Just like food references were thin, except by deprivation, in Agatha’s account of the First World War, so they are again in this chapter, on the Second. It’s no surprise, thought, that when references do appear, they are heavily freighted with significance.
Since Agatha was always a great lover of apples, the following anecdote is worth excerpting, from a period when various of Agatha’s houses were occupied by the military and government for the war effort.
“While the work of furniture-moving was in progress Hannaford, the gardener, who was a faithful old rogue, devoted to anyone he had served for long enough, took me aside and said, ‘You look now what I’ve saved for you from Her.’ I had no idea who Her might be, but I accompanied him to the clock tower above the stables. There, leading me through a kind of secret door, he showed me with great pride an enormous quantity of onions on the floor, covered with straw, and also a mass of apples.
“‘Come to me afore she went, she did, and said, were there any onions and apples, because as she’d take ’em with her, but I wasn’t going to let Her have them—no fear, I wasn’t. Said most of the crop had failed, and I just gave her enough as was good for her. Why, they apples were grown here, and so were those onions—she’s not going to have ’em, take them away to the Midlands or the East Coast or wherever she’s going.’
“I was touched by Hannaford’s feudal spirit, though nothing could have been more embarrassing. I would a thousand times rather Mrs Arbuthnot had taken away all the apples and onions; now they were landed on my hands, with Hannaford wagging his tail like a dog who has retrieved something you don’t want from the river.
“We packed up cases of apples, and I sent them to relations who had children and might like them. I could not face returning to Lawn Road with two hundred odd onions. I tried to wish them on to various hospitals, but there were far too many onions for anyone to want.”
We also get in this chapter a mention of what Americans would call a victory garden, planted and maintained by Agatha’s energetic dynamo of a sister Madge, bursting with “new potatoes, rows of peas, French beans, broad beans, asparagus, little carrots, and all the rest of it.”
Agatha and her wartime buddy, Stephen Glanville, would pool resources to make a nice meal of it under the conditions of rationing: “‘I’ve got some butter from America—can you bring a tin of soup?’ ‘I’ve been sent two tins of lobster, and a whole dozen eggs—brown.’” On one triumphant occasion Glanville scored “real fresh herrings,” but alas, the only cooking method available was “the hot water boiler. A sad evening.”
Glanville is in fact the one who prompted Agatha to write her one and only historical mystery (and quite possibly the first of its kind—hard now to imagine a world without historical murder mysteries in abundance) set in ancient Egypt. He may have regretted it, because Agatha constantly afflicted him with questions of everyday life beyond his archaeologist’s immediate knowledge, and of course that included food: “reed birds on spits… loaves… bunches of grapes.”
A charming confirmation of my working hypothesis of food mentions mirroring the happiness of Agatha’s liaisons appears at the end of the chapter. After spending most of the war far away in the service, Max reappears one cold night unannounced. She can hardly believe it at first. But this one proves to be utterly unlike her postwar reunion with Archie.
“This was Max! He might have left yesterday. He was back again. We were back again. A terrible smell of frying kippers came to our noses and we rushed into the flat.
“‘What on earth are you eating?’ asked Max.
“‘Kippers,’ I said. ‘You had better have one.’ Then we looked at teach other. ‘Max!’ I said. ‘You are two stone heavier.’”
“‘Just about. And you haven’t lost any weight yourself,’ he added.
“‘It’s because of all the potatoes,’ I said. ‘When you haven’t meat and things like that, you eat too many potatoes and too much bread.’
“So there we were. Four stone between us more than when he left. It seemed all wrong. It ought to have been the other way around.
“‘Living in the Fezzan Desert ought to be very slimming,’ I said. Max said that deserts were not at all slimming, because one had nothing else to do but sit and eat oily meals, and drink beer.
“What a wonderful evening it was! We ate burnt kippers, and were happy.”
Kippers and Potatoes
With few recipes even alluded to here, I decided to pay homage to wartime potatoes and end-of-war kippers, with this variation on the theme of the Scandinavian dish Jansson’s Temptation. A kipper is a herring preserved one way or another, smoked being one of the more popular treatments. If you, like I, live in a place where kippers are harder to come by than in the U.K., use some other kind of smoked oily fish. Moreover, if you can’t imagine that you could possibly be the sort of the person who would love a baked mass of potato, milk, and smoked oily fish, reconsider your approach to life. I find this so addictive it’s hard not to keep scraping out bits from the pan long after I’m full.
3 cans smoked sardines in oil (~4 oz or 100 g each)
1 lb (450 g) onions
2 lbs (900 g) potatoes
1 tsp salt + 1 tsp pepper
1 c (250 mL) milk
½ c (125 mL) cream
Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C). Into a large oven-safe frying pan drain the oil from all three cans of fish. Peel and slice the onions and get them frying in the oil. Peel the potatoes, slice them lengthwise, then crosswise as thin as your knife skills permit. Dump the slices from each potato into the frying pan as you go, so they can start cooking. When all the potatoes are in the pan, sprinkle over the salt and pepper and stir well. Tip the fish and whatever is left of oil and juices in the can into the pan, and stir well again. The fish will break up into bits; this is fine. Pour over the milk and cream. Set in the oven and bake 30–45 minutes until the top is bubbling and browned. Of course, if you want to emulate Max’s homecoming, you could let it bake till it burns. It’s your call.