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The Irish smallholder lives in a state of isolation, the type of which is to be sought for in the islands of the South Sea, rather than in the great civilised communities of the
ancient world. A fortnight for planting, a week or ten days for digging, and another fortnight for turf-cutting, suffice for his subsistence; and during the rest of the year he is at leisure to follow his own inclinations, without even the safeguard of the intellectual tastes and legitimate objects of ambition which only imperfectly obviate the evils of leisure in the higher ranks of society.

One might almost think Sir Charles envied the Irish smallholder, so bitter is his resentment. Even Redcliffe Salaman himself, impregnably decent as he is, can see only a degraded peasantry sunk in sloth and intellectual darkness, locked in a hopeless symbiosis with the tuber. But, in spite of the most vicious inducements to abandon it, these peasants retained their impenetrable language, concealed within it a vast and continually refreshed tradition of oral poetry, and continued to make music of a beauty and complexity to be found nowhere else in Western Europe except Spain. They married young and sought to drive out the English by outnumbering them.

All the same, even if a way of life based exclusively upon the potato may be richer than Sir Charles Trevelyan suggests, when the root fails, all is lost. It is estimated that up to a million people died, either from starvation or from disease that came in the Famine's wake. Emigration, to the United States and also to Australia, that followed the Famine robbed Ireland of another million or so, and dowered those nations with a rich strain of ineradicable Anglophobia. To live habitually on the cheapest food is to leave yourself without resources – ‘except', as Malthus said, ‘in the bark of trees like the poor Swedes.'

The History and Social Influence of the Potato
is an extraordinary book, like no other, a vast compendium of curious fact and passionately recounted social history that calls to mind an unexpected but completely satisfying fusion of
The Anatomy of Melancholy
and Fernand Braudel's
Capitalism and Material Life
. In its inflamatory humanitarianism, the book may now also stand as a monument to the sensibility of the period of welfare socialism voted in at the end of the Second World War: possibly the only time in the history of Britain (excepting 1649) when the great majority of British people actively demonstrated that they knew what was good for them, that potatoes were not sufficient fare.

In an article in the current
Tatler
, Mrs Elizabeth David laments that Salaman did not include recipes: in fact, he includes several. This is one, for the soup served in Epping Workhouse in the last years of the eighteenth century: ‘4lbs pickled pork, 6 stones of shins and legs, 6lbs of skibling (meat waste), 28lbs of potatoes, 20lbs of Scotch oatmeal, 21lbs of salt, 1lb of whole pepper and 1/4lb of ground pepper, a dozen carrots and a handful of mint, to 56 gallons of water.' He notes: ‘The Epping soup was designed on more generous lines than was usual in such cases.'

(1986)

There's a smashing Erté on the cover of this luscious production, showing a woman dressed up as a carrot, though its point is by no means that Woman is only another edible, and an everyday, common or garden item of consumption, at that. Elsewhere, here, you can find her companions: an Erté onion woman, a celery woman, and a tomato woman, designs for George White's
Scandals
(New York, 1926). These costumes transform the most commonplace comestibles into something rich and strange via the medium of beautiful women.

To transform women themselves into food was evidently a favourite Twenties trick in stylish circles. There's an account of the Santa Claus Ball at the Kit-Kat:

The characters will present a typical Christmas dinner. Lady Grant will be Plum Pudding, Mrs Redmond McGrath Red Wine, Lady Dunn White Wine, Lady Ashley, Lady Jean Dalrymple, Dorothy Bethell, Lady Scarsdale are all parts of the menu; while Lady Patricia Douglas is Mince Pie and Mrs McCorquodale, who is organising the pageant, is to be Champagne.

So, although all the recipes in this something more than cookery book are perfectly viable and many are splendid, one can't escape the feeling that
Food in Vogue
is not purely food. Not food as fuel, pure and simple, but food as an aspect of style.

At the front of the book is a photograph of a girl with an oyster shell in one hand, a fork in the other, and, wedged – to her
unsurprise – firmly between her teeth, a pearl, presumably out of the oyster. It's a striking image but not so much a concrete sign as a diffuse suggestion of a total environment of high living.

