Is There a Nutmeg in the House? (35 page)

addition to the story of the Reform Club’s genie, the man who also volunteered to organise the almost non-existent cooking for the troops in the Crimea, who attempted to relieve the Irish during the famine, who could as easily superintend a 238-cover civic banquet in York in honour of the Prince Consort as a Christmas dinner for 22,000 of London’s poor – once more the whole ox roasted by gas – or betake himself to Castle Howard to show off his dexterity with his famous little Magic Stove. Cooking on the supper table in the ballroom (the Queen was staying), Soyer produced, or appeared to produce, his well-known
oeufs au miroir
at the rate of six every two minutes.

Soyer’s capacity to turn every event he organised or attended into a major theatrical show, and to get it into the news, was boundless. He could even use an upturned fallen column on the Acropolis as a table on which to set up his Magic Stove and cook a
déjeuner à la fourchette
(his own term) for half a dozen travelling companions on their way to the Crimea, and then write home to the
Illustrated London News
describing the event. The resulting illustration may be seen in
Soyer’s Culinary Campaign
, his account of his Crimea activities, published in 1857.

If those who already possess a copy of the Helen Morris biography
Portrait of a Chef
, published in 1938, find that some of the stories in
Memoirs of Alexis Soyer
sound familiar, it is because they are. Mrs Morris lifted large chunks of the Volant/Warren book, sometimes word for word, and without the slightest mention of its existence. It was an odd omission, for her book was not in other ways dishonest and, although rather plodding, does provide detail and the hindsight of posterity naturally lacking in the little book written with such immediacy after its hero’s sad death at the age of forty-eight. For reference, both volumes are needed. But poor Mrs Morris has been properly found out.

One of the great treats in the Volant and Warren book is their account, as participators in its creation, of the extravaganza at Gore House which Soyer christened his Universal Symposium. There he had organised kitchens producing foods of all nations, installed restaurants and refreshment rooms appropriate to all pockets. It was a palace of entertainment for the visitors to the Great Exhibition of 1851. Lady Blessington’s one-time salons and boudoirs were transformed into pagodas, pavilions, kiosks, arctic grottoes filled with mirrors and real ice, crystal-ceilinged caverns. In the grounds were picnic tents and a gigantic banqueting
pavilion. Fountains and statuary were everywhere. As a theatrical impresario Soyer was born out of his time. His proper element would have been the Hollywood of the great silent epics. At least when his Universal Symposium was demolished it was replaced by a building not inappropriate in scale and purpose. It was the Albert Hall.

Tatler
, March 1986

Perfumed Toothpicks and Table-hopping Birds

Bartolomeo Scappi’s
Opera (Work)
, later subtitled
Del Arte Dal Cucinare
or
The Art of Cookery
, was first published in 1570. Scappi, who was probably of Bolognese origin, called himself Cuoco Secreto, personal or private cook, to Pope Pio V, who reigned from January 1566 until 1 May 1572. Pius V, formerly Cardinal Ghisleri of Bologna, was one of several grandees of the Church who had employed Scappi, among them that Cardinal Campeggio who with Wolsey had presided over the court which in 1529 heard Henry VIII’s divorce suit against Catherine of Aragon.

By 1536 Campeggio was installed in a palazzo in Trastevere, across the Tiber from Rome, and there, in April of that year, he gave a magnificent dinner to the Emperor Charles V, a celebration of his Imperial Majesty’s formal visit to Pope Paul III.

Although it was still Lent, neither the grandeur of the occasion nor the lavish arrays of food were affected. There was of course no meat, but every fishy delicacy to be found in Italy was produced for the Emperor, and caviar imported from the
mar maggior
, the Black Sea, appeared twice during the feast, once plain with lemon juice, once in pies. There were truffles stewed in oil and citron juice, five separate salads, asparagus, capers, small lettuces, borage flowers, rosemary flowers. Raw sweet fennel, which figures in almost every one of the meals recorded by Scappi, whatever the season, made two appearances.

