JOHN MACLEOD: As we slide into this dystopian re-run of the 1970s, just pray we don't have to eat the food...
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As we slide back further into this dystopian re-run of the Seventies, why not eat like it?
Or so I thought the other day when, for a few coppers, I picked up a glossy, 50-year-old volume from the honesty box bookstand at our local Stornoway Co-op.
Personal Choice: A Selection of Favourite Recipes Contributed by Leading Celebrities is very much of its time.
Dame Julie Andrews and Lulu apart, practically everyone is now dead.
The photography is lurid. Much of the fare looks varnished, or overengineered – a prawn cocktail on the cover less like an appetising hors d’oeuvre than one of Princess Margaret’s summer holidays.
It’s difficult to believe in many instances that the mustered stars actually cooked like this, or cooked at all. Did Lord Longford really like to whip up fillets of sole with mushroom sauce, Tahitian chicken – a horrific affair, with flaked almonds and glacé fruit – and ‘Scotch Woodcock’?
And can we really believe that, in assembling seafood vols- au-vent, Ken Dodd set aside his tickling stick to labour over a tattyfilarious béchamel sauce with 11 different ingredients?
In many instances, one suspects the cornered VIP simply summoned his or her agent, who rifled frantically through the wilder pages of Fanny Cradock.
John Macleod's copy of Personal Choice: A Selection of Favourite Recipes Contributed by Leading Celebrities, is very much of its time
It’s an era of cutlet frills, piped coloured mash, things set in aspic and rather too many components out of tins and packets.
Recipes include lard, dripping, green and orange food colouring, powdered gelatine and shards of angelica.
Yehudi Menuhin’s lasagne verde calls for tinned artichoke hearts. Mary Quant’s chicken soufflé caps even that: central to its concoction are two cans of condensed chicken soup.
Less a meal than a hostage situation. Indeed, there is scarcely a dish between those covers you would actually want to eat – with the exception of the one menu from a professional.
Robert Carrier’s moules marinière, coq au vin and raspberry peach cup do sound tasty, have no Frankenstein ingredients, are straightforward in preparation and would charm guests today.
And, though today all but forgotten, the purring Yank left one abiding legacy: no one did more to popularise the casserole.
Guests… well, that is to put your finger on the central flaw of Personal Choice.
It is not at all what Roger Moore, Harry Secombe, Morecambe and Wise, Simon Dee and the rest would actually make for their tea: it is how they would self-consciously entertain.
Hence all the cutlet-frills, the incessant gussifying of things like avocado and grapefruit, colour shrieking off the page at every turn like the latest Walt Disney and, in the background, the ominous hum of the plugged-in Hostess Trolley.
Ironically, by the mid-Seventies people were already toiling to bring us back to good and honest food – which starts, as every true cook knows, not with brilliant kitchen craft but with astute shopping.
But, at this juncture, still below the radar: it would be the Eighties before the calm common sense of Mary Berry, Jane Grigson and Gary Rhodes began widely to percolate in our homes and it dawned slowly upon folk that there was no shame in serving up a perfectly roasted chicken or some oozing macaroni cheese.
Our national cuisine took a long time to recover from the Industrial Revolution and the rupture, for most and within a generation or two, from the countryside, the fruits of the soil and the farmers’ market.
That was capped by the widespread collapse of domestic service after the Great War, ending the widespread complacency of ‘Can’t cook, don’t need to cook, Cook will cook.’
It was suddenly a line of work that young women – their eyes opened to richer possibilities – now largely shunned.
Save, that is, for lasses from Ireland and the Hebrides – including both my grandmothers, who spoke fondly of their days ‘below stairs.’
And many hitherto prosperous households, by the late Thirties, were in new hard times.
That assured broadcaster David Jacobs offers a menu here – plaice and cucumber rolls, chicken casserole with fruit, wine jelly with Danish cream sauce.
But, as one 2013 obituarist recorded of his childhood, his father’s business collapsed ‘just before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.
‘The chauffeur disappeared from the family’s life, then the car, then the maid and then their home…’
Hitler’s war, of course, brought rationing, and it lasted a long time, only disappearing in 1954. It did abiding damage to the national palate, compounded by the advent of heavily processed food and the deep freeze.
And as the middle classes took nervously to actually cooking for themselves it was very much for self-conscious little dinner parties: a grilled grapefruit at one end and the opened After Eights at the other.
The French talk about food all the time, especially when they are enjoying one of their protracted lunches.
In Britain, and till very recently, this was thought rather vulgar, and there was an unwritten rule around the late Queen that you were never to remark upon, far less compliment, anything served to you at her table.
A clergyman who knew her well once told me that, after a pleasant weekend at Balmoral, and in concluding his bread-and-butter letter of thanks for HM’s hospitality, he wickedly added, ‘As for the food, it was unmentionable’ – to, he subsequently gathered, her great hilarity.
But by the Eighties we were beginning to talk about food: to care about provenance, to worry about additives and animal welfare. It isn’t fashionable to vaunt Delia Smith, or Mary Berry – who has only in very recent years become a national treasure, though she has been around a very long time.
But they turned the page from the Cradock, Carrier and Kelly era and when cookery shows were little more than camp entertainment.
And, though not of direct impact – you can pick at random any cookbook by Jamie Oliver and be sure it has outsold all of Elizabeth David’s volumes put together – her influence over time, through people like Terence Conran and Simon Hopkinson and Nigel Slater, did much to change the way we eat.
Minimal recipes, from fresh ingredients carefully sourced, and a much more informal approach to entertaining: brunches and kitchen-suppers, in our pullovers and usually at the weekend.
And when not minded to cook – which few of us, given our busy modern lifestyles, now essay every day – remembering one of Elizabeth David’s calming dictums: that bread, cheese and fruit is a complete meal.
The purist, too, should be kept firmly in his place.
‘Some will find my version pure heresy,’ murmured Nigel Slater in 1994 of his delicious 30-minute chicken korma.
‘I am only making something for supper, you know – not entertaining a Moghul emperor.’
