In most instances, the words “I can’t cook” are a lie: the person saying them is perfectly able in the kitchen, and just being needy, excessively modest or anxious (maybe their sauce split before you arrived). But sometimes, alas, the phrase is just a simple statement of fact. At the tail end of the 1970s, for instance, the editor of a book called Writers’ Favourite Recipes asked the novelist Beryl Bainbridge what she liked to make for supper after a long day at the typewriter. Bainbridge carefully prefaced what she had to tell him with the phrase (used by her children) “I am a very bad cooker”, but the editor was not – woe! – to be put off. Her recipe for Instant Mince was indeed included in the collection, for all that it was quite obviously a crime not only against mince, but also against potatoes, tinned tomatoes, vinegar, and any human beings who might end up having to eat it (in case you’re wondering, the four ingredients are combined and boiled vigorously until the pan is “almost dry”).
For a while, of course, Beryl’s Instant Mince was pretty much lost to posterity; cook books go out of print, and with them the culinary outrages of the past (“spoon the instant mince on to [buttered, white] bread and cover with HP sauce, also raw onion rings”). But now, like some horrible alien in a movie, it’s back, for another editor has seen fit to gather it into a new collection of author’s recipes titled Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake, where it lurks next to several other equally unappetising confections: Robert Graves’s Mock Anchovy Pate, Norman Mailer’s Stuffed Mushrooms, Rebecca West’s Dutch Onion Crisps. As you may tell, this is not a book for the easily-made-queasy, and though I am usually implacably opposed to trigger warnings, I think it should have come with one: This Book Includes Scenes Featuring Large Quantities of Margarine and Fillet of Beef Served With Bananas. Some Readers May Find It Distressing.
after newsletter promotion
The beef and bananas – how the stomach resists even the typing of this combination! – is the creation of Noel Streatfeild, the author of Ballet Shoes and another of those who baldly admits to being “a very bad cook”. Streatfeild insists that she has practised her “Filets de Boeuf aux Bananas” (NB the French here is a clever but ultimately ineffective smokescreen) and that she got the recipe from an acquaintance in whose house she was staying. But if I tell you that it comprises steak served with bananas that have been fried in breadcrumbs and an egg sauce that is seasoned with horseradish, you’ll understand immediately that Malcolm Gladwell’s principles of success do not apply here. You could spend 10,000 hours perfecting this dish, and it would still be fit only for the dustbin – though I would still be marginally more inclined to eat it than Graves’s Pate, which is made from minced fish, egg and steamed jellyfish. I believe him when he notes that “nobody at the table will know what they are eating”.
It’s not all bad. The book does include the odd recipe from the famously sybaritic and greedy, and even from a couple of writers noted for their abilities as cooks. You probably can’t go wrong with Ian Fleming’s scrambled eggs (whips to the ready), or Rosamond Lehmann’s extravagant variation on shepherd’s pie (the secret ingredient is orange peel). Kingsley Amis offers us his fromage à la crème, a perfect combination of egg whites, cream cheese, cream and sugar, though one knows perfectly well that he probably never actually made it for himself – and sure enough, a mere few pages later, up pops his longsuffering ex-wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard, whose devils on horseback come from the cookbook she wrote with the restaurant critic Fay Maschler (a brilliant volume that I own and use often).
Nora Ephron is here, and Laurie Colwin: two fabulous American novelist-cooks, neither one of whom, so far as I know, was inclined to make a cake using canned soup as Sylvia Plath did (she got the recipe from her mother, Aurelia, which casts a lot of the more bloody poetry in a new light, I think – and I intend to start a PhD on this tomorrow). But in the end, we’re forced to conclude two things on closing this (OK, I’ll admit it) very fun little book. First, that famous writers are no better than the rest of us when it comes to cooking, and often a good deal worse; at present, I’m finding Rebecca West’s onion-crisp-things to be more indelible even than her journalism. Second, that distracted as they are by plot and character, they may be a danger both to themselves and to other people in the kitchen. Margery Allingham wrote some very fine detective stories, but her insistence that her salad cream will last for a year is suspicious-making to put it lightly.