Dinner With Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table

by Cita Stelzer

  Not everyone would characterise the foods he asked be sent to the trenches as “the simpler the better” but we should remember the diary entry of Harold Nicolson, a contemporary and fellow member of the upper class, 25 years later, after lunching with the Churchills in their wartime flat, “We have white wine and port and brandy and hors d’oeuvre and mutton. All rather sparse.”14 Not how we would understand the term.

  Impatience with badly prepared foods came to the surface when Churchill, by then Prime Minister, was entertaining Molotov and other Soviet officials at Chequers. The Soviets’ schedule had been erratic and meals were often late or postponed indefinitely. At one dinner, quail was served but to the Prime Minister’s nose, they were not quite “right” and too dry. He was “displeased” and said to the caterer, “These miserable mice should never have been removed from Tutankhamen’s tomb.”15

  At more formal dinners, Churchill’s taste seems to have diverged even further from the plain food, well prepared, that he told his contemporaries he preferred. Of course, to someone born in Blenheim Palace, plain food would have meant something vastly different from what it means today, or indeed even from what it meant to his contemporaries.

  Churchill’s likes and dislikes were formed in rarefied late-Victorian and Edwardian society, in which diners of his social class were accustomed to multiple courses, and quite elaborate courses at that. And nothing in his girth or in his consumption of cigars and champagne suggests any late-in-life conversion to moderation. Norman McGowan, who cared for Churchill late in life, said he was “blessed with an excellent digestion and a lively regard for the pleasures and benefits of good food and wine. Not for him is the ascetic regime of so many famous men of advancing years”.16

  Aged 88, Churchill, having recovered sufficiently from a broken leg, attended a dinner of his beloved Other Club at the Savoy, where “the food and wine are remarkable”.17 The chef proudly prepared what is reported to have been Sir Winston’s favourite dishes:18

  PETITE MARMITE SAVOY

  FRIED FILET OF SOLE WRAPPED IN SMOKED SALMON AND

  GARNISHED WITH SCAMPMPI

  FILET OF ROAST DEER STUFFED WITH PTÉ DE FOIE GRAS

  AND SERVED WITH TRUFFLE SAUCE

  No dessert is mentioned. Few would call this plain food, and the accounts of other witnesses are not completely consistent with this chef’s view of what Churchill preferred at this late stage in his life.

  With Anthony Eden, a private dinner consisted of “champagne and oysters in his bedroom”;19 and with Field Marshal Alanbrooke “a tête-à-tête dinner sitting in armchairs in the drawing room”, dining on “plovers’ eggs, chicken broth, chicken pie, chocolate soufflé and with it a bottle of champagne between us, port and brandy!”20 Even under difficult circumstances, Churchill’s fare was very often a cut above the ordinary. When escaping from captivity in South Africa, he hid for two days’ living on two simple cold roast chickens, melon and whisky, a diet denied most fugitives.

  It may well be that Churchill preferred to say, and perhaps even to believe, that “plain food” was his culinary choice because from at least the eighteenth century “the patriotism of plain cooking was one feature of Englishness”, with “the roast beef of old England … an emblem of solidity, unyielding to Napoleon’s batterie de cuisine”.21 Claiming a preference for plain food, in short, was used by Churchill and his contemporaries to wrap themselves in the flag, to assure themselves that no matter how high their station, they had not abandoned their muscular Britishness for the more effete tastes of continental Europe. No drippy French sauces for a true Englishman. “The PM doesn’t like his chicken ‘messed about’,” affirms Lord Moran,22 referring to Churchill’s dislike of devilled chicken.

  But Churchill’s exposure to the troops in the field and their vastly different culinary backgrounds, together with his experience of wartime rationing, and advancing years did acquaint him with the virtues of simpler English fare. Lady Williams, a credible witness to his preferences during his second premiership, reports that his tastes ran to simple foods, and that among his favourites were jellied consommé, Irish Stew, and plain chicken. Lady Williams also relates that, after a long night, sometimes at two or three a.m., the Prime Minister would suddenly signal that her dictation (or to use Churchill’s words, “take down”) chores were over by hollering “soup!” This meant that he wanted his customary late-night bowl of jellied consommé and that he was ready for bed. Indeed, Churchill seems to have had a more-than-average interest in soups, his preference for consommé matched by his aversion to cream soups.

