Recipes

Recipes for food that can be served at book club meetings for Parade's End

Ferens came in, removed the bacon plates and set on the table a silver water-heated dish that contained poached eggs and haddock.

Mrs Satterthwaite was ultrafashionable and consummately indifferent--she only really lost her temper if at her table and under her nose you consumed her famous Black Hamburg grapes without taking their skin and all. 

'Breakfast! With Duchemin! You go, my boy! You'll get the best breakfast you ever had in your life.'

He added to his brother-in-law: 'Not the eternal mock kedgeree Claudine gives us every morning.'

The chairs, arranged along the long table that was set for eight people, had the delicate, spidery, mahogany backs of Chippendale; on the golden mahogany sideboard that had behind it green silk curtains on a brass-rail were displayed an immense, crumbed ham, more peaches on an epergne, a large meat-pie with a varnished crust, another epergne that supported the large pale globes of grapefruit; a galantine, a cube of inlaid meats, encased in thick jelly.

'Don't you know mother's mascot?' the girl asked. 'She tells everybody...Don't you know the story of the man with the champagne? How mother was sitting contemplating suicide in her bed-sitting-room and there came in a man with a name like Tea-tray; she always calls him the mascot and asks us to remember him as such in our prayers...He was a man who'd been at a German university with father years before and loved him very dearly; but had not kept touch with him. And he'd been out of England for nine months when father died and round about it. And he said: "Now, Mrs Wannop, what's this?" And she told him. And he said, "What you want is champagne!" And he sent the slavey out with a sovereign for a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. And he broke the neck of the bottle off against the mantelpiece because they were slow in bringing an opener. And he stood over her while she drank half the bottle out of her toothglass. And he took her out to lunch...o...o...oh, it's cold!...And lectured her...And got her a job to write leaders on a paper he had shares in...'

The large, clumsy but otherwise unnoticeable being that this fascinating man had brought in his train was setting up pretensions to her notice. He had just placed before her a small blue china plate that contained a little black caviare and a round of lemon; a small Sevres, pinkish, delicate plate that held the pinkest peach in the room. She had said to him: 'Oh...a little caviare! A peach!' a long time before, with the vague underfeeling that the names of such comestibles must convey to her person a charm in the eyes of Caliban.

'He's trained Simpkins of New Bond Street. For a telephone message overnight special messengers go to Billingsgate at dawn for salmon, and red mullet, this, in ice, and great blocks of ice too. It's such pretty stuff...and then by seven the car goes to Ashford Junction...All the same, it's difficult to give a breakfast before ten.'

Just after lunch--and it was an admirable lunch of the cold lamb, new potatoes and mint-sauce variety, the mint-sauce made with white wine vinegar and as soft as kisses, the claret perfectly drinkable and the port much more than that, Mrs Wannop having gone back to the late professor's wine merchants--Miss Wannop herself went to answer the telephone...

Not absolutely silent of course: but silentish! Coming back from the parson's, where they had dropped the little London sewer rat, they had talked very little...Not unpleasant people the parson's: an uncle of the girl's: three girl cousins, not unpleasant, like the girl but without the individuality...A remarkably good bite of beef: a truly meritorious Stilton and a drop of whisky that proved the parson to be a man.

Oh, that was Grandfather's Wantways all right,' she declared. 'I know it well. It's called "Grandfather's" because an old gentleman used to sit there called Gran'fer Finn. Every Tenterden market day he used to sell fleed cakes from a basket to the carts that went by. Tenterden market was abolished in 1845--the effect of the repeal of the Corn Laws, you know. As a Tory you ought to be interested in that.'