The Man Who Ate the World: In Search of the Perfect Dinner

by Jay Rayner

  But mostly there was just the gentle hum of things done right. Pat attempted to whine—“at the end, all that will remain is the memory of good food in a red room surrounded by people I don’t like the look of”—but I could tell her heart really wasn’t in it; that she was having too good a time. As we sipped our coffee, Wareing appeared at our table and thanked us for coming. None of the critics had returned, he said. Then, unbidden, he said, “I got it wrong at the beginning. I went from driving an old banger to a Ferrari and lost control.”

  Emboldened by Wareing’s declaration, Pat began talking about her problem with the sort of people who came to this sort of restaurant. Wareing looked baffled. Of course there were customers for whom money was no object, he said. There were always a few of those. But no business like his could survive on that trade alone.

  “An awful lot of the people who come here have saved up to do so.”

  Pat nodded slowly and said, “Oh!” I knew what she was thinking, because it was what I was thinking: that it was in the nature of what I did for a living that we really hadn’t had to save up at all. We both felt foolish and humbled.

  We went out into the night with boxes of Petrus chocolates and a signed copy of Wareing’s new cookbook, and the gently giddy feeling of an evening well spent.

  A couple of weeks later, at the end of a long day, I walked into the bedroom. I had been rereading the Petrus menu, not to remind myself of what I had eaten—those dishes I could still taste—but to remind myself of what I had not eaten, of all the things that were still there to be tried: the breast of quail with the onion fondue and fresh almonds, say, or the Cumbrian lamb roasted with saffron and cumin. It was my version of window-shopping.

  Pat was already in bed, reading a novel. I said, “Did you have a nice time at Petrus?”

  She looked up at me and grinned as if suddenly surprised by the memory. “Yes,” she said. “I did. It was lovely. Really, really good.”

  “What did you have to eat?”

  There was silence in the room. She blinked, pursed her lips and said, “Nope. Can’t remember. No idea. Not a thing.” And then, as if she felt she might be insulting me personally, said, “Sorry.” She shrugged, and returned to reading her book.

  In 1976, my mother was invited to present a new cookery program for national British television. That was the year family mealtimes became unreliable. The thirty-minute show went out on ITV, one of only three channels then available to British viewers, and was called Kitchen Garden. In the first half, a gardener gave the viewers tips on how to grow that week’s chosen vegetables. In the second half, Claire demonstrated how to cook them.

  It must have been curious for the Great British public to witness my mother’s sudden reinvention as a celebrity chef. Of course she was already famous by then, but more for her tips on sexual health than great ideas for dinner. Now, in addition, she was going to be supplying Britain with handy recipes for ratatouille.

  I turned ten that year and at the time, none of this seemed particularly odd. My two older siblings and I were used to our mother taking on new challenges. She had started her career as a nurse in the 1940s, an escape from that miserable childhood, and risen to the level of sister before trying her hand at freelance print journalism while on maternity leave to have my sister. She never went back to nursing. One-off articles led to offers of health columns. She became a consultant to a BBC television medical drama, Emergency Ward 10, and then a pundit on television in her own right. Contracts for nonfiction books about health and motherhood led to the suggestion that she try her hand at fiction, and she eventually became a best-selling novelist, too, both in Britain, the U.S., and elsewhere.

  Now she was going to be a TV chef. I well remember coming into the kitchen one weekday afternoon, in our house in the cherry blossom suburbs of northwest London, to find her standing over a cardboard box full of vegetables, peering at its contents suspiciously. It was not particularly odd to find her at home. Although she was a working mother, one of the first of her breed, almost all her work could be done at the old, clacking typewriter that was located in her narrow office just off the front hall, which she shared with the family gerbil. To find her here in the kitchen at such an early hour, however, was peculiar. The only other times I had seen her cooking during the day were on Christmas Eve or, in the years when we still observed it, just before Passover, when she would be preparing to feed a houseful.

  She told me distractedly that she was experimenting, which sounded improbably exciting. What I didn’t realize was that I too would be part of the experiment, for she needed people on whom to test her recipes—and who better than her husband and kids? Looking back, I see now that this was just the way things worked in our house. My mother’s career was the family business, and we were all employees in it. In 1972, after the success of one of her novels, my father, Des, resigned his post as a PR man in the women’s wear business and combined his flourishing career as an artist with the job of agent and manager for my mother.

  There were jobs for the children, too. Claire received around 1,000 letters a week from her readers, a damburst of angst flooding into the house from the four corners of the nation, and she ran a team of secretaries to help her reply to them all. Occasionally, if she received a lot of inquiries about the same problem, she wrote a leaflet covering the subject and then offered that on her newspaper problem page. The response was often enormous, and for pocket money we were employed to stuff envelopes—and there could be 15,000 or more—with my mother’s preprinted advice. It was, of course, a fantastic education. At an early age I was an expert on the symptoms of the menopause, could rattle off tips for long-married couples who wanted to rekindle their lovemaking, and knew a use for live natural yogurt that should never be described in a book dedicated to the enjoyment of food.