  Such a Churchill favourite was consommé that, in 1934, he formally asked the Ritz in Paris for its recipe and paid their invoice of 190 Fr. when it arrived. In 1938 he found confirmation for his preference from a doctor who suggested a diet that, among other restrictions, allowed “no soups except clear consommé”.23

  Colville, Churchill’s Assistant Private Secretary during the war, described a dinner he had with the Prime Minister and his daughter Mary:

  The tastelessness of the soup so excited his frenzy that he rushed out of the room to harangue the cook and returned to give a disquisition on the inadequacy of the food at Chequers and the fact that the ability to make a good soup is the test of a cook.24

  Edmund Murray, one of Churchill’s bodyguards, provides another “soup!” story. Churchill was staying at the royal palace in Denmark after receiving an award from King Frederick IV of Denmark. Churchill’s regular valet had the night off so when he required his “soup!” there was no one to prepare the consommé. The story goes that the King himself prepared the soup and served it to Churchill.25

  Churchill preferred his Irish stew with “plenty of small onions and not much broth”.26 Irish stew was on offer at a lunch with General Eisenhower, and when Ike praised the sauce and crust – mostly potatoes and some meat – Churchill promised that “this would be our main dish for the Tuesday luncheons. It was.”27 Irish stew also became a favourite with Eisenhower’s Chief-of-Staff, Walter Bedell Smith, who joined Ike and Churchill for private lunches on Tuesdays in the months before D-Day. We are less sure of why Churchill once complained that someone “forgot to add pineapple chunks” to his Irish Stew”.28

  Mrs. Georgina Landemare knew better than anyone how Churchill defined plain food, and that he liked it perfectly cooked. She was the Churchills’ cook throughout much of their lives, at Downing Street, Chartwell, Chequers and elsewhere. Eight years older than Churchill, Georgina Landemare started off as scullery maid in the country houses of Hertfordshire. Somehow, somewhere, she learned to cook and graduated into the kitchen where she met and married a famous French chef, Paul Landemare. They became what are now known as celebrity chefs, famous for the perfection of their Anglo-French cuisine and for catering for special events of the English social scene, like Cowes Week.

  “In the 1930s she came for special weekends to Chartwell, but from the outbreak of the war, she became full time. She retired officially in 1953 but still came on occasions to help out during 1954.”29 She was adored by the Churchill family and particularly the Prime Minister who never complained about her cooking as FDR did about Mrs. Nesbitt’s. So fond of his cook was Churchill that he left her two paintings in his will. Lady Williams confirms that she was much loved by the entire family.

  She received the freshest fruits and vegetables from Chartwell, on Mondays by car and on Thursdays by train in hampers.30 Colville gives Clementine credit for providing “ambrosial food,”31 but some credit must also go to Mrs. Landemare.

  Lady Churchill, who helped her edit her book and wrote the introduction for Recipes from No. 10: The Churchill Family Cook, said she was “enchanted” to have Mrs. Landemare “because I knew she would be able to make the best of rations and that everyone in the household would be happy and contented”. Lady Soames said later she was able to “combine the best of French and English cooking”.32 And “One thing tested her a lot … was when my father, to show it was business as usual, som
etimes decided to use the dining room at No. 10, instead of the Annexe. So darling Mrs. Landemare would have to transfer from one kitchen to the other, sometimes at a rather late stage, and be driven round in the duty car, with the covered dishes, wrapped in shawls to keep them warm, clasped tightly on her lap.”33

  Sawyers, Churchill’s ever-present valet, once rather “harshly informed an American cook [who had cooked a partridge for one and a half hours] that Mrs. Landemare cooks partridge for only fifteen minutes”.34 She knew the Prime Minister liked his meats underdone, never overcooked, which might have created some problems, given Churchill’s habitual lateness to meals. She was a legend.

