Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen

by Matt McAllester

  We worked our way through a hundred boxes of linen tablecloths, coffee-stained mugs, wooden eggcups, Middle Eastern cushions, pillowcases, and, most precious to me, battered kitchen implements. I picked out a potato masher and big serving spoons and two spatulas and two Sabatier knives whose blades had been sharpened over forty years into slightly wavy lines; a blue Le Creuset oval casserole dish; terra-cotta tapas dishes; a dark-green tureen; a dozen small brown cauldron-shaped ceramic pots. As many relics of her kitchens as I could fit into my kitchen drawers and on shelves. These things had been used, not just looked at or sat on. And I remembered their being used. I had benefited from their use, over and over. They introduced me to a thousand sources of joy: chocolate mousse, roast chicken, steak. You wouldn't have been able to sell them at a yard sale, but to me they were invaluable.

  We were in no hurry to sort through it all. We did it in bursts. I wanted to string this out as long as possible, this rediscovery of my mother's possessions—and my mother—with my sister, whose memories were sharper and broader than mine. She had always welcomed family lore when I had shrugged it off, hostile to a past that seemed to hold nothing but sadness. Memories tripped out of her as we sorted through the piles. I began to see the past, for the first time, as something I might be able to cherish rather than flee from. “She bought you this as a wedding present,” my sister said, as we gazed at an entire Wedgwood dinner service with a green and gold trim that wasn't exactly ugly but wasn't exactly my taste. I had been a teenager or perhaps in my early twenties when she bought this, Jane explained. Nearly two decades would pass between the time of that purchase and when I actually got married.

  Finally, months after the process of dividing up the spoils of death had begun, we sat on the floor going through the last of it. Family diamonds and pearl pins were laid out messily in a tan jewel case; some photographs of a beautiful young woman in the mid-1960s, posing for her photographer husband, my father; compact discs that I had given her and was now taking back. All that was left to divide up between us now were her books. We each kept some art books, some novels, some poetry, some history. We put others aside for the charity shop. My sister took the gardening books. I didn't care much about flowers and vegetables.

  “Can I have the cookbooks, then?” I asked my sister.

  “Sure, but can I keep French Country Cooking?” she said. “It was Elizabeth David's first book.” And therefore, we both understood, our mother's most precious cookbook.

  As my sister pushed the gardening books toward her side of the room, I picked up A Book of Mediterranean Food from the pile of cookbooks sitting on the beige carpet. My sister, I realized some weeks later, was wrong about French Country Cooking. A Book of Mediterranean Food was, in fact, Elizabeth David's first book, published in 1950 during the years of postwar rationing. My mother's copy, worn and yellow, was a reissue that had appeared in 1965. A Penguin Handbook, it's called, and a handbook is what it is. A revolutionary instruction manual to a generation of women who had very little idea how to cook. Years before Julia Child, decades before Jamie Oliver. It was a book of joy emerging from a continent that still staggered from six years of war, of evil and death and scarcity. The war is over, it seemed to be saying to women at the time, and now it is time to celebrate around the table together, to smell, to taste, to drink, to feast.

  I flicked through it. I picked up The Robert Carrier Cookbook. Who ever talked about Robert Carrier now? But in our home, he had been like an unseen member of the family. My mother's careful rectangles of tape kept the thing hanging together. Drops of something brown—early versions of sauce for spareribs?—spattered pages 336 and 337, the latter of which featured the recipe we used to love. I had forgotten about spareribs.

  Katie Stewart was another happy spirit in our house. I took up the disintegrating copy of The Times Cookery Book—just referred to as “Katie Stewart” by my mother—and I remembered that this book had furnished me with the recipe I had chosen for my first-ever attempt, at age sixteen, at cooking for girls in the hope they might have sex with me. “Chicory with Ham in Cheese Sauce,” pages 57 to 59. It was not good and it did not work.

