Eating Posh .......

Once I felt I had cracked the perennial problem of speaking as posh as possible, I was very keen on exploring any avenue that offered an opportunity to Eat Posh. As a child the only time I came anywhere close to upmarket food was at family weddings where cold ham or chicken was generally served with salads followed by pink blancmange and every flavor imaginable of jellies. Although this might seem remarkably mundane from where I now stand in the year 2020, back in 1949 it was fare that provoked a great deal of excitement in anyone under the age of fourteen hailing from the less salubrious streets of working class Northfleet and Gravesend. Family weddings were something we all looked forward to.

The only restaurant I had ever been taken to was very occasionally a branch of British Restaurants set up in WW2, where spam was served with mashed potatoes and split peas and also, most excitingly, dumplings with golden syrup. I remember one in Maidstone close to the cattle market with particular affection because we went there on two occasions. What we were doing at the cattle market remains a mystery but in the early 1940s Maidstone was a most desirable destination on the local green buses.

Years later as a pupil at Wombwell Hall my classmate Valerie Goldsack boasted of a trip to Cliftonville where her entire family lunched at The Lido and she had egg and chips for two shillings and ninepence. Even more excitingly her father had ham, egg and chips for four shillings and sixpence. When I told my mother she said it sounded like daylight robbery to her and that them seaside places were known for it. As our own seaside trips only ever occasioned bowls of cockles or whelks and fish and chips to eat on the beach I was very envious and urged Valerie to tell me what else was available on the Lido menu. She said something called scampi was being served also with chips but at seven shillings it was unlikely there were many takers. I wondered what scampi might be and was quite certain that she was as uninformed as myself so did not pursue the matter further but determined that at some future date I would try this clearly upmarket menu item. It was to be several years before this became possible.

By the time I left school early in 1956 Gravesend definitely had at least one Indian restaurant, a Chinese Takeaway, and what’s more either a Berni Inn or an Angus Steak House that flourished from within the Royal Clarendon Hotel. The latter was a destination I developed a great desire to visit. Both Vic and Peggy Troke who ran the corner shop in Shepherd Street, Northfleet and my ever more worldly cousin Margaret who was already considering abandoning her young husband in favour of an attractive alternative keen on dining out, had stories to tell about the various steaks available. There was Filet Mignon she told me, together with Prime Rump or T-bone and delicious saute potatoes that were available if you didn’t quite fancy chips. If you were seriously hungry you could opt for a starter such as soup or melon with Parma ham or even something called a prawn cocktail which sounded suspiciously like a drink. There were desserts such as apple pie, sorbets and meringues. Really sophisticated diners ordered half bottles of wine – Spanish Burgundy or Mateus Rose. This latter fact was detailed to me by Peggy Troke, who was only marginally surprised at my interest and was responsible for fanning the flames of my increasing desire. To make matters worse my cousin began to talk to me about an exorbitantly expensive dessert called Crepes Suzette upon which was apparently poured large quantities of brandy. Although I had no experience whatsoever of brandy it became ever harder to imagine never being in a position to at least try something made with copious quantities of it.

It was Mr Frank Blackburn whose filing and minor typing I was responsible for at Francis, Day & Hunter, 138 Charing Cross Road, who ultimately was to provide my very first experience of what I at any rate considered to be Fine Dining. I can no longer remember what actioned the momentous occasion but he was to take his secretary, Pat who was eighteen years old, typed all the really important letters and was engaged to someone called Lionel, and me out to lunch at Lyon’s Corner House at Tottenham Court Road. Pat told me this one Monday morning using her most important voice. With seating for two thousand the first Corner House had opened in nearby Coventry Street in 1909. It proved an enormous success providing a wide range of eating choices over four floors together with the opportunity to book theatre tickets, buy flowers and chocolates and make telephone calls. A mere hop, skip and a jump from Piccadilly Circus the exciting new venture certainly attracted large numbers of theatre goers and decades later was a magnet for young office workers such as myself except I had not as yet gathered together enough courage to enter such a place. I don’t know when the Tottenham Court Road Corner House had opened and until the point of the proposed lunchtime visit had of course only admired the building from the outside. However, Pat was certainly knowledgeable about it because on the occasion of their engagement Lionel had taken her there as a very special treat and had presented her with the all important Ring over coffee and after dinner mints. Disappointingly when I asked her what eating choices had preceded the mints she said she couldn’t remember.

