The Surprising Life of Constance Spry Read online

  Everyone was consulted and recipes were begged, borrowed – though, she assures her readers, ‘not stolen’ – from books, correspondents and friends. She collected ideas from everyone and anyone who sat in her kitchen or wrote to her. June Platt was an American cookery writer whom Connie met in New York before the war. ‘Fortunate to be beautiful, clever to wear lovely clothes, and wise to know all about food’ was how Connie described her. Platt sent her several of the little 15-cent books such as the Pennsylvania Dutch, New England and Southern cookbooks compiled by groups of women who collected and published traditional recipes from their families and their community to raise money for social work – a marvellous way to record and celebrate the ‘foodways’ of America. Similarly, though not so widespread, the Federation of Women’s Institutes in the UK published Country Housewife’s Handbooks, and Connie made several contributions to her own branch in West Kent. Full of first-hand information, they ranged from a plan for a three-year rotation of vegetable crops, through fruit, flowers, herbs, poultry and bees, to the brewing of wines and the preserving of all kinds of home-produced foods. Another of her sources was the compilation of country-cooking called Farmhouse Fare published by Farmer’s Weekly in 1935.

  Connie’s writing style was simple, direct and witty: ‘Corned beef and cabbage has not a party sound, but it is lifted out of the prosaic by the addition of horse-radish bread sauce.’ She was unalterably opposed to mediocrity in any form, had a genius for improvising and refused to accept grey compromise. She argued that out of wartime austerity might emerge positive changes that would replace the old eating habits, those interminable dinners of numerous rich dishes. She wrote about a simple summer wartime lunch that in the past would have appeared meagre but now seemed so much healthier, more delicious and ‘suitable’: ‘A salad of grated, raw vegetables with a cream dressing well flavoured with chopped chives and chervil accompanied by hot golden fried potatoes followed by a dish of cold, creamy rice with a thin sprinkling of sugar browned under the grill, and home-bottled fruit.’ She could not live without cream and she gave instructions on how to make it with four ounces of margarine and a gill of milk – ‘One can make nearly ½ pint of thick cream.’

  Violet Henson, who wrote articles on food from Tunisia for Harper’s Bazaar, was a rich fund of recipes and suggestions. The Hensons were by then living under German occupation and, according to Connie, were half starved. Violet was forced to turn their exotic garden over to growing vegetables and herbs. She and Connie kept up a regular correspondence, much of it about food:

  She told me of sardines that she was salting and tomatoes being dried in the sun and pounded into purée and covered with oil to keep through the winter and then she said: ‘Jerusalem artichokes grow here like weeds, and I am going to try them done like a potato salad – they might be eatable like that . . . Have you tried them cut in thin slices and fried like potatoes? Quite good and you can do them in oil if you have any – we have no fats but that now.’

  Connie wrote to Violet that pigeons were one of the few free foods available in England, but people were reluctant to eat them. Violet sent her a recipe for her book for Compôte de Pigeons with Raisins and Onions. Connie also recalled: ‘In Hammamet they often ate wild asparagus. It grows there in pure sand that runs through your fingers like a silver trickle . . . I was surprised to see Arabs bringing in baskets of wild asparagus which they picked near the sea.’

  Anyone could come into the kitchen to try something out and produce a recipe. Val Pirie, home on leave, made French pâté – Connie’s war version replaced some of the meat with Prem or Spam, which might have made it unrecognizable to the French palate but was a brave attempt to spice up an otherwise dreary meat substitute. On another occasion, ‘Miss Pirie, who is always game to try any caprice in the kitchen, cooked savoy cabbage as she remembered having it often in her home in Angers. Small heads cooked whole, well drained and served with béchamel sauce.’ Not a lumpy English white sauce but a French béchamel carefully made with margarine and vegetable water – indispensable, declared Connie, even in wartime. She was a champion of well-made sauces and despaired of the typical Englishman’s ‘I like to see what I’m eating, give me good, plain English food’ attitude, which most likely pointed to bad sauces, badly made. ‘[The English] will swallow dreadful gravy, accept Gloy on cauliflower, and eat shockingly bad mint sauce,’ she wrote with ill-concealed outrage. ‘There are people who seem proud to proclaim their dislike of sauces. They almost imply that there is something patriotic about their point of view, with a sort of “dirty-foreigner-slosh-him-in-the-eye” touch . . . It all sounds very John Bull, solid English, and no nonsense.’

