Cooking In a Bedsitter

A 1977 paperback: "First published as Kitchen in the Corner, 1961"—

Even though the cover is the only illustration, this book is a treat (if for reasons other than my wanting to use the recipes).

The author is of the school of English writing which treats all subjects with unrelenting cheer.

Never mind that you live in a single room: you, dear reader,
can always muddle through—

Cooking a decent meal in a bedsitter is not just a matter of something that can be cooked over a single gas ring. It is a problem of finding somewhere to put down the fork you take the lid off the saucepan, and then finding here else to put the lid. It is finding a place to keep the butter where it will not get mixed up with your razor or hairpins. It is having your hands covered with flour, a pot boiling over on to your landlady's carpet, and no water to mop up any of it nearer than the bathroom at the other end of the landing. It is cooking at floor level, in a hurry, with nowhere to put the salad but the washing-up bowl , which in any case is full of socks.

However, with imagination, common sense and a great of newspaper, all this can be surmounted...

The first hurdle to consider:

... it is a sad fact that the better the room itself and the house in which it is found, the worse the cooking problem tends to be. In a large squalid rooming house, where the landlord calls only to collect the rent and where the cleaning, if any, is done by an indifferent slut with no standards to maintain, adventurous cooking is perfectly possible. If you find the sink filled with someone else's filthy crocks you can heave them out on to the floor without fear of a come-back. If you fill the whole house with the smell burning onions you will be cursed but not evicted; and nothing will look much worse whatever you spill on it.

But in a respectable house you have much more to worry about. Often you are not really supposed to be cooking at all (it is a common fallacy among the better class of landladies that one can exist entirely on tea, biscuits, and good books, without the need for food, beer, the wireless, or the companionship of the opposite sex). At the slightest crash your landlady will come tittupping out of her sitting-room to worry about the effect you are having on her nice furniture. If you want to peel onions under running water, you will probably have to peel them in your bath; and there will be nobody from whom you can borrow salt or a corkscrew in moments of emergency.

Where there is a will, our author believes, there are ways and means—one only need recognize certain limitations:

The principles of English cooking demand that first-class food should be cooked as simply as possible, and that a number of different foods should be cooked separately and served together. This is impossible on a gas ring. Indeed, bedsitter people have far more natural kinship with nomads brewing up in the desert over a small fire of camel dung, or impoverished Italian peasants eking out three shrimps and a lump of cheese with half a cartload of spaghetti.

The first thing a bedsitter cook must do is abandon the idea of 'meat and two veg', in favour of the idea of a simmering cauldron... And that brings us, inevitably to the casserole.

Here is how Ms. Whitehorn introduces readers to one-pot cooking:

OUT OF THE FRYING PAN AND INTO THE CASSEROLE

A French politician representing a somewhat backward district in Africa was some time ago found to have been eaten by his constituents. The journalist who discovered this used the phrase: 'Je crois qu'il a passé par la casserole' (I think he ended up in a casserole). Clearly the Africans knew what they were about. For making a delicious meal out of tough and intractable material, the casserole has no rival; and though, traditionally, most casseroles are oven dishes, all but the ones needing a crusty top can very well be done on a gas ring over an asbestos mat.

Not to worry: he was, after all, a Frenchman...

Before getting down to recipes, the author offers pages full of helpful tips, such as:

The coldest place in a bedsitter is very often under the bed. By all means keep food there, in a suitable box; though you had better find a way of reminding yourself of its presence before it reminds you.

Some advice is quite detailed—

BREADCRUMBS: Breadcrumbs are a bore in a bedsitter, but sometimes one must have them. There are four ways of getting them:
(1) Buy them. Some bought breadcrumbs are an alarming shade of orange and suitable only for fish; others are quieter in tone and will do for Wiener Schnitzel, fried chicken, etc. Bought breadcrumbs are not very suitable for the kind of pudding where you will eat them as they are, without further cooking.
(2) Dry slices of bread in front of the fire until they are hard; wrap up in newspaper, and first bang then roll the parcel until it is a parcel of crumbs.
(3) If you have a grater, you can grate a chunk of bread to make soft crumbs; but these are no good for frying.
(4) Get some housewife who hates to waste crusts to give you some of her crumbs.

