The years after the first world war witnessed a flowering in people's appreciation of food, writes a food historian, and the emergence of a new style of cookbook as a result.
Eggs with Marigolds, white strawberry jam, an 'ostrich' egg
manufactured in a pig's bladder… These may sound like inventions from the
fertile imagination of Heston Blumenthal (he of the snail porridge and bacon caramel), but they actually date from 1925, from a work with a deceptively unassuming title: The Gentle Art of Cookery. Written by Mrs CF (Hilda) Leyel, with the help of her assistant Miss Olga Hartley, this little book was part
of a striking upheaval in attitudes to food and cooking between the wars.
When food rationing ended in 1921, a new sort of cookbook appeared. Elegant, witty and allusive, printed in refined type faces and laid out with wide margins on thick, creamy paper, they resembled slim volumes of verse rather than the hefty manuals of prewar years. Written by society hostesses and famous restaurateurs, they had a new message: food and its preparation are stylish. They were part of an explosion of food writing, which saw scores of new cookbooks and the launch of more than 60 women's magazines.
There are two key reasons for this intense
new interest in domestic life, and in cookery in particular. The first is that relief at the ending of the war meant that people began to focus on
pleasure. New music, dance crazes, gramophones, cocktail parties, the cinema, motoring jaunts: all provided outlets for a culture giddy with release, and the idea that food could be a pleasurable indulgence formed part of this new spirit. The second is the gradual disappearance of servants. In the increasingly democratic
climate that followed the war, the working classes were no longer so willing to accept service as their lot, and the upper and middle classes were no longer so able to pay for it. The result was that a generation of middle-class women needed to be taught how to cook, and perhaps just as importantly, to be taught to want to cook.
Hilda Leyel's book admirably fulfilled both purposes, providing a level of detail in its instructions that was unusual among her
contemporaries, while inspiring her readers with its daring recipe selection. One such reader was Elizabeth David, who wondered whether she'd have learned to cook at all "if I had been given a routine Mrs Beeton to learn from, instead of the romantic Mrs Leyel with her rather wild, imagination-catching recipes".
Wild they certainly were, with a chapter called 'Dishes from the Arabian Nights', another on 'The Alchemist's Cupboard', and a startlingly original chapter of 'Flower Recipes', in which she revives the medieval and Tudor use of flowers for food with recipes such as cowslip pudding, ice cream of roses, nasturtium salad, and marmalade of violets.
The book was intensely modern in its focus on vegetables. Six chapters are devoted to vegetables, pulses, nuts and grains, as against the paltry one Mrs Beeton had allowed them. Old tastes are revived and new ones inculcated, with recipes for pre-industrial favourites like salsify and sorrel, and suggestions that Britons should use chestnuts
and mushrooms like their European neighbours.
Travel became more possible and affordable in these years, resulting in encounters – for the rich at least – with the cooking of Spain, France, Italy, Scandinavia and even Russia. Writers like Marcel Boulestin, Mrs Philip Martineau and Lady Jekyll popularised the staple foods of southern Europe, insisting on their economy, simplicity and charm in contrast to the stultifying complexities of haute cuisine. Perhaps due to the association of Europe's cuisine bourgeoise with the Bloomsbury group, who were the first to embrace it in Britain, this food was seen as excitingly bohemian. To cook such exotic and vibrantly flavoured food allowed the work-weary housewife to imagine herself an artist. So writers strove to go further, to outdo each other with ever-more exotic curiosities.
Mrs Leyel is no exception: her 'Arabian Nights' chapter toys shamelessly with the wind-swept, Rudolph Valentino fantasy of sand and sheikhs.
Anyone reading the cookbooks of the interwar years today will be struck by how modern they are. There are recipes for polenta and gnocchi, vegetables like aubergines, artichokes and avocados appear regularly, and foods we think of as 1980s' clichés, such as raspberry vinegar and chocolate mousse cake, crop up in books published half a century earlier.
So why did they disappear, these foods, and the lively,
questing culinary culture that
produced them? The answer lies with the second world war. The
food-control measures adopted from the start of the conflict were hugely successful, ensuring the population remained adequately nourished for the duration of the war. But the war fundamentally changed our approach to
cooking, reducing food to fuel, encouraging substitutions and
random invention (carrots instead of apricots, ground rice instead of fish), and cutting the recipe loose from any cultural context.
It took a long time for British food to recover from the habits of parsimony and improvisation that were so necessary during the war years, and it is only in the past two decades that it has again attained the levels of assurance and sophistication reached in the years between the wars. To
understand how elegant and innovatory British food can be, perhaps we should turn again to the work of Mrs Leyel and her contemporaries.
Nicola's book, 'Culinary Pleasures', is published by Faber & Faber on 3 November, priced £16.99. 'The Gentle Art of Cookery' has been republished by Kegan Paul, priced £85. You can order a copy by calling 01235 465500, by contacting a second-hand cookbook specialist such as Cooking the Books (tel 01242 577908).