  The solution for Connie was always to look to French cooking: simple traditional regional dishes such as Val’s childhood Pommes au Beurre and Galette de Savennières from the village baker, her own memories of dishes eaten in Paris restaurants before the war, and Rosemary Hume’s of haute cuisine learned at the Cordon Bleu. There was also the mystery ‘John, a professional cook’, whose critical eye, Connie acknowledged in her book, ‘saved her from many a gaffe’. Shav was regularly consulted. He had a passion for suet puddings and longed for the curries he had eaten in India. Connie despaired: ‘Nothing short of molten lava would pass for a properly hot curry.’ But she worked on improving her vegetable curries with piquant homemade chutneys, which were not the genuine article but Shav enjoyed them anyway.

  Sidney Bernstein, who was running the Films division at the Ministry of Information producing propaganda films, confided to Connie that he was looking for a good American voice to narrate London Can Take It – a short film about Londoners’ valiant response to the Blitz – for showing in the US. Connie immediately suggested Helen Kirkpatrick, who was infuriated to be rejected on the grounds that she was a woman. When commissioned by Lord Woolton to produce films about home food production, Bernstein consulted Connie about vegetables. In 1941 there was a bumper crop of carrots and a film was needed to encourage their consumption. Bernstein appealed to Walt Disney for cartoon characters such as Doctor Carrot, Clara Carrot and Carrotty George. In Come into the Garden, Cook Connie made a dig at these propaganda films, particularly the Disneyfied carrots: ‘The unfortunate carrot is suffering, like certain film stars, from too much publicity. Really it is a tortuous path from fresh, crisp raw carrot to carrot flan, and I, for one, don’t want to travel it. I’d rather eat them raw, though this is by no means the only excellent alternative. It’s no use allowing a certain wartime carrot impatience to put you off when it comes to the garden.’

  It was in her garden that Connie always found the greatest pleasure; there she could retreat and find satisfaction in making things grow while letting her imagination run free. ‘Giving up flowers to make room for vegetables is not all wartime sacrifice, unless you do it reluctantly,’ she wrote. Indeed, for her the aesthetic pleasure of a vegetable garden was as important as the culinary rewards in the kitchen, and she argued that a vegetable garden, particularly the French potager of her dreams, was as beautiful and colourful, in any season, as the flowerbed. In describing her imaginary potager Connie saw symmetry and formality, colour and texture:

  There is a splash of bright green like a rug thrown over the brown earth lying next to rows of grey flags, with common or garden parsley and leeks and edgings of herbs . . . Overall a grey-green bloom jewelled at intervals with rubied fruits, with here and there embroidery of strawberries. There’s a breadth of what might be tropical ferns, but is in fact chou de Russie; the bloom and curl of its leaves giving an illusion of softest velvet . . . sweet corn looks like tropical bedding and globe artichokes are as fine in form as the classic acanthus. There’s grandeur and colour in rows of red cabbages and purple, decorative kale.

  She dreamed of alleys of old pleached fruit trees, iron hoops like great croquet hoops on which soft fruits would be closely trained. In summer there would be unusual vegetables such as calabrese, aubergines and all kinds of salad such as lamb’s lettuce, and
sorrel growing between hedges of common fennel: ‘thick soft feather-green in summer with shapely and stately yellow flowers flung up’ in autumn. In January there would be a fine crop of creamy-headed chicory and good seakale to be kept in the cellar. On the walls with their old-fashioned thatched eaves would be espaliered fruits, melons and gourds growing in the hothouse, and the cool fruit shed smothered in clematis ‘Virgin’s Bower’.

