Pamela VAIsIDYKE PRICE
Sometimes I catch people looking pityingly at me, as if they would say, "Poor thing, she has put on weight, and how trivial her life must be, obsessed as she is with food and drink." They do not voice these feelings, because I have a protective reputation for verbal savagery, and well do I know how much fatter I must look from the back. But trivial my preoccupations are not. At a time when old age pensioners, interviewed, admit to spending £8 a week per couple on bingo, wives of redundant so-called workers lament that they'll "have to stop the payments on the telly," mothers send their children to school without breakfasts, it is very much in my mind that half the world's population never gets enough to eat, and that possibly a million people will die in Pakistan during the next twelve months from hunger.
Food and drink, to me, are things to respect. And I really do believe that many of the world's major problems would be solved if we solved that of giving people enough to give them a healthy life before anything else. •How many of those who bring additional complications to our usual everyday troubles are, or were, gastronomic personalities? Attila the Hun, Selim the Sot • (who flayed alive the noble Venetian commander of Famagusta), Savonarola, Torquemada, Philip II of Spain and his father, Charles V (how could they cope with these underslurw jaws?). James II and all those pretenders, Napoleon, Karl Marx (sponging on everyone to pay his grocery bills in Soho), Rasputin, Bismarck (he had to be medically slimmed), Hitler... and many a contemporary figure in and out of Parliament — do they care at all for what they put into themselves? No. And the unfortunate results of their not caring mean that thousands, even millions of us have to suffer for it, whether they incidentally have ulcers, worms, halitosis, colitis, constipation or acne — all of which, I hope, they do have, or did (and many did, which is moral).
I, who am as harassed as anyone by the bank, the taxman and the importunate trades persons (except that all mine are so kind to me that I suspect they take it out on others), know quite well what it is to have four o'clock in the morning fears of what bills the morning may bring, what rejection slips, what " I'm a failure " feelings, while walking the floor. At such times I don't care how fat I may be getting — I tend to go and cook, or, at least, look longingly at a recipe while resisting actual food. One that I found recently dates from my early married (still rationed) house keeping, when I often had my husband's chief 'dropping in,' or five or six medical students, and had to provide some sort of supper. The late Philip Harben, who became a dear friend, gives the recipe for Eggs Lucullus (as served at Topolinsky) in a now out-of-print book, and I think it makes an excellent first course or a supper main dish, at low cost.
For each person, you need 2 eggs (1 large one if you're really skimping), oz grated cheese, 2 oz mushrooms, 1-2 oz butter, and either a small lettuce between two, or the outer leaves of a large one. Chop the lettuce finely and the mushrooms not quite so finely, melt the butter and cook lettuce and mushrooms in it for about five minutes, seasoning with salt, pepper and a little paprika. Butter a flattish ovenproof dish and, if you like garlic, rub it with a cut clove. Spread the vegetable mixture in this and make holes in it for the eggs, which you break carefully into the spaces. Sprinkle the grated cheese over each yolk and put the dish into a hot oven for a few minutes, so that the cheese is slightly browned, the whites of the eggs set, but the yolks still liquid. (Timing is impossible unless one knows the oven, but three to five minutes minimum, and possibly seven to ten.) Nothing fine to drink with this, but robust white or red, depending on whether this is a first or main course.
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