For me, this column has two happy side effects. The first is that I'm eternally on a quest to eat and drink things I might tell you about. It was thanks to this "research" that I recently discovered my drink of the summer, an Italian vermouth called Punt e Mes. Believe me when I tell you this is a fantastic beverage. The name means "point and a half", and refers to its balance: a point of sweetness, and half a point of bitterness. In essence, it's how Campari might taste if it wasn't so medicinal, and Pimms if it wasn't so sickly. Pour a slug over some ice, add a sliver of orange peel and a shot of tonic, and you will feel exactly as though you are on holiday, even if you are only standing in your kitchen in Birmingham (or wherever). It is the sort of drink that both Marcello Mastroianni and the Queen Mother might have appreciated, and I really don't believe, when it comes to cocktails, that one can say fairer than that, do you?
The other happy side effect is that people have started coming to the house bearing idiosyncratic and obscure cookbooks. Last week, a dear friend arrived for supper and in his bag – it contained wine, too, and (woo hoo!) a video of a Stephen Sondheim concert – there nestled a copy of A Painter's Kitchen: Recipes from the Kitchen of Georgia O'Keeffe. "Thought you might get a piece out of this," he said, handing it over. Hmm. Georgia O'Keeffe. I was sceptical. I've long had an intense loathing of O'Keeffe, and her throbbing, overblown, wannabe-orgasmic, wannabe-Modernist canvases. Ugh! And so horribly popular, too! (As the critic Terry Castle puts it in her ace new book of essays, The Professor and Other Writings: "Until the 1990s, when the Asian-minimalist spa aesthetic finally took over, there was hardly a hippy-dippy hot-tub establishment between Baja and Mendocino that didn't have an O'Keeffe poster decorating the premises.") What on earth, I wondered, would the old bag's cooking be like? Did she come over all Esther Rantzen with her zucchini?
In fact, the book is unexpectedly amusing. Once again, I am reminded that cooking, like no other aspect of daily life, has an especial draw for those who carry the control freak gene (one thinks, variously, of Gertrude Stein and her kitchen slave, Alice B Toklas; of Martha Stewart; and of John Pawson, the minimalist architect who once published a cookbook in which he wrote, apparently without irony: "An insinkerator is effective at masticating biodegradable waste from the kitchen, but it does so with an extraordinary lack of grace."). A Painter's Kitchen is the work of Margaret Wood, who was employed as O'Keeffe's companion at her home in Abiquiu, New Mexico, from 1977 to 1982 – Miss O'Keeffe, as she is referred to throughout, was then in her 90s – and her boss's hilariously exacting standards are apparent from the get-go. Not that Wood regards them as hilarious; rather, she plays Mr Collins to O'Keeffe's Lady Catherine de Bourgh. While you and I might think O'Keeffe's "soup mix", a blend of powdered milk, soy flour, kelp and brewer's yeast, sounds vile, Wood will concede only that it has a "strong taste". Garlic sandwiches? Delicious. Yarrow tea? Spicy and soothing. A soup made from native weeds? Full of vitamins. (If this soup, when served, did not taste right, Miss O'Keeffe would announce that it had not been "made with love").
Food, in this context, is not just for eating, for giving pleasure to oneself and one's guests. It is another way of gilding one's mythology. Just as Alice B Toklas's splendidly rich recipes for pêches flambées and poulet à l'estragon are intended to impress on the reader the fact that, contrary to appearances, her late companion, Gertrude Stein, had a certain sybaritic softness (the robot poetry might give you a headache but, hell, she sure knew her carp from her croutons), so Georgia O'Keeffe's barely there recipes reinforce the idea of her painterly eye. They say: I understand ritual, the natural world, and the simple beauty of both. They say: do not doubt me, for I am an artist. All of which is not only fascinating – there's a PhD thesis in here somewhere – but worth bearing in mind next time you have a dinner party. Serve your guests a Punt e Mes followed by roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and they'll love you for ever. But serve them, à la Miss O'Keeffe, goat's milk followed by fried flowers (she suggests locust blossoms, but I expect wisteria will do), and they'll think you're, like, really creative.
