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Karen Robinson, Katherine Whitehorn - Slightly Foxed Issue 24

Six Things to Do with Cabbage

Transport yourself, dear reader, to the British urban landscape of Larkin’s mythical moment, ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP’. You are young, educated, ambitious, and have moved, alone, to a big city – London, even – eager for the experiences and opportunities your newly acquired adult status and independence dangle tantalizingly before you. Yet as you grapple with the baffling new exigencies of the lowest rungs of the career ladder, you also find yourself lodged in the lowliest form of metropolitan habitation: the bedsitter. You long for excitement and sophistication, but your life looks, feels and very probably smells like a cross between Lucky Jim and The L-Shaped Room.

And you are hungry. Not just metaphorically hungry for life, love, power and glory – you need actual food, to comfort your loneliness, to ease and warm social contact, to nourish the inner man or woman, to warm the heart and fill the belly, to set you up for the life you want. And you have to provide it – buy it, store it, peel it, skin it, fillet it, chop it, cook it, serve it – yourself. ‘Convenience foods’ barely exist, and only in shops that shut at tea-time. Fast food is fish and chips.

But help is at hand in this cheerless and cash-strapped struggle. Never mind sexual intercourse – which, according to Larkin’s teasing line, ‘began in 1963’ – though it might have been a consolation. That year also saw the Penguin paperback publication of Katharine Whitehorn’s Cooking in a Bedsitter, which turned the 1961 McGibbon and Kee hardback with the unpromising title of Kitchen in the Corner into a best-selling handbook for more than one generation of fledgling adults.

It is sensible, practical, brisk, funny and a little bit bossy – but its true genius, whi

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Transport yourself, dear reader, to the British urban landscape of Larkin’s mythical moment, ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP’. You are young, educated, ambitious, and have moved, alone, to a big city – London, even – eager for the experiences and opportunities your newly acquired adult status and independence dangle tantalizingly before you. Yet as you grapple with the baffling new exigencies of the lowest rungs of the career ladder, you also find yourself lodged in the lowliest form of metropolitan habitation: the bedsitter. You long for excitement and sophistication, but your life looks, feels and very probably smells like a cross between Lucky Jim and The L-Shaped Room.

And you are hungry. Not just metaphorically hungry for life, love, power and glory – you need actual food, to comfort your loneliness, to ease and warm social contact, to nourish the inner man or woman, to warm the heart and fill the belly, to set you up for the life you want. And you have to provide it – buy it, store it, peel it, skin it, fillet it, chop it, cook it, serve it – yourself. ‘Convenience foods’ barely exist, and only in shops that shut at tea-time. Fast food is fish and chips. But help is at hand in this cheerless and cash-strapped struggle. Never mind sexual intercourse – which, according to Larkin’s teasing line, ‘began in 1963’ – though it might have been a consolation. That year also saw the Penguin paperback publication of Katharine Whitehorn’s Cooking in a Bedsitter, which turned the 1961 McGibbon and Kee hardback with the unpromising title of Kitchen in the Corner into a best-selling handbook for more than one generation of fledgling adults. It is sensible, practical, brisk, funny and a little bit bossy – but its true genius, which infuses the merely instructional, lies in its recognition that its readers are real people, with hopes and dreams that transcend their surroundings and their scant culinary experience. The sordid practicalities of cooking in limited space, with minimal equipment, are tackled without euphemism: get a slop bucket as you won’t have easy access to a sink; newspaper is floor covering, splash mat and rubbish-wrapper; scrounge an offcut of Formica or Warerite (whatever that was) to use as a work surface – though you’ll find you have to stand it on the floor. But though it might just be a bedsitter with a single gas ring (the only microwave oven in the world at that time was probably something the size of a garden shed and kept in a special lead-lined room at NASA), that doesn’t mean you can’t make yourself a supper of chicken-liver risotto in thirty-five minutes, or have people round for a dinner of stuffed tomatoes and chicken Marengo. Though you should ask the guests to bring chocolates for pudding. The reasons why you should make all this effort are examined as closely as the methods: there’s a whole section called ‘Cooking to Impress’, which acknowledges that the person you want to impress is probably a girl – or a man – with the ultimate goal of a bit of Larkin about. So hide the squalid accoutrements of everyday life, ‘Nescafé, bottled ketchup and evaporated milk . . . in a suitcase under the bed. . . or leave them with a neighbour if you can be sure of getting them back’. And do ‘nothing as crude as putting a red sock over the light bulb to give it a romantic glow’. It probably seemed quite racy then: it has an air of disarming unworldliness now. What all this says about the accepted norms of life then – quite shockingly primitive to twenty-first century youth – makes this worth reading now as rich social history. And the selection of recipes is an eloquent evocation of the pinnacles and limits of what was available to those still a few decades from being called ‘foodies’. No pesto, no rocket, no Thai curry, no sushi, no hummus, no lemongrass, no smoothies, no muesli. And my source here is the 1977 edition, which had been revised in 1974. Yogurt (‘yoghourt’) does get a look-in, cooked with aubergines and lamb, but chillies are represented by an occasional solitary pinch of powdered stuff, and herbs and spices feature as odd sprinklings from packets. Risottos are to be made with, simply, ‘rice’ – today’s mandatory Arborio not specified, presumably because you couldn’t get it. And the necessary simplicity of the recipes does make you wonder if today’s superstar chefs don’t just complicate things for the sake of filling out the pages of their lavish cookbooks. (Cooking in a bedsitter must be achieved without the aid of glossy photos or indeed any kind of illustration.) There are three things to do with rhubarb, six with cabbage and five with liver, one involving dumplings. Enough newspaper-covered floor space, a sharp knife and ‘vertical cooking’, one dish perched above another on the solitary gas ring, are all you need to create sustaining fare with a taste of home. There’s a lot of cheap meat all round, and we are in a world where food intolerances and allergies, organic produce, low-fat spreads, vegetarianism, fair trade, humane farming, e-numbers and all the other modern-day accompaniments to the food we consume are simply, as they didn’t say then, not an issue. Neither does booze loom large, and although Whitehorn notes that the chapter on drink ‘was contributed by a man’, I can’t help thinking the line that red wine goes with red meat, white wine goes with fish and ‘more to the point, white wine goes with carpets’ is her own. The advice on buying ‘medium’ sherry for pre-dinner drinks, and that ‘there is nothing against having beer for the men and gin for the women’ should you decide to throw a party in the bedsit, will provoke nothing but disdainful smirks into their Slippery Nipples from the youth of today. But how thrillingly sophisticated it must have made its original readers feel. This book was more than just a cooking manual for the young, solo-living and clueless. Whitehorn’s brilliance as a journalist was her ability to connect with something in her readers’ innermost selves, and it is this instinctive understanding that turns a mere instruction manual into a classic that defines a generation. It was and continued to be, well into the next decade and beyond, a steppingstone to their ideal grown-up selves. If, thanks to Whitehorn, you were unfazed by the prospect of producing fish in white wine and your own home-made tartare sauce, what worlds could you not conquer?

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 24 © Karen Robinson 2009


About the contributor

Karen Robinson is supplements editor of the Sunday Times and an enthusiastic cook, provided the recipes aren’t unnecessarily complicated.

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