Among the Bohemians (33 page)

[It was] indescribably grand.
Epoch making; grapefruit, then a chicken covered with fennel and tomato sauce, a risotto with almonds, onions and pimentos, followed by sack cream, supported by Café Royal red wine,
perfectly
warmed… I shall repeat this grand dinner for our next weekend.
We all became very boozed.

Grapefruit and pimentos are now so easily available – despised, even – that it is hard to imagine how exotic they seemed in the 1920s.
At that time one had to seek out expensive imported citrus fruit at Harrods or the Army & Navy Stores.
Other fruit like melons or pineapples might cost as much as half a crown.
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The sensuality of booze and almond risotto were all very well for those who could afford it, nor did Carrington grudge time spent preparing delicious food.
But many artists, preferring to reserve their energies for the page or the easel, opted for a simple, anti-materialist life – preferably self-sufficient – in harmony with nature.
This too was radical and, for its time, innovatory.
In the spirit of William Morris and Edward Carpenter you might keep hens or bees, or cultivate a vegetable garden.
You might take up making home-made bread as Vanessa Bell eagerly did at Charleston during the war.
Such activities were both virtuous and productive, in a way that satisfied the creative soul.

The Neo-pagans were in love with simplicity.
These young friends revelled in the open-air life.
For such romantics, camping and picnics encapsulated the joy and freedom of the great outdoors.
They would swim and go for lengthy hikes; then, with appetites kindled by the fresh air, they would cook meals over an open fire and sing songs while watching the stars appear in the night sky.
In August 1913 a group which included three of the Olivier girls, Duncan Grant, Adrian Stephen, Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and a number of others set up camp at Brandon in Norfolk.
It poured with rain.
Roger, the chief cook, made toasted cheese and they all kept cheerful in the soggy tent by singing rounds.
But the following day the weather improved and everyone dried out.
Vanessa wrote to Clive about the simple pleasures he was missing: ‘I am sitting over the fire keeping watch on a wonderful stew R.
has made with a chicken, bacon, potatoes, a touch of apple, mint, etc.!
We also had an omelot [
sic
] made by him for lunch.’

The romance of the campfire was not easily quenched.
Who wanted conventional seven-course dinners when one might live like our ancestors as nature intended, in harmony with the seasons, gathering food from the hedgerows and woods?
When Rosalind Thornycroft fell in love with the magnetic Godwin Baynes, he swept her off her feet into a marvellous world of total freedom where, by the power of love, they left civilization behind them.
In 1907 the pair went on holiday with a friend on the Yorkshire moors, taking a lightweight tent and a Primus stove.
Godwin carried a fishing rod and a catapult.
With this equipment they lived almost without any form of food other than what they were able to pick, trap, or shoot.
They bought some potatoes and a bag of oatmeal, but there were mushrooms in abundance that year, and Godwin managed to hit a tough old rabbit using his catapult.
Rendering it tender enough to eat used up almost their entire supply of paraffin.
But for Rosalind this simple life was like paradise.

Such a fundamentalist approach to living called into question many assumptions about the way we eat.
These questions had lan tacit since Shelley’s day:

Never again may blood of bird or beast

Stain with its venomous stream a human feast!

The rise of vegetarianism coincided with increased prosperity.
As society became richer and more able to afford meat, people began to ask whether it was necessary to kill in order to survive.

The Vegetarian Society was founded in 1850.
By the end of the nineteenth century pioneer reformers like Henry Salt (author
of Animals’ Rights,
1892)
had gained much ground in their advocacy of a non-flesh diet.
Questioning accepted ways of eating set one apart from the masses, and gave one the ethical, humanitarian edge over the gluttonous rich.
The base carnality of meat-eating revolted many a tender-hearted Utopian if only on aesthetic grounds.
Their revolution championed home-made wholemeal bread with a chunk of cheddar, nuts, vegetables, fruit, honey from the bee, frothy milk, and boiled eggs.
Vegetarians were as exalted, as rejecting of convention, and as artistic in their way as those possessed of more earthy appetites.

