In 1951, boarding the Cunard liner Queen Elizabeth in New York, I found that the enormous cabin reserved for my brother and me was filled with huge trays of canapés, more than the two of us could eat, and our first caviar and goose liver. We were in heaven. But this very grand ship was to teach me more than how to fill my belly with wonderful food. The first morning I found the promenade deck and a deck chair with a card that read “Master J. Tower” in its holder. After tucking me into my blanket, the white-coated steward served me hot beef bouillon in a bone china cup. Too small to see over the rail, I stared at the sky and listened to the hum and vibrations of the ship, allowing myself to be voluptuously enveloped in the perfection of the moment. I remember thinking that whatever my future held, the freedom of this morning without adults, the only supervision from a perfect waiter folding blankets around my feet and providing delicious food, would be what I’d live for. Whatever happened (and it usually did, I thought), I would always have this.
The next area to conquer was the dining room. My brother and I were scheduled for the first dinner seating, my parents the second. Since my brother was embarrassed to sit with me (he wanted Cindy, the beautiful daughter of the Firestone tire heir), I was left alone with the waiter and the immense menu mostly in French. I found the things I knew I liked. Sydney’s Prunier had trained me to know Saumon Fume écossais, Caviare, Jambon de Paris, Homard à la Newburg, and Pommes Chips. The Mock Turtle Soup and Baked Alaska in English were easy, so I had those too. Then I had the Assiette de Petits Fours all to myself. Within days I was bedridden, sick as a dog from greedy and enthusiastic overeating.
Most any calm-sea afternoon before my downfall, I could be found in the dining room waiting for dinner, or waiting to be asked into the kitchens, where I had become something of a mascot. So one evening when I did not appear, my parents were compelled to explain that I was in bed, incapable of looking at more food. That night, there was a knock at my cabin door. In came a dining room waiter—not a cabin steward but my real dining room waiter. I was honored, but then my stomach tightened at the sight of the trolley piled high with domed dishes, among them an enormous silver cloche that obviously held a huge roast beef or goose. My heart sank. I knew if I said, “Please go away and let me die,” I’d insult the kitchen and lose my standing. If I ate any of it, I doubted I’d survive the night.
I should have noticed the sympathetic smile on the waiter’s face and the grin on the steward behind him. I recoiled in horror as the waiter, with a dramatic flourish, removed the dome. My queasy stomach perversely expected fatty meat, but I saw only a small green earthenware pot. My pal from the dining room laughed as he removed the lid to reveal a dish of simply water, lamb, potatoes, a hint of sage, and nothing more. The clean aromas of a Lancashire hot pot wafted across to my bed, and my appetite was immediately restored. The next morning I felt good enough to consume a quantity of smoked salmon, but I never dove blindly into a menu again. The chef had taught me balance, if not moderation.
We left the ship in Southampton in November as I was about to turn eight. England was in the midst of postwar rationing, just like Australia. There were no signs of it, however, as we headed up to London by the Golden Arrow Boat Train, with a wonderfully magical dining car and its afternoon tea of Toasted Teacake, Buttered Toast, Crumpets and Scones, Hovis Bread and Butter, Teatime Biscuits and “Quality Cake.” I was in heaven, although how much so I was only later to learn, when we got to London and found ourselves in the desert of nationally rationed and very scarce food.
It was cold, damp, and thick with fog as we made our way to the Hyde Park Hotel, our rooms looking out on trees, Royal Horse Guards in red and blue, and nannies whose big black strollers could be seen vaguely through the gloom. The Roman hotel had been vast, but these hotel rooms were the biggest I had ever seen. My brother’s and my suite was so large that I don’t remember him there after this. Maybe he was in school. Alone and bored, the city too fog-swathed to venture into by myself, I turned to the only entertainment I knew: room service and the dining room.
During the day I’d run the carts around the corridors with my favorite waiters, Bill and Ben, who would let me accompany them into the rooms of the less uptight guests. They showed me how to carve game birds, open wine bottles, and hold the tops of huge tureens as they ladled out turtle soup or consommé Célestine.
