A Starter for a Start

We begin with a meal for one, a prawn cocktail on a Sunday night. Picture a small flat in East London (picture it as you will, after all there's no reason why you shouldn't be actively involved in some arm’s-length manner), and me walking in woozy and weary after three hours talking to publishers and artists at the Whitechapel's inaugural London Art Book Fair. I drop my bags heavy with catalogues, pamphlets and other trifles, and walk to the fridge, where the stock made from last night's roast chicken has been chilling, a thin skin of fat hardening on its surface. I skim it off, and return the stock to the hob to reduce it to one litre of clear amber broth, filling the room (open-plan living, you know the score) with a sweet warm fug.

The day’s been pure Indian Summer, but by 7pm the sun has set, and the large window overlooking the balcony is a dark rectangle suspended on the white wall and I feel it brooding at me like an empty movie screen. I tug on the blinds to shut its unsettling eye, then set about cracking two eggs that have been sitting on the counter all afternoon coming up to room temperature, discarding the whites and seasoning the yolks with salt and mustard (no white pepper in the house, as Sainsburys only had ready ground). For the next ten minutes I stand there, oil flask in hand (light olive oil - sorry Simon Hopkinson, Lindsey Bareham et al, but this is a sauce with a history for me, and in my home, we did not use groundnut oil), and begin to stir, dripping the oil in sparingly at first, drop by drop, then gradually in a thin stream as the runny yellow mixture emulsifies, growing unctuous and unyielding.

The building is silent and my attention is lulled by the circular sound of the wooden spoon as it ploughs like a rudder around and around, and with each stroke a presence takes firmer shape beside me, looking over my shoulder companionably. "Always stir in the same direction," I hear my mother say. Mayonnaise was her speciality, and a regular treat, as on Sundays we were left to fend for ourselves, and she was compelled to descend to the kitchen to feed us. She made a remarkably good fish cooked whole in a salt crust, or bacalhau roasted in garlicky olive oil and accompanied with roast potatoes à murro. For most of the year this was the sum total of her culinary input, although at Christmas she became enthused by the notion of sweets and might spend an afternoon or two romping about like Marie Antoinette in the Petit Trianon, whipping up the frivolous and the fabulous (marquise au chocolat, crème anglaise, a fruit compote).

So I begin with Prawn Cocktail partly because the mayonnaise element is my single link to what I can scarcely call a tradition of cooking in my family. In it lie all my roots, and in putting it together (the Prawn Cocktail being something one assembles rather than cooks), I lay down a seam which runs deeper than any other in anything else I shall ever cook.

But there are other reasons too. For one thing, prawns (together with Vache qui rit cheese) were my favourite foods in the universe throughout my childhood and I could while away hours in a happy daze simply thinking about them. It was a passion I shared with my cat, but he had a supra-human advantage in that he could smell their presence over vast distances. Felix’s raison d’etre was beauty, and he took his ornamental function seriously. Each morning, he would arrange himself at the window overlooking the park, reclining like an albino odalisque or sitting upright with his feet in first position, impassively observing the doings of squirrels and birds. Over the course of a day he might allow himself the occasional turn of the neck, but on the whole his dignity dictated that he should never find anything so interesting as to disturb his composure. He appeared to resent the inconveniences of fleshly existence and generally picked away at his food with a wrinkled nose and a penitent air. Mother may not have welcomed the idea of taking a cat when we moved to London, but over time they evolved a kind of grudging respect, or perhaps I could even call it a fellow feeling towards one another. In practice he may have been my pet, but in theory he was all hers.

As I was saying, what Felix and I did have in common was our love of prawns. The only thing that could move him was the whiff of crustaceans disrobing in the kitchen, and this would send him loping blindly the length of the building like a laser-guided rocket (although he was lamentably inelegant in motion). Whenever I saw a white blur careering through the hall, I knew there could be only one thing on for lunch, and I’d set out hopefully in his slipstream only to find that whilst his presence was welcome in the kitchen, that of a wheedling child was not similarly tolerated, and I was sent packing even as Felix made himself comfortable on a bench and snacked on tidbits from the chopping board.

Away from home was when the Prawn Cocktail made its appearance, my first course of choice whenever we ate out, and I took a connoisseur’s interest in its presentation and execution. I particularly loved the classic double glasses where the dish was suspended above a bowl of crushed ice. Its appearance at the table, all rimed in white, turned Starter into Dessert, festive and fun. All that fuss over a few prawns in pink sauce! What’s for an eight-year-old girl not to like? But last Sunday was the first time I’d tried this restaurant classic in a domestic setting. I guess it’s a mixture of nostalgia, amusement and a slight sense of ennui about the well-beaten track of my own cooking habits that’s made me decide the time has come to revisit some of these forsaken grande dames of the twentieth century menu.

I chilled a large dessert glass and lined its base with finely shredded Gem lettuce, and following Hopkinson and Bareham’s recipe, I sprinkled finely sliced spring onion and diced cucumber over it, laying the peeled prawns on top, and napping them with the ancestral mayonnaise seasoned with ketchup, cognac and Tabasco sauce, then sprinkling paprika like a powdered pigment over the top. It looked, as Michel Roux Jr might say, “pretty as a picture,” a dinner light on the stomach but redolent with associations. The spring onion and cucumber seemed redundant to my palate, and if I make it again, I would bother with neither of these intrusions into the perfectly balanced trinity of crinkly leaf, prawn and Mary Rose sauce.

I ate it with the book at my side, plotting my first Prawn Cocktail Years dinner, three courses from the “Fifties Hotel Dining Room” chapter. Of which, more next week!