It was during the war that I began my culinary adventures.
A real corn tortilla eaten the moment it comes off an earthenware comal set over a wood fire can be ambrosial . . . the Mexican peasant is as exigent about how his corn is prepared for that tortilla as any Frenchman is about his finest soufflé.
I suppose you could say that my sister and I were brought up in a middle-class home—not clearly upper or lower, but somewhere in between—on the outskirts of London. There was never much money around for luxuries, but because my mother was so versatile in the kitchen, despite her full-time teaching job, we ate extremely well from a variety of foods of such good quality that it would be difficult to match them today. I was her biggest fan and always looked forward to her meals: she made even liver and bacon seem like a very special dish, and her braised stuffed veal breast would earn a cordon bleu in my book. Occasionally she would give us money to buy what we fancied for supper—I suppose we were about ten and eleven then—and we would invariably come back with a rich, gloriously unpasteurized Camembert cheese and a hunk of liver sausage.
I remember we used to go to Sainsbury’s in Edgware, where the foods fascinated us. The walls were of gleaming white tile and on each side was a spotless and orderly counter—one with a display of countless cuts of bacon, “green” (salted) or well-smoked, from Denmark or England mostly, next to the cold meats and pies; on the other, huge slabs of butter from Ireland, New Zealand, Denmark, Normandy, and different parts of Britain. I can still smell that freshly churned butter as it was hewn off from the main slabs with ridged wooden pats that were constantly dipped into cold water, and the rough shape was slapped deftly into a small, even block—you could buy the smallest amount. At the end of the store was a display of gunnysacks full of different types of sugar from all over “the Empire”: Barbados, a soft brown; Demerara, fine brown crystals; “pieces,” another lumpy brown; castor, a fine granulated; and loaf sugar for tea. We always had jars of several sugars in the house, each for a different recipe.
When I was very young, I remember those afternoons when a neighbor’s maid would look after me. She knew my passion only too well, and when we returned from a walk with the dog, she always brought back a bag of six warm, dark brown, yeasty doughnuts coated with granulated sugar—nothing like the oversweet cakey doughnuts you find in the United States today. The best part of eating them was getting to the middle and that luscious pocket of real raspberry jam. I would eat five out of the six and thought I had gone to heaven.
At weekends we often had visitors to tea. It seemed that we were forever cutting bread and butter. It was often an exasperating business when the bread was too new and that carefully cut slice would collapse as soon as you cut through to the bottom crust, or the butter was not soft enough to spread evenly. I never liked all these visitors because they disturbed my reading. I was an avid reader and would work my way through the shelves of the library: cowboy stories, romantic novels, the Brontës, Dickens, Thackeray. Whatever the book might be, it was unkindly interrupted by that seemingly endless round of teas.
It was at about that time that I won a scholarship to a fancy girls’ school in Hampstead. My rich godmother helped out and bought my uniform for me. I wish I had made more of my time there. I was shy and giggly and must have been an unbearably irritating student. But I did have my bright moments, topping all in French and Latin, as well as being quite a good painter. While most of the rest of the curriculum fell on deaf ears, I did attend and worked hard in the cooking class. We had a wonderfully equipped kitchen, and it was there that I learned—and have never forgotten—the basic principles of pastry making. I had always watched Mother, who was an accomplished pastry maker, making short crust, flaky, puff, and occasionally choux pastry, but that experience was reinforced in the school kitchen: cold ingredients—and there were no refrigerators then—light handling, and always using a metal implement to stir. I once nearly failed my cooking exam when I was caught using a wooden spoon to mix the pastry dough. We learned all sorts of uninteresting things, too, like how to make tapioca pudding—my bête noire with all those glutinous lumps—white sauce for vegetables, milky puddings, blancmanges, and the like. But they all came in useful because throughout our growing years my sister and I were expected to cook at home: it was part of growing up.
From the moment I turned eighteen in 1941, I spent the years of World War II in the Forestry Corps of the Land Army, which took me to South Wales and Wiltshire. It was then that I began to appreciate the freshness of local country foods: freshly baked breads from peat-fired brick ovens, home-cured hams and local cheeses with strong cider for harvest suppers, and trout and salmon straight out of the small rushing streams a stone’s throw from the door. After some postwar years in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, and London, where I first started to cook with more interest, I began to spend vacations abroad on a shoestring budget. I remember I was fascinated by long, leisurely meals in restaurants facing out onto La Rambla in Barcelona; my first beef tartare and fondue in an Austrian skiing village—although these are not typically Austrian; a “seafood holiday” around the coasts of Normandy and Brittany, before France became so chic to travel in; and Provençal food in the South of France. They were new and great gastronomic adventures to me.