One of the interesting things about the sixty-year trek through
Vogue
back-number cookery columns is the point at which the women to whom those columns were addressed actually began to cook themselves, instead of employing other people to do it for them.

The early decades boast occasional references to bachelor girls frying themselves bacon sandwiches, but not half so many references as there are to cooks, cocktail bars, and dinners in restaurants, itself a helpless response to the post-First World War shortage of staff.

In the Thirties, when
Vogue
prose reached an apotheosis of tinkling breathlessness, cookery for the upper classes was introduced as a witty eccentricity:

Some of the most unlikely people are cooking. The Hon Mrs Reginald Fellowes has had a perfect little kitchen built next to her sitting-room and, if you think this is an idle gesture, consult some gourmet who has exclaimed his way through a dinner prepared by her own white hands.

But the contemporary tomato woman regards cooking as a stylish accomplishment and may look herself up in the index and find no less than ten ways to cook herself, including one recipe for tomato in horseradish-flavoured cream that is almost as stylish as a pheasant with gin and juniper from the Thirties, as elegant in its excess as Cole Porter. But tomatoes with horseradish, from the most recent pages of the magazine, is the sort of simple little thing that somebody who cooks every day might well do for best; pheasants with gin and juniper is the sort of one-off job that somebody who hardly ever cooks at all can spend a whole day of therapeutic endeavour on – especially when there is somebody to clear up the dirty dishes for her.

A recurring theme throughout the cookery columns is a curiously magical linking of recipes with famous names. As if something of the mana of ladies or gentlemen of wealth, birth, and distinction may be absorbed via the ingestion of dishes, or entire menus, synonymous with them. In the Sixties, Loelia, Duchess
of Westminster, suggests Homard Frappé, White Devil (which turns out to be just devilled chicken, no skull beneath the skin), and apples in rum for a ‘magic' Sunday dinner. Back in the Thirties, Lady Portalington and Lady Juliet Duff and Mrs Syrie Maugham contributed recipes that, though perfectly sound, are so amazingly boring – Scotch collops, apple tart, pancakes with haddock – it doesn't seem surprising that English upper-class tables had such a bad reputation, nor that
Vogue
made sporadic forays into continental high life for fresh fare, sometimes with disappointing results. The Comtesse Mercati had a chocolate cake that no one could duplicate without the recipe – ‘and she can't remember the recipe.' Tough.

With the arrival of Elizabeth David and Robert Carrier in the Fifties and Sixties, the cult of the personality tended to centre itself round the cook as magus, rather than the inspired amateur as cook. Miss David's magistral hauteur and Carrier's transatlantic exuberance and professionalism – ‘During this new series of articles on food, drink and entertaining, I am going to dispel the maze of myths that surround
haute cuisine
' – helped make cooking well a classy thing to do. And if the book ends with a flourish on Pamela Harlech's column titled, ‘Seventies People and their Recipes' (Mrs Rupert Hambro's ginger soufflé, Anthony West's cucumber soup, Lady Elizabeth von Hofmannsthal's cabbage in cream) the upper classes clearly – by their fruits shall ye know them – spend a bit more time with the pots and pans than they did when top-flight cooks were ten a penny. This food has its own mana. It is magic because it is Good.

There is also, hereabouts, Arabella Boxer's recipe for wild green salad (sorrel, dandelion, watercress, and so on) which suggests that even after the collapse of absolutely everything, those of us dedicated to gracious living will still attack the weeds and roots and nuts and berries that may well form a staple diet with a bit of flair and verve. Cooking as dandyism.

Indeed, the most touching thing about these resurrected pages of early
Vogue
, their menus, their parties, their restaurants, their famous hostesses, and their table settings, is an absolute concentration on the frivolous that can, on occasion, aspire to the heroic. A wartime caption: ‘On leave, he likes to dine against the sophisticated decor of Popote du Ritz. You in his favourite black, his
favourite lace, feminine to the last flounce.' That'll show Hitler what we're made of.

