R.M. Healey

I met Jane for the first time in October 1985. I had put together a festschrift for Geoffrey’s eightieth birthday in March that year and had hoped that this evidence of my interest in him and his work might produce a meeting with the man I had admired since my late teens but had never met.

Geoffrey had been ill for some time—so incapacitated in fact that the letter of appreciation he had sent to me had to be dictated to Sophie. On the phone Jane seemed happy for me to meet her husband, but the event was put off at least twice due to Geoffrey’s worsening health. Eventually, however, she relented and invited me and my then girlfriend to visit Broad Town Farmhouse. I could hardly think of anything but this forthcoming meeting throughout the coach journey from London to Swindon. Would I be able to converse freely with a man whose put-downs in print could be merciless.

I needn’t have worried, for when we arrived at the farmhouse and Jane opened the door of the sitting room that afternoon what I found was a man laying supine on a couch who barely acknowledged our appearance and who when spoken to by my girlfriend responded by groaning and placing a handkerchief over his face. Jane hurriedly ushered us out of the room. Geoffrey was evidently incommunicado to all but his immediately family. As if in compensation, Jane led us up to her husband’s writing room—to the desk, the shelves of books and the giant photocopier. I thought of all the books that had been typed in that room since 1945, when Geoffrey had bought Broad Town Farmhouse at an auction in a local pub.

Jane then guided us around the garden that she and Geoffrey had created out of virtually nothing and which had featured in that wonderful book—Gardenage.  Jane prepared lunch and, knowing nothing of our tastes, had opted for simplicity – bloater paste with toast followed by roast chicken – all cooked to perfection. We chatted between mouthfuls, but I can only recall one revelation from Jane –  that Geoffrey’s incapacity had not prevented him from pinching the bottom of his attractive young nurse.

Geoffrey’s eventual death a few weeks later was followed early in the New Year by a invitation from Jane to attend a memorial reading of excerpts from his work at the Royal Festival Hall. It was good to see that some of the contributors to my festschrift were there, but even better to discover that Jane welcomed my girlfriend and I with the gift of several books written by her late husband, including  copies of The Harp of Aeolus with corrections by him and the very rare Legenda Suecana, a collection of love poems to a Swedish girl that had appeared just before he and Jane had first met.

This was our final meeting, but not our final correspondence. Around 1987 I had invited her to visit me in Hertfordshire with the lure of a visit to the home of Dr Salaman, the renowned expert on the history of the potato. She politely declined this invitation, and I did get some indication of her emotional state when she admitted in her reply that it was only her work that kept her from the utmost despair.

This was the last letter I received from her. Not long afterwards I read that she had cancer and was on a diet that consisted almost wholly of carrots (which she must have hated), but her death in 1990 aged just 62 came as a real shock. A year later I made a pilgrimage to Troo in order to visit the maison troglodyte that she and Geoffrey had shared for so many years. I did not know Sophie back then and was reluctant to knock on the door, but I knew I had found the right cave when I gazed at the garden. It was very much the plot of a cookery writer. Three years later Jane was still on my mind when I began to research a biography of Geoffrey. A few years into it I met someone who had shared a house with her in west London. The artist Jack Daniel knew her in the early fifties when she was working as a young picture researcher for the publisher George Rainbird. We talked about her early life with Geoffrey, who she had met while he was editing the encyclopaedia People, Places, Things and Ideas, and just before we parted he fished out from one of his portfolios an etching of Jane which depicted her writing at a table in her flat, next to a window through which can be seen the rooftops and chimney pots of neighbouring houses. This, explained Jack, would have been around 1954—so many years before she made her triumphant debut with Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery. I would love to know more about Jane’s early years with Geoffrey and I suppose that I will discover more details as I continue my research.

Bee Wilson

‘We so often lack piety towards our best things’, wrote Jane Grigson in Good Things (1971). She was writing about kippers, and the sad fact that cured herrings – one of Britain’s ‘worthy contributions to fine food’ – were now of such ‘indifferent’ quality on fish counters.

