‘I’m considered to be quite a successful cook!’: an extract from Harriet Baker’s ‘Rural Hours’
Posted by Harriet Baker
Harriet Baker has been awarded this year’s Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award for her debut Rural Hours, a work of literary criticism exploring the country lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann. We were delighted to host Baker at the shop to launch the book last April; you can listen back to her conversation with Lauren Elkin in our podcast here. Below, read an extract from the book, in which Baker recounts Sylvia Townsend Warner’s experiments in cookery.
‘I love anything to do with cooking,’ Sylvia Townsend Warner told the journalist Louise Morgan in 1930 in an interview for Everyman magazine. ‘I’m considered to be quite a successful cook!’ In her flat on Inverness Terrace, where she had first learned the habit of living trimly off a small salary, she had recorded recipes in a large cream-coloured canvas notebook; now, at her cottage in the Dorset village of Chaldon, it flourished with country ingredients. She contrived salads – seakale with tomato, apple and watercress with vinegar cream – and, when her lover, Valentine Ackland, had been handy with her rifle, casseroles – hare with prunes, pickled walnuts and marmite, or pigeon with bacon dripping. She made sandwiches with hard-boiled eggs and combinations of garden herbs, leek and onion pie, vinegar loaf, sweet and sour apples, and Boodle cake. She cooked in rhythm with the seasons, taking pride in her calendar of jams and pickles: marmalade on steaming midwinter mornings; jams from the glut of summer fruits; and, in the autumn, her mother’s marrow chutney, gooseberry vinegar and chestnut sauce for the store cupboard. Occasionally, she appended a recipe with a note on what to drink, and in her notebook listed the wines stored at the cottage – eighteen half-bottles of Harvey’s Margaux, two bottles of Pichon Longueville, six bottles of shooting sherry, and a bottle of sparkling burgundy which she opened to celebrate the publication of her long poem, Opus 7, in March 1931. Even the simplest meals deserved a good drink.
In the kitchen, Sylvia’s inclination towards frugality infuriated Valentine, who was prone to treats and over-spending. ‘I suppose in time I shall learn not to make this housewifely fuss over small crusts of differences,’ Sylvia wrote in her diary after an argument. ‘It is just like “my God, I must not waste that half tomato—” which is so maddening to her.’ Her compulsion to use and reuse was both an effort to save money, but it was also a facet of her increasingly anti-waste ethic. She was also an excellent cook, and could find a purpose for everything. A Sunday chicken saw its way through the week – boiled with rice on Wednesday, made into a mousse on Friday – and vegetable scraps were thrown into a stout aluminium pot. Wooden spoon in one hand, pen in the other, Sylvia was warming to her theme. Soon, she began to write up her domestic experiments in a series of brisk, authoritative articles for The Countryman, offering advice on cooking and housekeeping as if she were a country Mrs Beeton. ‘With a stock-pot I can snap my fingers at tinned soups and meat extracts,’ she wrote in one such dispatch. ‘At its richest, it gives me a consommé; at its most exhausted, the basis of a mulligatawny.’ She advised her reader to be wary of the pot turning sour from steam dripping back into it from the lid, and to flavour the contents using a bouquet of garden herbs. These were essential for the cottage cook. In a bed visible from her own kitchen door, Sylvia had planted sage, mint, marjoram, tansy, chives, parsley, thyme, tarragon, hyssop, basil, savoury, southernwood, rosemary and balm, and now she studied their flavours, recommending the more subtle and unusual. ‘Such combinations as chives and nasturtiums, tansy and balm, thyme and southernwood, are as exquisite as the usual mess of dried herbs is dreary,’ she counselled.
In 1933, while she was living at Miss Green, Sylvia outlined an idea for a book on cooking. She was writing an article called ‘The Kitchen Year’ for Everyman, in which she playfully compared the art of plain cooking to religion – ‘It is not for nothing, surely, that the chef’s cap rises as high as the mitre, that an apron (and we may treat the difference between white linen and black grosgrain as immaterial) girds alike the loins of the cook and the bishop’ – and was corresponding once more with Morgan, now the magazine’s editor. ‘What would please me most would be for you to […] carry on your crusade for cookery as an intellectual thing,’ she wrote to Morgan, ‘and commission me to do a series of superior Counsels from the Kitchen: say, six, one a month.’ Suddenly ‘enamoured of this idea’, she drew up a list of chapters for the book, which was to be called ‘The Devil Sent the Cook’:
1. Fish ransomed from the frying-pan.
2. Salads.
3. Unusual Breakfasts.
4. Other herbs than parsley.
5. Sauces and flavours.
6. Traditional and country-side recipes.
Her motivation was partly educational. She had already condemned tinned foods in ‘The Kitchen Year’ and now took aim at idle and unimaginative modern cooking. ‘Think what it would be,’ she wrote to Morgan, ‘to teach only one per thousand of our population how to make a salad that is a not a green porridge soaked with vinegar and invariably trimmed with tomato and hard-boiled egg.’ But though the book was to be instructive, it would also offer a vision of rural cooking. It would be a celebration of food’s pleasures and possibilities, and of the home cook – in starched white linens, a bishop in her own kitchen – as creator and artist. In a handwritten note, Sylvia assured Morgan that ‘Each article [would] begin with general principles, essential Don’ts (usually done), and […] go on to original recipes; except the last,’ she added ironically, ‘and they, I promise, shall be authentic and unheard-of.’
The ‘authentic’ here is knowing: she was wary of rural caricatures. In ‘Folk Cookery’, a short story published in the New Yorker in 1936, Sylvia satirised a village Ladies’ Committee dispatched into the community to gather recipes for a book on Old English cookery. Returning from the cottages with handed-down recipes for partridge and port wine stew, buttery turnips, and quinces baked with Double Gloucester and nutmeg, the Committee is ruffled by the villagers’ culinary sophistication, and rules in favour of the humbler bramble-tip cordial, cowslip pie and candied hemlock. But though the story reveals Sylvia’s contempt for the sentimentalising of rural domestic life, she wasn’t immune to the charms of folksy wisdom. Her own cookery book included what she would later describe as ‘homely truths’, such concoctions as stewed turnip for a tickly cough, or bergamot oil to prevent mildew from ruining books.
Extracted from Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann by Harriet Baker, published by Penguin Books.
