Dining with the Famous and Infamous

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 Dining with Destiny Series
as part of the Rowman & Littlefield Studies in Food and Gastronomy

General Editor: Ken Albala, Professor of History,

University of the Pacific ([email protected])
Rowman & Littlefield Executive Editor:
Suzanne Staszak-Silva ([email protected])

The volumes in the Dining with Destiny series explore food biography,
examining the private eating lives of icons from across the span of
literature, art, music, politics, and revolution. If you’ve ever wondered what
Lenin lunched on, whether George Orwell really swigged Victory Gin, or if
there’s such a thing as a Freudian supper, then the Dining with Destiny
series is for you. Behind every great man and woman is a great meal. Their
peccadilloes are explored anecdotally against the backdrops of history and
culture, with accompanying recipes. Taste the disconsolate marriage of
Marilyn Monroe to Arthur Miller, make red gravy and pasta Sinatra-style,
or shake up the kind of chocolate malted that Woody Allen likes. How
about a banana sandwich with Queen Elizabeth? Or a road trip picnic with
Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald?
Dining with Destiny is not just for all the “foodies” out there—the night-
time cocoa will lie forgotten as you realize that Malcolm X entered the civil
rights movement by rejecting anything piggy on his plate and as the
Swinging Sixties are revealed through the hedonism and hashish cookies of
Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan. The reader will dream of sitting at the table
prepared by Hitchcock, Nelson Mandela, or Picasso. But beware: Dalí’s
lobster in chocolate sauce means that he has a desire to sleep with you
rather than paint.
Each of these figures took part in landmark historical and cultural events
that have shaped and defined our way of life—but they also had to eat. Now
it is time to reveal the real man by looking in his fridge to discover what
makes him a revolutionary, a hero, a rogue! Dining with Destiny lets you
taste what’s on Darwin’s fork.
Dining with the Famous and
Infamous

Fiona Ross

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Rowman & Littlefield
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing
Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com

Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB

Copyright © 2016 by Rowman & Littlefield

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or
by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and
retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by
a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ross, Fiona, 1966–
Dining with the famous and infamous / Fiona Ross.
pages cm. — (Rowman & Littlefield studies in food and gastronomy.
Dining with destiny)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4422-5225-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-5226-
4 (electronic)
1. Cooking. 2. Celebrities—Miscellanea. 3. Antiheroes—Miscellanea. 4.
Food habits—History—Miscellanea. 5. Food in popular culture—History—
Miscellanea. I. Title.
TX714.R6745 2016
 641.5—dc23 2015024476
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

 I would like to dedicate this book to these special people,
lost and found, and their food:

Olive Bucket’s Heart Pie

Elsie Turner’s Stovies
Alastair Ross’s Pizza
Jimmy Turner’s Hogmanay Shandy
Rachel McWalter’s mugs of Mellow Birds (plus toast and raspberry jam)
Moira Ross’s Kenyan Beef Curry
Angeline Levy’s Sole-in-a-Drawer
Glenys Sanger’s Welsh Cakes
Agnes Kasule’s Matoke (plus a glass or two of Waragi)
Sarah Parry’s Plum and Brandy Tart . . .
Here’s tae us; wha’s like us?
Damn few, and they’re a’ deid!
—Robbie Burns
 Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Chapter 1: Dining with Famous and Infamous Artists

Salvador Dalí
Mark Rothko
Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh
Andy Warhol
Auguste Renoir
Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo
Pablo Picasso

Chapter 2: Dining with Famous and Infamous Movie Stars

Joan Crawford
Michael Caine
Laurel and Hardy
Cary Grant
Marlene Dietrich
Alfred Hitchcock
Liz Taylor
John Wayne
Marilyn Monroe
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall
Woody Allen

Chapter 3: Dining with Famous and Infamous Musicians

The Beatles
Louis Armstrong
Frank Sinatra
Woody Guthrie
Bob Dylan
Bob Marley
Michael Jackson
The Rolling Stones

Chapter 4: Dining with Famous and Infamous Writers

Evelyn Waugh
C. S. Lewis
Ernest Hemingway
F. Scott Fitzgerald
John Steinbeck
J. D. Salinger
Ian Fleming
W. H. Auden
George Orwell
Agatha Christie
Oscar Wilde
Sylvia Plath

Chapter 5: Finally, the Nuts

Casanova
Sybil Leek
Nostradamus
Aleister Crowley
Bibliography
About the Author
 Acknowledgments

