Will the popularity of Parade's End (just ending) and Downton Abbey (just beginning) lead to a spike in sales for Penguin's beautiful reissue of Arabella Boxer's Book of English Food? I hope so. An elegant if rather patrician writer – if I read her right, she is absolutely convinced that most domestic servants loved their work – Boxer tells the story of the flowering of English food between the wars, an unexpected bloom that occurred mostly in the houses of very posh people and which died with the outbreak of the second world war. The recipes are delicious, relatively straightforward, and fabulously camp. Even better, she cites the provenance of every one, with the unexpectedly spiffing result that, this autumn, we can all be a little bit posh. There is a certain amount of pleasure to be had in serving up a dish like Steamed Spring Vegetable Pie, and announcing casually: "Ah, yes. This was a favourite of Lord Berners, you know. He used to serve it at Faringdon." But then, I have a borderline obsession with greedy old Berners, an aesthete who liked cream with everything, and who dyed his mayonnaise blue using a special powder sent from Paris by Vera Stravinsky.
It would be worth buying English Food for Boxer's opening essay alone. The anecdotes that stud it, like currants in a bun, are far funnier than anything Julian Fellowes has ever come up with. For instance: in the 1920s and 30s, professional cooks were careful to keep their best recipes secret. Take Mrs Woodburn, who cooked for the Mildmays for 50 years. (Who are these Mildmays? Boxer writes of them as if we should know, with the result that I have a strong urge to pretend that I'm on nodding terms with every one of their descendants.) Mrs Woodburn had an asparagus ice for which she was famous, and when the Queen Mother, then the Queen, was staying at Flete (where is this Flete? will my National Trust card permit me to stalk its ballroom?), she asked her for the recipe. Alas, no dice. "Yer husband asked me for that," said Mrs Woodburn. "But I wouldn't give it to him." If Fellowes wrote this scene, cook would blush to her roots, and rush off to inscribe the receipt in her best handwriting, on finest parchment.
It's Boxer's contention, though, that the new food of the 20s was developed not in the kitchens of our great houses, which continued to turn out heavy Edwardian dishes, but up in town, where a new generation of hostesses – Emerald Cunard, Nancy Astor, Wallis Simpson, Sibyl Colefax – were busy teaching everyone else how to be modern by painting their drawing rooms white, breakfasting in bed, and offering their guests an exotic new confection known as Rice Krispies (Downton Abbey would ideally be invaded by a crusading interior designer some time quite soon, were its writer not so chronically obsessed with a certain vision of the past). These women were influenced by their roots – some were American-born – and by taste-makers such as June Platt, the cookery writer at Vogue, and Lady Sysonby, whose cookbook had illustrations by Oliver Messel, the stage designer, and an introduction by Osbert Sitwell. I say "modern" but, of course, we're not talking about a salad scattered with lentils and a few bits of goat's cheese. A quick pre-dinner drink at Wallis's place involved the handing round of nine different canapes, eight of them hot. (And mind the white carpet when you bite!)
Entertaining, if one did it properly, was an exhausting business. Even in London, dinner parties were vast; at her house in Charles Street, Mrs Ronnie Greville had 56 guests to dinner in 1928. Were people pleased to receive such lavish hospitality? Not always. Some things never change. Your guests, or mine, might hop into a minicab and bitch all the way home. Guests of these top society hostesses would write the whole thing up in their diaries. In 1930, Harold Nicolson – the writer husband of Vita Sackville-West – was invited to Cliveden by Nancy Astor. But Harold, judging by his tone, would rather have stayed at home: "Thirty two people in the house… Little groups of people wishing they were alone... After dinner, in order to enliven the party, Lady Astor dons a Victorian hat and a pair of false teeth. It does not enliven the party." What a bore Nicolson must have been. Berners, whether for the right reasons or wrong, would have laughed until the blue mayonnaise shot right out of his nose.
