Header overlay

Cooking with a Poet

In the spring of 2001 I was browsing through PEN’s ‘News of Members’, an often diverting page or two at the back of their quarterly bulletin. Amidst announcements of any number of new novels, prizes, plays and fellowships, not to mention Fay Weldon’s elevation to Companion of the British Empire, lay this:

Paul Roche has the following privately printed books available: Cooking with a Poet, More Cooking with a Poet, New Tales from Aesop and Fifty Poems.

There followed an address in Majorca. I, a hopeless cook, was alert at once. Cooking with a poet! Why should one ever wish to cook with anyone else? And was this, moreover, the Paul Roche of whom I had been reading in Frances Spalding’s excellent life of Duncan Grant? Roche had been Grant’s close friend and helpmeet for many years (though not, for once, his lover), seeing him through to his death at a great age in 1978. Grant had painted him, in 1949. Could this really be he? I wrote the next day.

Soon, there came to the house a charming letter, a photograph of ‘my paradise of a small garden’ and a parcel of some of the most enchanting volumes I had ever seen. Printed in India (of which more below), they were bound in sari cloth, each in a different rich colour and pattern, and each embossed in gold. They smelled slightly musty, as if they had been stored in someone’s cellar. A number of typographical errors had been elegantly corrected with the author’s fountain pen, and each volume autographed in the same lovely hand. Finally, these little books turned out to contain not just recipes – Onion Soup without the Fuss, Dandelion Wine, Mincemeat Tel Aviv – but a selection of poems and the hugely entertaining story of the author’s life.

And yes, of

Subscribe or sign in to read the full article

The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.

Subscribe now or

In the spring of 2001 I was browsing through PEN’s ‘News of Members’, an often diverting page or two at the back of their quarterly bulletin. Amidst announcements of any number of new novels, prizes, plays and fellowships, not to mention Fay Weldon’s elevation to Companion of the British Empire, lay this:

