A Book of Mediterranean Food

by Unknown

  It was during those icy, hungry, weeks that I took refuge from reality in writing down memories of the food I had cooked and eaten during my Mediterranean years. As I did so, my remote and at the time rather austere Greek island life began to take on the glow of a lost Paradise of plenty and glamour. As for my war years in Alexandria and Cairo, the food had indeed been plentiful, varied, and often truly delicious. I had of course, although without realizing it, become addicted to the food and cookery of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. That addiction I have never lost. But in the England of the late 1940s and early 1950s it was scarcely possible to indulge it. Well, at least I could put my memories of it on to paper, so that I would not forget about the bright vegetables, the basil, the lemons, the apricots, the rice with lamb and currants and pine nuts, the ripe green figs, the white ewes’ milk cheeses of Greece, the thick aromatic Turkish coffee, the herb-scented kebabs, the honey and yoghourt for breakfast, the rose petal jam, the evening ices eaten on an Athenian café terrace in sight of the Parthenon, the unlikely fish stews concocted by a sponge diver from the Dodecanese island of Symi who briefly cooked for me in Alexandria. So it came about that at that particularly bleak and painful period of English gastronomic life immediately following the end of World War II, I put together the bare bones of the book which became Mediterranean Food.

  Some two years later, in 1949, a friend with connections in the literary world offered to show my ragged collection of recipes – I had after all been using them – to various publishing acquaintances. All of them except one said – and who shall blame them – ‘What a mad idea writing a cookery book when we don’t have enough food to cook.’ That one exception was John Lehmann. I didn’t know him, although his name was familiar as the editor of Penguin New Writing, when he wrote me a brief note telling me he would like to publish my book, and asking me to go and see him in his Henrietta Street office.

  It wasn’t only that I had never met John Lehmann. I had never met any publisher and had no idea what to expect. When I was shown into his office, Mr Lehmann was courteous but brisk. He would publish my book, he would pay me £100 advance, £50 on signature of the contract, £50 on publication. He was going to commission John Minton – I hadn’t heard of him – to illustrate the book and design the jacket. Mr Lehmann showed me a book about Corsica which he had recently published. It was called Time Was Away, and the illustrations and jacket design were by John Minton. The author was Alan Ross. I thought it looked interesting and certainly it was most decorative. So that was settled.

  Now about the title. Mr Lehmann wasn’t happy with mine. I had called it A Book of Mediterranean Food, but was open to other suggestions. How about The Blue Train Cookery Book then? Oh dear. Surely that famous Blue Train had vanished along with our pre-1939 lives and the Tatler photographs of society girls sitting in bathing suits on the beaches of Cannes, Menton, Cap d’Antibes, St Juan les Pins? Diffidently, I reached for a straw. ‘Er… the Blue Train never went to Alexandria and Cairo, did it?’ Mr Lehmann agreed that that had been the case. ‘Well, have you any other ideas?’ he asked. ‘I can’t help thinking that the word Mediterranean in the title is an important one.’ ‘Look,’ he replied, ‘you go home and think about the title, and I’ll think about it too, and we’ll see what we both come up with. Meanwhile you must write an Introduction to the book and perhaps enlarge it a bit. It’s very short, you know.’

  Home I went, wondering whatever an Introduction was to be about, and not at all happy at the prospect of thinking up a new title. So it was a tremendous relief when only two or three days later I received a letter from John Lehmann telling me that on reflection he realized that perhaps after all I had been right, and that my original title should stand.

  To this day, I admire the good grace with which John, a man who – as I was to discover when I came to know him better – was far from easy-going, conceded that I might have my way over that Mediterranean Food title. Now of course it seems unthinkable that it could have been called anything else. At the time, the decision had really been in the balance. As for the Introduction, I produced something pretty perfunctory which Mr Lehmann was tolerant enough to accept. Likewise, my friend Veronica Nicholson, who had talked, not to say nagged, me into turning my notebook of recipes into some semblance of a book, accepted the dedication which I proposed to put in it.

