OF ALL THE ELABORATE FANTASIES I HAD AS A CHILD ABOUT LIFE as a grown-up, the only one that has come true, so far, is that I get to eat what I want. Or more precisely, when I am faced with dismal choices in airports, for instance, or hotels, I get to not eat what I don’t want. Throughout my childhood, meals were not battlegrounds—which might as least have offered the thrill of skirmishes and retreats, feints and maneuvers, wounds freshly given or received—but sieges; and I was always the beleaguered. Ironically, it was the presence of food, rather than its absence, that created this painful condition. Years later, reading Alistair Horne’s The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870–71, I was struck less by the eloquent descriptions of starvation, than by Horne’s account of how the desperate Parisians dispatched first carrier pigeons, then snails, to carry messages out of the city and across enemy lines. But I had no way I could send a message; no one to send it to.
My principal, although not my sole, adversary in this struggle was my stepmother. Janey had grown up with three siblings and a widowed father in a croft in the northeast of Scotland. I have a tiny photograph of the four children standing beside a horse and cart on an overcast, windy day. All four are scowling, and the dresses and long hair of the girls are blowing in the wind; my stepmother is barefoot. The children walked several miles to school daily, in all weathers. They came home to stack the peat, feed the hens, weed the garden, help in the fields, mind the sheep, and milk the cows. When they sat down to meals they said grace and ate what they were given. The older daughter stayed home to care for her widowed father. Janey chose one of the few professions open to women of her class: nursing. She spent most of her adult life, until she married my father, living in hostels and eating whatever the dining room served. Suddenly, in her early fifties for the first time she had a home and a kitchen of her own, a husband and a stepdaughter to feed.
This feeding had to be accomplished within the constraints of our lives at the boys’ school where my father taught. The school was in a valley about fifty miles north of Edinburgh and was surrounded by farms, bare hills, and moors. The nearest shops were in the village four miles away—a journey that no one, after a decade of petrol rationing, made casually. Most of our food was purchased from the vans that circled the valley, visiting outlying houses: the butcher and the greengrocer came twice a week, the fishmonger only on Friday. Milk was delivered and bread was brought up from the village.
Once the food entered our house it had to be stored and then cooked. Bell’s Cottage had a larder with a gray marble slab but no refrigerator. Both custom and climate made this less problematic than it would be nowadays. The school had fridges but no one we knew had one at home, and heat waves were rare; it’s boiling, we complained, when the temperature reached seventy. Just as well, given that all cooking was done on the Esse, a solid black stove, fed with coke twice a day. Esse was a creature of moods, faltering and flaring with the winds; dishes emerged barely cooked, or done to a crisp. If she went out she took a long while to recover. On winter mornings, when ice glazed our windows, inside and out, Janey and I would dress in the small circle of her warmth; I would marvel at Janey’s corset, like a suit of armor, only worn beneath the clothes.
My father, who had spent his entire adult life in schools, was of that generation of men who could barely make a cup of tea and were proud of the fact. A slice of toast was the far frontier of gourmet cooking. He was, of course, in charge of alcoholic beverages. So it was just as well that Janey, in spite of her institutional life, was a competent cook. Only now, as I write this, do I realize that I have no sense of whether she enjoyed cooking. Probably that was not a question that women of her generation asked as three times a day, seven days a week, they set the table; restaurants were a rare treat, takeaway and prepared meals unknown. Janey had learned to cook from her older sister in the Scottish tradition. She baked scones, she made pancakes—not for breakfast but for afternoon tea—about two inches in diameter and eaten cold with butter and raspberry jam. She made meringues (particularly vulnerable to Esse’s whims) and a lovely, light Victoria sponge. Very occasionally she made gingerbread. Afternoon tea was my favorite meal. I could eat as little, but not as much, as I wanted. And the grown-ups tolerated my presence as they sat around the fireplace in the sitting room.
So was the siege one of pleasure? Alas, no. To reach tea, I had to survive the main meal of the day, which at that time was lunch. For lunch, six days a week, Janey cooked and served meat. The concept of vegetarianism was unknown in our world, although, among my father’s books, I did discover a novel by Aldous Huxley that included a vegetarian couple, pitable, pale, sandal-wearing people who tried to feed their dog on oatmeal. For Janey, people who didn’t eat meat were poor. We were not poor. Quod erat demonstrandum. She remarked often, and joyfully, that she had married a gentleman.