  Come into the Garden, Cook was published in 1942 using paper and binding that conformed to strict war-economy standards. Connie dedicated it to her friend Ella Reeves, ‘with affection and gratitude’. With Helen Kirkpatrick’s foreword and Lesley Blanch’s delightful comic drawings, it felt like a warm-hearted group effort. Everyone had contributed something – recipes, garden advice, encouragement, good humour – or had just enjoyed the good food. The book was an instant success and went into several editions before the war had ended.

  Meanwhile, Constance Spry Ltd was doing surprisingly well. Despite the austerity and the bombs, wealthy London society still clung to as much of its extravagant lifestyle as it could, managing without armies of servants by dining out, dancing until dawn to make the most of the blackout, and indulging in country pursuits at weekends when they might bag a rabbit or two to fill out the meat ration. The Dorchester kept its contract with Connie’s shop throughout the war and several of her patrons continued to request her skills with flower decorations, even if they expected her to use material grown in their own gardens. Another source of business was the GIs who turned nearby Grosvenor Square into a ‘Little America’ where they hung about, ‘bunching’ their girls in South Audley Street and impressing them with expensive bouquets and corsages of flowers bought from the shop. Most of the remaining staff held other part-time jobs such as night shifts at a precision-tool factory in Clapham, where their floristry-trained fingers were especially valued. Sheila McQueen, now married with a baby, was the most senior decorator and did most of the flowers for quiet weddings and parties for soldiers on leave:

  I found that I had acquired great speed doing three or four arrangements in a matter of a few hours between visits to the air-raid shelter. My undying memory of those war days, when the blitz was at its height, was to go to work in the morning to the sound of the sweeping up of broken glass and the sight of torn buildings – a bath or a fireplace the only things hanging on the wall of what was once a home . . . It is a miracle that people in those circumstances still thought about and indeed wanted their homes and small celebrations decorated with flowers – but they did.

  In May 1944 Helen Kirkpatrick and her young GI brother Kirk, went to Park Gate for the weekend. As usual they arrived with ration-busting goodies including ‘a most wonderful packet of brown sugar like gold dust’. Their mother, who lived in America, sent Connie regular food parcels including boxes of luscious candied fruits. Connie, who was struggling to learn to type, sent a typed thank-you letter in which she wrote of her admiration and affection for Helen and Kirk, who had shown her photographs of his new baby. Connie, who was never a great baby fan, seemed to be feeling some hankering for a grandchild, and she wrote to Mrs Kirkpatrick about her ‘ridiculous pleasure in a baby belonging to a maid’, who ‘lays siege to any heart she fancies and I can well imagine what pleasure the real authentic grandchild can give’. Connie’s son Tony was serving as a captain in Supply Training, where he clearly felt undervalued. He had applied to work with Information Service Control, stating his experience with radio scriptwriting and programme production, but for some reason he was refused. He and his first wife Maggie sometimes visited Connie. She was always pleased to see them and was perhaps sad that they apparently showed little sign of wanting a family.

  In July 1944, everyone was shocked to hear that Rex Whistler had been killed in the Normandy campaign. In August Helen Kirkpatrick wrote with news of entering Paris riding in a tank of the Free French forces, then had nearly been killed by snipers at a thanksgiving service in Notre Dame Cathedral attended by General de Gaulle. She later described a visit to the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s mountain retreat where, Connie was delighted to hear, she had swiped a frying pan from the Führer’s kitchen to cook field rations. By the following summer the war was finally over, but it would be several years before life could return to normal.