In honour of the Emperor a good deal of gold was in evidence. Large prawns – I think they were the ones we know as scampi –
cooked in wine were presented with their tails and claws gilded and silvered, and for eating the sweetmeats and conserves in the two final services – there had already been ten, for just twelve persons – gold and silver forks replaced the ordinary ones which had been used throughout the meal. (In 1536 any kind of table fork was an extreme rarity.)

Perfumed toothpicks and small bunches of flowers with silvered and gilded stalks were then placed before each guest, there was music, singing, live birds let loose from within the folds of starched and intricately-folded damask napkins hopped or flew around, and Cardinal Campeggio’s imperial entertainment had clearly been a triumphant success.

The memorable meals recorded by Scappi, fascinating though they are, fill only one of the six books into which his
Opera
is divided. Recipes are the mainstay of the work. With the exception of tomatoes, peppers and potatoes, which had not reached his cooking pots, Scappi covers almost everything edible, from anchovies and aubergines – he calls them
molignane
– to
zambaglione
(three versions) and
zazzeri
, otherwise strips of dried gourd skin, part-boiled then re-cooked in a sauce of almonds or walnuts and garlic. A pound of
zazzeri
– the Roman pound was then about 10½ ounces – made enough for five dishes. They don’t sound very enticing, but they were certainly economical.

Some of Scappi’s most attractive recipes are to be found in his final chapter, which deals with food for convalescents and the sick. Here are no fearsome brews of sparrows’ brains and dung such as physicians of the day were given to inflicting on their patients, but straightforward consommés, almond broths, green herb omelettes, simple fruit tarts filled with melon, pears, bitter cherries, peaches, quinces.

Then there are two
zambaglione
, one much as we know it today except that chicken broth is added to the eggs, sugar, and wine – Scappi used sweet malmsey – along with a heavy flavouring of cinnamon. The second version is a broth made green with pounded mint, marjoram and parsley. Beaten eggs and acid green grapes or gooseberries are added, together with grated bread. The mixture is cooked until it thickens and it is served hot. The broth apart, it sounds a bit like a fancy modern stuffing for turkey.

It is scarcely possible in a short article to convey an idea of the riches to be found in Scappi’s book or of its truly magisterial quality, but for those who have the necessary Italian – there has
never been a translation – it provides a lifetime of absorbing and enriching reading.

Now for a little book as different as can be from Scappi. Small, French, confined to one subject only, it was in its minor way quite as definitive. Its title is
L’Art de bien faire les glaces d’office
, it was published in Paris in 1768 and its author, Emy, describes himself as
officier
, meaning in this context, confectioner. That is all we know of the writer of this delightful treatise on ices, although the evidence of his own writing shows him to have been thoroughly conversant with the history of artificial freezing as well as with its practice and the confection of the cream and fruit ices for which he gives appetising and well-balanced recipes.

The variety he describes is equally impressive. Orange flowers, violets, rose petals, almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, chestnuts, pistachios, black truffles, saffron and rye bread went into Emy’s ices, and so of course did coffee, chocolate, caramelised sugar, and aromatics such as vanilla, cinnamon and cloves. He even devised pineapple ices, the last word in novelty. That rare fruit, he considered, was better in ices than in its natural state.

I don’t think any of today’s Florentine, Roman or Sicilian ice-cream shops offers more tempting variety than did Emy writing just about one hundred years after Louis XIV, his court, and the Parisian public, had first been introduced to those frozen delights. Lucky the people who enjoyed his ices.

So far as I know, there was never another edition of Emy’s book, but it is worth recording that when in the 1950s I paid a London bookseller £10 10s for my copy, I was told that nobody was interested in the subject. Tastes and times have changed. So have prices. In a recent catalogue sent to me by an antiquarian bookseller a copy of Emy was offered at £700, and I have seen another at £950. Perhaps it would pay some publisher to do a facsimile.

Eliza Acton’s
Modern Cookery for Private Families
, published by Longmans in 1845, was initially an immense and deserved success. It ran into several editions – three in the year of publication – and is indeed a very great and original cookery book. Apart from Sir Kenelm Digby’s entrancing, posthumous
Closet Opened
of 1669, Eliza Acton’s must be the finest in the English language, but after the author’s death in 1859, the publisher apparently forgot about her book.

