….well - maybe not everything, but certainly the way a rebellious Sixties generation (me too) saw the possibilities of a bright new world on the other side of la Manche unimaginable in the grey streets of post-war London.
It started in earnest in 1960, with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett, whose satirical revue, Beyond the Fringe, transferred from Edinburgh to London. By September 1963 - the year I married a young man just profiled in Paris Match as Britain’s King of Satire - the Beatles had arrived, the Stones were on their way, suet dumplings were out, and ratatouille was in - the more Frenchified and garlicky the better.
Meanwhile, Mao’s Little Red Book and Elizabeth David’s Mediterrean Food was required reading for young women who were as interested in what we set on the table as we were in politics (young men didn’t do home-cooking in those unenlightened days). While revolutionary China existed only in our imaginations (£50 was the cash-allowance when travelling abroad), the ingredients for Mrs. David’s ratatouille - aubergines, tomatoes, courgettes, garlic and olive oil by the gallon - were available from the street markets and delis of Soho. Ostensibly, the area was London’s red light district, but it was somewhere where foreigners could be found in quantity and no one asked questions about who you were or what you did.
Soho was also home to The Establishment Club, a members-only theatre club modelled on the cabaret clubs of pre-war Berlin. The club’s co-proprietors were Nicholas and his friend from the Cambridge Footlights, Peter Cook. The Establishment was, happily for my future husband and me, just down Greek Street from the office of a newly-fledged satirical magazine Private Eye, where I’d taken employment as shorthand typist, bookkeeper, tea-maker and flogger of the mag round the streets.
Subversion was on the menu nightly at the Club. Lennie Bruce (above, left) flew in from LA, as did the caste of Chicago’s Second City, but most of the talent on stage and off was home-grown. In 1963 Nicholas and I were married, Peter had married Wendy Snowden, a beautiful art-student he’d met at Cambridge, and family life - new babies - was about to take us both, Wendy and me, out of the thick of it.
The limitations as well as the joys (and stresses) of young motherhood could explain why we decided to cater for a couple of hundred guests with our own interpretation of Mrs David’s ratatouille at The Establishment’s after-party for the first Amnesty International concert in the Albert Hall. We might have gone a bit over the top on the aubergines, bought cheap at the end of the day from Berwick Street market - but no one seemed to mind.
The venue was photographer Claude Virgin’s studio in The Pheasantry (no kitchen, one-ring stove - now a pizza parlour). Guests - well - two newborns, everyone who was anyone, a few (Jeff Bernard) who were only there for the Chianti, a brace of Beatles and I can’t remember how many Rolling Stones. And - yes - I did get to rock the floor with Mick Jagger. Which sort of explains the warm fuzzy feeling I get whenever I cook ratatouille. Some things you never forget.
p.s. Paid-subscribers (I do love you!) will shortly be in happy receipt of a recipe for rabbit with garlic and rosemary, the other dish (with apologies to Mrs. David) Wendy and I cooked on the one-ring stove that day.
p.p.s. Check out the fruit and veg prints in the shop on my website, www.elisabethluard.org
Oh gosh, you do bring back the memories. I too cooked my first ratatouille from Mrs. David, away across the Atlantic in Sheridan Square in the West Village. Only the American edition of French Provincial Cooking had not been adapted for American ingredients and American eggplants are huge compared to English aubergines. I had ratatouille for a crowd--would have been a fine contribution to your shindig--and ate it over and over for a week. It does keep well.
I arrived in London in 1969 and just missed the best of the party I think ... My next piece will look at some Soho stories and you’ll have to correct me please if I get it wrong - perhaps you remembered Elizabeth Smart ?