  A family memoir paints a picture of this indomitable woman. In October 1940, minutes before a bomb fell on No 11 Downing Street, the Prime Minister rushed into the kitchen to warn her. She is reported to have retorted “Sir, the soufflé isn’t quite done.”35

  On a gloomy family afternoon in late July 1945, when the voting results had so catastrophically thrown Churchill out as Prime Minister (but not out of his seat in the House of Commons), Lady Soames recollected that the cook was making honey sandwiches and saying: “I don’t know what the world is coming to, but I thought I might make some tea.”36

  Years later, Mrs. Landemare told Joan Bakewell (in a TV interview) that the Prime Minister liked Irish stew, and asked that it be reheated the following day “if any were left”.

  In the same interview, Mrs. Landemare said: “I did my best to look after him – it was my war work.”37

  Churchill’s preference for well-cooked plain foods was not rigidly applied. On 25 September 1985, at a commemorative dinner at the Savoy, The International Churchill Societies (as The Churchill Centre was then called) served a dinner that included what were believed to be Churchillian choices. Here is that menu in full:

  La Petite Marmite Churchill

  Le Contrefilet de boeuf rôti Yorkaise

  Les pommes noisettes

  Les haricots verts frais en branche

  Les quartiers de poires rafraichies au citron la bombe

  glacée pralinée

  Ou

  Les batons de celeri farcis au Roquefort

  Pol Roger white foil, extra dry

  Richard Langworth reports that Churchill preferred Stilton to sweet desserts, “but he could easily be persuaded to take both”.38

  Another source tells us that Churchill ordered “off the menu when it came to the dessert course. His choice of Roquefort cheese, a peeled pear and mixed ice-cream never varied,”39 – although we do know that there were times when Stilton was at least equally preferred to Roquefort.

  In January 1941, after Alfred Duff Cooper said a press conference was a success, Churchill replied “… starving mice appreciate a Stilton cheese when it is set before them.”40

  I have found very few Churchill comments on dessert. At a lunch in 1941, when a baked jam pudding was served, he said: “This is the sort of thing which helps [Minister of Food] Lord Woolton” and expressed great “satisfaction at seeing it on the table”.41 Note that he did not say anything about the dessert itself or its taste. Lady Williams, who dined frequently with him when serving as his secretary during his second premiership, recalls that he never ate fruits (except at breakfast), puddings or sweets. He did, however, once seem irritated because Mrs. Churchill had apparently “used some of his favourite honey, sent from Queensland, to sweeten the rhubarb”.42 No mention that he actually ate the dessert.

  Churchill scoops caviar, lunch at Yalta

  Churchill did, however, have a “passion for cream”, Norman McGowan tells us, and “would empty the jug himself and then look around the table. “Does anyone want cream?” he would ask rather pugnaciously.”43

  Menus, of course, are one thing, quantities of food actually consumed are quite another. Although Churchill loved caviar, and can be seen dipping into a large vat of the delicacy at Yalta, Lady Williams notes that he ate only small portions.

  Churchill’s desire for perfectly prepared and certainly not overcooked foods led to at least one deliciously amusing incident when he was on board a British destroyer on 15 August 1944, on his way to watch from the sea the American landings in the South of France. Lieutenant Derek Hetherington of the Royal Navy was instructed, while the Prime Minister was sleeping, to prepare lamb cutlets for him, to be ready in the way he liked them the moment he woke up. Not knowing when Churchill would wake up, and being instructed not to wake him, Hetherington cooked the first pair of cutlets until they were overdone, then cooked pair after pair so that when Churchill woke up, there would be at least one pair done just as he liked them.44

  It is obvious that some eye witnesses’ reports are at variance with others, at least in details recollected. No matter. In the end what does matter for our purposes is that Churchill never allowed his preferences for food and wine to interfere with the main purpose of his dinner gatherings, or with the conviviality of the occasion. People and conversation were always the indispensable items on his menus.

  Notes

  1. Halle, Kay (ed.), Winston Churchill On America and Britain, p. 256

  2. Moir, Phyllis, I Was Winston Churchill’s Private Secretary, p. 132

  3. Winston S. Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, p. 201 (Originally published by Longmans, Green & Co. in 1898.)

