Читать книгу Food for Friends - Babette Hayes - Страница 7

This little book has deep roots in my life in Australia. Along with others by Leo Schofield, Richard Beckett (alias Sam Orr) and Barbara and Charles Blackman, it was first published in 1979, as part of a series of people ‘talking about food’. The series designer, Barbara Beckett, was then married to Richard. She was the driving force behind the books and I suppose, looking back, they were part of an ever-expanding interest in food and what it meant - that was taking place across Australia and in my home town of Sydney. Its publication came at the end of a long decade of research and writing, where I had compiled numerous books and articles on cooking and lifestyle and become much more intimately acquainted with my newly adopted home.

The first venture started shortly after my arrival in Australia in 1965, when I was commissioned by Paul Hamlyn to be the art director and stylist for a hefty tome, the Australian and New Zealand Complete Book of Cookery. This involved travelling across both countries and provided a wonderful opportunity for someone who had barely set foot on Australian soil to meet and see what was happening in the world of food and wine ‘down under’ and ‘across the ditch’. At the same time, I had been appointed Cookery Editor for House and Garden and Photographic Editor for Australian Home Journal.

The next milestone was 200 Years of Australian Cooking, originally launched as The Captain Cook Book to time it with Cook’s bicentennial anniversary. It allowed me to extensively research old family diaries and their cooking records. This entailed connecting with members of the Country Women’s Association in Tasmania which led to interstate intro- ductions to a wide variety of country women, who loved cooking, and who let me read through their old, treasured, much-used family notebooks and cook books. It also allowed me to meet with famous TV food personalities, who all loved talking about food, and who added a contemporary element.

New publications kept pace with my working life, with The Home Journal Cook Book following my appointment as that magazine’s Cookery Editor. The Australian Cook Book in Colour, Barbecue Cooking, Family Fare, and Party Fare all followed. And there was even a Pan paperback, Babette Hayes Cook Book. The publication, in 1978, of Australian Country Cooking Style, at the encouragement of Barbara Beckett, allowed me to realize another dream – to photograph the food for one of my own cook books. Travelling with various photographers, I had taken photographs with my 35mm Minolta, as I was getting stories together for Belle magazine and Vogue Living, both interstate and overseas. I enjoyed the responsibility for planning the recipes for Australian Country Cooking Style, as well as setting up and gauging the composition and lighting for the finished dishes.

Revisiting the stories and recipes in Babette Hayes Talks about Food for this new 2017 edition, now titled Food for Friends, and featuring my own family photographs, I was asked what has changed in my approach to food. And I realize that I am just as passionate about cooking and eating with family and friends, about sampling food cooked by others, and reading about what is happening in the world of food. I can also sense my early desire to escape from formality in the creek-side picnics in the bush and the informal gatherings described in its pages.

When we first arrived in Australia, I couldn’t wait to organise a picnic but was met with resistance. The heat and the flies, I was told, were good reasons for not going ahead. But slowly I convinced our new-found friends that it could be enjoyable, with the right location. I always suggested that they bring a dish they loved making and people would bring their specialities. It was a joy; it was sharing. These events were a reprise of the amazing picnics we’d had in Oxfordshire, setting off in our 1927 Bentley or whatever vintage car we had ... packed with food and children, before picking up our friends, Lewis and Patricia Morley, with their young son, Lewis, to meet up with ten or more others at the designated picnic location.

Off touring through Wales on a camping holiday in our 1929 Morris Cowley

Looking back I see that for me, there has always been a very fine line between friends and family. So these pages recall moments of being together, sometimes gathered around a campfire or, lit by candles, at the kitchen table, in the age-old ritual of enjoying food with loved ones. Reflecting on these many years of cooking and entertaining, I realize that I like not to be too formal. I like to mix things on the table ... plates and wine glasses that don’t really match. If people want to help, I like to have them around me, catching up on news as they chop and stir or whatever. We rarely had a separate dining room and it still doesn’t appeal because I am not going to shut myself away somewhere just because I am cooking. And there is a certain pleasure in having a sense of support and help. For their part, friends and family also enjoy sharing, and maybe learning, although that has never been the intention. I think you can cook anything anywhere, even on a camp fire. I would liken it to someone who is comfortable with words, spoken or written, which flow with ease them. Cooking is a part of me. It flows for me and I feel totally comfortable with it.

