Michael in Southampton in the sixties…..I have a pic somewhere of him cooking but of course can’t find it when I need it…..
Back in the sixties, I shared a little house in Southampton with Michael and Ariane Batterberry and I now feel I lived the early days of a revolution. The sixties were a confused food decade bracketed by Julia Child and Alice Waters with the hugely popular I Hate to Cook Cookbook in between. In Manhattan, we were in the first fine flush of Julia,not just Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but the even more significant TV show where Julia showed that anyone could cook well if they concentrated, no – if they loved eating well. She didn’t cook easy food or health food, she cooked the food she liked. When people say they’re lousy cooks, they usually don’t want to eat for one reason of another.
Michael did all the cooking that summer. At that time, he was a writer, not a professional cook, which is quite a different animal – I’d call him an instinctive cook, and the greatest compliment, an inspired amateur which means like Julia he cooked the food he liked to eat. If I’m not eating at Per Se I think eating the food of an inspired amateur is the next high. While others of us were experimenting with Julia’s recipes for Blanquette de veau, duck a L’orange, even Beef Wellington if you can believe it, Michael was looking ahead to the future of fresh and local. Alternatives to supermarkets were few even in the farmlands of the Hamptons — The Silver Palate wouldn’t open up until the late seventies.
But every morning Michael drove out to Montauk to buy steaks cut from fresh caught swordfish, fillets of sea bass. He went to the local farmers’ markets for little potatoes to steam and toss in butter and herbs, and ears of corn which tasted of corn and not as they do today, of cornsyrup. It was a revelation to me. So was his special dessert. He mixed seedless Thompson grapes with yogurt or was it sour cream, topped the dish with demerara sugar crusted under the grill. An unusual mixture, haunting.
And at parties held in the Batterberries’ Hershey Bar coloured drawing room, I first tasted homecured Gravlax, I now remenber.
Michael was impossibly nice, the most generous, least competitive of people – rare indeed in the world of food. It’s a matter of record how many people he helped and kept helping, me included. He always had an open mind. And I never saw him NOT enjoy himself. That was probably because he never lost his sense of humour. One of our guests at Southampton was a smart guy from Harvard. Rain fell on Sunday and we played Ghosts, one of those humiliating word games. Idea was you had to keep expanding a fragment of a word. Finish it and you were a Ghost. Three Ghosts and you were out. An altercation broke out when our Harvard guest refused to accept he’d picked up his third Ghost and then abruptly left the house party. Many years later, Michael and Ariane ran into Harvard in Morocco who remembered with INTENSE PLEASURE his weekend in the country. That says it all about Michael’s ability to charm.
A story which Michael loved to recycle when we met was the summer pudding incident. I was cat-sitting the penthouse that my sister and brother in law rented from Judith Jones, Julia Child’s famous editor ,and using the opportunity to have dinner parties on the pretty covered terrace. One evening, we were arguing over the ingredients of the purple summer pudding I’d made and served with lashings of cream. At the height of the discussion, I dramatically dumped the contents of my plate over the terrace wall. Soon after Michael went out for cigarettes and returned in stitches. Downstairs on the street a chauffeur was trying to remove summer pudding and cream from a limo’s windshield with tiny pieces of Kleenex.
I last cooked dinner for Michael a couple of years ago when I was visiting New York. I was stumped: an unfamiliar kitchen, unfamiliar shops. I decided to be simple. Little did I know that I went to the MOST expensive butcher in New York (on Lexington between 63rd and 64th streets) and paid I think fifty bucks for a couple of pounds of ground lamb. It says something about our long friendship that I never thought it inadequate to serve simple Shepherds Pie to Michael. After all he had once defined me with great sweetness as being good at improvisational desserts. And he loved it. Loved even more the bill for the gift wrapped gold plated ground lamb. Laughed like a drain.
Miss him alot already.