  Nowadays, all – or at any rate, nearly all – authors have the assistance of publishers’ editors whose task it is to check details of style such as the use of capitals, italics, punctuation and footnotes, the correct placing of quotation marks, and of course spelling. (Although I am myself an instinctive good speller, it is surprising how many writers are hopeless ones.) In the case of cookery books recipes are scanned for inconsistencies and such aberrations as ingredients which appear in the directions for cooking the dish but have been forgotten by the author in his initial list of requirements for it – or in reverse, ingredients left, as it were, hanging in the air without apparent purpose. All such points are important in a cookery book, but are often ignored by the cookery writers themselves, as I was to discover when I spent two years as editor of cookery books for the publishing firm of André Deutsch. A hazardous job at times. Authors aren’t always delighted to have their writing technique questioned. Personally, I’m only too grateful to have faults and inconsistencies pointed out, although I do draw the line at so-called editors who go through my copy adding hundreds of commas and capitals – you’re neurotic about commas, Leonard Russell, literary editor of the Sunday Times in the late 1950s, once told me. No wonder, given some of the editing I’d been subjected to. Anyway, in 1950 John Lehmann didn’t employ a specialist editor to deal with cookery, so my original typescript (years later John told me it was the untidiest ever submitted to him) was left more or less as I had handed it over. Even the recipe for ‘Turkish stuffing for a whole roast sheep’ which had so beguiled the late Julia Strachey, John Lehmann’s reader at the time, that, she told me later, she had finally persuaded John to publish the book on the strength of it – ‘Imagine, a whole roast sheep, and the meat ration a few ounces a week’ – was left undisturbed. So was the one for a spit-roasted gigot à la provençale, studded with a dozen cloves of garlic and twice as many anchovy fillets, served with an extra litre of thrice-blanched cloves of garlic given a fourth and final bath in a cup of bouillon. That recipe I had chosen to leave – I am no longer sure why, nor do I remember its source – in the original French. This elicited a characteristically waspish comment from Mrs Ernestine Carter, the American editor of Harper’s Bazaar, who by mischance had got her hands on the typescript. Who does she think she is, demanded Mrs Carter of a colleague, does she expect us all to read French? I felt it had been like saying pas devants les domestiques. All the same, I left those French gousses d’ail and filets d’anchois. John Lehmann didn’t object to them so why should I translate them for Mrs Carter? They are still there, French and all, on page 77.

  In May 1950 Mediterranean Food was published. The price was 10s. 6d. John Minton’s jacket was stunning. In the shop windows his brilliant blue Mediterranean bay, his tables spread with white cloths and bright fruit, bowls of pasta and rice, a lobster, pitchers and jugs and bottles of wine, could be seen far down the street. On the Sunday following publication day, Elizabeth Nicholas, the immensely respected Sunday Times travel writer, published a review of the book. As I read it – I did not then know Mrs Nicholas, although she and I became friends later – I found it hard to believe my eyes. She really liked the book, and she had really read it. Her praise was unqualified, she had understood the reasons that had made me refuse, as she put it, ‘to make any ignoble compromises with expediency’, adding that it would be the greatest mistake to water down a serious work on Mediterranean food ‘to suit present, we hope transitory weaknesses in our own victualling service’. Nicely put, that last phrase. Another point made by Mrs Nicholas, and one which particularly pleased me, was that following well-deserved praise for John Minton’s admira
ble illustrations and a few kind words for my own choice of gastronomic quotation, her final accolade was, ‘as further testimony to the unusual quality of this book, it should be added that it contains not one reference to Brillat-Savarin’. It was gratifying that a critic had noticed what had indeed been a very deliberate omission. The great sage of gastronomy had been all very well in his way – and in his day – but it seemed to me that we had all heard rather more than enough of aphorisms like the one about a meal without cheese being like a pretty girl with one eye, and in any case to a generation which had suffered from five years of wartime food and rationing and could barely remember what it had been like to have unlimited butter, cream, oranges, lemons, sugar, jam, meat, not to mention wine and olive oil, the cheese at the end of a meal was an irrelevance. The point was first to make sure you had the wherewithal to prepare a meal, then you could start worrying about whether or not it would be complete without three or four ounces of cheese.