  In the pile was a beautiful 1909 copy of Mrs. Beeton's Family Cookery and the sensible-looking two-volume Good House keeping Cookery Encyclopedia. And there were the Elizabeth Davids, the books my mother had in recent years implored me to read, telling me over and over that if I wanted to learn how to cook I could find out how through Elizabeth David. I had ignored her advice while she was alive. I'd glanced at the books—largely unillustrated, page after page of writing. Recipes by an old lady, they looked like. Time-consuming textbooks rather than easy-read cookbooks. I preferred the warmth and pictures and hand-holding of the matey Jamie Oliver and the impossibly tricksy vertical food of three-star New York chefs. “I couldn't make a piece of toast when I married your father,” my mother had told me. “Elizabeth David taught me everything.” These were the books that led her lovingly, excitedly beyond toast. French Country Cooking. Italian Food. Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen. An Omelette and a Glass of Wine.

  There was one final book in the pile. It had a dirtied blue leather cover and gold lowercase lettering that said, simply, cookery book. I opened it, glanced at the yellowed newspaper clippings and the handwritten recipes in a jagged, peaked script I knew as well as my own. I was shocked at how much life there could be in a dead person's handwriting. I closed it quickly.

  I knew in that moment that there was one way I might bring my mother back: heading to the kitchen and cooking her recipes. Her spareribs, her chocolate crispies, her strawberry ice cream—they could be my portals to a past I barely remembered, a past I'd willed myself to forget. Food is one of the great memory-joggers. Conjuring certain tastes, combining certain flavors together in the kitchen, could perhaps whisk me back to a time when I sat on a wooden stool next to the stove and watched my mother sweep her spatula around a mixing bowl, happily leaving traces of melted chocolate that could be collected only by my finger. Even though she was dead, I could share with her something that bound us and our whole family together in the good years. In the kitchen, any kitchen, I had always felt close to having a family, even when all four constituent parts of that family were living in different houses in different countries, tension and anger and silence separating us. Over a chopping board with a sharp knife in my hand, something bubbling on the stove nearby, a glass of wine on the counter, I felt part of something good, something loving—even if I was in Jerusalem or Baghdad. Ever since it disintegrated, I had missed my own family and felt drawn to the tables of other people's families. And I had longed to build a family of my own, a family that could sit around a table and eat and talk and laugh.

  I wanted to put back together what had long ago been lost and broken.

  My mother could help me with that, I decided. She could help me drag her back from the past so that I could almost feel her with me, in the kitchen. I was sure of it. I should read her cookbooks. I should do as she'd told me over and over—read and learn from Elizabeth David. And I should keep learning until I no longer needed to keep the books open on my kitchen table as I made her food. Then, presumably, I would be able to cook—as she defined it. More than paintings and tablecloths, these books and her recipes might open up my closed memory so that I could bring back the young, sane, beautiful mother of whom I had only fragmented memories. My mother had not looked after me for about twenty-five years. I wanted back the woman I had known for the first ten years of my life, the woman who placed heavenly, delicious food at the center of our family and of my relationship with her. She had read these pages and learned from Elizabeth David, her mind opening to Elizabeth David's revolutionizing evocation of the Mediterranean world of garlic, olive oil, wine, and French quay-side restaurants. My mother had made this food and taken joy from feeding people she loved. She had turned her kitchen into a magnet for her family. I couldn't call her up and ask for cooking advice anymore, but perhaps I didn't need to
; her books could teach me everything she had known.

  In the kitchen at Port an Droighionn

  10

  The famous cookbook writer Elizabeth David has, with friends who are more business-minded than she, opened a shop named Elizabeth David Ltd. It is on a street behind Sloane Square, and it has become a temple for people interested in food. It is 1965 and Elizabeth David is now a slightly fetishized figure in Britain. She and her friends realize that a kitchen shop selling utensils, pots, pans, and dishes sourced by her and sold by her could prove enormously profitable. Her writing in books, newspapers, and magazines has unparalleled influence in the British food world and beyond. She complains to a man from the Le Creuset kitchenware company that she is bored of their yellow-colored enamelware and wants to see blue casserole dishes, gratin dishes, pots, and pans. Blue like the color of the packets of Gauloises she smokes. Two years later the company obliges, and in 1967 she is the first to sell blue Le Creuset in Britain.