The recipes here are more ambitious than heating canned soup, but still are campfire cooking; really, all that can be done in this setup. And as former chef and London resident J. remarked, not only are the dishes pathetic, but many are the kind of thing a corner shop would sell, ready-made.

The author does, however, offer wisdom beyond simplified recipes and single-pot cooking.

Ms. Whitehorn's guidance about coping with one-room life includes preparing and cooking for categories of visitors, from

Your parents, or your parents' spies — who are there to reassure themselves that you are eating adequately, get to bed early, know no vicious young men, and breathe plenty of clean fresh air.

...to, "Delicious little parties à deux."

That last includes separate sections, on "COOKING FOR A MAN" vs."COOKING FOR A GIRL", and:

ASKING HIM UP
...If you are not sure of the state of the room, don't ask him in. Many is the young man I have horrified by saying, 'Oh, do come in, I'll have it all cleared up in a minute,' picking the dirty clothes out of the fender as I spoke...

Do not, whatever you do, tell him the truth and say: 'You can't come up, because I haven't made the bed.'

ASKING HER UP
...If you have a set of rough and ready house rules designed to protect the amorous from casual interruptions, DON'T put these precautions into effect unless you really mean business. Nothing causes the timid fawn to shy away faster than the feeling that the rest of the house knows what she is in for (especially if she hopes she isn't). A towel hung over the outside door handle may lose you game, set, and match.

Ms. Whitehorn offers an Epilogue, where she suggests there may be one person in Britain

... who has wholly solved the problem of eating well in a bedsitter. When I went to visit him, a compound smell of celery, garlic, and freshly ground coffee - the essential smell of a French kitchen - met me faintly as I climbed the stairs. There was a sound of steak-bashing from within, and when I knocked on the outside of his door, a bag of vegetables fell heavily to the ground on the inside.

That last touch seems a bit much, and other details about "Marcus" and his room are laid on thickly:

... On every wall there were hooks from which hung knives and saucepans, and a string of onions, and another of garlic, a salad-shaker and a grater, and two kinds of egg whisk, and a bunch of bay leaves. The only picture was a Victorian still life in oils, showing a brace of freshly killed pheasant with some vegetables. There was a beer barrel in one corner, with an old slipper under the to catch the drips; and in another some curd cheese draining into a small shaving bowl through a sock. The open wardrobe door revealed, beneath the somewhat agricuItural jackets and trousers, a box of earth in which some mushrooms were growing.

The backstory is that Marcus had been working as a chemist when he invented and patented just the thing for bedsitter occupants: a refrigerator that uses chemicals and needs no power source—

... a model of this now stood in the shadows near his wardrobe. The invention had sold, though not spectacularly; Marcus was now eating entirely on the profits, and had given up regular work altogether in favour of food.

When I asked him 'How do you manage to live so well in your bed-sitting-room room' he winced like a huntsman hearing a fox's brush called a tail.

'You mustn't think of it as a bed-sitting-room,' he said. 'I'm sleeping in the kitchen.'

Ms. Whitehorn is not advertised as a fiction writer. She is, however, married to one—who contributed the book's chapter on wine; could "Marcus" be an invention of one of the couple?

In any case, Marcus' story illustrates the most elaborate adaption to bedsitter conditions imaginable, and Ms. Whitehorn lays it all out in her jolly manner.

With her own bedsit days behind her, the author has (the front matter informs us) gone on to be jolly about a range of topics:

Katharine Whitehorn is now a columnist of the Observer, married and possessed of a perfectly respectable kitchen stove. Before that, however, she cooked on a variety of gas rings, primuses, and hotplates, while working as a publisher's reader, teacher, waitress, cook in a bowling-alley coffee shop, and journalist... Her other books include Whitehorn's Social Survival (1968), How to Survive in Hospital (1972) and How to Survive Children (1975). She is married to thriller-writer Gavin Lyall, with whom she lives in Hampstead, surrounded by guns, books and (too many) cats.