Those who know me, know of my childhood. I was born in Damascus and we lived in Douma in a typical, large, flat-roofed home, surrounded by a lush green garden. Brief holiday visits to the Lebanon were frequent and when my father died in battle, in Syria, in 1941, we lived in Cairo and Alexandria. This period of my life ended when I was finally taken to England, aged 8, by my mother and my new stepfather, on a troopship in December 1944, towards the end of the war.

I arrived in England, not speaking a word of English. All school children were evacuated due to the bombing of London and the major cities, so after a brief spell in the North of England, I was sent to a boarding school to learn the correct King’s English. I was strictly brought up from ‘day one’ and quickly had to learn perfect English table manners. I was not to speak at the table during mealtime and I curtsied every time I was introduced to an adult until I was 14 years old.

Family picnic amongst the ruins with my friends in Syria 1939

In Hyde Park, London, with my brother Bruno, wearing our boarding school uniforms 1946

Post-war, when my mother was working at the French Consulate and was usually very tired, I would help her prepare the meal, clear away and wash up. She was an invalid for a while in England, following a back operation, and was unable to move around very much. So, from the age of eleven, I did the weekly family shopping regardless of whether we lived locally or across the Thames, in Barnes.

I learnt to negotiate with our grocer In Kings Road Chelsea to swap food coupons in our ration books – saving our soap stamps to buy precious eggs and negotiating with the grocer to procure other rare rations like butter. Mama was regularly getting Elle, one of the top French magazines, and I loved their food articles, collecting the recipes and recipe cards they published every week. Each card would give you their suggested three course daily menus, which I pored over and practised where possible. I had never previously researched cooking methodology other than learning to cook my mother’s specialities which all involved eggs – dishes that she would get our cook in Syria to prepare for the many menus she would organise for VIPs and their visitors: Cheese souffle, vanilla egg custard for Ile Flottante, fish and prawns with cream sauce, Quiche Lorraine, Mousse au Chocolat. The rest I learned by experience, by making use of whatever I had or whatever was available – by whatever came up; whatever presented itself.

When I was 15, I went to Hammersmith Art School in London, where it seemed natural for me to go to our local Shepherd’s Bush food market to get lunch for fellow students, then come back to put out a feast, at minimal cost, for 8-10 of us. I would also cook for my friends at home. My Austrian stepfather owned a factory making underwater swimming gear and I would organise working bees, where we put together underwater masks to earn much-needed pocket money. We would sit in my bedroom, working away, before I went down to cook a budget spaghetti or rice dish. It was always such a joy to sit and eat together.

Our first kitchen about to serve coffee 1957

Farewells with my mother as Stephanie, Guy and I are about to sail from Portsmouth on the SS Canberra, January 1965

Over these years, I adapted myself to whatever kitchen was at hand and I have had a series of kitchens in my life, none of them the ‘ideal, dream, functional, beautiful kitchen’ and definitely not the kitchens I have carefully designed for my various clients, after this became my design speciality. But every kitchen of my own has been much appreciated, even when it was not like our latest, super-efficient kitchen in the house at the back of the Hospital Café, where we are living in Bowral. But I would say that, whatever the kitchen you are faced with, you can learn to work with it.

Talk of kitchens makes me recall my first one as a young married woman in Shepherd’s Bush on three half-levels of a workman’s tiny terrace house. We had two bedrooms, one minute bathroom, one living room and a very basic kitchen. It had a small fridge and stove lined up along one wall, alongside a sink with no hot water; we carried it in from the bathroom next door. On the opposite wall to the sink, there was a small Victorian-era fireplace, with shelves either side. In between, there was just enough room for a small jewel of a round, antique, scrubbed-pine table with four chairs, given to us by Mimi, my husband’s mother. We would stretch the seating with stools and somehow managed to squeeze six to eight people around it.

In London, I was working for Josiah Wedgwood on their showroom and exhibition displays, enjoying their range of historic and contemporary dinnerware and visiting their ‘seconds’ factory for bargain buys. As I started styling for various home magazines, I found myself writing on cooking for Queen Magazine, and moved on to be the cookery writer for the newly launched Sunday Telegraph Colour Magazine, with the ‘test’ cooking taking place in the most humble of kitchens, ours!