  The new task would eventually seem more onerous than any of that—not least because it was unpaid, save for the dishes laid before us. My mother, it should be said, was a very good, if instinctive cook. To accommodate her working life she had developed a strong line in casseroles, mostly involving chicken or lamb, which could be put together in the morning, and then long, slow-cooked for dinner that evening. She made terrific creamy soups with dumplings and on winter afternoons there was tea in front of the fire, with crumpets and slices of sticky malt loaf with a generous smear of butter.

  Now, with the contract to present Kitchen Garden, we were in the land of the vegetable and there our satisfaction at the table was far less certain; dinners became a time of nervous anticipation, and praise quickly given, whatever we thought, for we did not wish to damage her self-confidence. She was the one putting food on the table, if at times all too literally. “There weren’t food economists on the show,” she told me, when we finally discussed it. “It was only me.” One day that box of vegetables simply turned up at the door. “And they said cook these. There was kohlrabi and salsify in there, things I had never seen before. I had to guess what to do with it. And for the first time I had to do weights and measures. Up to then I used to do a handful of this or a handful of that.”

  There were three series of Kitchen Garden altogether, out of which came three short books eventually combined into one longer volume. On the cover of the latter my mother, now in her midseventies, is wearing a floral apron and is obviously just a few years older than I am now. With her is the gardener, a freelance TV presenter called Keith Fordyce, who made his name on the seminal BBC TV show Ready Steady Go! Part of the idea behind the program was that it should be presented by people not normally associated with either cooking or gardening and so here they are, in an orchard, positioned around a barrow full of fruit and vegetables. My mother has a tense grin on her face, which, to me, says, “What the hell do you expect me to do with all of this?”

  Browsing through that compilation now is to revisit those days when my mother was experimenting on the wilder shores of vegetarian cookery, a relatively unexplored territory. I remember fondly her peppery cabbage soup
made with milk, and less happily a Chinese cabbage chop suey with a sauce that was thickened with corn flour. There was that lush, satisfying ratatouille which, because of its amenity to slow cooking, had long been a part of the family repertoire, and courgettes hollowed out and stuffed with an irresistible mixture of breadcrumbs, anchovy fillets, and olive.

  There are some dishes I don’t recall at all, among them a lasagne in which slices of aubergine and endive were substituted for the pasta and a vegetable cassoulet flavored with Worcestershire sauce, which now sounds distinctly worrying. Then there are the dishes I wish I had forgotten but can’t: There was that venerable beetroot soup borscht, a reminder of my family’s Ashkenazi roots, which my mother quickly pressed into service and which I still hate to this day. There was a claggy, gray vegetable pâté, made with white beans and mushrooms. But worst of all there was the spaghetti marrow. That, I regarded as nothing less than a culinary betrayal.

  In the late 1950s a leading BBC news program screened a film about the success of that year’s spaghetti harvest in Switzerland, which showed teams of Swiss peasants collecting strands of spaghetti from the trees on which they grew. Many viewers were taken in by what was, of course, an elaborate April Fool’s Day joke, and phoned the BBC to ask how they might grow their own spaghetti trees. My mother had always loved the gag and when she was presented by the television production team with a spaghetti marrow, she was entranced by the notion that she might demonstrate how the stuff really did grow on trees, or at least on a ground-crawling bush. “I just thought it was a hoot,” she told me.

  The spaghetti marrow is a pale color—from off-white to yellow—hard to the touch, and can grow to just under a foot long. It is a less than sensitive ingredient that requires a serious boiling for at least forty-five minutes before it might be considered ready to eat by those who like this sort of thing, which I don’t. Let it cool for a few minutes, slice it in half, and spoon out the seeds. After that, if you scrape at the flesh with a fork, it will come away in long fibers that lend the marrow its name. There, however, the similarity to spaghetti ends. This marrow tastes like, well, a marrow: The fibers are crisp and not un-reminiscent of cucumber. Anybody with a particular love for cucumber might find this beguiling. Anybody who, like me when I was a kid, is told it is a vegetable version of pasta cannot fail but to be disappointed.

  My mother made a very good tomato sauce to go with it, one that would have gone exceptionally well with, say, actual pasta, and then gave us cheese to layer on top. I cannot recall how the family responded to this dish the first time it was served for dinner, but I imagine we were as enthusiastic as always. Perhaps we were too encouraging, for the spaghetti marrow quickly entered the domestic repertoire. Some dishes she cooked only for the show. Others turned up at dinner parties. But the spaghetti marrow was served regularly for the family. Or at least that’s how I remember it. I recall prowling the kitchen to see what was for the table that night and how, catching sight of its bleached-out skin, my heart would drop.

  In adulthood I told my mother how much I had disliked it.

  “But you always ate it.”

  “You brought me up to be polite.”

  “That wasn’t it. You were just greedy. You wouldn’t let yourself go hungry.”

  A few months after she began working on the series, my mother decided to get serious and marked out an area at the back of our small garden as a vegetable patch. There were runner beans and strawberry plants, tomatoes and, of course, an area set aside for spaghetti marrow. That summer was the hottest since records began and, beneath an unrelenting sun, the plants thrived, yielding first their curling yellow flowers, which soon brought forth the marrow themselves that my mother doted upon every day. Now I would not be able to escape them. The damn things were practically family.

