MY SPICY LIFE
I never intended to be a cook. In fact, my interest in food didn’t become serious until 1960, when I was 20 and working as an au pair in the Basque country of france.
In the evening, I watched Madame von Bochstael make the children’s supper. They got exactly the same dinner as we would have later: tiny rare steaks, salad with french dressing, boiled potatoes, followed by a sliver of apple pie.
The toddler had hers in a high chair and her baby sister had hers whizzed up or mashed. no special ‘kids’ food’. It was fresh food, made from scratch by a woman who could cook. And we sat round a table. And we talked to the children.
Those three principles: good ingredients; careful preparation; time to enjoy, became my mantra.
I hate hurried, hand-held junk. It seems to me such a wasted opportunity. The novelist Julian Barnes, a great wine buff, once told me he didn’t have enough evenings left in his life to waste one on a bad bottle of wine. I feel the same about food.
Anyway,I knew I wanted to learn more about cooking, so I moved to London to do a threemonth Cordon Bleu course, and got my first freelance catering job when two of us students were sent to cook for a dinner party: egg mousse, roast pheasant, hazelnut meringue cake with a raspberry coulis.
we had to lay the table, decant the wine, do the cooking, carve the pheasant, wait at table, make the coffee and wash up. And we were terrified: neither of us had ever seen a pheasant, never mind plucked, drawn and roasted one.
But we managed. Euphoria changed to exhaustion at about midnight — and we spent our entire earnings on a taxi home.
The job led to more evening cheffing, and when I left cookery school, I took a three-day-a-week job cooking for the three partners of the embryonic law firm, McKenna and Partners.
I’d been taught the principles at the Cordon Bleu, but now I set about cooking my way through the 1,200-plus pages of the Constance Spry Cookery Book. The partners were extraordinarily good about it. when I got to the chicken chapter they ate chicken, in different guises, for weeks.
At the time, I was living in a bedsit on a top floor in Barons Court, west London, while my landlady lived in the basement. She had no sense of smell, which was just as well since I cooked all the time. Most customers would recommend me to their friends. But some would not. I remember cooking for a woman in Holland Park and hearing one of the guests complimenting her on the food.
‘This is delicious, darling. Any chance of getting the cook’s phone number?’
‘Oh, no, I do all my own cooking. I just have a little girl to help with the serving.’
A little girl! I’m a great clumsy 5ft 9in and I’d cooked everything. So I put business cards into the guests’ coat pockets, with a note on the top: ‘ your dinner at Mrs X’s was cooked by . . . ’
A few of my ideas were rather more hare-brained — like starting a catering delivery service to actors in their dressing-rooms between shows on matinee days. It was a resounding flop. I hadn’t reckoned on the stage doormen demanding a cut in return for access; I’d not realised how many actors want to go for a walk between shows or sit in a pub; and, worst of all, I hadn’t figured that shows would close without warning — I’d arrive with a load of picnic trays to find the theatre dark.
Then, one day, Lady Elizabeth Anson, whose company Party Planners organised fashionable events, asked me to cook a lunch at which Princess Margaret was to be the guest of honour. The menu, she said, was to be caviar, followed by lobster.
I’d never cooked, indeed never seen, either delicacy. But I had a book, and plenty of time to mug up. The caviar was easy. The lobster, however, put the wind up me. The instructions were perfectly clear: I had to kill it by splitting its head in two.
I bolstered my resolve. Cooks had to learn to kill things. what the book failed to mention was that when lobsters are alive they are black and when cooked, bright red. which is why Declan, the butler, found me, knife in hand, solemnly despatching boiled lobsters. He teased me about it for years
Even though I was flying by the seat of my pants and still remarkably ignorant, I began to make a living. Unfortunately, my landlady finally realised I was running a business upstairs and wanted me out. And I needed a proper kitchen.
So, at 26, I bought a near-derelict row of four garages, with rooms above, funded by loans of £9,000 from Mum and the bank. After getting some building work done, I lived in one bit and let the larger one.
