<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Matt McAllester was a foreign correspondent for Newsday<\/i>, known as a war reporter, imprisoned for a week in Iraq in
\n2003, and for his previous books about his time in Kosovo and Iraq. <\/span>Bittersweet:
\nLessons from My Mother’s Kitchen<\/i> (Bloomsbury <\/span>\u00a316.99) is not the book you’d expect from a man
\nwho writes: “A year later I was back in Baghdad, sitting in my hotel room one
\nafternoon, when a bullet ricocheted around my balcony.” That was in 2005, and
\nthe result of the rifle shot was to persuade McAllester to propose marriage to
\nhis girlfriend when he returned to London in February. All in all, he seems an
\nunlikely person to be writing a book about how he learned to cook. <\/span>But he had two crucial connections with
\nfood. The first was his father, the well-known advertising photographer, Don
\nMcAllester, who took the photographs that illustrated many of Jane Grigson’s
\ncookery columns in the Observer Magazine, and who presumably took the lovely,
\nthough uncredited family photographs that are one of the joys of Bittersweet<\/i>. The other link with food is
\nthe writer’s mother, Ann, who told him, “If you want to know how to cook, read
\nElizabeth David. She’ll tell you everything. Read French Provincial Cooking<\/i>. Her books are marvelous. We all learned
\nto cook from Elizabeth David.” This conversation took place on May 4th<\/sup>,
\n2005, at his mother’s nursing home in Swiss Cottage, where she died,
\nunexpectedly, of a heart attack two days later, leaving a good deal of
\nunfinished emotional business for her son.<\/span><\/p>\nDuring that last visit his mother had asked him if he thought he was
\na good cook, and he answered that he thought he was “not bad.” She then asked
\nif he always left the cookery book open, so as to be able to consult the recipe
\nwhile doing the cooking, and he admitted he did. “Then,” she concluded, “you
\ncan’t cook….If you need to keep the book open, you’re not really cooking.” <\/span>They had had these “companion”
\nconversations many times before. His mother’s behaviour had for many years been
\nunpredictable, except that it was likely to be bad and embarrassing, and her
\nappearance went from the chic woman we see in the book’s illustrations to a
\nraggedy bag lady.<\/span><\/p>\nAnn McAllester was alcoholic and bipolar, and it appears that the
\ndiagnosis of the latter condition came too late to treat it and save her
\nmarriage, or her relationships with her children, who had enjoyed an idyllic childhood
\nliving with their near-bohemian parents in London and Edinburgh, with holidays
\non the west coast of Scotland at Port an Droighionn, first in a caravan, and
\nthen in a Norwegian-designed log house they built overlooking the bay. The
\nfirst cracks in the fa\u00e7ade of family happiness appeared when he rebelled at his
\nambiguously religious mother’s attempts to send him to a Catholic boarding
\nschool. (His mutiny took him to live and work in America, and finally to report
\nfrom some of this century’s most dangerous places.) Though he never really had
\na faith to lose, there were times during and after his mother’s final illness
\nwhen he derived some comfort simply from being in the beautiful, socially smart
\nJesuit Church at Farm Street, Mayfair. But he recognized he was there, trying
\n“to bluff my way past my own dogged atheism,” not just to conjure up happier
\nmemories of his mother, but also to try to influence the God whom he didn’t
\nbelieve in to help his wife conceive by IVF the child they longed for. Though he
\nsometimes appealed to an image of the Virgin, Our Lady of Lourdes, at the Farm
\nStreet Church of the Immaculate Conception, what he really sought was the
\nintercession of St Elizabeth David.<\/span><\/p>\nEven as a child McAllester was most in touch with his mother when they
\nwere cooking together. His grief took the strange form of trying to learn to
\ncook as well as his mother did. On the first anniversary of her death and
\ncremation, “I had no grave to visit so in the afternoon I went to the Waitrose
\non Finchley Road.” But the chief thing was to get over the open-cookbook
\nhurdle: “My form of cooking and shopping was inseparable from words on the
\npage.” Eventually McAllester does learn to internalize recipes, and approach
\ncooking analytically – and learns from his aunts that, whatever his mother
\npreached, she always<\/i> kept the book
\nopen while cooking. By three years after Ann’s death, his own “goal to memorize
\none hundred Elizabeth David recipes had faded away.” He continues to idolize
\nMrs David (a bit deceived by his research in an unreliable biography of her,
\nwhich he read in addition to Artemis Cooper’s excellent one), and though
\nunaware of the hard-drinking, difficult woman she became in her own old age, “I
\nlet her go. And with her, I had begun to let my mother go.” Therapy complete,
\nthe patient is cured, as recounted in an elegantly written memoir. More books
\nin this genre are already scheduled for publication; I don’t expect to read another <\/span>as compelling as this one.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Writing about food, eating and drinking – as distinct from how-to cookery manuals – goes back at least to antiquity, from Juvenal’s biting Satires and Petronius’s detailing of the excesses of Trimalchio’s feast, to the dietary prohibitions of the Old Testament. It would be both interesting and a little tedious to trace food writing through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-732","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-bO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/span><\/p>\n