My dislike of meat, I should explain, was based on taste rather than principle. I loved animals but accepted unthinkingly the ruthless economy of the farm. As an adult, I was pleased to discover other vegetarians, but I have often felt embarrassed by my own less robust principles. There was no element of sacrifice in my not eating meat, and my aversion was, at least partly, the result of geography. The summer I was eighteen, I went to Paris as an au pair. The city had long emerged from its various sieges and the family I worked for was intrigued by my not eating meat. One evening, Monsieur, a doctor, put on his apron and cooked a piece of veal with butter and mushrooms. The whole family gathered to watch me eat. The meat was delicious, tender, succulent. I could tell from the first mouthful that if I had grown up in France I would have been a carnivore, but somehow it was too late. Years of forcing down lukewarm mutton and stringy beef had made it impossible to reverse my tastes. I tried to explain this in my pedestrian French. The family nodded, not reproachfully but sadly; I was missing out on one of life’s exquisite pleasures.
Of all the rooms at Bell’s Cottage I have the least vivid memories of the kitchen—perhaps because I spent so many unhappy hours there. Like other children I knew, I didn’t eat with my parents. So I sat alone at the table. Only on very special occasions was I allowed to read. With no one to talk to, nothing else to do, I had just one task: to clean my plate. But this often involved hard choices. Should I eat the things I liked—assuming there were any—alone, or was it better to use them as a kind of camouflage for the meat, thereby rendering the former less likeable and the latter only faintly more so? Was it better to struggle through the meat while the nice food cooled, or to eat the nice things first and then approach the dingy slices? While I wrestled with these dilemmas, Janey came and went, correcting my manners and urging me to eat up. I could not leave the table until my plate was empty (India, starving children, the trouble she had gone to on my ungrateful behalf). I remember sitting there for hours, staring at the increasingly cold, increasingly unappetizing food. Probably it was more like half an hour, three-quarters at most.
My only, unreliable, ally in these struggles was the family dog, a sweet-natured border terrier named Speckie. Sometimes she loitered, obligingly, under the table and I could slip her a piece of meat. Too often, alas, she was out in the garden chasing the rabbits that plagued my father’s vegetables. So I sat there, cutting the meat into smaller and smaller pieces, washing down each piece, unchewed, with water. From this point of view mince was obviously the best, mutton and beef the worst—no, liver was the worst. Leopold Bloom’s appreciation of offal is the one part of Ulysses I have never been able to appreciate. On the grimmest days the main course would be preceded by oxtail soup, which I detested, and followed by one of the few desserts I loathed: tapioca.
Matters improved, in some sense, when I started school. I had my main meal there and when I got home had only a sandwich before homework and bed. No one asked about, and I didn’t mention, the school’s inflexible version of Janey’s principles. We had to finish everything on our plates and there was no choice about what that was, so if the main course was, say, potatoes, carrots, and mutton, I ate nothing. Led by our headmistress, we raced through grace: “For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful. Amen.” Then I sat down to play with my cutlery. Was I too young, I wonder, to appreciate the irony? Although the pupils were weighed at the beginning and end of each term, no one noticed that I regularly lost fifteen pounds. I regained the weight during the holidays when, once again, Janey was watching over me.
There are a remarkable number of meals in a week, a month, a year, but eventually I became a teenager and attended a different school, where I could take a packed lunch. I made it myself every evening, exactly the same for five years: a sandwich of pasteurized cheese with Janey’s rhubarb chutney, a cox’s apple, two biscuits, and a small thermos of instant coffee. But every silver cloud has a dark lining. I was now deemed sufficiently mature to eat with my parents in the evening. Or perhaps it was just too much trouble to have me eat separately.
By this time we were living in a farmhouse that we rented for a very modest sum. From the outside the house was attractive, the gray stone covered with Virginia creeper, a sloping garden with a copper beech and mature rhododendrons. Inside I remember one ugly room after another, and the ugliest room was the one where we spent the most time: the living room, which contained the television—a fairly recent acquisition—and the dreaded dining room table. We no longer had an Esse, and Janey produced our meals in the scullery using a little electric stove called a Baby Belling, of which she was very proud: it was reliable, modern, clean. The Baby sat on top of another modern acquisition, a formica-topped table. For power cuts and larger meals there was also a gas ring, fueled by a cylinder. Still, no fridge.
The French writer André Gide claimed that the happiest and the saddest hours of our lives pass at exactly the same rate. I beg to differ. These interminable suppers lasted from seven p.m. to, say, 7:25, and no hours in my life, however anxious, however difficult, however joyful, however sad, have passed more slowly. I was responsible for laying the table; my father sat at the head, Janey and I on either side. She served the food in the kitchen and I carried in the plates. No one said grace. My father’s inevitable compliment—I wish I could remember his exact phrase—took the place of that.