Meanwhile, my first lesson in shopping for perfect ingredients was just a few Knightsbridge blocks away at Harrods’ magnificent Food Hall. I went every day to see the twenty-foot-high, ten-foot-wide display of fish and shellfish, the fish laid out on a sloping, light gray marble slab, so fresh they needed to be cooled only by a mist of water. It must have been all the fish in London. But as food became more readily available in the next two years, sometimes the white belly of a forty-pound turbot would be decorated in a Prince of Wales fleur-de-lis of tiny shrimp, their pink in contrast to the orange coral of sea scallops still in their shells; sometimes it would be covered in an arabesque of fresh herring and lobsters. If the fishing weather had been bad, the display would be all smoked fish, with miles of kippers and mounds of smoked salmon and four-foot-long smoked eels biting down on the tails of whole smoked sturgeon.
Even with rationing, the poultry section had the usual domesticated Aylesbury ducks, if only two. Anything wild and shot was there in abundance. Mallard ducks, pheasants, plovers, teals, wood pigeon, and more I didn’t recognize hanging in rows along the marble hall. I was astonished not so much by the numbers of hares and rabbits as by the fact they were there at all: in Australia, rabbit was known as “bush chicken” and so common a pest that no one ate it. In England in those days, before U.S. battery systems were introduced, chickens were more expensive than beef. They were hardly any of those. The meat section boasted a couple of whole Welsh lambs, a half Scottish beef carcass, and every kind of offal, including calves’ heads scrubbed and white and ready for Tête de Veau, Sauce Gribiche, my favorite lunch at the hotel. My routine was to order something new on the hotel menu and then run to Harrods to see what it looked like raw.
My career as a food tourist was cut short one night when my parents unexpectedly stayed in the hotel for dinner and I, seizing my chance to have some wine, sat down at their table. Bill, Ben, the headwaiter, and the maître d’ all came to greet me. This caught my father’s attention, and he looked at me with new focus. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “I thought you were in school.”
“I am,” I said. “They’re teaching me to slice smoked salmon.”
Admiration and disgust were in a close race on my father’s face, but he knew I had him for the moment.
It says something about the size of our adjoining suites that I had been in residence for two months without my father noticing. It says something about my father, too. He turned to my mother, and I could read the looks on their faces. Each wanted to say to the other, “I thought you put him in school!” The waiters and I were devastated: my reign as Eloise of the Hyde Park Hotel was over.
That evening was about the extent of my parents’ attention span with me, because we remained at the Hyde Park for another month before eventually landing in a very Separate Tables hotel in the Surrey countryside nearer schools. It was another month before they found one. In the meantime, I attempted to reproduce my old routine by befriending the chef and the room service waiters. I failed. The entire staff thought I was a pest. So I turned my attention to the guests, particularly to an ancient English lesbian dressed in impeccable tweed suits. Mrs. Charlesworth let me take her two Russell terriers around the grounds while she played canasta with the beautifully mannered unmarried colonels, reverends, and female gym teachers who lived in the hotel. Then she’d let me finish off her gin and have a puff on her ivory cigarette holder.
Finally, I was sent off to school. I was miserable. For the first time in my life I had to eat bad food. At the hotel the menu had been very English, with very good ingredients, and I learned to love most of them. But unlike life at the Hyde Park Hotel, at school we were on English food rationing coupons. I had two eggs a week, no sugar or desserts, bread fried in bacon fat, and steamed puddings. Never did I see the actual bacon. It was a long way from shipboard lobster Newburg and grand hotel roasted teal duck.
The school food was cooked for hours and covered with sauces reconstituted from powders labeled “brown,” “fish,” or “custard.” It was a diet made for scurvy; in my six years at English private schools, I never saw a piece of fresh fruit.
For that I would have to wait for the weekends. After the country hotel we moved to a manor house near Guildford, forty miles from London. It had a three-acre garden, which included an enormous “kitchen” garden. At last my mother had a kitchen and an orchard soon to be full of fruit.
My mother was a beautiful, passionate, intelligent, and multitalented alcoholic woman, a great natural cook in several cuisines, her favorites being American and Mexican. My memory of her is of the two forces holding sway in her—elegant in Jean Patou suits, pearls, and Cartier diamond brooches pinned to her lapels on her way to those endless parties; or plunked down in old mannish clothes in the garden dirt all day with no gloves, the rings taken off and put in a nearby flowerpot. Food and entertaining were the way my mother communicated. She had never cooked before her marriage, but she was a natural and quickly learned her way around the kitchen. My father’s making light of all her talents save cooking and gardening meant they became her only artistic outlets. Hopeless in most maternal respects, she took food and hospitality very seriously. Parties meant mountains of food, rivers of drinks, and the carpet rolled up at midnight for dancing to tangoes and Pedro Vargas’s Mexican music until dawn.