Mr Blackburn booked a table for one o`clock on the top floor at the most prestigious restaurant choice, the one with a rather exotic name that I no longer remember, and a string quartet on Fridays and Saturdays though not at lunchtime. I had been in a state of some excitement for three days and wore my best black felt skirt adorned with applique butterflies and a pale blue orlon twinset. I sat in excited anticipation at what was to come, admiring the lines of white linen napkins and heavy silver. This was most definitely taking part in the High Life! We were given glossy white menu cards imprinted with gold and red lettering offering a range of breathtakingly exciting fare. Most of the dishes were a complete mystery to me and so considering Pat to be an expert I waited to see what she would choose.

After a great deal of consideration she finally said she would have melon with Parma ham followed by a Filet Mignon with saute potatoes and a garden salad so after a regretful glance at other items on offer that might have been quite delicious had I been courageous enough to order them I decided to have the same. Mr Blackburn chose soup followed by a chicken dish of some kind. Rather disappointingly we were not offered wine but were able to have pineapple juice whilst Mr Blackburn drank beer. I was of course still extremely nervous but the only hiccup came when I mistook granules of ginger for brown sugar rather spoiling the melon because I had sprinkled it liberally over the plate. I then had no alternative but to pretend that I always liked to eat melon that way and in fact I think I said that when my mother served it that’s what we always did. It was disgusting and definitely difficult to consume. I noticed our employer giving me sympathetic looks as I determinedly swallowed one adulterated spoonful after another. However, the only thing that was daunting about the steak that followed was that I was asked how I wanted it cooked and whilst I was contemplating this odd question Pat said she wanted hers medium so I said I would have mine the same.

Apart from the shaky start with the melon it turned out to be quite the most exciting meal of my teenage life and I had quite decided that before we reached the stage of ordering sherry trifle from the very impressive dessert trolley. It had not been totally without anxiety though and I was most definitely still completely over-awed by my surroundings and impressed with the ease with which other diners seemed to order items from the menu, clearly without any underlying fear of being unmasked as working class aspirants. If only I could reach those dizzy heights myself! Just imagine how it would feel to be completely confident in such a situation.

That Friday lunchtime visit to the top floor of Lyons Corner House was a culinary watershed moment for me and I became ever more determined to Eat Posh as frequently as was humanly possible in the future hopefully starting with the Grill Room at the Clarendon Hotel close to home in Gravesend where neighbours might hear about it and be impressed at my rise through the lower classes. It was to be some time before that ideal was realized and in the interim I discovered to my horror that a large number of restaurants describing themselves as offering High Class Dining , tendered their menus only in French which made me wish that I had paid a great deal more attention to Miss S Smith’s classes at Wombwell Hall. In some despair I eventually resorted to the local library to try to discover how to recognize the more frequently appearing staples of French dining and commit them to memory. The librarian wanted to issue me with a book called French Cooking for Beginners and gave me an odd look when I tried in some discomfiture to explain my actual dilemma. She used a slow pace when she spoke to me. So I wanted a book about menus in French offered by restaurants I had not as yet been invited to dine at? She would like to help but it appeared I would need to be much more specific.