Paul Roche has the following privately printed books available: Cooking with a Poet, More Cooking with a Poet, New Tales from Aesop and Fifty Poems. There followed an address in Majorca. I, a hopeless cook, was alert at once. Cooking with a poet! Why should one ever wish to cook with anyone else? And was this, moreover, the Paul Roche of whom I had been reading in Frances Spalding’s excellent life of Duncan Grant? Roche had been Grant’s close friend and helpmeet for many years (though not, for once, his lover), seeing him through to his death at a great age in 1978. Grant had painted him, in 1949. Could this really be he? I wrote the next day. Soon, there came to the house a charming letter, a photograph of ‘my paradise of a small garden’ and a parcel of some of the most enchanting volumes I had ever seen. Printed in India (of which more below), they were bound in sari cloth, each in a different rich colour and pattern, and each embossed in gold. They smelled slightly musty, as if they had been stored in someone’s cellar. A number of typographical errors had been elegantly corrected with the author’s fountain pen, and each volume autographed in the same lovely hand. Finally, these little books turned out to contain not just recipes – Onion Soup without the Fuss, Dandelion Wine, Mincemeat Tel Aviv – but a selection of poems and the hugely entertaining story of the author’s life. And yes, of course, it was he.
I was born in Mussorie, in the foothills of the Himalayas, and lived the first nine years of my life mostly in India, in the days of the British Raj. My father was a captain in the Royal Engineers and later engineer of the line for the Great Indian Peninsular Railway . . . My father and mother met at a regimental dance in Chatham. He was bowled over by her charm, gaiety and beauty and danced half the evening with her ugly sister just so as to be introduced. He made up his mind on the spot and proposed within 24 hours. ‘I’ll marry you on condition you take me to India,’ the young woman said. Little did she know that eleven years later she was to die and be buried in Poona, after a love match that never for a day waned in intensity.
Since my own parents had fallen in love at first sight in India in 1946, married within three weeks and conceived me, their firstborn, in the foothills of the Himalayas, I felt a deep connection with this opening. But the richness of Roche’s long life (he is now at an undisclosed point in his nineties) and the charm and vitality of his telling are of immediate appeal to anyone, whether literary, culinary or just plain curious. Cookbooks-cum-memoirs, they weave together the life, the poems and the recipes. There’s also quite a lot about sex, discussed with disarming honesty and directness. Rapturous childhood innocence, ‘coupling with little girls from the age of eight’, gives way to torments of guilt in a Catholic boarding school; happy ‘coupling almost every afternoon in my one-room flat in Bloomsbury’ gives way to more guilt when a baby is conceived without love (though a loving reunion takes place in adulthood); a passionate marriage, producing four children, ends in celibacy and distress: ‘I see now that in pursuit of my ambitions I had the insensitivity of an egomaniac.’ But I am leaping ahead. Paul Roche’s life has been shaped by mighty things. He had a magical Indian childhood of heat and dust, monkeys, opium poppies and pye-dogs, living in a palatial house in Poona built by the Sassoon family, and retreating to hill stations during the holidays – ‘idyllic spots, beautiful, old world and élite’. In the poem ‘A Child’s Raj’, sonorous place names evoke ‘the perfect present passing like a yawn’. All this comes to an end with the death of his mother: the children are brought back to England by their broken-hearted father on a voyage whose melancholy beauty has never faded. The two boys are sent to Ushaw, a Catholic school attended by the male members of his mother’s family since the reign of Elizabeth I. Set on a bleak hillside above Durham, it was so cold in winter that the inkwells froze in the pupils’ desks. ‘It was a rare year in which some boy did not die. . . We almost looked forward to the deaths because the funerals were so beautiful.’ Ushaw nearly broke Paul’s spirit. The beauty and freedom of India fell away, he developed a religious mania, and by 18 he had become ‘a slight intense youth who gazed at life with a doomed resignation’. But the school also gave him a classical education which laid the foundations of his distinguished career as a translator and his creative life in poetry. Roche has had residencies in Tennessee and Virginia, New Jersey and the California Institute of the Arts, and taught in the English Faculty of Smith College when Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were there. He and his wife remained friends with them until just weeks before Plath’s suicide in London. Throughout his teaching life, Paul’s main concern was always ‘to undermine the system’. But it was surely Italian cooking that first awoke his marvellous relationship with the kitchen. Studying for the priesthood – his first ambition on leaving Ushaw – he and his fellow seminarians were cooked for by nuns in Rome: spaghetti, risotto, fish, meat, cheese and luscious fruits in season all nourished a sensuous palate. When, on return to London, he was sacked for incompetence from his post as Assistant Secretary to the Archbishop of Westminster, Paul Roche’s full adult life really began. Free from commitments, he set out to travel through Europe, and began to write. But if India, the Catholic Church, literature and travel all fed his intellectual development, it was his friendship with Duncan Grant that nourished his spirit and furthered his literary career. They met in 1946, crossing Piccadilly on a warm clear night in July. Grant – Duncan, as Paul always calls him – was then 62. A few words of conversation began an immediate and enduring friendship. They corresponded throughout Paul’s years in America – the period of his marriage beginning now – and when, in 1961, the death of Vanessa Bell left Duncan desolate, the family packed up and returned to London, and a rapturous welcome. A series of poetry readings in grand and bohemian Bloomsbury houses soon followed. ‘They earned me the envy, and I think contempt, of every poet in England.’ Among the delicacies served on these occasions were strawberries dipped in chocolate. Duncan’s own culinary preferences involved alcohol: Paul gives recipes for Nonagenarian’s Rapture (cognac), Unscrupulous Elizabeth (whisky) and Bonny Prince Charlie (gin). In More Cooking with a Poet he also tells you how to cook Fat-Bottomed Boys, a tomato dish inspired by one of Duncan’s favourite limericks, which I shall spare more sensitive readers. And it was Duncan’s legacy of paintings which enabled Paul, his marriage ended, to move to Majorca in 1986. Here, he bought the perfect house, first viewed in ‘the hot haze of a muslin afternoon’, with a garden that looks on to orange groves and mountains. Now, Paul writes and translates, tends his garden (characterized by ‘the three essentials of a memorable garden: lack of fussiness, a sense of unity, and a series of small surprises’) and is visited by his children. In 1994, his daughter Cordelia accompanied him on a return trip to India. ‘How exciting, strange and even bewildering to be in India again after nearly seventy years! And to have a warm sun on the skin in December!’ The trip, which lasted several months, included a visit to lay flowers on his mother’s grave. The whole is recorded in A Visit to India, bound in crimson cloth and published, like all Paul’s work, by Writers Workshop Books, founded in Calcutta in 1958. ‘In a laptop, push-button age, Writers Workshop prefers Gutenberg-era style printing.’ The volumes are hand-set, letter by letter, and hand-printed on a hand-operated Indian-made machine. Delightful though they are, if you are an anxious eater you should not buy these books. Many of the recipes are healthy, but many are deliciously stuffed with calories and cholesterol. If you are an anxious cook, forget it. You will find no weights and measures, and instructions are generally minimal: ‘A lot depends on the thickness of your saucepan and the nature of your heat’; ‘Any old stewing steak will do’; ‘The best way of cooking fish is not to’ – and so on. But if your idea of a good time includes sloshing liberal quantities of alcohol into almost everything; if the thought of Rose Petal Salad makes you absurdly happy; and if you believe, as Paul does, in putting every last scrap in the kitchen to good use, then these unique little volumes are for you.  

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 8 © Sue Gee 2005


About the contributor

Sue Gee’s novel The Mysteries of Glass was long-listed for the 2005 Orange Prize.

Comments & Reviews

Leave a comment

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.