The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
How Len Deighton got men cooking
His ‘cookstrips’ taught baffled bachelors the basics – but ‘The Ipcress File’ showed them it could be sexy, too
As I settle down tomorrow night to watch the first episode of The Ipcress File – ITV’s new adaptation of Len Deighton’s classic 1962 spy novel – which recipe from my sauce-spattered copy of Deighton’s Action Cook Book will be the most appropriate accompaniment? His cervelle de veau au beurre noir (step one: “Get yourself a decent set of brains. Calves’ brains are best, but lamb, pork or ox are OK”) has a suitable smack of the 1960s, as does his tripe and onions.
If I’m not feeling brave, I may plump instead for Deighton’s caneton à l’orange, although I’m worried about how to follow his injunction to “ask your greengrocer for oranges that are not sweet” in the not-so-swinging London of the 2020s – there’s no sweetness filter on Ocado and I don’t think I can face the blank looks in Tesco.
Deighton, now 93, is currently more fashionable than at any time since his retirement 25 years ago from what he calls the “gruelling” business of writing. All of his novels and works of military history are currently being reissued as Penguin Modern Classics; the new version of Ipcress follows the 2017 big-budget mini-series based on his alternative-history novel SS-GB.
But although the game-changing influence that his sardonic, unromantic novels had on the thriller genre is at last being properly acknowledged, the impact of his innovative cookery writing looks in danger of being forgotten. In today’s world of MasterChefdominated television schedules and laddish star chefs such as Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver, we forget that in the 1960s most British men, far from being gastronomes, barely knew where their kitchens were. Deighton did more than anyone to change that.
Indeed, there was a time when Deighton was equally well known in the seemingly non-complementary roles of thriller writer and gourmet. In March 1965, a grand lunch at the Mayfair hotel was thrown in his honour, to celebrate the simultaneous release of his Action Cook Book and SidneyJ Furie’s film of The Ipcress File, starring Michael Caine.
Covering the event, a Daily Telegraph diary columnist appeared nonplussed by the notion of a male gastronome: “I asked Mr Deighton whether the book represented his wife’s cooking or his own… He merely repeated the question and laughed.” It was the prevailing attitude. “Men who cooked domestically were seen as rather effete,” Deighton recalled when I met him, a few years ago. “We didn’t have the yob chefs we have today.”
Deighton’s love of food began when he was a boy living in a modest mews house in Marylebone, which backed onto a grand house where his mother worked as a cook. He still cherishes the memory of his normally phlegmatic father’s astonishment when he was told that the pork pie he was eating was the work of 11-year-old Len.
He was working as an illustrator when he embarked on his celebrated “cookstrips” – illustrated recipes in three or four panels, with clear, concise instructions. Their genesis, he told me, was accidental.
“I would buy very expensive books about cooking, but as they cost so much money, I didn’t want to take them into the kitchen because they’d get covered in flour – I’m very sloppy. So I wrote it all out on a piece of paper and stuck it up in my kitchen, so I could screw it up and throw it away. And, of course, I ended up drawing the ingredients, because it’s easier to draw an egg than write the word ‘egg’. It was just a lot of scribbles. Then my friend Ray Hawkey [Daily Express design director and pioneer of infographics] said that would work in a newspaper, if he tidied it up and put a thick black border round the panels.”
The first cookstrips appeared in the Daily Express, but went on to become a weekly feature in The Observer, running for more than four years from 1962. The no-frills approach – rather different from the recipes of bestselling food writers such as Elizabeth David, who presupposed a fair level of culinary knowledge in her readers – was designed to appeal to baffled bachelors.
It worked: the cookstrips became phenomenally popular; some even ended up on wallpaper and tea towels. This was partly because they proffered basic practical tips that other cookery writers seemed to ignore – not just the right order in which to put oil and vinegar on a salad, but exactly what preparation you could get away with asking your butcher to do for you – and partly because Deighton strove to demonstrate that cookery was fundamentally straightforward and scientific in a way that ought to make it fall well within the masculine skill set.
“I’m not a great cook, but I am interested in working out the whole chemistry and physics of it – that it’s heat that cooks and not temperature, and so on,” he told me. With this approach, he could make unfamiliar dishes – such as the then excitingly exotic crème brûlée – seem as achievable as trifle.
Then there was the visual appeal of the strips: supreme clarity, but with a quirky quality (this was partly because the lettering on the strips was done first by a professional, and Deighton would then draw elongated utensils and squashed ingredients to fit the remaining space). And beautifully economical though the strips were, there was always room for offbeat remarks and little jokes. I’ve only just noticed that alongside his recipes for crépinettes de porc and de volaille, his own version is called crépinettes de ighton.
Eight months after he started on the Observer strips, Deighton made his debut as a novelist with The Ipcress File. This was class warfare in the form of spy fiction, as his northern working-class hero (unnamed in the book) emerged as smarter than his ex-public-schoolboy colleagues in British Intelligence – and a culinary connoisseur to boot. The latter was supposedly also true of James Bond in Ian Fleming’s novels; but the poetic way in which Deighton’s hero engages with food (“We ate […] the chicken deep in which the butter and garlic had
been artfully hidden to be struck like a vein of aromatic gold”) expose Bond, though better able to afford frequent fine dining, as a gastronomic dilettante. And unlike Bond, who relies on his housekeeper, Deighton’s character cooks his own breakfast.
The idea that a knack with a saucepan can be placed among a man’s arsenal of sexual attractions belongs to the film of The Ipcress File rather than the novel, however. It was a risky business having Michael Caine’s hero (transformed into a cockney called Harry Palmer) do something as girly as cooking for a woman: “Dump Caine’s spectacles and make the girl cook the meal – he is coming across as a homosexual,” read a panicked cable from the film’s Hollywood backers. But when Palmer cracked two eggs in one hand as he made an omelette for Sue Lloyd, men noticed that their wives and girlfriends swooned. (Although, famously, Caine couldn’t master the trick, and it’s a close-up of Deighton’s hand we see in the movie.)
By this stage, Deighton’s cookstrips were so popular – one can be glimpsed stuck to the wall of Harry Palmer’s kitchen in the film – that two anthologies were published in 1965: the Action Cook Book, followed by Où est le garlic? The paperback cover of the former got in on the “man plus gourmandism equals sex appeal” formula, featuring a woman draping herself over a chiselled-jawed hunk sporting a shoulder holster as he tosses spaghetti.
The irony is that Deighton, the pioneering gastrosexual, didn’t find his skill in the kitchen was much of an aphrodisiac when he began courting his future wife during this period: she rapidly got fed up of eating the same thing over and over for days as he strove to perfect the recipes for his cookstrips.
Having convinced at least some of his generation of men that the ability to cook was an ambition both attainable and worthwhile, Deighton abandoned professional food writing in the mid-1960s to concentrate on fiction and filmmaking; but, he says, he remained a “cooking fanatic”, instilling the same skills in his two sons.
His ideal last meal, he told me, would be “roast shoulder of lamb, pommes de terre Anna, and bread and butter pudding”. I hope whoever is tasked with making it has a copy of the Action Cook Book to hand: he’s very particular about the pudding. “Final result should have a crisp brown ‘toasty’ top. BEWARE burnt sultanas. Ugh!”
‘Men who cooked were seen as rather effete. We didn’t have the yob chefs we have today’