Rural England in the throes of rationing meant that the only meats and poultry in plentiful supply were locally caught wild things. I would walk down the streets of Guildford ogling all the wild hare and rabbits hanging outside the shops, with little buckets under their noses to catch the blood for “jugged hare,” or lièvre à la royale. In 1953 sugar became available and in 1954 meat and everything else. Now wild game was the luxury because no one could afford gamekeepers anymore. When I was at home, my mother and I would often shop together. She took me to the greengrocer, the butcher, the poulterer, the fishmonger, and, twice a week, the farmers’ market, where one could find fresh herbs and salad greens, honeys, more game, and potatoes dug that morning. Everything was local or regional because it had to be. There were no large industrial farms and no refrigerated transportation, very little gas for anything but local transportation.
At the fishmonger’s they would try to frighten me with tasting a raw oyster, a game I kept up for as long as I could, and in the greengrocer my mother taught me to pick out the best Channel Islands new potatoes and green beans. They had to be small and of the same size so they would cook evenly. The watercress had to shine, the Brussels sprouts had to be tiny and firm, and the lettuces had to have no brown spots. The vegetables and fruits we bought were to supplement our orchard of pears, apples, and quinces, and our vegetable garden of herbs, edible flowers, green “runner” beans, and American crops like squashes, corn, and lima beans, which the gardeners thought were devil’s work and most of the time the weather agreed. There were also strawberries and raspberries (both of which were my project and responsibility), and blackberries, mulberries, and hazelnuts from the wild “common” land where I’d go horseback riding.
On several occasions, when I managed to get myself suspended or expelled from school, my exile to the garden was a haven, not an exile. Even if Mullins, one of the gardeners, did insist on pinching my bottom, I got used to it after a while. This was England, after all.
I cannot think of a more important education from my mother than gardening, and certainly no education I enjoyed as much. There were no big concepts like “organic” or “pesticide-free”—I’m not even sure there were chemicals. It was all manure and plowing under, and double digging, and the dung from our horse stables, and my pet twin goats kept the strawberries and asparagus very happy. “They need to be fed a lot,” my mother would explain, firing my imagination about plants that had to eat before we ate them.
When my mother’s ambition didn’t outlast her martini consumption, and the housekeeper-cook had no idea about the food, I often ended up cooking. There were memorable disasters, like the time we received a shipment from the U.S. embassy of what appeared to be vegetable shortening, which I promptly used to cook eggs. It was only after the house was made uninhabitable by the smell that we all realized I had just fried with pure lanolin meant to keep naval leather in good condition at sea. Her most memorable was a Saturday night when I came home from school, sniffed the air, and said, with dripping contempt, “What are we having, fried cheese?” Her face fell. One whiff from her of the kitchen and she knew the wild pheasant had been hung according to true English tastes, to their desired level of putrefaction. Into the garbage it went and off to the martinis went my mother. I looked in the “larder,” which, since as ever money talked, was full of the usual. On any given day there would be a whole poached wild Scottish salmon, a fresh ham (meaning leg of pork brined and poached), leftover game birds and beef, as well as cakes and pudding made by the housekeeper. I put it all out on the dining room buffet and everyone was happy once the smell of heated freshly rotten game bird had cleared.
My mother was not an alcoholic in the usual sense. She didn’t drink during the day. What she had, I realize in retrospect, was a problem metabolizing alcohol. She’d consume two martinis and it was as if you’d hit her with a sledgehammer. So I was used to taking over the kitchen. But the large summer garden parties were the most dramatic and heart pounding for me. At age fourteen I would find myself with the housekeeper and waiters doing the second half of a meal for a hundred people, carefully removing huge wild Scottish salmon from their poaching liquid, peeling them and decorating them and giving them to waiters to take out to the garden tent. The boiled leg of mutton served cold with sauce gribiche or the grilled steak would have been done in advance, and I had been taught how to carve and slice a few years before, so they were no problem to finish. Nor were the green bean salad vinaigrette, the twenty-odd pounds of strawberries served in a bowl my mother had had made in Venice for that purpose, or the ice cream, usually wild blackberry, that we had taken turns all day churning. The quantities were heart-stopping for me, but our waiters Bill and Ben from the Hyde Park Hotel knew how much to put out and when to replace it.