Idealism is infectious.
The influence of noted vegetarians like G.
B.
Shaw and Tolstoy spread speedily through the ‘advanced’ sector of society, who began to see vegetarianism as the truer, healthier, more compassionate way to live.
In 1906 the young art student Clifford Bax brought a copy of Tolstoy’s essays on holiday to the Alps.
Reading it one evening before meeting his cousins for dinner in a Swiss hotel, he tumbled upon the author’s description of a slaughterhouse.
When the meal started to arrive the appalled Bax rejected course after course.
‘My elder cousin asked me if I were ill.
“To eat dead bodies”, I told him, “is barbarous and disgusting.”’ The cousins reacted with embarrassment, incomprehension and solicitude.
He was misguided; he must be mad… Or was he suicidal?
Despite threats and entreaties Clifford Bax remained obstinately loyal to salad.

Bax was one of many.
Augustus John tried vegetarianism in the lean days when he was a hard-up Slade student.
He and his sister Gwen lived ‘like monkeys, on a diet of fruit and nuts’, though John-like, he refused to be rigid about this and happily ate steak in a restaurant when asked out.
Frances Partridge remembered vegetarianism as being so smart among her fellow students at Cambridge that Newnham College offered a vegetarian option in hall: ‘It was probably one tomato…’

Frances, like many of her contemporaries, appreciated the high-minded ambience, not to say inexpensive menus, to be found in the vegetarian restaurants that were springing up all over London in the early twentieth century.
She used to go to Shearn’s in the Tottenham Court Road where ‘even the bread seemed to be made of vegetables’, but many people preferred the Chandos Street establishment run by Eustace Miles, a well-known dietary reformer.
To be seen here was to be associated with the fashionable avant-garde, for this was where Bohemian London met, ate and flirted.
Miles had introduced the daring innovation (in the era of chaperones) of providing small flags on each table, which one hoisted to indicate a willingness to consort with one’s fellow diners.
Rupert Brooke was a regular, and so was the poet Edward Thomas when he was in town.
He took Bunny Garnett to lunch there and they ordered nut cutlets and spinach sprinkled
with plasmon powder – a milk derivative advertised as increasing energy, brain power and strength.
These early vegetarians adopted the nut cutlet in the belief that it would compensate for any lost nutrients.
This slightly absurd substitute for meat was made by shaping nut mixtures into the form of a cutlet, and even poking a stick of macaroni into one end to resemble the bone.
Bunny, one of nature’s gourmets, was sceptical, and teased Thomas that his vegetarianism was in fact the cause of his dyspepsia.
But converts continued, as they do today, to insist that vegetarianism was the natural, healthy and moral diet for mankind.

This argument was further propagated in the 1920s by the influential New Agers of the day, the Theosophists and Transcendentalists, who included vegetarianism in their manifestos of healing and enlightenment.
In 1927 Robert Medley and his partner, the dancer Rupert Doone, gave up meat under the influence of a friend who had espoused Eastern transcendentalism.
She persuaded them that vegetarianism would be both spiritually elevating and cure Rupert’s rheumatism.
They gave up smoking too.
Unfortunately every meal now became an onerous, self-denying task of preparation.
Vegetables were so complicated compared to frying a chop.
Robert found the results deeply unsatisfying, and grumbled too that the quantities needed were expensive.
They stuck it out for two months before giving in to temptation – beef, roast lamb, and a nice cigarette: ‘With great relief I lit up again.
I was pleased that the fad was over…’

Though he continued to worry about Rupert’s health, Robert Medley really felt much more at home among like-minded carnivores than Tolstoyan salad eaters.
He was no fundamentalist by nature, and he resented the scrubbing and chopping which took up so much valuable painting time.

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Time.
One returns inevitably to this most fundamental of problems for the artist who has, unlike the man about town or the lady of leisure, an important activity which demands hours of that valuable commodity, and who grudges every minute spent in the kitchen rather than the studio.
Time spent at the stove was time spent not painting, writing or composing.
But still somebody has to chop vegetables and stir sauces.

It should be pointed out that women like Carrington and Dorclia who were prepared to roll up their sleeves in the kitchen were, for their class, unusual.
There is an important divide between those who could and those who could not afford a cook in the first half of the twentieth century.
Before 1914 a family with an income of
£
300 a year could afford to employ a cook whose wages were up to
£
18 a year.
They could also afford a kitchen-maid
at £8 a year.
After the war in the 1920s the Mitchisons lived comfortably in Hammersmith on £700 a year paying their cook £1 a week.
Today anyone who wanted to employ a live-in cook would expect to have to pay them around £12,000 a year.
It is not a highly paid job; nevertheless one would have to be earning a substantial income even to consider paying such a salary for a cook.
In the first half of the last century, the employment market was still heavily biased in favour of the middle-class employer, who, while living on what we would consider a very moderate income, was able to take for granted that the labour and drudgery of the kitchen was the lot of the servant class.
The thought of providing meals for guests without any help left Vanessa Bell quite aghast, and she strongly resented the rare times between cooks when she had to make the family’s meals herself.
Quite simply, most middle-class housewives knew that they would hardly ever have to cook a meal or wash it up in their lives, so long as their incomes didn’t fall too drastically low.

