Lucy Lethbridge on Ambrose Heath

There was a time when no cookery book library was complete without at least one volume by Ambrose Heath. And the choice of volumes was wide as Heath was dauntingly prolific. There are meat books, fish books, egg books, cheese books and tinned-food books; books on puddings, pies, cheese, soup, salads and pickles; guides to curing, pickling, winemaking and baking. Over a career of half a century’s journalism, he turned his hand to countless articles on any subject a features editor might require: but he was primarily a food writer who by his death in 1969 had produced over 100 cookbooks.

Heath was himself a recipe for reinvention. He was born in 1891, in Hampstead, as Francis Geoffrey Miller, and adopted a nom de plume because his father, an electrical engineer, was ‘a gentleman and disapproved of Journalism’. He had a variety of rather rackety clerical jobs before moving into writing for newspapers – and he eventually ended up as cookery correspondent of the Morning Post. In 1933, he produced his first four cookbooks and by 1939 had notched up 15 more, including his bestselling translation from the French, Mme Prunier’s Fish Cook Book. Among his earliest commissions was Good Food on the Aga (1933), sponsored by Bell’s Heating Appliances of Slough, which had only recently introduced this innovative oven to Britain – or, as the manager put it in his introduction, returned from ‘voyaging some years to discover the AGA cooker in Sweden’.

Heath was only 42 when he started turning out cookbooks but already he had adopted the tone of a rather elderly countryman. Often decorated with lovely woodcuts by Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden, his books move through the seasons with an eye on what was available before refrigerators. Out-of-season fruit and vegetables come under the label ‘empire imported’ but his contempt for the tasteless winter strawberry is total. His recipes barely bother with the details, it’s a pinch of this and a dab or a dusting of that; the home cook is told, sternly but vaguely, to gut a rabbit, scour a snail and skin a squirrel. His writing now is more evocative than instructive: mutton cutlets are ‘Honest and oniony’; for Lent, he recommends ‘Salt cod in its pallid winding sheet of egg sauce’ – and with a wave of the hand, he suggests, quite rightly, that ‘bananas with cheese’ is a ‘combination you will either like inordinately or detest’. I tried it for breakfast before writing this: it was OK. Like Shirley Conran 50 years later who thought life too short to stuff a mushroom, Heath drew the line at smelts: ‘By the dainty-fingered, smelts may be stuffed with chopped, fried onions, mushrooms, oysters and parsley bound together in a thick white sauce. But not for me.’ He was exorbitantly fond of egg recipes – and even a cursory flick through a selection of his books finds any number of combinations of hardboiled egg and anchovy paste savouries (mostly exactly the same one, deftly re-worded). Heath had published in 1933 a cookbook for Country Life, a magazine established in the 1890s to celebrate the mostly imaginary arcadia of urban dreams. Heath reflected gustily on the decline of rural life. ‘Forty years ago, the smaller country house had not yet been entirely divested of its domestic splendour … there was a lavishness about country life which was very different from the present time.’ He deplored the new transports and technologies that had introduced processed food to the British household. So, during the war, Heath came again into his own, an authority on extreme nose-to-tail eating when it was necessary rather than fashionable – with advice on cooking coot, moorhen, sparrows and ptarmigan; he may have drawn the line at stuffing smelts but he included a recipe for fried minnows.

Food writer Michael Bateman visited Ambrose Heath in 1969 – when Heath was 70 (he died later that year). Modest, even reticent, in corduroys and checked shirt, this was not the bluff bon-viveur Bateman had expected. Heath and his muchyounger wife Violet lived contentedly in a cottage near Dorking and called each other Pooh and Loo. He was still writing books at a prodigious rate but was strapped for cash and quietly gloomy, ‘gazing distantly through his tortoiseshell half-glasses like a disillusioned schoolmaster’. His wife confided to Bateman that, apart from new potatoes, Heath intensely disliked vegetables. They were modest eaters who no longer touched meat – mostly living on porridge, tea and biscuits – and sparing drinkers who retired to bed early after a simple snack and some homemade rhubarb wine. ‘We hardly ever go out. We’re blasé old cabbages.’

For Bateman, the key to Heath’s individuality was precisely that he lived ‘outside the swim’, immune to fashions and fads and London foodies worrying away at new ideas. It gave his writing an engaging eccentricity while at the same time being a vivid chronicle of 20thcentury domestic social life in Britain. Heath conceded as much. Good food-writing is only marginally about recipes: ‘What I write is dull, very dull. But I don’t write dully.’

Good Food on the Aga by Ambrose Heath (Persephone, £13), The Country Life Cookery Book by Ambrose Heath (Persephone, £13)