  Sometime in 1977, during the production of the second series of Kitchen Garden, my family moved house. The vegetable patch did not come with us, but for a while the spaghetti marrow retained its place at the dinner table. Eventually, though, it began to recede to be replaced by other curiosities. Because of my mother’s medical background she was always keen to experiment with the latest innovations in diet, and we became one of the first households in Britain to use low-cholesterol butter substitutes. Olive oil as a cooking medium arrived early. And long before the F-Plan Diet was published, my mother came up with a weight-loss regime based on fiber for one of the weekly women’s magazines for which she wrote. Each morning she drank orange juice with a bran tablet dissolved in it, which turned the liquid sludge gray. For a while she even suggested we all do the same, and told us how good it would make us feel, but we were wise to her by then. We had been guinea pigs for long enough. We knew where a willingness to please might get us. We all said no.

  I had been surprised by my mother’s use of the G word. She had called me greedy. I accepted that I was a man of appetites. That much was obvious, but I was hoping for a more exotic diagnosis, something that combined sensuality, my cultural heritage, and a finely honed nose for quality. I had wanted to be told I had a rare disease. Instead, I had been informed I had the common cold.

  This demanded further investigation, and so, thirty years after the summer of the spaghetti marrow, I invited my parents to lunch. A few years ago we would have booked a table at Rules, the oldest restaurant in London, which first opened in Covent Garden in 1798 and which specializes in game. It is a fantasy of dark mahogany wood, velvet banquettes, and shiny brass rail. Years ago my mother wrote a series of twelve London novels following two families from the 1780s until the Second World War, and each one had contained a scene set at Rules, for it was one of the few constants in a changing city. Every now and then my siblings and I would each go there alone with just our mother, for a little time pretending to be an only child. I would watch her eat oysters when they were in season or roast pheasant and I would order jugged hare.

  But Claire wasn’t convinced that Rules was what it had once been. I didn’t think this was fair. I had visited more recently than she had and been amazed by how the place had managed not to become a hostage to its history. It was still a great game restaurant. The truth is, it was my mother who wasn’t what she once was. In 2003 she had fallen desperately ill and spent three weeks in intensive care with multi-organ failure, pneumonia, and septic shock. Before, like all of us, she had been a large person, but no one spends that long hooked up to the wall in intensive care without losing something, and in her case, it was seven dress sizes. With it had gone her appetite, which, to a Rayner, was like mislaying a much needed limb.

  So we didn’t go to Rules, where even the starters would have proved too much, and instead booked a table at a classic French bistro on Baker Street called Galvin. It was run by two brothers from Essex who had both cooked at Michelin-starred places in London but who had tired of the demands that sort of food made upon them, their customers, and their ingredients. Together they had put together something much more simple and, I couldn’t deny, much more appealing. It was a place for all those great French classics I loved so much and I watched with huge pleasure as, unprompted, Des ordered the snails in their shells with hot bubbling garlic butter.

  Suddenly it occurred to me that I could learn a lot of what I really needed to know about myself from my father. Where had that little boy frying his bread over the burner in the gloomy Swiss hotel come from? Why, from just across the table. Here is the old man with his spring-loaded tongs and his sharp pick tugging out the chewy punctuation marks, dipping the debris of a shattered baguette into the hot, garlicky fat, and enjoying himself immensely. Witness: myself when old.

  I ordered oysters. My mother ordered steak tartar. We were happy.

  I asked them whether I had always been a child of appetites and, to prove the point, Claire retold the story of my birth, the repetition of these tales being her prerogative: She reminded me that I was a huge baby, a little over ten pounds, who had been born at 4 p.m. which was just in time for tea. But this, we all agreed, w
as merely family anecdotage, attached to a fat child after the fact because it fitted so comfortably. She also insisted that there must be a genetic element to the way we piled on the weight; that we were a breed of “winter survivors.”

  “I remember seeing photographs of relatives I had never met,” she said, “and there was always a sprinkling of large arses.”

  Naturally, I found this comforting, but again it felt like a justification rather than an explanation. I tried another tack. I knew my parents had endured deprived childhoods, that theirs had not been a life of plenty like mine. Perhaps they had overcompensated as parents to make sure that we never went without.

  My mother agreed there might be something in it. “My memory of the war is not of the bombs or the Blitz but the constant feeling of hunger. When we were evacuated, the people who took us in were given a budget to feed us with but they rarely spent it. We learnt from the local kids what we could eat from the countryside around us.” She developed a taste for sorrel this way, plucked from the hedgerows, and for hawthorn tips, and if there was a boy among them who had a knife, they would pull up a rutabaga from the farmer’s field and cut it to the core where the good stuff was.

  “It’s rather pleasant, raw swede,” my mother said as they took away her steak tartar and prepared the table for her char-grilled liver with girolles. My father was having duck confit. I was having sautéed calves brains with capers and beurre noisette.

  “And so when your own kids come along, you want to make sure they eat well,” Claire said. It made sense. We recalled that, at many meals, the food wasn’t plated. It was in dishes in the middle of the table to which we could help ourselves, and we did, with pathological enthusiasm.