L ike all books, this one is indebted to many people. I want to thank my
kindly and talented editor, Ken Albala, for his advice and support. The
library staff in the hot and dusty Upper Reading Room of the Bodleian
Library has been wonderful, carting endless volumes of peculiar books
from deep down in the stacks. Thank you to my dear friend Gillian Harrison
for introducing me to the Bodleian and for all her fine companionship there
in the golden hours. Thanks to Moira and Alastair Ross for their huge
delight in undertaking ancillary research on food. I’d also like to thank
Margaret and Ken Conway for letting me curry a goat in their kitchen;
Shelley Cooper for helping me cook a suckling pig on a makeshift spit in
her back garden; and the Allen and Harris property-letting agency for
allowing me to marinade the aforementioned pig in the bath of the flat they
rented to me. To Mary Birtill and Irene Tominey, I owe a debt for inspiring
me with the Going Foot, as I do to all my Camino friends for walking the
way with me. Jane Ganly has been a great help with ICT advice and her
intimate knowledge of chocolate; also to Nathan Shelton of Bread and
Butter Creative, I owe eternal thanks for all his wonderful design work on
my website and blog. To Yorick, Roberta, and Louise, I would like to
express gratitude for all those mad dining experiments in the Allam Street
kitchen, and I must also thank Jean and Richard Haigh for advice on the
vast subject of vegetables. Thank you, Emily Gray, for letting me camp in
your attic. Thanks to Titch Hughes for showing me how to zip up! I’d like
to send a kiss to Roisin Ross for teaching me how to love, swim, and be a
mum, and also for being my best girl forever. May you always have a
bubble bath with the dog.
Finally, I’d like to express deep-hearted thankfulness to my dear husband
and best friend, Gareth Sanger, for all the immense generosity, love, and
belief he has shown in giving me a room of my own and £500.
 Introduction