The next snag I was to encounter was not the actual language of Posh Eating but hunting down those who might be persuaded to indulge what I hoped was to become my key hobby for the foreseeable future. Eating Posh did not come cheaply. Clearly young men of my own age and background were quite out of the question for obvious reasons and so I gravitated to the atypical and anomalous. This meant that much coveted restaurant meals were not always a comfortable experience. I had moved on from Francis, Day & Hunter via Lawrence Wright Music, David Toff Music, and a recording studio in Bond Street where I was hoping to meet the rich and famous but it wasn’t until I found myself typing in the basement of Pye Records for a man with a vicious tongue called Bernie that an actual employer was cajoled into using his expense account to lunch out with me. Bernie said that if he did so this should be at his favourite little restaurant in Frith Street, Soho where he was well known and where the food was divine and where a sommelier advised on the choice of wine. No, he said, he most definitely did not want to go to the grill at the top of Lyons Corner House either in Tottenham Court Road or Coventry Street – only the gastronomically challenged would consider such a thing . Wary of his underlying spitefulness I hesitated only for a fraction of a second before of course enthusiastically agreeing.

Bernie was of course a gourmet of the most exasperating kind and he took a great deal of pleasure in humiliating me as much as possible and referring to me as the rather gauche little girl who did his typing. Even the over attentive waiter began to look rather disapprovingly at him and gave me a wink. I won’t go into all the humiliating details but later Bernie accused me of having a steak and chips mentality which although I realized was part of his particular brand of sadism I did not completely understand. It all had to do with the fact that he ordered something called Coquille Saint-Jacques and urged me to do the same. I was reluctant only because I had no idea what the dish comprised of and was too embarrassed to say so and so instead I opted for Steak Frites. As I was still at the stage where I viewed a piece of steak as an enormous treat it was a shock to realise that there were those who saw my choice rather as I might view chicken nuggets today. Bernie lost no time at all in commenting disparagingly on my unfortunate lunch choice with the waiter but also an hour or two later with all and sundry keen to listen at Pye Records. Fortunately only an elderly woman from the Copyright Department paused by his desk to agree with him because his favourite restaurant was also one she favoured. The positive aspect of all this was that I learned not only how to order and eat scallops but later how to cook them which might have pleased the Northfleet librarian.
Over several years of sharpening and honing all the attributes necessary for Posh Eating and of necessity dealing with the needs and expectations of a great many unusual dining companions, I gained a degree of valuable experience. Elderly American tourists recently widowed who were on the Trip of a Lifetime were often to be found wandering The Strand and Fleet Street and always eager for conversation and a break from dinner at The Savoy. The recently bereaved were never in any way sexual predators and merely grateful for a dinner companion I came to realise and therefore only too keen to be directed to Rules in Maiden Lane or Kettners in Soho or whichever establishment happened to be my current obsession. Dating men in their sixties and seventies meant that I was exposed to a decidedly different style of conversation and learned how to listen attentively. Asking questions about their grandchildren and the career they had recently retired from meant that generally they did most of the talking.

I did not of course confine myself to the geriatric because the inhabitants of bedsitter land in South Kensington also provided a hunting ground. Young men from the Middle East who all seemed to be studying at the London School of Economics were definitely not hard up in the sense that other Londoners were at that time, and luckily for me they were bored and anxious to find English girl friends. Although their eating habits were largely confined to that which they found familiar, some of them were also keen to try pastures new and accompany me to various of my favourite haunts in the West End. Of course they had a keener interest in sex than the elderly tourists and that was something I had to develop tactics for dealing with when I found their attentions overwhelming.

It would be true to say that with a certain amount of grim determination, over a five year period I was indeed able to achieve the aspiration of getting to grips with Posh Eating first anticipated whilst still a child. Of course there were hazards and pitfalls along the way and a great many mistakes made. Progressing to working in a series of nightclubs during my twenties then helped a great deal particularly when it came to assessing the qualities of various champagne houses and the joys of oysters and caviar. Nightclubs at that time leaned towards the most expensive gastronomic treats. And all the experience gained meant that once I had children and of necessity turned my full attention to cooking I became a most enthusiastic cook and consequently their diet was not nearly as mundane as my own had been at a similar age. I am not sure, however, that they were ever completely aware of this fact.