In Sydney, after I emigrated here with my husband, Guy, and two-year-old daughter Stephanie in 1965, my ‘test’ kitchen became the small 1930s kitchen we had in a flat overlooking Mosman’s Sirius Cove. I recall waking up on our first day to the sound of fishermen, casting nets from their bright, Mediterranean blue and green painted boats – a dream come true. That small kitchen was soon put to work as I was appointed cookery editor for House and Garden. I did all the dishes for my cookery articles there, which were photographed as I cooked and styled in our home and garden.

Our first makeshift kitchen in the laundry at Hunters Hill 1967

Hunters Hill 1968

Two years later, we bought our first home. It was in Hunters Hill and we moved in with our two young children, Stephanie and baby Sholto – Arabella was yet to come. It was a wonderful old sandstone house with a long, wide verandah at the back that everyone remembers for the memorable meals we shared there at our very long table, often seating 16.

We eventually put in a new kitchen, using pine for the joinery, which was set against old sandstone walls and complimented by a terracotta floor of round, inverted drain-pipe caps – the closest thing I could devise to my French Grandmother’s hexagonal tiles. Two ovens were a ‘must’, along with a wide gas cook-top, over which sat a magnificent copper hood, made by my friend, master-craftsman, Louis Berczi. A round antique Australian cedar table sat in the middle and was used for our family meals as well as doubling up as much-needed work space. With its stable door and graceful old windows – the original ceiling rafters overhead – this kitchen was a warm setting for many a photoshoot for several cook books over the next 16 years.

Then it was time to take a break from the magazine, design, book-writing world. Meditation, and a different pace of life saw me returning to England in 1984 for a few years before I found myself heading back to Mosman and living, once again, in an old stone house. I picked up where I had left off, writing, designing, exploring and enjoying the changing world of food and cooking, and appreciation of what Australia offered in design and architecture.

Twenty-five years later, I have moved on to another adventure with my youngest daughter, Arabella, who had always wanted to run a café and shop. In 2015, following a phone call from an old friend, Jasper Foggo, we came to a new life in Bowral, as owners of the Hospital Café. This latest adventure has been quite a learning curve and most of all we have enjoyed being part of the community and making many new friends. I have particularly appreciated our super-efficient, light-filled kitchen in the house that lies at the back of the café.

Interviewing Christo in New York for Belle 1979 (photograph by Lewis Morley)

My trio: Arabella, Sholto and Stephanie

But location aside, some things remain central to me. I enjoy bringing people together; both old friends and new acquaintances. If I have any wish it is just to pass on the pleasure of sharing and seeing information passed on to others. It gives me great joy to see my daughters, Stephanie and Arabella, cooking, and also my granddaughter, Hanna, trying new recipes. For his part, my son Sholto is particularly good at cooking chops and steak. He has the perfect touch and knows how to seal in the juices and cook so it is as rare as we each individually like it. He also does magical things with the river trout he catches, which he pan fries on a camp fire or smokes in his smoking box, and if we are lucky, brings to cook for us to enjoy at home.

I have enjoyed my personal cooking journey from the changes that took place in England in the 1950s with the influence of inspiring writers like Mapie de Toulouse Lautrec in Elle, to Elizabeth David’s adventures as she wrote about her food discoveries and travels through France, Italy and Spain – all so transforming to England’s attitudes to cooking. Then coming to Australia in 1965 opened so many doors. The timing was perfect, offering me many publishing opportunities to express new ideas. Through magazines and books, I was able to reach a wide readership, offering me the privilege to be able to contribute to Australian culture in so many ways. I felt deeply honoured when, on the Queen’s birthday, in June 2014, I was awarded the Order of the Medal of Australia (OAM) for Service to Interior Design, Australian Cuisine and writing (books and articles).

It has been an adventure which has led to personal and professional friendships with various ground-breaking food writers and visionaries, committed ‘foodies’, organic farmers and cheesemakers, creative photographers, designers, artists, architects and inspiring home makers. Of these, none has been more sustaining that my lasting friendship with my dear friend, Margaret Fulton, who has made such an immense impact on Australians and influenced generations of families.

But finally, my personal journey has been about much more than the cooking. It has been about the preparation and being together, and creating together an embracing experience as an ordinary part of our everyday lives.