Grigson herself never lacked piety towards the best seasonal ingredients. Yet she found a way to express her appreciation that was devoid of earnestness or gastronomic pretension. She urged us to buy lobster, occasionally, if we could afford it, because she couldn’t think of anything ‘so sweet, firm and succulent’. But she also insisted, wisely, that, even at the height of midsummer, ‘frozen peas are sometimes the only honest choice’.

Good Things is my favourite of all her books. I used to read it at the kitchen table as a child.  A certain greediness in its tone appealed to me then. The title is both an invitation and an injunction. Good Things are what her recipes promise us but also what she wants us to demand: to learn the difference between muddy Fenland celery and the year round ‘flabby’ kind; between a hand-raised meat pie and an ‘assembly line’ horror.

As she explains in the Introduction Good Things – a collection of her Observer columns – is ‘not a manual of cookery but a book about enjoying food’.  As a greedy child, I spotted that Grigson’s appetite felt more unbridled than Elizabeth David’s. There’s a wonderful moment where she confesses to nibbling the sprigs of parsley on cold buffets, to the surprise of the waiters. We should use, she insists, as much butter as possible with spinach, given that government subsidies make it so cheap compared to France.

Some of the earliest things I cooked were from Good Things. I remember in particular the walnut biscuits cooked on rice paper with a ‘delightfully chewy texture’; mushrooms cooked with bacon, breadcrumbs and parsley; and a sublimely buttery Crécy soup.

But returning to the book, I am struck not so much by the recipes – though they remain inviting – as by the sheer quality of her prose.  Grigson combined virtues that are almost never found together. She was scholarly yet forthright; enthusiastic but not uncritical.  When she drew on food history, it was never the ‘potted’ kind; rather the sort that informs the way we cook now. She revived many forgotten British treasures, such as mackerel with gooseberry sauce, not for tradition’s sake, but because the ‘sweet-sour astringency’ of the fruit cut the richness of oily fish. Her breadth of references stretched from Isaac Newton’s baked quinces to the Burgundian snail industry. Yet often Grigson’s sentences are as clear and wise as a children’s picture book: ‘Carrots are sweet. And carrots are a beautiful colour. And they are cheap’.

Grigson taught us that the proper attitude to food may be a kind of secular piety: to ‘prove all things’ and ‘hold fast that which is good’.

Anne Willan

Jane Grigson and I shared many things. We were both born and brought up in northeastern England, we were both sent to boarding school, and we both graduated from Cambridge University, Jane with an M.A. in English myself in Economics. Most importantly, both of us loved food. There were nearly 10 years between us and when we met we were almost in middle age, but it did not seem to matter. We talked the same language, there was instant empathy.

We share a favorite country: France. We would troll the markets, sniffing and poking, exchanging glances, each of us knowing what the other was thinking. After living in Paris and Burgundy for 20 years, I was pretty sound on cheeses. Jane knew much more about charcuterie than I did, particularly the famous rillons and rillettes.of the Loire. Of course she had written the classic book Charcuterie & French Pork Cookery (1967) which continues to be the definitive guide to French charcuterie and has even been translated into French, the ulitimate, and rare, compliment.

I first met Jane in 1977, when she came to have a look at La Varenne, the cooking school I had founded in central Paris two years before. Jane was at home at once, with her love of passing on knowledge to others, she was chatting with the chefs at once, even the formidable Chef Chambrette with whom she was soon exchanging views on how best to cook the different breeds of pig. Albert Jorant the pastry chef was equally receptive, he liked plump women.

Le Loir was where Jane lived in France, not La Loire. She and her husband Geoffrey Grigson inhabited a troglodyte dwelling cut into the soft tufa stone cliffs of the riverbank. The layout was classic, she explained, going back hundreds, even thousands, of years. A small, glass-fronted porch covered the cave mouth and the front room, the only one with any natural light. A couple of dark bedrooms had been hollowed out behind and the whole was ventilated by a shaft to the top of the cliff. For the first years when Jane’s daughter Sophie was small, water had to be carried from the river in plastic jugs, and light came from oil lamps not electricity.

