by Diana
Serbe
I was not supposed to go to London.
I was eight months pregnant and should have been home in New York, wrapping
a child's bedroom in gossamer cuteness. How did it happen, that I was
on an airplane headed to London wondering if it would take the entire
staff of flight attendants to hoist me from my seat?
My husband, Al, was a film director
who made commercials, but dreamed of making a film. He came home one
day, wearing a smile so broad it hardly fit through the door. "Sit
down," he said and went on to tell me that he had a chance to do
a feature film. At first he didn't say the words London, England. "The
airline said you can fly, and your doctor said she wished everyone were
as healthy as you.""Airline? Fly?" "We have to go to London. Just
think - you can go shopping in Harrods.""London?" I stammered,
too stunned to think about Harrods, too pregant to think about shopping.
"You mean London, England?" I asked as if there were an alternative
London. Though I was stunned, it was apparent that he had already negotiated
the difficult aspects of bringing a very pregnant wife to London. The
film studio had already lined up a flat and recommended a doctor. Since
Harrods hadn't enticed me, he added, "We can see a lot of theater.
There's a production of King Lear at the Old Vic. It's on now.
Limited engagement. Probably not coming to New York."At first I didn't know what to say.
This was not a vacation, but going to live in England for an extended
period of time. I stared at the air around me. Then I looked at my husband's
eager face. First I thought of Harrods, so famous for its food halls.
Then I remembered some familiar words: "This scept'red isle . .
. this precious stone set in the silver sea . . . this blessed plot,
this earth, this realm, this England." Shakespeare. And there was
a production of Lear, Al had said, knowing he was uttering an
incantation.How awful would it be to have a
baby born on a scept'red isle? They knew how to delivery a baby in London.
I fell asleep dreaming of Windsor Castle, the British Museum, all the
landmarks I was not going to see while a baby somersaulted within me.
* * * *
London was a city that wore a crown, and,
despite the long history of the treachery of kings, the mix of medieval
stones and Georgian town houses, London's crown belonged to Queen Victoria.
Her morals, her rectitude, the very etiquette of life that she imposed
held sway over London. Cab drivers didn't lean on horns, the population
lined up in queues to wait their turn. This was civility and I was pulled
into its restrained heart with the first glimpse of the city. The studio settled us in a flat
near Sloane Square, then the dividing line between the traditional,
somewhat staid Kensington and the mod Chelsea. Like most London interiors,
the flat was filled with floral drapes and slip-covered armchairs that
sank when you sat in them. I liked the flat for being comfortable, for
having an insouciant attitude to interior decoration. The kitchen was a different story.
This room, ignorant of the needs of a cook, was a disorganized sliver
with a drop leaf table as work space. When opened, the leaf shot straight
to the sink, locking the cook in or out of the kitchen. I could tolerate
the kitchen: until the baby was born, we would go to the theater and
eat our dinners out. Not only that, I hardly knew how to cook.We went to see King Lear the second night after our arrival.
"Fie upon jet lag," I had declared, "a pregnant woman
must not delay." In the theater I heard London. The first thing I heard was the quiet
of the audience - evidence of that admirable British restraint, I thought,
since I knew the entire audience must have been as giddy with excitement
as I was. When the actors began to speak, I heard the English language,
spoken as it was meant to be spoken. I thought of my own American speech
with the heavily pronounced R : I said towerrrr, the British said tow-ah.
When the play was over and I rose from my seat, I had made a decision,
one that was inevitable and irreversible: I would be as British as the
British - decorous, restrained and civil, even ceremonious. And I would
be that with a British accent. No loathsome R. In the dizzying first two weeks
of our arrival, we ate out most of the time, and in London restaurants
I ate the foods of my childhood. In one restaurant I ate steak and kidney
pie, that delicious stew cooked under a golden dome of crust. In others
I found prime ribs and Yorkshire pudding, shepherd's pie, cottage pie,
and my childhood favorite, bread pudding. Just as I had done when a
child, I saved the pudding's hidden treasure for last - the raisins
plumped from cooking. Acting like a child evoked a nursery rhyme, "put
in his thumb and pulled out a plum."In an effort to please us, the studio
had stocked our larder with familiar American products - boxes of brand
name cereals, none of which we ever ate at home, jams and jellies imported
from US companies. We ignored the cereals in favor of either New York
style bagels, which Al found in Golders Green as a Sunday treat, or
the weekday muffins purchased at a bakery in Sloane Square, one of the
few places within walking distance for a pregnant woman.One morning, however, there was
only one muffin left. Someone had to eat corn flakes. I picked up the
box, and examined the red rooster. "We're running out of food,"
I said. "And I am tired of going to Sloane Square, getting the
same old muffins.""You can't go running around.
