Cooking with Confidence

The day before I sit down to write this piece, I am having lunch with my husband’s family. For pudding, Auntie Chris serves up her Christmas pudding. It is undoubtedly hers – always made to the same recipe, she tells us, the recipe her mother used before her. ‘I use the same one,’ her daughter chimes in. But of course, the recipe is also Marguerite Patten’s. What follows is warmth, recognition, even gratitude for a recipe that has become part of this family, woven into its years and celebrations. Quickly, everyone around the table admits to having a copy of Patten’s seminal book, Cookery in Colour – a book so ubiquitous that its now dated cover is almost instantly recognizable on a shelf.

It is no exaggeration to say that Patten taught multiple generations to cook. Her cookbooks bear little resemblance to the celebrated cookbooks of today: they were real manuals, designed to teach basic cooking, even (often especially) for those short on time, money, energy or knowledge. But they were no flash in the pan: Patten’s stepby-step, no-nonsense pragmatism won over countless readers. She became a fixture of our kitchens, her recipes adopted by families as their own, and passed on like an inheritance. Marguerite Patten was born Hilda Elsie Marguerite Brown in Bath in 1915. Her father died in 1927 when she was 12, leaving her mother to bring up three children of whom she was the eldest. ‘I am frequently asked if I enjoyed cooking from an early age, and the answer is “No”,’ she said later in life, but she began cooking occasionally to help her busy mother after her father’s death. She had ambitions as an actress and spent a season in repertory in Oldham after leaving school. During her first ‘resting’ period she took a job with the Frigidaire Appliance Company, demonstrating to customers how to use their new refrigerator for cooking. The role required a sense of performance that captured Patten’s imagination and sent her down the path of home economy. During the war she worked for the Ministry of Food, creating and promoting recipes which made the most of rationing. She was placed in Harrods, where she gave frequent cookery demonstrations. It was here that she began creating her own dishes and recipes, and writing Harrods-branded cookery books. During this time she also began to appear on BBC radio, first for their daily Kitchen Front series and later for a new afternoon programme, Woman’s Hour. Television followed, and it cemented her role as a kitchen agony aunt. Her first two non-Harrods cookbooks were explicitly aimed at those who came to the kitchen without prior knowledge. Learning to Cook was written for young people who had been unable to learn to cook because of wartime food shortages, and Cooking for Bachelors and Bachelor Girls was for young men and women returning from the services and moving away from the family home. This straightforward novice guidance set the tone for the rest of her career. Her most successful book was Cookery in Colour which, at the time, was ground-breaking. Published by Hamlyn in 1960, this ‘picture encyclopaedia for every occasion’ was the first widely available cookbook containing colour photographs and featured a thousand recipes, almost all of them accompanied by a photo. The idea was to help the nervous cook by supplying clear visual aids. It was, as you would hope, a riot of colour: so many photos, of course – half a dozen across double-page spreads, and whole pages devoted to pictures of bowls of soup and jars of marmalade – and even those pages full of text and recipes were printed on coloured paper. It was a kaleidoscope of cookery and produce, and full of enthusiasm and abundance. When it was first released, it must have been a staggering sight. And there was undoubtedly a market for it: it sold over 2 million copies. Over the following fifty years, Patten’s output was unparalleled. To describe her as prolific would be an understatement: she wrote 170 cookbooks, including a series of ‘500’ books, all of which featured 500 recipes on a chosen topic (bread and scones, jams, pickles and chutneys, electric mixers and blenders, and so on). Those writers we think of as being the most productive didn’t come close to Patten: even including posthumous publications and anthologies of her work, Elizabeth David wrote fewer than 20 books, and Jane Grigson no more than 25. Patten’s work sold more than 17 million copies. So perhaps it is no surprise that just about every household in the UK seems to have a copy of a Marguerite Patten book. Cookery in Colour, like all her books, is spare in its prose. It is there to do a job: to provide comprehensive instruction on all the kinds of cookery that a normal household might want. Her introduction to the Eggs and Cheese chapter reads simply: ‘Cheese and eggs are a first-class food. A meal containing cheese or eggs is every bit as nutritious as one with meat or fish. There are so many different cheeses to choose from that dishes need never be monotonous.’ She then launches into a dozen recipes that combine eggs and cheese, from a camembert mousse to ‘tomato and cheese surprises’ (tomatoes stuffed ‘tightly’ with cheese, panéd and baked). As someone who spends much of her working life faffing about with the words that surround a recipe, it seems to me that Patten has said all that really needs to be said about the marriage of eggs and cheese. There is an understandable tendency to celebrate those food writers of the twentieth century who wrote discursively or narratively or who – like Claudia Roden or Madhur Jaffrey – introduced new flavours, techniques or cuisines to the UK. But the cookery book as an instructional book deserves its own praise. Patten was under no illusions about her role. Reading Elizabeth David made her realize that one can tell people about the place in which a dish originated as well as the dish itself: ‘I would quite like to do more of that kind of writing but I suppose I’m associated with practicalities, and publishers do tend to put you in pigeon-holes, but maybe that’s right because we each have our place. I’m basically not a person who writes a lot about recipes.’ Our engagement with cookbooks has changed since her day: now recipes are widely available (for free) on the Internet, so cookbooks have to offer more than just recipes. They have become physical objects that combine decoration and aspiration, books that include the types of dishes we would like to make – if only we had the time and energy and inclination. Owning one of these books speaks to the kind of person we are or, more accurately, would like to be. We want to be thought of as the person who cooks regularly from Ottolenghi or Alison Roman or Simon Rogan. So it’s ironic that the very first cookbook to feature colour photography was so prosaic in its goals and in its target audience. Each of Patten’s books is simply designed to make cooking as easy as possible and she assumes a truly basic level of knowledge or skill. In the breakfast chapter of The Basic, Basic Cookbook, she teaches the reader the role of cereal, how to make toast, tea and coffee, and heat up bought bread rolls and tinned baked beans. There is something refreshing about being taken back to basics, with no room for nerves or self-doubt. It is hard to overestimate the value of gentle but firm encouragement: ‘Often the basic cook is put off making sauces because people imply they are very difficult. Some sauces are complicated but the recipes that follow are not.’ For the intimidated cook, she is a culinary guardian angel: ‘Do not be frightened by the mention of yeast if you have not used it before, as it is very straightforward.’ All she really wants is for her readers to find confidence in their kitchens and with food. Alongside her functional language, she encourages curiosity in a delightful way: ‘You will find there is an almost bewildering selection of cheeses in good supermarkets and grocers. Occasionally you may be offered a taste of an unfamiliar cheese – do take advantage of this.’ I find Marguerite Patten endlessly reassuring. In The Basic, Basic Cookbook, she writes, ‘Do not be afraid of entertaining your friends, even if you are a beginner at cooking. It is you they have come to see, they are not judging your culinary skills.’ Many of us, myself included, would do well to take her words to heart. Patten is often written about as a home economist, a celebrity chef (a title she hated: ‘I am NOT! To the day I die I’ll be a home economist’), a recipe writer, or as a presenter of food. I’m not sure any of these roles truly encapsulates her essence. For me, Patten is quite clearly a teacher. That is the unifying theme throughout her career, from the day she started at Frigidaire to the moment she stopped writing: her many, many cookbooks are testament to a life spent teaching countless readers and children of readers and grandchildren of readers how to cook simply and with confidence. She died in 2015, aged 99. On hearing of her death, Woman’s Hour presenter Jane Garvey said, ‘Before everyone else there was Marguerite Patten.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 79 © Olivia Potts 2023