. “So did Ollie’s, and Robin, our younger brother, he used to hang on to them.”

My approach to sweets, when I was a child, most aligned with Robin’s, but I’m not convinced ours is the best strategy. Every year, I’d make my Easter egg last until my birthday (29^th May), at least, but I think nibbling crumbs of chocolate every now and then was less pleasurable than gobbling it all in a couple of days would’ve been because I wasn’t present in that experience which can only be experienced, to the full, in the present.

Bibliography

Dahl, Roald. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Puffin Books, 2013.

"Rationing in World War Two." BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/topics/rationing_in_ww2. Accessed 5th March 2018.

“Stanford marshmallow experiment.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment#cite_note-Mischel1972-1. Accessed 3^rd March 2018.

“I adored her, and she was very loving towards me. She used to say I needed it.”

Grandma grew up in the amusingly named village of Pratt’s Bottom, Kent, but her family are originally from South London. My grandma’s grandma (always referred to in the family as “Gran-Gran” as my mum inadvertently christened her this when she was told, as a toddler, “this is your great-grandmother” and replied with "Gran-Gran!") lived in a council flat off Walworth Road, Southwark. Of course, I never met Gran-Gran, but I see her very clearly. My mum says she was a bit frightened of her because she was so fierce; a tiny old lady with a strong London accent, chatting to everyone in the street, arguing with stallholders at Borough Market.

Grandma tells me that her own mother suffered a lot from ill health, “so Gran-Gran used to come down, from London to Kent, if mum had gone to bed, and I would help her, and that’s where I learnt a lot, from her. And, you know, me and Gran-Gran – we got on very well.”

The kitchen of the 1940's house at the Imperial War Museum, London.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPVvta-tHC8

“She taught me so much whereas my mother was very…um…well, not interested in cooking.”

I note the politeness in Grandma’s description of her own mother’s attitude towards cooking. Grandma has always been elegant in posture and character – she still is – and I admire the generosity she shows her mother who I know to have been, on occasion, quite cruel towards her. I also feel that there is something beneath this phrase – “not interested in cooking.” I don’t think peeling potatoes was the only aspect of family life her mother was “not interested in.” 

I ask if Grandma’s older sister, Cordy, helped with the cooking too. Cordy is the eldest, and it occurs to me that most families, especially in the 1940’s, would expect the eldest child to become a kind of pseudo-parent.

“No, no. Cordy didn’t like cooking at all.”

So, this cooking Grandma did with Gran-Gran wasn’t a chore enforced from outside – if anything it was a treat.

Grandma tells me that Cordy “felt Mum was always on my case.” Of Gran-Gran, she says, “I adored her, and she was very loving towards me. She used to say I needed it.”

“What kind of stuff did you cook with Gran-Gran?” I ask.

This is more or less what I imagine Grandma and Gran-Gran's family meals looked like.
Good Housekeeping. ©
http://www.goodhousekeeping.co.uk/food/recipes/street-party-food-ideas-recipes/

“Well, I suppose it was just for us in the family,” Grandma concentrates, “I’m trying to think…It was very ordinary…stews...”

I have to admit, I’d expected a Proustian rush of poultry, beef, Yorkshire puddings, pies – classic British food that made a scant appearance in my own childhood – and was perhaps a little disappointed to have my expectations subverted. The truth is that food is a background character in Grandma’s story of learning to cook. The main character is Gran-Gran. I think Gran-Gran taught Grandma to nurture as she taught her to cook. I believe the two are closely linked.    

“It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you,” (1) Nigel Slater writes. He also says, “my mother burns the toast as surely as the sun rises each morning,” suggesting that it is not the toast itself he enjoys but the fact that someone has made it for him. Maybe that was part of my fixation about cut up apples (see previous post) – their necessitating someone else’s time and effort.

A still from the TV adaptation of Toast.

The conflation of preparing food and nurturing reminds me of Elisabeth Luard’s insistence on cooking for her dates, rather than being taken to a restaurant by them. Luard writes, “I think the young men of my fancy, brought up to the puritan rigours of public schools, found all this nurture a little alarming” (36). I find the similarity between Luard’s analysis of this and Grandma’s adult life a little alarming.

When she was twenty-two, Grandma married Grandad, who, aged seven, had been sent away to an austere boarding school run by the Freemasons – a place so grim, its building has subsequently been used as a set for horror films. Grandad jokes that he initially thought Grandma was “a bit rough” but, underneath that, I think he really thought she was a bit soft.

“That’s what I love about your grandma,” he told me once as we watched her from a distance, talking to someone we’d bumped into on a walk – a woman Grandma had helped in her job before she retired. “She has such a big heart.”  

Bibliography

Luard, Elisabeth. Family Life: Birth, Death and The Whole Damn Thing. Corgi, 1996.

Slater, Nigel. Toast. Harper Perennial, 2004.

Life stories and cookbooks.

My grandma is a pretty ballsy woman in every area of life. Her culinary confidence was especially palpable to me as a child, as I was a fussy eater and she was unfazed. I felt like she could always rustle me up exactly what I wanted (okay, so, egg and soldiers isn’t too demanding, but it was her willingness to do it that comforted me and made me feel special).

I remember one evening, at my grandparents’ house, I was on the brink of a meltdown and Grandma offered to cut up an apple for me (because eating a cut up apple is a far superior experience to biting the flesh from the core like an animal). I was stunned. I’d often beg Mum to do this for me (at an age before my handling of a fruit knife would’ve been appropriate) and she’d usually reply that I could just eat a whole apple (uh, Mum, do I look like a rodent? Answer: unfortunately, yes, pre-braces me very much looked like a rodent). So, I was incredulous about this offering of a cut up apple and Mum says, “Grandma doesn’t mind, she went to catering college.” Grandma affirmed this with pride – handling food is second nature to her (her skills far exceed cutting up an apple, by the way, this is just a memory that feels significant to me).

Grandma won 3rd prize for a cake when she was 15 or 16 (apparently all her competitors were a year older, so we can discount the girls who won 1st and 2nd prizes due to unfair advantage and accept the fact that Grandma won 1st place.)

When the opportunity to write a food blog as part of my degree came up, I liked the idea of writing a ‘food memoir’ but didn’t think I had much material for that knocking about in my own brain – but then I thought, “Grandma does!” What’s more, I love hearing Grandma’s stories about her life, so this is the perfect excuse to go to my grandparents’ house, have a natter and still be grafting towards that degree. Cheers, Roehampton.  

I’ve now ‘interviewed’ Grandma for the first time on the topic of food, which brought up tons of ideas, so my concept for this blog feels nebulous. To give me focus, I’ve pinned down my 2 main aims. They are:

1. To gain insight into food cultures of the past, from the 1940’s to now, without losing a personal perspective on food. Many of Grandma’s experiences are typical of the time in which they occurred, but many are not. I’m mindful of the importance of staying true to what Grandma tells me about what she cooked, ate and felt about food. I want my exploration of Grandma’s history to be illuminated, but not overpowered, by objective historical facts.
2. To explore multiple personal stories through the lens of food. I want to compare Grandma’s stories about food to the ways in which food is presented in literary narratives (both autobiographical and fictional). I will draw comparisons based on what the food is, how the food makes the eater feel and the role food plays in interpersonal relationships.