Two years later, in 1861, young Mrs Beeton was not so neglectful. She helped herself to a number of Miss Acton’s recipes, publishing them without acknowledgement and in an emasculated form. Miss Acton had expressed herself with some force on the subject of plagiarism – she had had good cause – but now she was dead, and Mrs Beeton’s borrowings, to use a euphemism for a disreputable procedure, went unchecked and apparently unnoticed.
Modern Cookery
was available in an abbreviated form in a Penguin paperback, but secondhand copies of the original are infinitely preferable, and not difficult to come by, if rather expensive.

Coming to our own day, one book (of course there are many others) I regard as indispensable and would certainly take to a desert island is Tom Stobart’s
Herbs, Spices and Flavourings
. Stobart was a photographer and a mountaineer, and had photographed the famous Everest expedition of 1953. He was also a most gifted writer, who turned what he claimed to be simply a work of reference into an original, irresistible book.

Daily Telegraph
, 17 September 1988

The Baking of an English Loaf

A very exaggerated idea of the difficulty and trouble of bread making prevails amongst persons who are entirely ignorant of the process.

Eliza Acton:
The English Bread-Book
, 1857

Any human being possessed of sufficient gumption to track down a source of fresh yeast – it isn’t all that rare – and collected enough to remember to buy at the same time a pound or two of plain flour, get it home, take a mixing bowl and a measuring jug from the cupboard, and read a few simple instructions can make a decent loaf of bread.

And if you cannot, after two or three attempts, make a
better
loaf than any to be bought in an English shop – and that goes for health-food and whole-food and crank-food and home-spun shops generally, just as much as for chain bakeries and provision
stores and small independent bakers – then I am prepared to eat my hat, your hat, and almost anything else put before me, always with the absolute exception of a loaf of English commercial bread.

Please do not jump to conclusions. It is not my intention to make even a slight attempt to persuade you into baking your own bread. I am simply going to tell you how to set about it if you feel you must, and I find it comical as well as shameful that in this day and age anybody should be forced into so archaic an activity.

No Frenchwoman, at least no French townswoman, would dream of baking her own bread. In France, fresh loaves are baked twice daily by every baker and bought twice daily by every householder. If and when the French bakery system breaks down, there is, as every schoolchild knows, a revolution. Had Marie Antoinette been a French princess rather than a Hapsburg from Vienna, she could never have said, or have been credited with saying, that the people of France could make do with cake instead of bread.

As recently as the summer of 1965, the people of Paris rose up in revolt against the annual August closing of some sixty per cent of the city’s bakeries. To Parisians, it had become a major grievance to be obliged to walk perhaps as far as a kilometre to find a baker who kept his business open during the summer exodus to the sea and the country. The Government was obliged to step in and decree that the bakers (not, mind you, the shoemakers, the plumbers, the electricians, and the laundries, just the bakers) must stagger their holidays. A baker, in other words, has a public responsibility and cannot with impunity desert his post.

In France, a meal without good bread and plenty of it is simply not a meal. For that matter, a meal without bread isn’t a meal anywhere in Europe except in England. And I mean England. I do not mean Scotland or Ireland, where it is still possible to buy real bread.

A certain school of English patriot is much given to the expression of belief in the creed that we have in England the finest ingredients in Europe and that ‘British cuisine at its best is the best in the world’.

I find it amazing that any responsible person can presume to make such a claim when our basic necessities are so hard to come by, when a new-laid egg is as rare as a flawless ruby, when English butter is not nearly as well made as Dutch, Danish or Polish, when the best fresh vegetables available to Londoners and other
city-dwellers are flown from Cyprus or Kenya or sent from Italy, Spain or Madeira, when our cheese is marketed by packaging factories, and when, manifestly, not one householder or one restaurateur in a thousand has grasped the elementary truth that the finest ingredients and the greatest cooking skills this side of Escoffier can combine to produce only a bleak and hollow sham of a meal, joyless and devoid of stimulus, if the customer or the guest is offered no more in the way of bread to go with his food than a skimpy little wedge of white winceyette placed with boarding-house gentility underneath a folded napkin upon a side-plate.