It was during the war that I began my culinary adventures.
About to go swimming, Ontario Lakes, 1955.
I then took myself off to Canada, where eating was a revelation after the stringent rationing of wartime and postwar Britain. For the first time I ate honest, ethnic peasant foods and crusty bread and made use of produce from Mennonite farms. From there I made my first trip around the United States in the fifties. I ate my first so-called Mexican food and drank my first margarita on Los Angeles’s Olvera Street—I thought more kindly of it then than now. I dined at Antoine’s and Galatoire’s in their heyday with the president of the Vieux Carré Commission of New Orleans, and later ate my first West Coast salmon in Vancouver. It was darker in color than I was used to, but meaty and delicious. Everything was new and exciting except for tea in Boston: I arrived there with my head full of images of the Boston Tea Party, longing for a good cup of tea, only to be served with what I was later to know as standard American tea—a slender tea bag hanging limply from a thick mug of lukewarm water.
PPK + DK in their Mexico City apartment, 1958.
My wanderings then took me to the Caribbean in 1957 to attend the first Casals Festival in Puerto Rico, where I lived with a local family and had a chance to try the native dishes at their best. After a brief stopover in the Dominican Republic—which was then still under the subduing heel of Trujillo—I landed in Haiti. One of the first people I met there was Paul Kennedy. He was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times based in Mexico City. It was, as the Mexicans say, “un flechazo”—an arrow, shot to the heart—and I needed no second invitation to join him there.
I was overwhelmed when I first visited the Mexican markets—chiles of all shapes and sizes, wild greens and herbs I had never encountered before, and a profusion of tropical fruits of all hues. It was then that I first began to appreciate that ever-present and haunting smell of fresh tortillas as they puffed up on the comal, and tasted my first spongy white tamales wrapped in corn husks as they were drawn from large improvised steamers at the entranceway of the market. The bakeries, too, were a revelation with their crusty bread rolls (bolillos) and fifty or more varieties of sweet yeast breads that were constantly being replenished fresh from the oven throughout the day.
It was in Mexico that I began to develop new tastes, completely different from any I had experienced before: the piquancy and surprising flavors of the different chiles; the muskiness of the herbs; the sweet density of the tropical fruits, both delicate in flavor and fascinating in texture. No two were alike. Yes, it was the textures above all that stood out, and then the contrasts of flavors that enhanced one another: spices and charred chiles with soused fish, onion wilted in bitter-orange juice with musky oregano, the crunch of salsa mexicana (finely chopped white onion, green chiles, cilantro, and tomato) with raw seafood, pigs’ feet with crisp lightly pickled vegetables, and shredded meats in exciting chile sauces. They immediately became a passion and in no time at all joined the ranks of my personal “soul foods.”
I am constantly asked how to train one’s palate. It would be presumptuous of me to set down any hard-and-fast rules. I can only suggest that one should perhaps start with, for instance, a salad dressing, taking time to taste several different oils, vinegars, mustards, and so on. Mix various blends of them and then try to decide how successfully they complement each other and the salad greens you are going to use. And this is just one simple example.
My manuscript for my first book came back from my editor marked: “Feet, tongue, noses, ears . . . explain your passion for these!” “Textures, flavors, something different,” I responded. After all, how dull to be always eating chicken breast and fillet of beef. Cut a tomato into quarters and another into slices and try both . . . there is a difference in flavor, because of the texture, subtle though it may be. Mashed potatoes are boring; riced potatoes are something else again. For preference I would choose julienned or sliced potatoes, with the skins on, of course, or better still, a good baked potato with a crusty skin—no foil, thank you! Why eat that spongy, tasteless rice—precooked, converted, predigested, whatever—when for a half hour more of cooking time you could have a good chewy plate of brown rice? There are many more instances like these.
Brillat-Savarin devotes several pages of Physiologie du goût (translated as The Philosopher in the Kitchen) to the “Analysis of the Sensation of Taste”; here he is on the process of tasting:
A man who eats a peach, for example, is first of all agreeably impressed by the smell emanating from it; he puts it into his mouth and experiences a sensation of freshness and acidity, which incites him to continue; but it is not until the moment when he swallows and the mouthful passes beneath the nasal channel, that the perfume is revealed to him, completing the sensation that every peach should cause. And finally, it is only after he has swallowed that he passes judgment on the experience, and says to himself, “That was delicious”.
I thought of that passage during one summer in Italy. On a bus trip up to a small hillside vineyard, the road was lined with cherry trees laden with rich, red bunches of cherries. I could not get down from the bus fast enough and with unseemly haste crammed my mouth full of them. The sensation of biting through those taut skins into the juicy flesh beyond was as sensual a culinary experience as any I could remember.