If alcohol drove a wedge between my mother and the family, it was my one point of connection with my father. I lived for the wine ritual that anchored my one-day weekend, when I’d return from school, determine what was being served at Saturday’s dinner, and discuss with him the appropriate bottles. I would push for my favorite wines, of course, even when they were too expensive for the occasion. He didn’t always appreciate my maneuvers, but on the whole he was pleased by my performance as his private sommelier, and proud that I would accompany my mother to Berry Brothers in St. James’s (London) to taste and pick out the English bottlings of “Claret” or “Pomerol” house wines for the year.
Retrieving the bottles was nonetheless fraught. The four-hundred-year-old cellar was cavernous, with five or six rooms, and I had to descend a long, gray stone staircase in darkness before I got to the ten-watt gloom. I had seen all the Hammer company’s horror films, so I had nightmares about those rooms throughout my teens. Yet I made the white-knuckled descent, because of what was ahead of me: choosing, decanting, tasting, and finally drinking them with dinner. When there was no company, we served only red wine, since my father considered white “effeminate” and champagne “frivolous.” Perhaps that’s why I adore both.
In the summer of 1958 my mother left for the United States to put my brother in Brown University. My father decided to stay in London and he and I were alone in our Knightsbridge mews flat. By that time I was sixteen, so my parents felt I could hold down a kitchen of my own. It was my job to cook. I had Harrods to shop in, and food was plentiful, even though I blew the week’s budget the first day. The first dinner in the flat, one for my father and his Australian mistress, was a success despite melting the plastic colander over boiling water while keeping the rice warm to go with my Veal Marengo.
My aunt in Washington wrote constantly with cooking advice: “I have an easy recipe: Take a cut-up bird—chicken, grouse, or what have you (even rabbit)—wipe it dry and clean, and brown it in butter (salt and pepper) in a pan on top of stove. When brown pour heavy cream over it, put a tight lid on pan and turn heat low, and let cook half an hour. Serve with wide noodles in butter and a green salad.” When she told me about whole Mediterranean sea bass baked in the oven and I cooked it, my father was aghast at the expense, which only mounted as more recipes arrived: “the first and second ribs of beef,” “wild mushrooms with potatoes,” “an honest to goodness Indian lobster curry,” “coquilles” in their shells, and “last but not least, chicken livers in 100-year-old Madeira.”
Before the summer was out my aunt and uncle decided to send me Paris to eat, learn, and buy them truffles. They told me which restaurant, and my thank-you note to them says I had “six escargots, a croustade de crabe, salade verte, gateau des pêches (de la maison), and café.” The crab was in a white wine sauce (very light) and served on a vol-au-vent. “I don’t usually like them, but this one was exceptional. The food was good and down-to-earth! So many restaurants have very fancy food that tastes of nothing but money.”
Money was a problem if you were a young glutton, even a subsidized one. I wrote of passing Fauchon’s, “which makes Fortnum & Mason look ill. Fresh truffles, mangoes, mountains of chocolate truffles, cakes enough to make you smash the windows to get at them. The only trouble was it reeked of money, so I was forced to stay out—just as well, I suppose.” But my father was just as indulgent when it involved teaching by traveling. In 1956 he sent my brother and me alone to California and back, traveling on the French ship Liberté from Southampton to New York, the 20th Century Limited crack train from New York to Chicago, and from there the California Zephyr to San Francisco, stopping in the Rockies to pick up wild trout for the dining car.
Such indulgences could not last, and I was soon back in boarding school, where I finally complained to the headmaster about the food. For breakfast there was white bread, margarine, and cheap marmalade; for lunch, typically shepherd’s pie and bread pudding with powdered custard sauce; and for the evening meal a repetition of breakfast. I was surprised when he offered a challenge instead of the usual caning for speaking out. “Cook a meal that could be reproduced, on a given budget, for the students.” I enlisted a boyfriend and cooked veal and beef meat loaf with fresh peas and little white onions, watercress salad, and an upside-down apple tart served with cheddar. I was applauded—and the boardinghouse food stayed the same.
But nothing of English food and ingredients had prepared me for the weird swill dished out at the Connecticut prep school Loomis, to which I moved for two years starting in 1959: chipped beef in flour sauce on a rusk that would choke a giant, and lime Jell-O with marshmallow and bacon. I thought of a hunger strike but decided instead on illegal trips to town for the newly discovered luxury of hamburgers and malted milk shakes. Threats to expel me didn’t work (been there, done that), even after I tried to run away to Cuba anyway and join Che and the revolution. I was made head of the student committee on food, a position that meant nothing in the face of a phalanx of dietitians drumming up Jell-O. For the headmaster, it was an admirable act of revenge.