Heavenly freedom, one might think.
Having a cook undoubtedly saved precious time, but the emotional energy that the relationship consumed could be seen as neutralising the advantages.
Skirmishes with the servants were a constant feature of life before the Second World War.
Nor was it easy to find good ones.
Already in the 1920s the never-ending cascade of advertisements offering ‘good plain cooks’ had reduced to a moderate flow, and such as could be had might well be more plain than good.
With sufficient confidence and good cookery books, these unadventurous servants could be chivvied and cajoled into producing food to the taste of their employers.
Carrington trained Olive to cook the kind of food that she and Lytton liked, but in due course Olive left: ‘I dread starting all over again teaching someone to cook, and our habits.’ Carrington committed more of those precious hours to showing Flo, her replacement, how to make omelettes and
‘soupe à la bonne femme’,
but reforming working-class tastes was an uphill task.
She had to give Flo an emotionally fraught lecture when she made cheese on toast instead of cheese fondue, and it churned them both up dreadfully.
An earlier cook, Mrs Legg, had been discovered to be a thief, who had read all Carrington’s private papers: ‘It is despairing!’ Employers who cared less about their food, and were less patient than Carrington kept their distance from the kitchen, leaving the ‘good plain’ cooks to run things their own way.

Anthony Powell recalled that at Cyril Connolly’s in the thirties ‘the succession of cooks went up and down in quality’.
Connolly’s gourmet standards were unfortunately no guarantee of a good meal, and guests leaving his King’s Road flat were sometimes relieved to find a conveniently parked
mobile coffee stall outside, where they could satisfy their hunger with a couple of sausage rolls.
Ottoline Morrell’s cook produced a stodgy and unvarying diet of risotto, boiled celery and rice pudding.
The drunken Irishwoman taken on by Harold Acton and his brother, in the mistaken belief that a tipsy cook would be more imaginative, turned out to be a disaster.
She laced every dish with sherry, kirsch, whisky or maraschino.
When incoherent howls started to echo from the kitchen she had to go, to be replaced by an almost equally mad Czech, who produced uninviting meals from bizarre combinations of vegetables: ‘[They were] calculated to give you a vague feeling of impending doom: lurid egg-plant, depressing parsnips or lugubrious potato salad besprinkled with bleeding red cabbage…’

*

Harold Acton was never poor.
He could afford a cook, and despite the drawbacks continued to do so, but those who couldn’t were forced to cook for themselves.
This posed all sorts of problems for the déclassé Bohemian who had grown up separated from the realities of food preparation by a green baize door.
If you didn’t have servants there was, between inadequate, inefficient kitchen equipment and the accomplishing of a three-course middle-class dinner, an almost unbridgeable gap.

For as we explore the eating habits of Bohemia, it is important to remember how labour-intensive the preparation of food was a hundred years ago.
Take soup – readily available today in tins, cartons or takeaway outlets, quickly heated and consumed.
Now look at what that simple meal involved eighty years ago.
Mrs Beeton estimates an hour and a half for the preparation of carrot soup, not including the additional five or six hours needed to simmer a good bone or vegetable stock.
The stock needed to be skimmed and clarified before being added to the chopped vegetables, and the cooked vegetables had then to be reduced to a runny purée by pushing them through a fine sieve.
There were simply no short cuts in the way of bouillon cubes or blenders, and Campbell’s canned beef noodle was still many decades away from providing its own special contribution to the art scene.
Soup was unequivocally off the menu unless one was prepared to give hours to its preparation.
Many other dishes were equally impracticable in the circumstances in which artists lived.
How could food be kept fresh in a studio without a refrigerator?
How could washing up be done when the cold water tap was two floors down?
How could you simmer stock, roast meat or bake potatoes on a gas ring?
How could you cook at all when you had never been taught to?