If you are a regular visitor to this spot, you know that I drop Laurie Colwin’s name like pick-up sticks. I do not exaggerate when I say she is one of my ultimate food heroes; there are dozens of reasons for this, but one of them is that through her work, I was introduced to other cooks and writers I now consider my heroes, including the woman I consider the finest food writer in the English language, Jane Grigson.
Next March will mark the 15th anniversary of Jane Grigson’s death, an anniversary that fills me with shock and sadness: 15 years without Jane! According to her daughter Sophie, a celebrated cookery writer in her own right, Mrs. Grigson decided shortly before her 60th birthday to “retire,” to work only on projects that interested her, nothing that she felt merely a sense of obligation to do. She would have less than two years to do her heart’s work before losing her life to cancer. In a just universe, she would not only still be with us, feeding her boundless scholarly curiosity and enthusiasm, she would be making money hand over fist, bucketloads of money. She wrote some of my favorite cookbooks, including Good Things, Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book, Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book, The Mushroom Feast, Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery and the wonderful English Food, from which I quote below (hoping once again that I’m not grossly abusing the idea of fair use). If you live in the UK, I recommend heading down to your bookshop and snapping this book up. If you live in the U.S. or elsewhere, it is a slightly more complicated and expensive task to snap this up, but I still encourage you to do it. Those of us who love English food, the food of the “domestic tradition” of which Mrs. Grigson writes, have become used to a certain amount of ribbing from people whose exposure to English food came from pubs and “family” restaurants serving watery, indifferent or outright nasty food, or from cafes and pizza places in tourist-trap neighborhoods serving bowdlerized versions of Continental food and charging through the nose for it. If you have eaten food like this, and you wonder “what in God’s name would make a person eat English food?”, Mrs. Grigson’s recipes will come as a pleasant surprise: comfrey-leaf fritters, sorrel with eggs, Welsh onion and potato cake, roast turkey with parsley and lemon stuffing and giblet gravy, granary bread with walnuts, damson sauce, apricot pie. The recipe for brown bread ice cream is a marvel; I have fed it to people who turn their noses up at the idea of ice cream with whole-wheat bread crumbs, until they taste it, at which point they finish the whole bowl in happy silence.
The quote below is a long one, but I’m reprinting it here because it encapsulates some of the most deeply-held feelings I have about cooking and baking. There is a bit of head-butting in food circles about whether it’s better to emphasize ingredients (i.e. buy the best ingredients you can and do as little as possible to them) or technique (i.e. truly great cookery comes more from what you do to the food than to the food itself). Mrs. Grigson thought that both were crucial, and she worried that we were losing our grip on both. I bought the 1992 hardcover edition of English Food, published by Ebury Press, about two years after it was published. When I read Mrs. Grigson’s introduction, I felt something I had never felt from a cookbook before, and have very rarely felt since: the feeling that good food was worth fussing about, and that fussing about it didn’t make you some cranky old relic, pining for a time and place that never existed; rather, it made you one of a shrinking but passionate population that realized there was glory in those beautiful, grand, ancient domestic dishes, glory worth celebrating and appreciating and studying and just plain considering. She would have made an astonishing teacher. Actually, to me at least, she was.
Since finishing the first edition of this book in 1974, I have come to understand the weakness of the domestic tradition that was once our glory, and to a certain extent—in some homes—still is.
The weakness is a lack of professionalism, the lack in each of us, of a solid grounding in skill and knowledge about food, where it comes from, how it should be prepared. Somehow we do not manage in shops and restaurants to keep high standards that constantly remind the cook at home of what food can be. You have only to spend a day visiting Fauchon or Le Notre in Paris, or some the supermarkets of German and Italian towns, and then spend the next visiting the groceries of Piccadilly to see what I mean. How often when you go to a restaurant for a meal are you delighted to eat something far better than you can make for yourself? To enjoy some aspect of skill that makes you long to get into the kitchen next day, and see if you can come anywhere near it?
The thing is that if you have a solid basis of skill, and can constantly refer to the highest standards, you have a better chance of adapting to the changes of life than if you merely look in magazines and books for new ‘recipes’. The English, like the Americans, are always demanding ‘recipes’. And cookery writers like myself provide them. I am lucky in working mainly for a paper that allows me enough space to hint at the fact that words such as apple, cheese, bread are meaningless: that for good food one needs to understand that a Cox’s Orange Pippin in a pie will give you a quite different result from a Bramley; that for a good cheese sauce Parmesan must be used because English hard cheeses will put too much fat into the sauce before they can achieve the same intensity of flavour; that sliced bread and frozen poultry are not worth buying—ever. I suspect, from my reading, that mass circulation women’s magazines are directed by entirely populist points of view—that one should never suggest that one variety of a fruit will give you something better, because half their readers think they cannot afford it. In a country that spends the amount ours does on hard liquor, gambling, ice cream of a worthless kind, sweets, cakes, biscuits, this is nonsense. If people choose to spend it that way, fair enough. But let them not plead poverty as an excuse for bad food. And let people who provide the awful food not shrug off responsibility by saying, ‘Well, it’s what they want.’
This really is trahison des clercs. ‘Let them have trash’ seems a far worse attitude than ‘Let them eat brioche’. The latter came from a complete lack of understanding; the former comes from a conniving complicity in lower standards by people who would not accept them for themselves and their families at home. To provide worthless things, or things that are worse than they should be, shows what you think of your fellow human beings. In the past food was often adulterated by unscrupulous purveyors—sand in the sugar, dried hawthorn leaves in the tea, water in the milk—but at least this was recognized as a vicious thing to do. Now our food is adulterated and spoilt in ways that are entirely legal, even encouraged. Have you managed to buy farm butter recently? Or a farmyard chicken that has run free?
And these crimes against good food are encouraged by domestic science teachers who think it is fine to teach pupils to make pies with pastry-mix and ready-prepared pie fillings. When criticized, they answer, ‘We have no time; anyway, they enable us to teach children “the manipulative skills”.’ What skills? The skill to turn on the tap and mix the mix to a dough? The skill to operate a tin-opener? The skill to turn on the oven, a foolproof oven, to the correct temperature? Such ‘manipulative skills’ are usually mastered at home before school begins...The development of taste and true knowledge should be the business of secondary school home economics teachers. And if they are not able to do this through bad organization of the curriculum, they should be seeking to change the system, not conniving in it and excusing themselves.
O Yeah! Sing it Loud. Ladies Home Journal and Family Circle are the very roots of evil, don’t I know it? Sitting around for hours at a time in a waiting room with nothin but those things, staring at me. (’Seven Secrets of a Happy Woman’- whuh?).
The crux of this is where my mother and I have issues about cooking. No, I do not believe that you can replace every single ingredient listed with something benignly fat-cholesterol-carbohydrate free. You cannot. And I will not stand by and watch if you must, I say. I found out very early on that picking the right produce and meat is essential. Learning to use my eyes and nose, my sense of taste, my instinct. I didn’t learn to cook until I was 31…