Consuming Interest
By LESLIE ADRIAN ATEMPERATURE in the eighties is invariably the sign for the British male to emerge in an aura of moth-balls and an assortment of putty- coloured garments known as tropical kit. (I ex- clude an elegant old man in panama and cream tussore I saw the other day in Cheltenham and on whose sartorial empire the sun had never set.) But this is changing. Savile Row influence gave the American his grey flannel suit : our trans- atlantic tourists have brought us the lightweight.
For the first time, the big tailoring firms are bringing out reasonably priced summer town suits for the mass market. These are made either from lightweight cloths or, by omitting linings and interlinings, from fabrics of normal weight.
Most customers inquire first about the new synthetics because of their crease resistance. But these new blends are not as light as traditional woollen cloths. A normal winter worsted suiting weighs twelve or thirteen ounces per yard, but for a summer-weight suit a nine-ounce cloth will be used. The most popular synthetic blend, a 50-50 Terylene and worsted, weighs ten ounces. When the Terylene is increased to 65-35, the weight of the cloth is thirteen ounces.
Austin Reed's best seller is a nine-ounce all- wool worsted two-piece suit for £16 10s. Their 50-50 Terylene and worsted is £18. The John Collier group make a suit in the same blend for £10 19s, 6d.
Simpsons tell me they are not yet convinced that synthetic blends are the answer. Their most popular summer weights are made from blended wools. They do a mohair and wool two-piece with the fashionable new sheen for £20 and also a silk and wool mixture at the same price.
From time to time I propose to mention new cookery books when they are a little out of the ordinary, like Thought for Food (Museum Press, 15s.). Cecily Finn and Joan O'Connor have had the amiable idea of visualising family or social occasions—occasions, too, cf business or of love— and suggesting an appropriate menu : what to give, say, an.angry client; or a former lover en- countered after a lapse of ten years. Some of the dishes are ingenious: though one or two I would say might be catastrophic. To give your husband, for his first dinner at home after a honeymoon in Italy, Spaghetti Bolognese would be asking for trouble; only a strong-minded, a positively noble husband could survive seeing yet another dish of spaghetti—let alone eating it. Nor is it reasonable to after-theatre guests to offer. them steak tartare, and jeer at them if they don't happen to like it. Still, wrong-headed though the book is at times, the ideals a good one.
Cooking Ahead (Faber, 12s. 6d.) is not the most alluring of titles, but for once the pun has point. Barbara Worsley-Gough's aim is to help you to produce the kind of menus which will give your guests the impression of chef-graced living, but which in fact you have cooked yourself. Her book concentrates on the kind of dishes that can be made in advance : 'good food that is con- cocted peacefully and attentively in the spare moments of Monday or Tuesday for the dinner- party on Wednesday.'
She points out something which is obvious enough, but which had not really struck me : that English cooking, no matter how good,, is not really suited to the servantless 'household; and I think her explanation why is worth quoting : English cooking was evolved through cen- turies of modest prosperity in farmhouses and manors, where scullions were numerous and very cheap to employ, when it was usual for three or four women and girls to be kept busy all day in the kitchen and dairy and still-room producing the food for one household. With the disappearance of the scullions, and then of the trained and, practical cook, the traditional dishes remained the staple diet of the country, but became plainer and plainer and duller and
duller because nobody had time to make the sauces and dress the vegetables and stuff the fish and beat out the eggs and the cream, all of which once gave richness and variety to the splendid raw material of English food.
There are many good ideas in this agreeably written book; and I have asked the author to give us four recipes appropriate to the season— recognising that while a good dinner may taste better on a June evening, there are few things more tiresome than having to cook on a June afternoon. I asked her, therefore, to suggest some dual-purpose dishes—following the traditional principle of the Sunday roast, hot today, cold to- morrow, but prepared in a way that makes it possible for the cold tomorrow to be a dish in its own right : worth waiting for. And the first of her 'pairs is :
BCEUF EN DAUBE
It is hard to decide whether this old French provincial dish is more delicious cold or hot, so I make a lot of it and have it both ways. I buy three pounds of chuck steak and a calf's foot (split) or a pig's trotter. I put four ounces of chopped fat bacon into a casserole over low heat, with three onions, two carrots and two cloves of garlic, all chopped small. While they melt in the fat I wipe the foot and the steak, and tie up the steak with string, and make a bouquet garni with bayleaves, cloves, pepper- corns and a sprig each of parsley, thyme an chervil. I push aside the vegetables and colour the meat and the foot in the hot fat, turning them carefully, then put in the bouquet, plenty of salt and fresh-ground black pepper and enough red wine to cover the meat. The well-fitting lid goes on and the casserole goes into the oven to simmer very gently indeed for -four hours. I turn the steak over at half-time.
Finally, I take out the bouquet, the foot and the string and slice the steak and we have it for dinner. The next day the remains have jelled, and I remove the top fat and put the casserole in the refrigerator. Later I turn it out on to a dish and surround it with olives, halved lettuce hearts and sliced white endive dressed with oil and lemon-juice.
So many people have been using the excellent vinyl-coated leathercloths, now used for bath- room, kitchen and nursery upholstery, as a wall covering that one leading maker, Williamsons Of Lancaster, have decided to produce a special range of their `Lionide' vinyl-coated cloths for walls. These are just coming on to the market now. Scratch and crackproof, grease and stain resistant, they provide a nearly indestructible wall covering. The price is approximately 12s. 6d. a yard for fifty-inch widths. Walls must be pre- pared as for normal wallpapering and ordinary paperhangers' adhesives are used. The only extra precaution necessary in hanging the vinyl cloths is the addition of two tablespoonfuls of domestic antiseptic to every gallon of paste as a mould Inhibitor.
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