  The shop becomes Elizabeth David's realm, more important to her for several years than her writing. People come for advice, for guidance, for a glance at her. The famous send notes or stop by, many of them friends—Peggy Guggenheim, Freya Stark, Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon, Len Deighton, Robert Carrier, and the woman who was in many ways Elizabeth David's successor, Jane Grigson, who dies before her mentor and whose food my father often photographs for The Observer's Sunday magazine. Elizabeth David eats there, drinks there, socializes there, holds court there.

  My mother is drawn, like thousands, to 46 Bourne Street.

  She enters the shop with my father one beautifully sunny Saturday morning in the late 1960s. The storefront display, by the designer Anthony Denney is unlike anything my mother has ever seen. On the wooden table in the window is a symmetrical, interwoven, almost sculpted pile of pots, pans, and utensils. Around her are blue-gray walls with white shelves full of French and English kitchen equipment—soufflé dishes, bean pots, cast-iron skillets, and glowing yellow and orange Le Creuset casserole dishes whose lids are surprisingly, reassuringly heavy. The tiles on the floor are black and white, and they, too, are covered in pots and pans and roasting tins, stacked, almost overflowing, and slightly overwhelming to my mother. She has never seen anything like this. No one in Britain has. It's like walking into the fantasy kitchen that Elizabeth David's books have conjured up over the past fifteen years for a generation of people, mainly women, who were still making do with postwar rations when the first book was published.

  Down the narrow stairs in the basement, where the owner has her cubbyhole office—she likes to drink wine in there and brings in lunch for the friends she hires to work in the shop—is another room full of items that Elizabeth David has personally hunted down on long journeys through the back roads of France and England. My mother and father walk down the steps, and there is Elizabeth David herself deep in conversation with a man—about food, of course. Some other customers, supplicants, wait in line for the word. My mother does not talk to her. My father finds her formidable.

  My mother is piecing together her kitchen. This is the first of many visits to the shop, and my mother is following its owner's advice: Some sensible person once remarked that you spend the whole of your life either in your bed or your shoes, Elizabeth David writes in French Country Cooking, which my mother has read from cover to cover. Having done the best you can by shoes and bed, devote all the time and resources at your disposal to the building up of a fine kitchen. It will be, as it should be, the most comforting and comfortable room in the house.

  My mother's kitchen in the house on Elizabeth Close is tiny. There's no room in it for cookbooks, so my mother has to cross the small landing to pick them off a shelf in the living room if she needs to consult Elizabeth David or the others in her growing collection. The address, in Little Venice, is fashionable, but the house my father's father has helped pay for as a wedding gift is narrow, and soon they will move to a bigger place nearby on Ashworth Road. In the meantime, my mother crams ever more into the pale-blue cabinets that line the kitchen's walls. There's a blue Le Creuset gratin dish from Elizabeth David Ltd.; a set of industrial-sized aluminum pots and pans that are a gift from her mother, who owns a hotel in Edinburgh and has access to restaurant suppliers; earthenware dishes found in a market in Puerto Pollensa in Majorca, where her father often docks his yacht, Xanadu.

  Many of the pots and pans in my mother's kitchen come from the shoots my father does for advertisements, magazines, and books in his studio near Chancery Lane. He takes a lot of pictures of food, and those photographs require props—knives, wooden spoons, serving platters, jugs, storage jars, casserole dishes, a large salt jar. Some can be reused in later shots, but eventually many of them make their way back to our house.

  Food comes too. To get one perfect chicken for an ad or the illustration of a Jane Grigson recipe in The Observer magazine, my father and his assistants will buy ten. Not all of them will be cooked during the day, so the uncooked chickens, sirloins, lamb chops, and the bags of carrots, lettuce, fruit, cakes often end up with us.

  My mother's younger sister, Kata, is also learning to cook, but she's spending a year at the Constance Spry school in central London, learning first flower arranging and then cooking. She is dyslexic. University, in these days, isn't an option for her. She's only sixteen or seventeen, and her parents have sent her to live in a convent in Hampstead—“a good, safe place for a virgin to live,” she calls it later in life—where she shares a room with a granddaughter of the king of Belgium. When she can, she escapes, walking down the broad, busy Finchley Road to my parents' house and my mother's little kitchen.