  No sooner was Mediterranean Food launched than John Lehmann began to ask, ‘What can you give me next?’ On that occasion I was ready for him. I had a small collection of French recipes which hadn’t been suitable for the Mediterranean book. These, when put together, became French Country Cooking, again with a jacket design and illustrations by John Minton, and published in 1951. I had made friends with both John Lehmann and John Minton, and it was a blow to me when in 1953, whilst I was half way through the writing of a third book, Italian Food, the first John wrote to tell me that his publishing business was to be wound up. Although he had earned much prestige as a highbrow publisher his firm was losing money. The Bristol printers, Purnell’s, who had subsidized him and supplied him with paper – still very short in those days – had told him they could no longer finance him. In the course of what must have been an explosive meeting one of the Purnell directors had said, ‘What we need, Mr Lehmann, is a few rattling good yarns.’ John had stormed out. Perhaps rightly. But he had left his authors desolate. In my case desolation was a firm of publishers called Macdonald’s, also owned by Purnell, but financially successful. School books and Jane’s Fighting Ships were among their assets.

  As things turned out, Macdonald’s chose to retain only two of John Lehmann’s authors. I was one of those unfortunate ones. The other was the American Paul Bowles, author of the much-acclaimed novel The Sheltering Sky. Paul, as he told me later, was soon able to shake off his contractual ties with John Lehmann’s successors. I was not so lucky.

  Sometime in 1954 or 1955 I received an odd letter from one of the Macdonald directors. He realized, he said, that I might find the idea infra dig. – strange expression – but Penguin had approached the firm with an offer for Mediterranean Food and he felt it his duty to pass it on. So far from thinking a cheap paperback would be ‘infra dig.’ I jumped at the offer. A Penguin would mean a vastly increased readership, and in all probability a younger one which would include students, young married couples and many professional women sharing flats or living on their own but still needing to cook for themselves and to give the occasional dinner party. At 10s. 6d. the hardback edition of the book seems and indeed was cheap enough by today’s standards but at the time was quite an outlay. The paperback was to be 2s. 6d., a price within the reach of nearly everybody. Children could and did buy the paperback for their parents. More important, in 1954 food rationing had at last come to an end, and apart from Bee Nilson’s The ABC of Cookery published during the war, there was no other paperback cookery book on the market. My book had been given a dazzling opportunity. It was mainly, I learned, through the efforts of Miss Eunice Frost, the only woman director of Penguin Books, strongly supported by Sir Allen Lane himself, that the offer for Mediterranean Food had been made. The remaining members of the board had opposed the project.

  Of those disagreements I knew nothing at the time. My task was to revise and update the book, to write some new material, add a few recipes. I was only too pleased to comply with Penguin’s modest requests. As I wrote in my preface to their first, 1955, edition, ‘So startlingly different is the food situation now as compared with only two years ago that I think there is scarcely a single ingredient, however exotic, mentioned in this book which cannot be obtained somewhere in this country, even if it is only one or two shops. Those who make an occasional marketing expedition to Soho or to the region of Tottenham Court Road can buy Greek cheese and Calamata olives, tahina paste from the Middle East, stuffed vine leaves from Turkey, Spanish sausages, Egyptian brown beans, chick peas, Armenian ham, Spanish, Italian, and Cypriot olive oil, Italian salame and rice, even occasionally Neapolitan mozzarella cheese, and honey from Mount Hymettus.’ How right Elizabeth Nicholas had been about ‘the ignoble compromises with expediency’ which I had not made. The truth was that I had felt squeamish about compromises. I shrank from words like margarine and vegetable lard. I declined to use those substances in my own cooking, so why inflict them on my readers?