  ELEVEN

  A Beginning School

  1945–1950

  The end of the war brought a tremendous sense of relief and celebration. In the cities there were scenes of wild excitement in the streets, people dancing, jumping in fountains and climbing lamp posts. In the country they lit bonfires and sang ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and went home late to Spam and chips. In the weeks following VE day, Connie noted, everyone wanted flowers: ‘lots of them – for parties to celebrate, to wear in their hair or a buttonhole, or a bunch to give to mother, the wife or some friends who had helped out in the past. Flowers are for everyone . . . we’re going to have peace now, it will all be different, you’ll see.’

  But for the first few years after the war, things were not all that different. Austerity Britain lasted into the early 1950s, with high prices, worsening shortages, continued rationing, plus a fuel crisis and terrible weather. Life for the average housewife was still one of drudgery, with no servants and either no husband or one who was struggling to recover from his war experiences, not always with much success. Women just out of uniform or who had gone out to work to help the war effort were forced back into domestic life, losing their independence and once again becoming the ‘voiceless, submerged half of the population’. They were fed up; the war was over, but life was still shabby and stale. They longed for colour and a bit of cheerfulness, not more shortages and make-do-and-mend.

  Connie, who had spent her war trying to cheer people up, decided it was time to educate them as well. Rather than doing flowers for other people, she felt, it was now time they learned to do them for themselves – and it need not be just about flowers. If young women could regain a sense of satisfaction and pleasure in making a beautiful and successful home, surely that in itself would bring purpose and colour back into their lives. Connie recognized that social and economic changes brought about by war would change people’s prospects. But her natural get-up-and-go approach allowed little patience with people who let themselves become frustrated or depressed. ‘Because we have to adopt a different way of life, it need not be unattractive,’ she wrote. On the outbreak of war a student who had just completed the course at Connie’s flower school had said to her, ‘After the war, could you not add cookery lessons to our flower programme? I think we shall need it.’

  With this suggestion in mind Connie and Rosemary Hume decided in the autumn of 1945 to reopen and combine their two schools into the Cordon Bleu Cookery and Flower School. During the war Connie had often dropped in for lunch at Rosemary’s restaurant when she was in London and they had mulled over ideas. Rosemary asked an old friend, Muriel Downes, to replace Dione Lucas as her partner at the restaurant, and they set up in new premises in Marylebone Lane where it could once again be run as a training ‘kitchen restaurant’ for the students while remaining open to the public. Until they could find suitable premises for the cookery school Rosemary and Connie arranged with the Central London Electricity Company to use their Model Kitchen in Victoria Street for pupils to study classic bourgeois French cookery – ‘elegant but not extravagant’ – as taught at the École du Petit Cordon Bleu in Paris. Connie’s flower school, meanwhile, found temporary premises in Belgrave Road, where students received training in table decoration, arranging flowers for the house, florist’s work and some practical gardening, plus shopkeeping and business management. Students were asked to bring green overalls or aprons and a card index for filing recipes. Connie, always alert to rival flower businesses, stipulated that students sign an undertaking that they would not engage in professional work during their period of training; if a student proved any good, she would take her on herself. At around forty guineas, fees for the full y
ear’s combined cookery and flower courses were not cheap. The day courses were quickly booked up, with a waiting list mostly of women wishing to work as professional cooks or run their own flower business.

  Connie now began to think about a far more ambitious project, one that would return her to full-time education. Why not open a residential school where women from all over the country could come and live for a year while they trained? Connie had lectured to hundreds of women during the war and shown them how to decorate their Nissen huts with flowers, grow their own vegetables and cook delicious meals with rationed food. She knew that they responded, like the children at Homerton had, to any element of pleasure and beauty introduced into their lives. She and Rosemary agreed that young women leaving the armed forces and girls just leaving school could benefit from a year spent in beautiful surroundings learning to cook excellent food despite the all-pervasive rationing, as well as mastering the art of creating a cheerful, elegant home. These young women all faced a very different future from their pre-war sisters – they could not expect to have servants to run their homes and some would have jobs as well as a husband and children. Life was altogether more demanding than it once had been.