Is There a Nutmeg in the House?

PENGUIN BOOKS

IS THERE A NUTMEG IN THE HOUSE?

Elizabeth David published eight books during her lifetime, from the evocative
Book of Mediterranean Food
, published in ration-bound 1950, to the masterly
English Bread and Yeast Cookery
of 1977 – both books being immensely influential in very different ways. In 1984 she published
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine
, which was the direct forerunner of this book: in it she allowed herself to look back on three decades of popular and successful journalism. Her last eleven years were taken up with the ever-expanding and never-finished project which, after her death in 1992, emerged as the scholarly social history of ice and ices,
Harvest of the Cold Months
.

The subject of two very different biographies and a major television programme, Elizabeth David continues to fascinate both her long-time devotees and also a younger generation discovering a
grand dame
of the past who speaks a language and conveys a message they feel completely at home with. Her writings testify to an inevitable gift of making her many passions, be they loves or hates, come alive.

Jill Norman, who created the Penguin cookery list and went on to publish and eventually write equally distinguished work, was Elizabeth David’s editor and friend for over a quarter of a century, and is now the Literary Trustee of the Estate. She saw
Harvest of the Cold Months
through to posthumous publication, then persuaded many of Elizabeth’s friends and enthusiasts to contribute notes on their favourite pieces for the anthology
South Wind Through the Kitchen
, and has here completed this last of the projects left unfinished on Elizabeth’s death.

Jill Norman is an author in her own right, her most recent book being
The New Penguin Cookery Book
.

Is there a Nutmeg
in the House?

compiled by Jill Norman

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

www.penguin.com

First published by Michael Joseph 2000

Published in Penguin Books 2001

11

Copyright this collection © The Estate of Elizabeth David, 2000

A number of the articles and recipes in this book have been previously published and their sources appear at the end of each article. The year of copyright will be the year of first publication.

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-194972-7

Contents

Introduction by Jill Norman

Kitchens and their Cooks

Elizabeth David’s ‘Dream’ Kitchen

How Publishers like to have their Cake and Eat it

Scoff Gaffe

Stocks and Soups

The Oxo Story

Taking Stock

The Making of Broths and Stocks

Recipes

Yogurt

Salads and First Courses

Summer Greenery

Leaf Salads

Crudités

Recipes

Vegetables

Garlic Presses are Utterly Useless

Tians

Le Rouge et le Noir

Erbaggi Mantovani: Vegetables of Mantua

Home Cooking

The Great English Aphrodisiac

Recipes

Herbs and Spices

The Besprinkling of a Rosemary Branch

Herbs, Fresh and Dried

Green Pepper Berries

Is there a Nutmeg in the House?

Recipes

Relishes of the Renaissance

Italian Fruit Mustards

A True Gentlewoman’s Delight

Eggs

Quiche Lorraine

Hand-made Mayonnaise

Poached Eggs

Recipes

One William Verral

Pasta and Rice

Edible Maccheroni

Do not Despair over Rice

How Versatile is Risotto?

Recipes

Letter to George Elliot

Mistress Margaret Dods

Fish

Kedgeree

Recipes

Two Cooks

Letter to Jack Andrews and John Flint

Meat

Christmas in France

Untraditional Christmas Food

Recipes

John Nott

Poultry and Game

What to do with the Bird?

Recipes

Alexis Soyer

Perfumed Toothpicks and Table-hopping Birds

Bread and Pizza

The Baking of an English Loaf

Recipes

Variations of Pizza

Banketting Stuffe

Desserts

Caramel Desserts

Crème brûlée

In Pescod Time… I went to gather Strawberries

Recipes

Ice Creams and Sorbets

Hunt the Ice Cream

Making Ice Cream

Ice Cream Recipes

Pomegranates Pink

Sorbet Recipes

The Madeira Era

Letter to Gerald Asher

Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

In the early eighties, Elizabeth and I spent many very agreeable hours selecting the articles which appeared in her first anthology,
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine
, published in 1984. The kitchen in her house in Halsey Street may have been crammed with utensils of all sorts, but bookcases and shelves took up every wall in the other rooms and corridors overflowing with her substantial library of cookery, history, travel and reference books, and numerous files and folders of assorted papers. Out came the dusty files of articles written for the
Spectator, Vogue, House & Garden, Wine & Food
or for a wine merchant’s catalogue. Most of this material was new to me: I had not seen the articles when they were first published and knew only from references in Elizabeth’s books that some chapters were based on early journalism.

Our routine was to take a number of files each, select the pieces each found most stimulating, most expressive of the pleasures of good food, and likely still to appeal to readers, and then compare notes. It was one of the most enjoyable editorial tasks I have ever undertaken. The articles were a pleasure to read, and Elizabeth’s reminiscences about the research and writing of many of them often kept us talking until late at night.

In the end we had too much material, and decided to put some pieces aside for a later volume. This, at last, is that volume: during the last years of her life, most of Elizabeth’s energy went into gathering material for
Harvest of the Cold Months
which was finished after her death and published in 1994. By that time mountains of miscellaneous papers had been transferred from Halsey Street to our house, and only much patient sorting by my husband, Paul Breman, made it possible to assess their contents and select further material for this new collection. The articles Elizabeth and I put to one side sixteen years ago are here, but others were published later: scholarly and historical essays appeared in
Petits Propos Culinaires
and Mark Boxer persuaded Elizabeth to do a monthly column for the
Tatler
in the mid-eighties. Here she was free to write on anything that engaged her at the time: the potato as aphrodisiac, useless kitchen equipment like garlic presses, the travesties wrought by British chefs and caterers in the name of pizza or
quiche, the story behind the Oxo cube. Often the basis of a piece would be a review of a recently published book.

Elizabeth always read widely in early cookery books in English, French and Italian and enjoyed trying out their recipes. Many of those which she adapted from well-known English writers have appeared in her English books, but here we have her versions of
Relishes of the Renaissance
from one of her favourite works, the
Opera dell’Arte del Cucinare
of 1570 by Bartolomeo Scappi, cook to Pope Pius V; notes on the ices recorded by Emy in
L’Art de Bien Faire les Glaces d’Office
in 1768; some simple vegetable dishes from Bartolomeo Stefani’s
L’Arte de Ben Cucinare
(1662); and more articles about other writers – William Verral, master of the White Hart Inn at Lewes; John Nott, author of a dictionary of receipts of the late Stuart period; the enigmatic Countess of Kent to whom is attributed
A True Gentlewoman’s Delight
; and the ebullient chef Alexis Soyer, nineteenth-century self-publicist who would have made some of today’s television cooks look like mere amateurs.

In 1965 Elizabeth opened her kitchen shop and during the next few years published privately some booklets of recipes which were sold through the shop.
Syllabubs and Fruit Fools
and
English Potted Meats and Fish Pastes
were published in
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine
; parts of others are reprinted here.

During the twenty-five years I worked with Elizabeth she was constantly experimenting and trying out new dishes, sometimes for a book, sometimes because a food she or one of her friends particularly liked was in season, or because there was a dish she wanted to explore more thoroughly. When she was satisfied with the recipe and it was typed in its final form, it was her custom to give copies, usually signed and dated, to friends. Many subsequently appeared in her later books, but others which did not are included here. The folders from her house yielded many unpublished recipes, and occasionally accompanying articles. During the preparation of
Harvest of the Cold Months,
Elizabeth assembled a file of ice cream and water ice recipes. In the end, her curiosity about the use of ice took over, and the ice cream collection was not used. It appears here for the first time.