Myfirst tenants were the pop group the Hollies, of which Graham nash was the lead singer. Crowds of screaming girl groupies would sometimes gather outside the house, hoping for a glimpse or a touch.
years later, when Graham had formed Crosby, Stills & nash, he invited me to a concert at the festival Hall. Afterwards, I walked forward to the stage and he came out to chat. He looked at the front-row seats and nodded with satisfaction.
‘Good concert,’ he said. ‘If they don’t wet their knickers, you’ve failed.’ I used to hide the group’s
hash for them among my dried herbs, but no one ever came asking.
Once or twice, when I was still cooking in the small hours, they would come in, high as kites, and marvel at the sparkle of sugar on a pie crust, or the wondrous design of a lettuce leaf, or want to tell me the secrets of the universe. I must have seemed very staid and respectable to them.
By now, word had spread that I was reliable and would go anywhere. And that I would work weekends, which a lot of the Cordon Bleu graduates with mummy and daddy in the country and hunt balls to go to, would not do.
If things went occasionally wrong, it was usually my fault. I was delighted one day when the partners of a firm of shipping brokers said it was high time I sat down to enjoy my own cooking, and would I join them for lunch?
All went well until the senior partner looked intently at the salad in front of him, then reached into it with his fingers.
Ah, I thought smugly, he’s never seen a designer salad before; he’s curious about the radicchio, arugula, lamb’s lettuce, pea tendrils . . .
And then he had a piece of string between his fingers and was gently pulling it out of the salad.
The string turned into a length of chain, and then — out popped a bath plug. Fast as anything, I said: ‘Well, at least it proves I washed the salad.’
Back at my new home, I had an Abyssian cat, Benedicat, who liked to roam the nooks and crannies of Paddington. He was forever getting stuck on scaffolding or locked in someone’s garage. Once, he climbed into a caravan and ended up in Cornwall.
One day, a voice on the telephone said: ‘Do you have an animal called Benedicat?’
‘Oh Lord,’ I said, ‘yes, I do. He’s always going walkabout. Is he stuck on your roof?’
‘No,’ came the reply, ‘ but his collar tag is stuck in my trifle.’
Despite this, our reputation grew; and within two years, I had four people working for me. Caroline Burrows (later Caroline Waldegrave) became head chef, rising rapidly from a junior cook just out of the Cordon Bleu. Her success was as much a surprise to her as it was to me.
When I rang the Cordon Bleu school for a reference for her, the reaction was: ‘Caroline Burrows? Surely not? She is the naughtiest girl in the class.’
I think it was this schoolmarmish response that made me think Caroline must have a bit of initiative. She certainly did: at 23, she became the first principal of Leith’s Cookery School, which I opened in 1975.
As for me, I grew to love almost every aspect of business. Sometimes, this involved a bit of ingenuity.
One summer, we had a wedding job in Surrey on the same day as one of our clients was entertaining the Queen Mother in Kensington, and Elton John was having a party in North London. Needless to say, all our staff wanted to gawp either at the Queen Mother, or at the mother of all Queens, so I got the short straw and went to supervise the wedding.
Therewere no tablecloths for the buffet. They’d been sent to Elton John’s house. Since he was having a caveman party with our waiters in loincloths and our waitresses in leopard-print bikinis, he really didn’t need tablecloths, but they were too far away to fetch.
One of my staff had a horrid time driving round Esher trying to borrow linen from hotels and pubs, or buy anything white — tablecloths, curtains, sheets. No luck.
The bride’s mother appeared in pink silk from head to toe. She looked in dismay at the flowers and candelabra, napkins and plates, sitting about in boxes on the floor. I comforted her.
‘ Madam, please don’t worry. really. We never, ever do the buffet until the wedding party has left for church. We need to keep all the food in the refrigerated vans you see. Health and safety.
‘And anyway, we hate to spoil the surprise by letting you see it half-finished.’
She bought this tosh, I’m glad to say, and went off to see her daughter married.
Meanwhile, I was up to her linen cupboard in a flash, whipping out her sheets and tablecloths. I think if she’d not had enough, I’d have stripped the beds. We were ready and smiling when the wedding guests arrived.
Our client, perhaps in relief at seeing the buffet, got stuck into the champagne.
