Machiavelli in the Kitchen
Rosa Lyster on cooking to win, inspired by 'glamorously unpredictable witch', Caroline Blackwood. Illustration by Jess Nash.
Bookstores are simply groaning with the proof that there is no law against anyone waking up one day and deciding to publish a recipe book, even if that seems like a strange or inappropriate thing for them to do. Still, when I first spotted Darling, You Shouldn’t Have Gone to So Much Trouble (1980) the perfectly titled cookbook by Anglo-Irish writer, socialite and tormented soul Caroline Blackwood, I thought at first it was a very niche and high-effort joke. It just didn’t fit with anything else she ever wrote or did. Blackwood, a glamorously unpredictable witch who’d been married to Lucian Freud and then to Robert Lowell, appeared to have no business publishing a jaunty little book that promises ‘stylish meals in seconds’, with an introduction that specifically addressed itself to harassed working mothers. Born into an enormously wealthy family and raised mainly by scary nannies, it was difficult to imagine Blackwood standing at a stove, or even knowing how to turn it on. Also, she was drunk all the time. That was one of the main things about her. When asked about their memories of Blackwood, many people who knew her seemed quite overcome by the impossibility of conveying the sort of squalor she lived in, her unmatched ability to trash a hotel room, her contempt for the concept of hygiene. Jenny Diski called her ‘a slut’s slut’ in the LRB once. Even the friends who really loved her make a point of remarking on how horrible she smelled. People like that don’t publish books containing recipes for ‘Saturday Salad’ or salmon mousse, do they?
Blackwood wrote vivid, unpleasant, much-admired novels in which food is a curse that people put on one another. In her work, meals are often a highly effective way of messing with someone, of creating resentment or indebtedness or plain old fear. In Great Granny Webster, for instance, a useless but well-meaning husband unwittingly torments his mad wife with dinner menus. Every morning, a footman comes and knocks at the insane wife’s bedroom door, and presents her with a list of possible dishes, written in French, as well as a list of potential wines. The idea is that she will thoughtfully go through this list and choose the menu for the day; the idea, in fact, is that the fulfilment of this duty is essential to her self-esteem, sanity, composure, etc, that this is an honour that means a great deal to her. But she is well past caring about stuff like this, if she was ever that sort of person at all – when presented with the lists, she hides or screams or scribbles everything out in crayon, but the useless husband keeps trying, apparently having no better ideas. The insane wife duly becomes more and more insane.
“People don’t cop to stuff like this anymore, at least not in the prefaces of their recipe books, which now seem mainly to be about finding ways to repeat the words ‘comfort’ or ‘nourish’ or ‘solace’ as many times as possible”