Nor do I remember much of our conversations. Topics that occurred almost nightly would include the weather (Scottish and changeable), the birds that visited the bird feeder, any other flora and fauna, and one or two items from the six o’clock news. Although my father and stepmother were a devoted couple, conversation often faltered. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was my fault, although I do remember doing my best: in Latin we had read about beekeeping, in history the Corn Laws were just about to be repealed. I still cut the meat into tiny pieces and had become expert at making my water last until the final piece was gone. Periodically Janey broached the alarming theory that drinking with meals was bad for the digestion but I always filled the glasses to the brim. They came from my grandfather’s vicarage and I have them still, my twelve, staunch allies. The new family dog was irascible and no help whatsoever.
I ate dinner with my parents most nights for the next four years, and during that time, for reasons that had little to do with food, meals grew steadily harder; a graph plotting conviviality and pleasure would have sloped gently but inexorably from low to lower. My father had retired from teaching and both his appetite and his stock of conversation dwindled. “Oh, Toby,” Janey would say as he set aside his plate unfinished, “I don’t know why I bother.” As for me, I fled the table as soon as I could to do the washing up and return to my homework. I worked on the card table in the parlor, where the wallpaper depicted, over and over, galleons in full sail at sunset. I remember now with some surprise that the phone sat in one corner; it was used so seldom it had to be dusted. Only when my parents were safely in bed did I venture upstairs to my L-shaped room. In the morning I left for school without seeing them. It was no surprise when I won the school medal, beating several girls with happier home lives.
Menu for a Miserable Meal, recipes not provided
Oxtail soup
Boiled potatoes, not new, no butter allowed
Boiled cabbage or mashed turnip—ditto
Slice of mutton with gravy, or lamb perhaps with homemade mint sauce
Tapioca
One glass of water
But I was not always asking for less; sometimes, and not only at tea, I wanted more. Sometimes Janey would buy a little tin of macaroni and cheese from the butcher and that would be my main course. Sometimes she made fish cakes, which I loved and was allowed to eat with ketchup. Sometimes my father’s bachelor friends came to supper and I, still not worthy to eat with the grown-ups when there was company, was allowed to have a cheese sandwich, my second of the day, and later eat the leftover sherry trifle. I used to make it for my North American friends until they discovered cholesterol. On Shrove Tuesdays Janey made crepes, beautifully thin, which we ate with lemon juice and sugar. She was adept at tossing them and I pictured her effortlessly winning one of the pancake races that were mentioned in the newspaper on Ash Wednesday.
That summer in Paris when I was eighteen, one of my duties was to go to the local market armed with a list that Annie, the maid, had written. I still remember the shock of those stalls: the tomatoes were so red and fragrant, the peaches so golden, the mushrooms so smooth and white, the asparagus so elegant. I stared in admiration at the gleaming mounds of butter, the pyramids of eggs, glowing as if lit from within, the rounds of cheese, firm or dimpled. Almost always I bought too much. Annie would tut-tut when she saw how little money and how much produce I brought home. I couldn’t explain that I wanted more, more. Food, I was discovering, could be about pleasure, about affection.
Janey cooked meat and forced me to eat it because she had grown up that way; because she knew of no alternative; because she believed that it was good for me; because it was too much trouble to do anything else. Did she enjoy watching me, day after day, shrink from my plate? I don’t know. But I do know that sometimes, not often, she cooked to please me and that I always thanked her ardently.
I am living in Iowa City this autumn and, for some reason, as I write this essay, I have been dreaming about my father and my stepmother night after night. I never meet them in these dreams; I am always looking. Perhaps these nightly visitations will stop now that I’ve finished this essay; perhaps they won’t. But somehow these dreams have made it clear to me what may not be clear in these pages. If I could have found a snail to carry a message from me to Janey it would have been a very short one: love me.
Menu for a Happy Meal
Tomato soup, tinned—see Andy Warhol
Fish cakes—see recipe below
Peas—freshly picked or tinned, no matter
New potatoes, straight from my father’s garden, with butter and mint
Rhubarb crumble with custard—substitute gooseberries in season
I serve these with mayonnaise to which I’ve added the zest and juice of 2 limes.
1 pound potatoes
1 pound salmon (Janey always used tinned salmon) fish stock, wine, or milk, for poaching the salmon Salt and pepper
4 spring onions
½ red bell pepper
1 teaspoon dill
2 teaspoons capers
2 eggs
seasoned flour (seasoned with salt and pepper)
bread crumbs
vegetable or canola oil, for frying
SERVES 4: Boil the potatoes. While the potatoes are cooking, poach the salmon in fish stock, wine, or milk. Finely chop the spring onions, bell pepper, and dill. Mash the potatoes and season with salt and pepper. Add the spring onions, bell pepper, dill, and capers. Then add the salmon, taking care to keep the fish in flakes. Shape this mixture into cakes. Dip each cake in beaten egg, then in the seasoned flour, in the beaten egg again, and in the bread crumbs. Fry or grill on each side until browned.