A Serious Table

Christopher Driver

  • Simple French Food by Richard Olney
    Jill Norman and Hobhouse, 339 pp, £7.95, October 1981, ISBN 0 906908 22 1
  • Living off nature by Judy Urquhart
    Penguin, 396 pp, £5.95, May 1982, ISBN 0 14 005107 4
  • The Food and Cooking of Russia by Lesley Chamberlain
    Allen Lane, 330 pp, £9.95, June 1982, ISBN 0 7139 1468 8
  • Food, Wine and Friends by Robert Carrier
    Sphere, 197 pp, £6.95, October 1981, ISBN 0 7221 2295 0
  • The Colour Book of Fast Food edited by Alison Kerr
    Octopus, 77 pp, £1.99, June 1981, ISBN 0 7064 1510 8

Drake postponed sailing against the Spanish Armada till his game of bowls was over, Nero preferred his lyre to ARP duty, Belshazzar’s feast was rudely interrupted. In that appealing branch of mythology which counterpoints the trivial with the catastrophic, the cooks on HMS Sheffield deserve a place, killed while preparing lunch. Few men seem as innocent and apolitical as a chef who is preoccupied with his craft – though an exception might have to be made for the trusty employed by the Borgias. Frenchmen, perhaps, are too realistic, or live too closely to their chefs, to subscribe to this view: it was a Frenchman who reminded the world that an army marches upon its stomach, and another Frenchman who proved it for the English. As Punch wrote after Alexis Soyer’s self-imposed slavery in the Crimea on behalf of his adopted country:

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