By the time I met her, Jane was writing a regular column for The Observer newspaper and she sold the editor on the idea of an Observer French Cookery School, to come from La Varenne. By then we had an established curriculum and hundreds of tested recipes, so putting together text on such subjects as Boiling, Poaching and Braising, or Petits Fours was easy, especially with Jane’s masterly editing. The series was a success, it came out as weekly inserts and the circulation of the Observer went up by 10% as a result.

Jane and I continued to be friends, particularly after Geoffrey died in 1985. By then my husband Mark Cherniavsky and I had our own property in France, which had come with a hectare of walled vegetable garden and an archetypal French peasant to go with it. My abiding memory is of Jane, a sturdy figure in wellington boots, talking earnestly to Monsieur Milbert, who was leaning on his hoe, hand rolled cigarette affixed to his lip. Both were surrounded by rows of leeks. Watching them, I wondered how many times in that 300-year-old garden precisely the same kind of encounter had taken place, though I suspected there had rarely been two such experts.

Jake Tilson

As you grow up you realise that there are certain books that have always been part of your family house, as important as the floorboards, walls and ceiling.  Luckily for me, Jane Grigson’s books sat in my parents kitchen, in particular Good Things and English Food. For years I didn’t realise that many of the recipes I was learning from my mother were in fact by Jane Grigson. It was only after leaving home, when I needed a cookbook shelf of my own, that my parents bought me books by Jane Grigson and Elizabeth David, recipes to span a generation.

My personal favourite is Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book, what a wonderful idea and so perfectly suited to people who care about ingredients first. It was essential reading when I got an allotment and would even help me choose what to plant. Every home delivery veg-box service should come with a copy of Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book with their first delivery so after two months of cabbage you’re still enjoying it. As well as being a joy to use Jane Grigson’s books are still a delight to read.

Malcolm Thick

I met Jane Grigson, regrettably, at the very end of her life. I read her article in the Observer Colour Magazine on British Vegetables and remarked to my wife Jane that her sources of history were a bit old (she had not consulted anything I had written!) Jane said, ‘don’t moan about it, write to her’, which I did. A week later I came home from work in Swindon to find Jane very excited – Jane Grigson had just phoned. I phoned her back. She took me to lunch (in Shaun Hill’s restaurant at Cricklade), questioned me for information and insisted that I must produce a paper for the next Oxford Symposium, which I believe had no more places but she had me ‘fitted in’. She also rewrote part of her introduction to Gillian Riley’s translation of Castelvetro to incorporate my ideas. We subsequently talked vegetable history over the phone. I remember being green with envy when I phoned her on one occasion and the conversation touched on Gerard’s Herbal of 1597. She put down the phone, reached up to a shelf and calmly informed me she would just leaf through her copy. Sadly, she was too ill to attend the Food Symposium and died soon afterwards. She had, however, launched me into the world of food historians, for which I will be ever grateful.

A further recollection: one day when I was out, Jane Grigson rang and spoke to my wife Jane, wondering if I knew anything about the transfer of new crops from the East by returning Crusaders. Jane consulted her ex-tutor, a Crusades expert and relayed his opinion that any transfer would not have been directly by knights coming back from the Middle East but via Norman Sicily where Arabs, Normans, and Jews all lived. Jane Grigson thanked Jane for the information and commented, ‘That’s fine, just as long as they were not growing them on a wet flannel on their windowsills.’

Colin Spencer

I recall when I first read Jane’s column in the Observer I knew a kindred spirit existed, her food was the food I wanted to eat and cook. One of her key early works, Good Things, was full of that beguiling combination between imaginative ingenuity and practical sensibility; as I read, how I ate the pages themselves, constantly delighted and full of anticipation. Her work with that of Elizabeth David, both imbued with a knowledge and love of food history, kick- started the revolution in British cookery, so that she is constantly worth returning to for ideas that are timeless and classic.

Laura Shapiro

Scholar, journalist and hands-on cook — that was a rare combination when Jane started publishing, and even today nobody pulls it off the way she did. Her books are full of lessons for the rest of us. I love going back to Food with the Famous and seeing what a good time she has bringing the library and the kitchen together, as if they were long-separated siblings now happily reunited.