You don't know London and you're close to having the baby," Al
said. "Mmm. Well, one of us gets
the muffin and the other one gets cereal. You may have it, " I
told him, pushing the jar of American grape jelly across the table,
singing as I pushed, "Do you know the muffin man, the muffin man,
the muffin man."Was I thinking of nursery rhymes
in preparation for the baby, I wondered. I had fond memories of my mother
reading rhymes to my siblings and me, introducing us to the muffin man,
to Jack Sprat - ahead of his time in avoiding fats - to a pumpkin eater
named Peter, and to another Peter, Piper, who set us to giggling with
his pecks of pickled peppers. English food was familiar, not just from
my own childhood table, but because of Mother Goose.As Al closed the lid on grape jelly,
I decided that we had had enough of US imports. It was time to claim
my birthright. In perfect diction, not an American R in sight, I announced,
"Today I am going to buy real English marmalade. I am going to
Harrods, even if the baby is born right there in the middle of jams
and jellies. Time we had a peck of pickled peppers."There were no pickled peppers, not
in Harrods. The vaulted food halls with their ornate chandeliers and
sparkling Portuguese tiles were another reminder of Queen Victoria's
grasp on the imagination of the British, of the days when Britannia
ruled the waves. But it was the foodstuffs that lit the imagination.
No mere slab of meat was sold in these halls. Every side of beef was
required to live up to the moral stringencies imposed by the fastidious
Victoria. Racks of prime ribs hung imperiously in the meat section,
while the freshest salmon from Scotland and miniature lobsters from
Dublin glistened at the seafood counters. Crocks of blue-veined Stilton
cheese from the interior dairy areas were stamped that they were by
appointment to the Queen herself. There were familiar and unfamiliar
foodstuffs imported from Italy and France, but I stopped, awestruck,
before a row of tin cans. Though once outraged when my mother opened
cans of Dinty Moore and Chef Boyardee, I was now enraptured by tins,
and it was the names that caught my imagination. I saw cock-a-leekie
soup, bubble and squeak, mulligatawny and kedgeree. This was poetry,
glowing in the small unnoticed crevices of everyday life.Moving from counter to counter,
I reached one that had a variety of meat pies, so many different pies
that it seemed possible one might indeed contain four and twenty blackbirds.
On a counter next to the pies I was startled to see the miniature head
of a ceramic blackbird with an indelicate beak open as if singing. With
the finest of British accents, I asked the salesperson if the blackbird
had a use."Madame," he replied,
bowing slightly from the waist, though his courtesy scarcely hid his
disbelief that anyone could be so ignorant, "that is put in the
center of a meat pie to let steam escape." "Oh, that's so wonderful,"
I exclaimed, enthusiasm breaking down my artificial British reserve.
I picked up a shopping basket. The blackbird flew in. The counter for jams and jellies
was like a counter full of jewels. The jellies glistened garnet or ruby
red, emerald or royal purple, gold streaked with orange. The real English
marmalade that I had vowed to buy jumped into the basket. It was followed,
in rapid succession, by an apple and thyme jelly, a mint jelly, a Victoria
Plum Conserve, a lemon curd and, oh, what glory, a mulled wine jelly.
When I found a quince preserve I paused remembering a recipe in my grandmother's
handwritten cookbook, a gift from a long distant relative. This was
my food. Not wanting to neglect my Italian husband who was devoted to
fennel seed, Al, I bought sausage. Since it had no fennel, I bought,
not one, but two jars of the seeds.Harrods makes the boast that it
will take care of you from birth until death. That day I took care of
the essentials needed for the new life within me. Not merely nappies,
but the true necessities of life - a copy of Mother Goose with Victorian
illustrations, a British Isles cookbook, British measuring cups since
the pint was measured differently than in the US, and a kitchen scale
that had weights in both grams and ounces. I bought a meat pie for us
to eat that night, an edible memory of the hours of sitting with my
mother and an open book. Just as Al had carted his mother's lasagna
pans, and, yes, they had come with us, I was grabbing hold of my own
happy memories. My children would eat meat pies, sing about blackbirds,
and play pat-a-cake because it would make me happy, and from the warmth
of my patting palm, they would get the handed-down happiness that I
had gotten.
I eyed the racks of prime beef as
I left the store. If only I knew how to cook...
Continue
to read...Part two in which
I meet a singing 'cordon bleu' cook ....
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