And from the Thirties, the caption to a charming, minimal drawing by Cecil Beaton: ‘Here you see a picnic in progress. The Marchioness of Queensberry and Miss Carley Robinson enjoy China tea out of a sprigged teapot and sit gossiping and watching the hovering butterflies.' Style as an end in itself; the exquisiteness, the rightness of that China tea, that sprigged teapot – so much glamour would vanish had it been a brown earthenware one with a woolly teacosy. And some of the heartless innocence of style, as well, of a leisured class that took its leisure as a right and not as a privilege.

As an informal history of the changing diet and social mores of the English upper-middle and aspiring upper-middle classes,
Food in Vogue
does very well, and even better if read as the concretisation of a consensus wish-fulfilment fantasy about the nature of stylish living. ‘How One Lives from Day to Day . . . Dinner hour at the Savoy; Surveying the kitchens at the Ivy; Supper at Rules; the Jardin des Gourmets has a delightful atmosphere of French rusticity; Entering the Spanish Grill at the Dorchester.' How one lived from day to day in the Thirties, until, in December 1939. ‘In Paris – Now – They shelter in the Ritz super-cellars in satin or wool pyjamas, hooded coats, warmly, gaily lined (Molyneux and Piguet) . . .' (Students of linguistics will be interested to note the usage, ‘one', omnipresent in
Vogue
copy of the Twenties and Thirties and now confined, almost exclusively, to the Royal Family.) It is the stuff of modern-day fairytale.

This lavishly illustrated book is also an informal history of English illustration over the last sixty years, flowering in the Forties, that heyday of English drawing: Keith Vaughan, John Minton, Edward Ardizzone, that beautifully agonised black and white with nostalgia already implicit in every line. Then the Sixties, and the rise of the photographer, Penn, Lester, Bookbinder, oh my, oh my. And with the Seventies, Tess Traeger's photographs that look exactly like oil paintings, Victorian oil paintings, at that; actual icons of nostalgia, images of a beautiful never-never land of fruit and beautiful children and flowers. This is the land where the tomato woman would like to live.

(1977)

My corner shop sells wrapped, sliced white loaves that, at a pinch, could poultice a wound. It also, sometimes, stocks twisted, unsliced bread with sesame seeds on top emanating from a Cypriot concern on the other side of London which can fool the unwary into thinking it is somehow a more authentic product than the Mother's Pride stuff, though authentic in
what
way I can't say. The corner shop also sells plastic bags of pitta, which is fine, though it looks a bit odd filled with butter and marmalade at breakfast. (Kebabs
a l'anglaise
.)

Five minutes walk away is one of those hot-bread outlets that sell poultices fresh from the oven. Seven minutes' walk away, virtually side by side, two shops stocking different varieties of those wholemeal breads that look hand-thrown, like studio pottery, and are fine if you have all your teeth. But, if not, then not. Perhaps the rise and rise of the poultice or factory-made loaf, which may easily be mumbled to a pap between gums, reflects the sorry state of the nation's dental health.

It is usually interpreted, however, as the result of a lack of moral fibre, as if moral fibre is somehow related to roughage in the diet. The British, the real bread lobby implies, are rapidly going, if they have not already gone, all soft, bland, and flabby, just like their staple food. The iron grip of the multinationals has squeezed all the goodness out of British bread, via the machinations of the giant miller-bakers, Allied Bakeries, Rank Hovis McDougall
et al
., and the only way to fight back is to lob a homemade stone-ground wholemeal cob at them. (Which, in some cases, would indeed be a lethal missile.)

The real bread lobby has, of course, right, virtue, and healthy bowel movements on its side. On the whole, it is free from that paranoid nostalgia that afflicted Anthony Burgess, when he – I think it was he – laid squarely at the feet of the Welfare State the blame for the fact that Heinz baked beans no longer taste as tangy as they did when he was a boy.

The Welfare State it is, according to the formula of reactionary food fetishism, that has made us all soft and bland and flabby and that is why we dig into Mother's Pride and Wonderloaf and Sunblest with such enthusiasm. Behind this, is an ill-concealed and ugly plot – not so much to swell the coffers of the hippy wholefood entrepreneurs who concoct those loaves that either go straight through you or else stay with you, heavily on the chest, for days, nay, weeks, as to get women back where they belong. Up to their elbows in bread dough, engaged in that most arduous and everlasting of domestic chores, giving the family good, hearty, home-baked bread.