  4. CHAR 1/351/50-52

  5. Soames (ed.), Speaking for Themselves, p. 582

  6. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Volume VII, p. 127

  7. Jenkins, p. 711

  8. Addison, The Road to 1945, p. 245

  9. CHAR 1/116/60

  10. Gilbert, 1914-1916, Volume III, p. 502

  11. Soames (ed.), Speaking for Themselves, p. 117

  12. Ibid., p.164

  13. Ibid., p. 178

  14. Nicolson. Nigel (ed.), Harold Nicolson, The War Years, 1939-1945, p. 166

  15. Pawle, p. 171

  16. McGowan, p. 87

  17. Montague Browne, Long Sunset: Memoirs of Winston Churchill’s Last Private Secretary, p. 314

  18. Howells, Churchill’s Last Years, pp. 111-112

  19. Eden, Anthony, Memoirs, The Reckoning, p. 202

  20. Danchev and Todman (eds.), p. 390

  21. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food, p. 133

  22. Moran, p. 283, referring to Churchill’s distaste for devilled chicken.

  23. CHAR 1/391/1

  24. Colville, p. 309

  25. Murray, I Was Churchill’s Bodyguard, p. 90

  26. Coote, p. 40

  27. Cooke, Alistair, General Eisenhower on the Military Churchill, p. 54

  28. Martin, John, MART 2, unpublished diaries for 30 November 1944, p. 168

  29. Soames (ed.), Speaking for Themselves, p. 581

  30. Buczacki, Stefan, Churchill and Chartwell, p. 258

  31. Colville, John, The Churchillians, p. 112

  32. Soames, Mary, Finest Hour, 115, p. 42

  33. Ibid.

  34. Soames, Mary, Clementine Churchill, p. 344

  35. Brocklesby, Eddie, “Nan’s Kitchen at No. 10” from the Serpentine running Club Newsletter, Autumn, 2003, p. 3

  36. Brocklesby, p. 3

  37. BBC TV Archives, Joan Bakewell Interview, 1973

  38. Langworth, Richard, Finest Hour, Frequently Asked Questions

  39. Nicolson, Juliet, The Perfect Summer, p. 47

  40. Finest Hour 144, Churchill Quiz, p. 63

  41. Gilbert (ed.), Churchill War Papers, The Ever-Widening War 1941, Volume 3, p. 1470

  42. Colville, p. 454 (paperback version)

  43. McGowan, p. 89

  44. Gilbert, Sir Martin, in conversation with Admiral Hetherington, 1965. Sir Martin Gilbert email to the author 19 April 2011

  CHAPTER 11

  Champagne, Whisky and Brandy

  “You can’t make a good speech on iced water.”1

  “I have always practiced temperance.”2

  Churchill consumed what by modern standar
ds are large quantities of alcohol. Among his list of essential provisions when, not yet 25, he set sail for South Africa in 1899 on a journalistic assignment to cover the Boer War, were some forty bottles of wine and “18 bottles of Scotch whiskey (10 years old), 12 Rose’s Old Lime Juice …” plus packing cases and the correct labelling.3 How much of this he was planning to consume personally we cannot be certain. He might have intended some for entertaining his fellow journalists and officers, or for gifts.

  Churchill was a lifelong consumer of whisky, insisting that it be served without ice,4 and very weak indeed.5 He drank it so weak that close observers described it as “mouthwash”. For Churchill, whisky was an acquired taste – a drink he initially “disliked intensely” but for which he overcame his early “repugnance”, writing in 1930 that “to this day, although I have always practiced true temperance, I have never shrunk when occasion warranted it from the main basic standing refreshment of the white officer in the East.”6

  That Churchill enjoyed whisky in the diluted form in which he habitually imbibed it there is little doubt. Confined to Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City after being hit by a car in 1931, he asked the attending physician, Dr. Otto C. Pickhardt, to write the following note, which he knew he would need in that era of Prohibition:

  This is to certify that the post-accident convalescence of the Hon. Winston S. Churchill necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits especially at meal times. The quantity is naturally indefinite but the minimum requirements would be 250 cubic centimetres.7