  To me it was wonderful that Mediterranean Food could now be bought for 2s. 6d., but immensely sad that John Lehmann, who had taken the risk of publishing the book in the first place, had no rights in the paperback – or indeed in any other edition: I resented Macdonald’s and the terms they had insisted on for the paperback, although at the time they were, I believe, quite usual. To me that didn’t make them any less scandalous. They would get 50% of the royalties, I was to be content with the remaining 50%. So matters remain to this day. That company, which had not had the slightest part in the initial publication of the book – and has never raised a finger to promote it, or either of the subsequent ones which fell into their hands – is still reaping, via the paperback editions, the benefit of John Lehmann’s flair and foresight. Macdonald’s certainly proved a sorry exchange for John. All that their chief director, a certain Captain Eric Harvey MC, could find to say to me when in 1953 I delivered my typescript of Italian Food was, ‘Do you mean to say that Mr Lehmann contracted to pay you an advance of £300 for this book? For a cookery book? No wonder his firm wasn’t paying. Ah well, let’s hope we get our money back.’

  I am happy to say that although Macdonald’s, at the time of writing part of Captain Robert Maxwell’s publishing empire, gather in their share of my paperback royalties, those of the hardback editions have long since passed from their control. Since then the books have gone through several lives, one of them every bit as dismaying as their previous acquisition by Macdonald’s. From the hands of a publisher called Robert Hale, of whom I shall say no more than it seemed a singular misfortune to have had my books acquired by his firm, I was rescued by Messrs Dorling Kindersley, the present hardback publishers. I am grateful to them, and hope that this new edition* of my very first book, published thirty-eight years ago, may prosper. I am only sorry that John Lehmann did not live to see it. He died in April 1987, aged 79. Although it now looks so very different, it is still basically the little book he so adventurously published in 1950.

  February 1988 E.D.

  Table of Equivalent Gas and Electric Oven Temperatures

  Solid Fuel

  Electricity

  Gas

  Slow

  240–310 F.

  115–155 C.

  ¼–2

  Moderate

  320–370 F.

  160–190 C.

  3–4

  Fairly Hot

  380–400 F.

  195–205 C.

  5

  Hot

  410–440 F.

  210–230 C.

  6–7

  Very Hot

  450–480 F.

  235–250 C. 8–9

  Table of Equivalent American Measurements

  English

  American

  ¼ lb butter or fat

  =

  approx ½ cup solidly packed

  2 oz butter or fat

  =

  approx ¼ cup = 4 tablespoons

  1 oz butter or fat

  =

  approx 2 tablespoons

  ½ lb c
aster sugar

  =

  approx 1 cup plus 3 tablespoons

  ¼ lb caster sugar

  =

  approx 8 tablespoons

  2 oz caster sugar

  =

  approx 4 tablespoons

  1 lb plain flour sieved

  =

  approx 4½ cups sieved cake flour

  ¼ lb plain flour sieved

  =

  approx 1 cup plus 4 tablespoons

  2 oz plain flour sieved

  =

  approx 8 tablespoons

  ¼ lb dry grated cheese

  =

  approx 1 cup

  ½ lb rice, raw

  =

  approx 1 cup

  LIQUID MEASUREMENTS

  English

  American

  1 gallon = 4 quarts = 8 pints

  =

  10 pints = 1¼ gallons

  1 quart = 2 pints = 40 oz

  =

  2½ pints = 5 cups

  1 pint = 20 oz

  =

  1¼ pints = 2½ cups

  ½ pint = 10 oz

  =

  1¼ cups

  ¼ pint = 5 oz = 1 gill

  =

  ½ cup plus 2 tablespoons

  2 oz = 4 tablespoons

  =

  ¼ cup

  1 tablespoon = ½ oz

  =

  ½ oz

  1 teaspoon = ¼ tablespoon

  =

  1 teaspoon = ½ tablespoon