  It's lunchtime, and Kata sits down at the table next to the window that looks out to the local pub. My mother reaches into the oven and takes out two small ceramic cauldron-shaped brown ramekins known as cocottes. They have been sitting in a shallow pan of boiling water for a few minutes with the lid on. Inside the little dishes are “Les Oeufs en Cocotte à la Crème” from French Provincial Cooking, Elizabeth David's fourth and most popular book, a five-hundred-page exploration of French food that gives Elizabeth David's American friend, Julia Child, anxious hours because it comes out two years before her Mastering the Art of French Cooking. My mother, many years later, gives a copy of French Provincial Cooking to my sister. The inscription reads: The Bible! Happy Cooking!

  The egg dish is not light. There are three ingredients: eggs, butter, and cream. The butter melts in each pot, the eggs follow, and when they begin to harden, the cream goes on top. Elizabeth David writes: This is one of the most delicious egg dishes ever invented, but it is rare to get it properly done.

  Kata spoons her egg out of the cocotte. There is also some pâté spread on toast. It is a delicious, simple combination. My mother makes the recipe one of her regular Elizabeth David dishes.

  Les Oeufs en Cocotte à la Crème

  You need ramekins for this. Or the little cauldronlike ceramic dishes that are also great for small, individualized desserts like petits pots de crème.

  Heat the oven or boil some water in a wide pan. Put a little butter inside each ramekin and then place the ramekins into the shallow water or into the oven so that the butter melts. Crack an egg into each ramekin and then cover. When the eggs are nearly done—it only takes two or three minutes—pour some double cream on top of each one. Take them out soon after and be generous with the salt and pepper before tucking in. Toast is good to have nearby.

  If you really love someone, bring them this in bed on a Saturday morning. On a tray with freshly squeezed orange juice, a thick slice of toast, and a bowl of café au lait.

  11

  THERE WAS ONE MAJOR PROBLEM WITH MY PLAN TO SPEND hours in the kitchen, hours reading cookbooks. I was a foreign correspondent. I did not have a domesticated lifestyle. “You need to know,” I had told the woman who would later become my wife when we began to date seriously, “that this is the only thing I know how to do. It's the only way I can make money. Besides, I lov
e it. I will never stop doing it. I will always travel. I will always be away for much of the year.”

  “Sure,” she said, “that's fine. I'm busy too, you know.”

  She meant it, too; she truly didn't mind my going away for long spells. But I minded, more and more. The truth was, I had begun, for some indistinct period of months or possibly a couple of years, to feel less in love with war zones than I proclaimed.

  This was me at thirty: I was with my friend Richard Miron, a radio reporter for the BBC, and we were making our way through a dusty lemon grove in the Gaza Strip at the start of the Second Intifada. It was the fall of 2000. We were near a heavily fortified Israeli army position, and in recent days the Israeli soldiers, unseen behind their walls of concrete, had been shooting dead quite a few Palestinians. The lemon trees provided us with cover, but then the bullets started zipping through the heavy early-afternoon citrus air of Gaza and past us, breaking the sound barrier in a sharp crack. “Look at these lemons,” I said, stopping to pick some off a tree as we ran through the grove with our bodies bent low. “They're the most lemony lemons I've ever smelled.”

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Richard said.

  “Picking fruit,” I replied, stuffing the firm lemons and their green pointy leaves into my pockets. I tore one open, and the sour, delicious juice dripped down my hand. The perfect meeting of a fresh ingredient with a life-threatening moment. I was very happy. “They can't see us among all these trees, you know.” The bullets continued to crack nearby.

  Something would happen in my brain in those moments. The fight-or-flight chemical, norepinephrine, seemed to surge inside me, making me feel hyperalert, almost limitlessly strong, and completely in control of my body. I experienced a beatific calm, a sense of extraordinary well-being and generosity. The lemons glowed with the deepest yellow. Their leaves seemed perfectly formed. My friend Richard was the most amiable companion possible. A distilled form of friendship was born amid the flying lead and the norepinephrine. Richard would be a friend for life, I immediately knew. I wanted to stay in the grove all afternoon gathering these perfect lemons with my friend.