By the time John came back with a strange concoction, the room really looked quite a lot better. … John gazed round approvingly and pronounced judgement: ‘Smell bad, but look good.’ The exact opposite could have been said of the meal, but with the important addendum that it tasted delicious. (Lynne Reid Banks, The L-Shaped Room)
In my teenage years, as I transitioned from reading children’s to adult fiction, I would spend many an hour looking through my parents’ novel collection. As well as being captivated by the idea that I had a lifetime of reading before me, I was also fascinated by the access these books gave me to an adult world: a world of work, love and sex, marriage and parenthood.
One of the books that caught my attention – and which I have now read at least three times – was Lynne Reid Banks’ The L-Shaped Room. First published in 1960, Banks’ novel is a first-person narration by Jane Graham, an unmarried woman awaiting the birth of her first child.
Like Rosamund in Margaret Drabble’s 1965 novel The Millstone, which also centres on unmarried motherhood, Jane is not a stereotypical irresponsible single mother – a 27 year-old middle class educated professional, after an aborted career in acting Jane now works in public relations for a London hotel. Drabble’s Rosamund is a postgraduate student of English literature, working on Elizabethan poetry.
And whilst both novels are set in 1960s London, neither protagonist is experiencing the swinging Sixties, at least as far as sex is concerned. Both Jane and Rosamund are sexually inexperienced, falling pregnant on their first unappealing sexual encounters. And whilst Jane goes on to develop another, better sexual relationship Rosamund steers clear of sex for the remainder of the novel, pouring her efforts into her study and impending motherhood.
Whereas Rosamund is fortunate enough to be able to live in her parents’ Marylebone flat, whilst they are out of the country working, Jane is made homeless by her widowed father who kicks her out of home on learning of her pregnancy.
And so Jane arrives at a rundown house in Fulham and rents a bedsit – in the shape of an L – at the very top of the house, with extremely limited cooking facilities:
One wall – the partition – was bare; along the other ran some rudimentary cooking facilities, consisting of a wash-basin-cum-sink with a tin draining-board and a small cupboard with a top just large enough to hold a gas-stove, about a foot square, with a grill and two small elements.
In fact Jane’s cooking facilities are not as limited as they could be. The journalist Katherine Whitehorn, in the preface to the 2008 reissue of her Cooking in a Bedsitter, originally published in 1963, describes how she was inspired to write the book in response to a complaint that there were no cookery books designed for people who ‘lived in one room and had only a single gas-ring.’ Whitehorn’s classic comprises approximately 300 recipes for such people, people who want to cook properly – recipes include Sausage Casserole, Venetian Liver and Mushroom Risotto – and who want to be able to entertain both friends and the opposite sex (with suggested three-course menus and tips on ‘Cooking for a man’ and ‘Cooking for a girl’).
In fact Jane is not described as doing much cooking in her bedsit in The L-Shaped Room. In the episode quoted above, she has been shopping for food, but her neighbour, John, a jazz trumpeter, cooks the food whilst Jane and her other neighbour, Toby, a writer, set to work on her room.
No mention is made of what Jane has bought – or of what John cooks – apart from the fact it smells and tastes significantly better than it looks. Looking through Whitehorn’s book for inspiration I came across her recipe for ratatouille, the French vegetable casserole composed of aubergines, courgettes, tomatoes and peppers, an ideal recipe for a bedsit cook as it can all be made in one saucepan. Whilst ratatouille can look quite appetising, one of Whitehorn’s suggested variations to the standard recipe is to stir two eggs into the mixture four minutes before the end, something I remember my Mum doing to the ratatouilles she used to make us (and obviously influenced by Whitehorn’s book which occupied a proud place on her kitchen cookery book shelf – a legacy of her student days). I remember enjoying the taste of the dish, but it wasn’t particularly attractive (sorry Mum!), as the egg would congeal around the vegetables and become discoloured by them.
It doesn’t suit my style to make a deliberately unattractive dish, so I present my variant – but still in the spirit of the original: ratatouille served with poached eggs on top.
BEDSIT RATATOUILLE WITH POACHED EGGS
Ingredients (serves 2):
1 onion, chopped finely
1 garlic clove, chopped finely
2 peppers, ideally different colours (I used one red and one yellow), cut into large dice
1 aubergine, diced
1 large courgette, diced
1 tin tomatoes
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and pepper
2 eggs
Method:
Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan over a moderate heat, and then add the onion and fry until it begins to soften and turn translucent. Then add the garlic and fry for a couple of minutes. Add the vegetables in the following order, cooking for a couple of minutes to soften before adding the next one: peppers, aubergine and courgette.
Finally add the tinned tomatoes. Stir, season and cook over a medium heat with the lid on until the vegetables are reduced to a thick stew (whilst retaining their distinctive appearance). Check for seasoning.
Remove from the heat (if you are cooking in a bedsitter with only one ring!), and turn your attention to the poached eggs. Fill a saucepan about a third full of water and bring to the boil. Add a few drops of malt vinegar (it’s meant to help keep the egg in shape). Crack an egg into the water, clamp the lid on and remove the saucepan from the heat – leave for 3 minutes and then fish out the egg. Repeat with the second egg or, if the saucepan is large enough, poach both eggs at once.
Transfer the ratatouille into a serving dish. Make two hollows in the ratatouille and place a poached egg in each one.
