Whilst many of the books that I consider favourites I first read years ago, there are others that I have come across much later in life.
One such book is Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns, which I only read for the first time last year, but was immediately taken by. Likewise the contemporary novelist Maggie O’Farrell, in her introduction to the 2012 Virago edition of the novel, writes of how, having found it in a second-hand bookshop, she started reading the book on her way out of the shop and, becoming immediately engrossed in it, had to find a bench to sit on so she could continue reading rather than waiting until she got home.
Comyns’s 1950 novel tells the story of Sophia, an aspiring artist and the many travails she endures before finally finding happiness. The novel, which is narrated by Sophia, opens with her encounter with Charles, a fellow artist, on a train and their hasty and ill-conceived marriage.
From the outset the couple are short of money: the novel’s title comes from Sophia’s lament that, when furnishing their first home (a flat in Belsize Park, North London), they are unable to get ‘a set of real silver teaspoons’ so, like their dinner service and cooking things, their ‘spoons came from Woolworths, too’. Charles makes little from his painting whilst Sophia scrapes a living as an artist’s model, and the couple are largely dependent on the generosity of others.
The marriage is not a happy one. Charles is selfish and irresponsible, Sophia naïve and ill-prepared for married life – she has an affair with Peregrine, an older art critic, whilst Charles admits to sleeping with other women. Neither Sophia nor Charles are prepared for parenthood: their firstborn, Sandro, experiences haphazard parenting in his early years, and a baby daughter’s life is tragically cut short, whilst Sophia’s second pregnancy – between the two live births – is terminated by an illegal abortion (at Charles’s insistence).
At the lowest point in the novel, Sophia – now separated from Charles – and her young son, Sandro, go to stay with Sophia’s brother in the countryside. He and his wife persuade her to advertise for a post as ‘lady cook-housekeeper’, which she reluctantly does. Employed by a gentleman farmer, Redhead, with an ailing wife and two daughters, Sophia sets up home, with Sandro, in Bedfordshire and settles into a relatively happy domestic lifestyle for the next three years, until a chance encounter between Sandro and an older artist, Rollo, brings Sophia a second chance at love and marriage.
As well as the novel being the story of a woman’s journey to happiness and greater self-understanding, it can also be read as a journey through food – and through cooking. At the outset Sophia’s general naivety about life and relationships is also seen in her relationship with food. When she and Charles shop for the first time as a married couple they go to a butcher’s: ‘I didn’t know much about meat, so when we got to the butcher’s, I said, “Can I have a small joint of bones stuck together?” and the butcher told me that kind of meat is called best end of neck of lamb’.
She also admits that her first attempts at cooking were not particularly successful – ‘At first everything I cooked tasted very strongly of soap..’, but, she finds out – as all keen cooks do – that success comes through practice: ‘soon I became quite a good cook’.
When poverty afflicts the couple, it is most acutely felt in the area of food. Sophia describes how they live on ‘vegetable soup and bread’. They are also fed by their friends; a fellow artist, Francis, gives them lunch – ‘scrambled eggs, tinned peas and carrots and a lot of coffee’ – and Sophia’s affair with Peregrine is initiated by his taking her out for lunch every day ‘to make sure I had at least one good meal a day’.
Conversely when Sophia and Charles have money, that is also celebrated through food. At one point in the novel Sophia inherits £150, and she and Charles go to the Café Royal to dine on ‘chicken and strawberries’. On other occasions Sophia cooks for Charles’s friends: ‘Sometimes [Charles] brought [new friends] home for supper and I would cook special dishes. Quite gone were the days when everything I cooked tasted of soap’.
Once working for the Redhead family, Sophia cooks to another level: Sunday joints, jam-making, pheasants and souffles, cakes and wedding feasts. As she notes, though, she is excluded from the events for which she is catering: ‘I cooked pheasants and souffles for the dinner-parties that I didn’t attend, and made cakes for tea-parties for guests that I saw through the kitchen window;’
And this ceaseless catering eventually takes its toll on Sophia. When Rollo takes her out for dinner on their first ‘date’ she comments that it was ‘the first time I had eaten a meal that I hadn’t cooked myself for over three years’. However, she is able to see the benefits of her time with the Redheads for, when she and Rollo are married and settled in to his house in St John’s Wood in London, they entertain frequently and Sophia ‘became rather famous as a cook’ so ‘[her] time at the Redheads wasn’t altogether wasted’.
When Sophia is still with the Redheads, one of the daughters, May, asks Sophia ‘to make a chocolate cake because some people were coming to tea’.
Having put this blog to one side for the last couple of months whilst I both completed a house purchase, and then waited for the delivery of a new oven, I was keen to get baking again – and thought the chocolate cake would be as good a place as any to start. My childhood memories of chocolate cake – both eating and baking – are of a handwritten recipe of my Mum’s which includes golden syrup as an ingredient. The recipe is no longer in existence, so I set out to make my own version of it (drawing on both memory and some internet research). I don’t think I got it quite right – though it was delicious – as it did sink in the middle. So, like any self-respecting cook I made extra icing to try and conceal my mistake. Like Sophia whose cooking improved over time, I regard this chocolate cake as a work in progress to be improved over time. But here’s my first effort.
CHOCOLATE CAKE
INGREDIENTS (for 1 large cake to serve 10-12):
275g caster sugar
175g unsalted butter, softened
4 tablespoons golden syrup
2 large eggs, whisked lightly with a fork
200g self-raising flour (or 195g plain flour plus 1 teaspoon baking powder)
50g cocoa powder
1-2 tablespoons milk
for the icing
80g dark chocolate, broken into squares
110g unsalted butter, softened
4 tablespoons golden syrup
80g icing sugar sieved
METHOD:
Preheat the oven to 180C / 160C fan / Gas mark 4.
Grease and line a 20cm diameter cake tin.
Sieve the flour, baking powder (if using) and cocoa powder into a large bowl.
In a separate bowl beat together the butter and sugar until softened and pale in colour. Then beat in the syrup.
Add the egg mixture a little at a time, beating well and adding a tablespoon of the dry ingredients between each addition.
When the egg mixture is added, fold in the remaining dry ingredients.
Add sufficient milk to create a soft dropping consistency (the mixture falls easily off the mixing spoon when lightly shaken).
Spoon the cake mixture into the prepared cake tin, smoothing over the surface.
Bake for 45-60 minutes until set and a cake tester or skewer comes out clean. Leave to cool in the tin for 20 minutes and then turn onto a wire rack to finish cooling.
When the cake is cold you can ice it. Melt the chocolate either in the microwave or in a glass bowl suspended over a pan of simmering water.
Leave the melted chocolate to cool slightly whilst you beat together the butter and syrup in a mixing bowl. Beat in the icing sugar, followed by the melted chocolate. Spread the icing thickly and lusciously over the top of the cake.