‘You were quite right,’ she said, ‘I should never have worried. It all looks beautiful. And how clever of you to have our monogram on the tablecloths. No wonder you wanted to keep it a surprise.’
Event catering has always been, for me, the most exciting side of the trade. The truth is I’m not obsessed by gastronomy. I seldom want to spend all day clearing consommé to crystal brightness or painting perfect pictures on the plate with fancy ingredients, or drive half way across the county to get the best ostrich fillets or morning-picked micro-leaves.
Back in the late Sixties, I found most smart restaurants stuffy: men had to wear ties; women were not allowed to wear trousers. (A great trick was to arrive in a trouser suit with a long top, and when refused entry, to slip off the trousers and claim to be wearing a mini- dress. I only pulled this off once, at the ritz.)
Sommeliers looked down their noses if you ordered the house wine and a kind of holy hush dominated. Worst of all, there were some fancy chefs so precious that they wouldn’t allow customers to add salt and pepper, or to have their steaks well done.
On the other hand, restaurants with a relaxed atmosphere, though cheap and cheerful, offered bogstandard food, horrible wine, amateur service and were deafeningly noisy.
So in 1969, when I’d happily grown up a bit, I took the lease of the ground floor of two crumbling terraced houses in Notting Hill and opened Leith’s restaurant.
I never considered the prospect of failure, which is just as well: more restaurateurs go bust than anyone except builders.
I shudder now to think how ignorant I was. I’d never had a proper job in a restaurant, never mind run one.
I just sat down and thought about what I would like as a customer. I decided on a four-course menu with a fixed price. No dress code. We would not be precious if customers wanted to have their beautiful Aberdeen Angus steaks cremated. And they’d sit on what I considered the most comfortable chairs in the world: office chairs on casters.
I had some idea that having a restaurant would mean drifting about in long earrings and false eyelashes, receiving compliments on the food and dishing out
to favoured customers. In fact (complete with earrings and false lashes) I spent most of that first evening in the ladies’ lavatory, unblocking the loo with a plunger.
The kitchen porter didn’t turn up and my mother manned the wash-up. But we were a huge success. Undeservedly.
At the start, our food was not marvellous, but at the time few restaurants cooked well, and most used frozen vegetables and canned celery, mushrooms and asparagus. The mere fact that we served only fresh food was newsworthy.
On top of my catering business and new restaurant, I was soon coping with a secondary career as a food columnist for The Daily Mail. All went fine until I wrote a recipe for a ginger peach brulée.
It was basically a crème brulée, with stewed peaches and an ounce of stem ginger, but I failed to specify what kind of ginger.
And an ounce of ground ginger is enough to blow your head off. Still, I was very confident about my Oxford orange marmalade recipe. I liked the slightly bitter caramel taste that two tablespoons of black treacle gave it.
I did not yet have a typewriter so I sent the recipe in handwritten. But I’d forgotten to cross the T of two tablespoons, so it appeared not as 2 tbs, but 2 lbs. And two pounds of black treacle is rather a lot for a couple of pounds of oranges.
The Daily Mail switchboard went white-hot with readers ringing in to complain of the sticky goo in their saucepans or, worse, of solid black rock and wrecked pan, and curtains that smelt of burnt molasses. The paper had to pay out seventeen shillings and fivepence (this was before Harold Wilson turned this into 87.5p) to every reader to compensate them for the ingredients.
Then one woman rang up and said: ‘ Look, how many oranges and how much sugar must I add to the treacle to get the proportions right again?’
Sensible woman, I thought. From now on we’ll pay out no more compensation — we’ll just encourage people to make a few years’ marmalade at once. Then I worked out that she would need to make 160 pots of marmalade. We paid her the seventeen shillings and fivepence.
The next day, when I arrived at my desk, I found a letter bomb on it. This was in the middle of the IRA letter-bomb campaign and we had all been given training: if you could feel something squashy, that would be the Semtex, and something that felt like wires was not good news either.
My envelope had the squashy bit in the middle and wires on both sides of it. So I did what we were trained to do and cleared the room. A copper came and took away my envelope. After a couple of hours, the police told me to collect it. It contained a lump of marmalade toffee with a dental brace embedded in it, two teeth attached. And a large orthodontist’s bill.