Iris Murdoch - The Sea, the Sea

I wonder if I shall ever write my Charles Arrowby Four Minute Cookbook ? The ‘four minutes’ of course refer to the active time of preparation, and do not include unsupervised cooking time. I have looked at several so-called ‘short order’ cookery books, but these works tend to deceive, their ‘fifteen minutes’ really in practice means thirty, and they contain instructions such as ‘make a light batter’. The sturdy honest persons to whom my book would be addressed would not necessarily be able to make a light batter or even to know what it was. But they would be hedonists. In food and drink, as in many (not all) other matters, simple joys are best, as any intelligent self-lover knows. Sidney Ashe once offered to initiate me into the pleasures of vintage wine. I refused with scorn. Sidney hates ordinary wine and is unhappy unless he is drinking some expensive stuff with a date on it. Why wantonly destroy one’s palate for cheap wine? (And by that I do not of course mean the brew that tastes of bananas.) One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better. Life in the theatre often precluded serious meals and I have not always in the past been able to eat slowly, but I have certainly learnt how to cook quickly. Of course my methods (especially a liberal use of the tin opener) may scandalize fools, and the various people (mainly the girls: Jeanne, Doris, Rosemary, Lizzie) who urged me to publish my recipes did so with an air of amused condescension. Your name will sell the book, they tactlessly insisted. ‘Charles’s meals are just picnics’, Rita Gibbons once remarked. Yes, good, even great, picnics. And let me say here that of course my guests always sit squarely at tables, never balance plates on their knees, and always have proper table napkins, never paper ones.

Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies. I wonder whence I derived my felicitous gastronomic intelligence? A thrifty childhood gave me a horror of wasted food. I thoroughly enjoyed the modest fare we had at home. My mother was a ‘good plain cook’, but she lacked the inspired simplicity which is for me the essence of good eating. I think my illumination came, like that of Saint Augustine, from a disgust with excesses. When I was a young director I was idiotic and conventional enough to think that I had to entertain people at well-known restaurants. It gradually became clear to me that guzzling large quantities of expensive, pretentious, often mediocre food in public places was not only immoral, unhealthy and unaesthetic, but also unpleasurable. Later my guests were offered simple joys chez moi. What is more delicious than fresh hot buttered toast, with or without the addition of bloater paste? Or plain boiled onions with a little cold corned beef if desired? And well-made porridge with brown sugar and cream is a dish fit for a king. Even then some people, so sadly corrupt was their taste, took my intelligent hedonism for an affected eccentricity, a mere gimmick. ( Wind in the Willows food a journalist called it.) And some were actually offended.

However, it may be that what really made me see through the false mythology of haute cuisine was not so much restaurants as dinner parties. I have long, and usually vainly, tried to persuade my friends not to cook grandly. The waste of time alone is an absurdity; though I suppose it is true that some unfortunate women have nothing to do but cook. There is also the illusion that very elaborate cooking is more ‘creative’ than simple cooking. Of course (let me make it clear) I am not a barbarian. French country food, such as one can still occasionally find in that blessed land, is very good; but its goodness belongs to a tradition and an instinct which cannot be aped. The pretentious English hostess not only mistakes elaboration and ritual for virtue; she is also very often exercising her deluded art for the benefit of those who, though they would certainly not admit it, do not really enjoy food at all. Most of my friends in the theatre were usually so sozzled when they came to eat a serious meal that they had no appetite and in any case scarcely knew what was set before them. Why spend nearly all day preparing food for people who eat it (or rather toy with it and leave it) in this condition? A serious eater is a moderate drinker. Food is also spoilt at dinner parties by enforced conversation. One’s best hope is to get into one of those ‘holes’ where one’s two neighbours are eagerly engaged elsewhere, so that one can concentrate upon one’s plate. No, I am no friend to these ‘formal’ scenes which often have more to do with vanity and prestige and a mistaken sense of social ‘propriety’ than with the true instincts of hospitality. Haute cuisine even inhibits hospitality, since those who cannot or will not practise it hesitate to invite its devotees for fear of seeming rude or a failure. Food is best eaten among friends who are unmoved by such ‘social considerations’, or of course best of all alone. I hate the falsity of ‘grand’ dinner parties where, amid much kissing, there is the appearance of intimacy where there is really none.

After this tirade it looks as if the description of the house will have to wait until another day. I might add here that (as will already be evident) I am not a vegetarian. In fact I eat very little meat, and hold in horror the ‘steak house carnivore’. But there are certain items (such as anchovy paste, liver, sausages, fish) which hold as it were strategic positions in my diet, and which I should be sorry to do without; here hedonism triumphs over a peevish baffled moral sense. Perhaps I ought to give up eating meat, but by now, when the argument has gone on so long, I doubt if I ever will.

I will now describe the house. It is called Shruff End. End, yes: it is perched upon a small promontory, not exactly a peninsula, and stands indeed upon the very rocks themselves. What madman built it? The date would be perhaps nineteen ten. But why ‘Shruff’? I have asked two of my (so far) very few local informants, the shop lady and the landlord of the village pub, and they both said, but could give no further account of the matter, that ‘shruff’ means ‘black’. (Shruff: schwarz? most unlikely.) I cannot yet discover anything about the history of the house. I never met the person, described as an old lady, a Mrs Chorney, from whom I bought it. The price was not low, and I was also compelled to purchase the almost worthless furniture and fittings. Considered as a house Shruff End has obvious disadvantages which I was not slow to point out to the house agent. It is mysteriously damp and the situation is exposed and isolated. There is running water and main drainage, thank God (I have lived without these in America), but no electricity and no heating system. Cooking is by calor gas. There are also some oddities of construction which I will describe in due course. The agent, smiling, could see I loved the place and the disadvantages meant nothing. ‘It is unique, sir,’ he said. Yes it is.

The position is inspiring, though as my village ‘neighbours’ take pleasure in telling me, it will be cold and stormy in winter time. Little do they realise how ardently I look forward to those storms, when the wild waves will beat at my very door! Since I have been here (now a matter of a few weeks) the weather has been quite distressingly calm. Yesterday the sea was so motionlessly smooth that it supported a whole flotilla of blue flies which seemed actually to crawl upon the surface tension. From the upper seaward windows (where I am sitting at this moment) the view is total sea, unless one peers down to glimpse the rocks below. From the lower windows, however, the sea is invisible and one sees only the coastal rocks, elephantine in size and shape, which surround the house. From the back door, which is the door of the kitchen, one emerges onto the little rock-surrounded ‘lawn’ of cactus-grass and thyme. This I shall leave to nature. I am in any case no gardener. (This is the first land which I have ever owned.) Nature, I note, has here provided me with a rocky seat, upon which I put cushions, and a rocky trough beside it, into which I put the pretty stones which I am collecting; so that one can sit upon the seat and examine the stones.