Maria José Sevilla

I first  met Jane Grigson  at Oxford  in the later part of the 1980´s.  She was an impressive figure, an exceptional   writer.    I   was  an  apprentice cook and aspiring writer  who wanted to be like her.  She already knew much about the food of the world.   I was just passionate about the food of Spain with only a limited knowledge of  food  beyond the Pyrenees.

One morning she rang me up at my office, I could not believe my luck, I was talking to Jane Grigson!  Having written   extensively about Spain, she wanted to know more about  the way  some vegetables such as cardoons and borage  were prepared in Northern Spain.

Jane  knew my family had  come originally from  Navarre, an area in which  such  vegetables  were not only produced on a  large scale but also cooked to perfection,  especially at Christmas time. Cardoon  was cooked  and still is in a medieval style, with an almond sauce;  borage , just the stems, for  the  leaves are never used,  are cut into small pieces, boiled with potatoes  and just dressed with the best olive oil you can find.     The last time we talked she told me she was sorry that she could not come to a press trip I was organizing. With an easiness to be admired she said that it was too late for her . I was devastated.

These days   I often write about vegetables and pulses and in winter, in our house in Spain I grow  artichokes  and cabbages of the kind Jane included  in the Spanish section of  her book  European Cookery where she also wrote about the meat,  fish and bread  Spaniards love.

“My  general feeling about the way Spaniards eat is that it  remains rather medieval”, Jane said.   I am sure Jane  would  have been glad to hear that even if,  in the hands of some of the best chefs in the world Spanish food has changed beyond recognition in the last two decades, the majority of Spaniards are still enjoying the food that she mentioned in her writing: a plate of lentils with chorizo,  an ‘intimidating’ plateful of roasted lamb  or the  same tuna fish dish  the Basques  have been  cooking  for thousands  of years.

Michael Seifert

Remembered with admiration and affection, Jane Grigson will always be with us.

So many people remember Jane for a whole variety of reasons. My particular (but by no means only) memories are of long political discussions, sometimes late into the night and always from our strongly held socialist beliefs. Socialism for Jane came from her heart as well as from her head. The core was a deeply held belief that it was our duty to aspire to a society in which every child – irrespective of nationality or social background – should have the chance to develop his or her self to the fullest potential of their ability. This meant ensuring, as a minimum, that they had food, housing, health care and education.

Many English people will see a contradiction between a gourmet food writer and a socialist.Not so: one can lead a civilised life and still feel compassion for less fortunate people. In Jane’s case, her socialist principles stemmed directly from her childhood experiences. Growing up in comfortable circumstances, Jane was horrified as a child to see other children in dire poverty – often going hungry and not even able to afford a pair of shoes in the depths of winter. Unlike many other people, these memories never left her and unlike others, she didn’t try to rationalise them or to blame the victims.

I can imagine how Jane would have felt today, with desperate parents, terrified of eviction from their homes, enduring the humiliation of queueing at charitable food banks to feed their hungry children. Recent figures show that more than a million children in Britain suffer from malnutrition; And this in early 2015, when we are told that the economy is ‘picking up’.

Jane would have found it painful to watch the gang of greedy, heartless, Old Etonians who run this country tear up and throw away the hard won gains of the last 70 years with dreadful consequences for millions at the bottom of our society.

Jane,you are sorely missed.

Barbara Santich

I met Jane only once, in 1986, when I wanted to write a profile on her and her books for Australian Gourmet Traveller. We had coffee somewhere in Covent Garden and talked for about 90 minutes. It was hardly an interview – she was such an easy person to converse with. Through her books I felt I’d known her for many years, and was delighted to discover that the author of these books was exactly the person sitting opposite me. Of her books, I wrote ‘Their charm comes from their felicitous blend of personal experience, anecdote and erudition … she has the happy knack of knowing what people want to read, what they want to learn about, before they themselves realise it.’ I appreciated her plain speaking, her commonsense and logic, the curiosity which drove her to explore and understand the fundamentals of a cuisine rather than simply praise the end-products. And it was same desire for knowledge that prompted her to turn the tables and start questioning me: What did Aboriginals eat? How did they cook it?