A book about food begins with the writer’s taste buds; close up, they
look like something you’d find waving in a rock pool, but taste buds
are, in fact, little rocket launchpads of delight. So, without forgetting my
nose and its wonderful olfactory abilities, let this book begin with my taste
buds!
Being brought up in North East Scotland in the 1960s and 1970s, a world
where middle-class women still cooked and their side-burned husbands
worked, it was in my mother’s and grandmother’s kitchens that I first
discovered food. Like lots of women who were manacled to the kitchen
sink in the 1960s, my mother, Moira, poured every ounce of the opera
singer–lawyer–artist–writer–scientist–burlesque dancer she might have
been into crayfish bisques, duck ballotines, and Peasant-Girl-in-a-Veil plum
puddings. “Try this,” she would say, holding out a whisk clouded with
sherried, whipped cream. And I knew it not only tasted delicious but also
was the stuff of dreams. She seemed the very opposite of my staunchly
religious Brethren grandmother, Olive Bucket, who wore thick, tan tights
and a variety of ladies’ wigs, and who decorated the inside of her house in
shades of peach. But from Olive’s kitchen, too, came moist coconut towers,
rhubarb crumbles, and miracles of pies, with buttery, crumbling crusts and
steaming, savory cores. If these pies reflected her inner life, Olive Bucket
was the Mata Hari. When Olive passed away, quietly and respectably, her
food vanished with her; she had never written down a single recipe. It was
up to me to try to rediscover the lost tastes and smells of Olive Bucket’s
kitchen.
My taste buds, then, are driven by nostalgia.
A hankering for the past, a longing to be there, wherever it was. And
people, in the pasts I longed and long for, were not just Olive and Moira,
but all the movers, the shakers, the crooners who sang some moonshine for
us, the actors and actresses who walked across our black-and-white
television screens, the artists through whose eyes we see the days gone by,
the writers and poets who show us we are not alone. I wanted, right from
the start, to know intimately what life was like for them. I wanted to know
what Marilyn did after a long day filming on the set. Did she light a
cigarette? Drink a Manhattan? Eat pasta? Did C. S. Lewis bite into buttered
toast and drink tea like Mr. Tumnus in Narnia?
My first hunt for such a ghost was when, about thirty years ago, I
trundled down to London to march on a Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament demonstration. Yep, I was a bit of a hippie in my youth. After
all, the Berlin Wall was still up and the UK government was all set to hand
out “What to Do in the Event of a Nuclear Disaster” self-help sheets, full of
useful advice about stashing baked beans and long-life milk, and then lying
under your front door holding your breath while your housecoat melted. But
I was also a food-obsessed rebel and got distracted in London. It just so
happened I had just read somewhere of a restaurant that one of my personal
heroes, Oscar Wilde, used to go to in London’s Soho: I decided to try to
find it.
After wandering around the labyrinth of Soho in the rain, I found Wilde’s
restaurant down a darkened street; it was small and crooked, with
discolored lace curtains in the window. That didn’t matter, though. This was
the closest I’d ever got to Wilde. I could almost see Oscar’s coattails before
me, and I imagined his heavy cheeks bright with the cold and a little too
much of his yellow wine.
I followed him into the restaurant. The poor, old place was a shadow of
its former self, dusty and a little fly blown, with a broad, Greek waitress
dressed in frumpy folds of black and white. I wondered what it would have
been like to have shared a table here with Wilde, watched the way he held
his knife and fork, smelled the grilled lamb fin-de-siècle aroma of the
London chophouses, listened to the splash of the coach wheels. I sat at my
own white-clothed table, ate scallops and oysters, and imagined Wilde was
my companion. Even though I couldn’t share my oysters with him, I could
still savor his existence. It was on my fork.
Finding Wilde was really the beginning of Dining with the Famous and
Infamous. It has been a bid to meet old friends whom I’ve never
encountered, to break bread with them. My research into the food lives of
the key icons of the twentieth century has led me on a fascinating food
history journey; many, many hours were spent in the Bodleian Library in
Oxford poring through crooked stacks of books connected with icons as
diverse as Einstein, Laurel and Hardy, Freud, Steinbeck, Lewis, Churchill,
Christie, Stalin, Allen, and Lennon, looking simply for the word sausages
or eggs. Sometimes, my leads went cold; some icons seem to have not eaten
so much as a cracker in the course of their lives—but nothing beats the
discovery of a meal, a favorite dish, an unforgettable food moment that
encapsulates character. And the further I went with my food detection, the
more I realized one simple, fundamental lesson: what we are is revealed in
what we eat. Of course, Agatha Christie or Humphrey Bogart had other
things to do with their time than write down recipes, so, when I got wind of
a dish and cooking story for my icons, I went on to develop a relatively
authentic, of-the-age, and tasty version of their food experience. The recipes
in Dining with the Famous and Infamous are, then, entirely my own.
Hopefully, they are tasty, close to life, and aromatic with nostalgia. Just
because Van Gogh might have cooked, that doesn’t mean he cooked well. I
didn’t want to poison you, my reader. Some things I thought you’d prefer
not to eat, so I haven’t given a recipe, for instance, for the semen cakes
enjoyed by Aleister Crowley, the notorious wizard. Nor did I want to
produce a book packed with recipes without any background or anecdotes.
If there can be no resurrection of a moment, there can be no food nostalgia.
Unexpected insights into the course of the history of art, literature, music,
and film are exposed on dinner dates. Van Gogh and Gauguin’s tangled,
heated, artistic relationship is expressed through their insane eating life
together in Arles, and it was no accident that one of the most damning
pieces of evidence offered up at Oscar Wilde’s trial for sodomy was that he
was witnessed feeding another man—and a lower-class one at that—
candied cherries. It took supper in the Seagram Building to persuade the
artist Mark Rothko that he couldn’t beat the establishment, and would you
ever have imagined a romantic date with Cary Grant or the writer of
Catcher in the Rye, the reclusive J. D. Salinger, would have involved TV
dinner trays? Both Salvador Dalí and Alfred Hitchcock’s perverse sense of
humor and frustrated passions are evident in their food foibles; Dalí was
sure that his lobster in chocolate sauce would have you heading for the
bedroom with him. Dorothy Parker becomes even more endearing when
you find out that she didn’t know (like W. H. Auden) what to do with bacon
in the kitchen: Did it really need to be cooked? George Orwell, by contrast,
could make a fine blackberry jelly, and John Steinbeck liked to make
hotcakes for his dog, Charley. Salinger tried to smoke a whole salmon in a
basket on top of his chimney. Shake up a mint julep, and you are sitting
across from F. Scott Fitzgerald, looking rumpled and endearing in his suit,
with his boyish side-parting. Taste Ian Fleming’s Jamaican cocktail Poor
Man’s Thing, which reveals much more about the real 007 than a Bond
martini. Like Marilyn Monroe with Arthur Miller, Sylvia Plath tried to bake
her way into Ted Hughes’s heart; Liz Taylor’s vast appetite for husbands is
mirrored in her food passions. Frank Sinatra’s and Richard Burton’s eating
lives were shaped by their fidelity to their food origins. In Frank’s case, it
was by delicious Sicilian dishes and his mother, Dolly’s, kitchen—she
would stir up her red sauces with knuckle-headed mafia types dipping bread
crusts and offering advice on the seasoning.
Dining with the Famous and Infamous offers up the lives of the famous
and infamous on a plate. Come, pull up a seat at history’s table.