Cooking in a Bedsitter
I learned to cook in a ‘bedsit.’ A bedsit, as bedsitters were generally called, was the English equivalent of an American efficiency apartment. Well, kind of an equivalent.
Although bedsits were one step up from a lodging–a rented room that might or might not include access to a communal kitchen–bedsits had not been built as efficiencies. Instead owners of large, older houses did minimal conversions creating bedsits for young people seeking the excitement of swinging London as the British economy recovered after World War II. I was among them.
The minimal conversion consisted of a gas ring to cook on and a gas fire for warmth. The ring sat about six inches off the floor attached to one side of a gas fire that had a white ceramic waffle that glowed red when hot. To get gas, you had to feed shillings into a meter. A shilling didn’t buy very much, so you were constantly weighing whether you wanted warmth or grub.
Luckily my bedsits were slightly less minimal. As I was the kind of earnest, proper girl that landladies liked, I was able to get the upmarket kind with a washbasin in a corner. This meant I had running water in the room for cooking and washing up and didn’t have to trek down the hall or up and down a flight of stairs to the bathroom and loo that I shared with the other troglodytes. Refrigerator? Are you kidding?
Living by myself I could indulge in small luxuries that made me feel oh so sophisticated.
One was buying the Observer on Sundays. I guess that was how I ran across their columnist, Katherine Whitehorn, and her book, Cooking in a Bedsitter.
I still have the battered and yellowing copy of the first Penguin paperback edition I bought in 1963, two years after it had appeared in hardback.
I already knew a good bit about cooking having watched my mother work in the kitchen. Her cooking, however, was anchored by the roast, the savory and sweet pie and pudding, and the sponge cake. These simply did not translate to the single, floor level gas ring.
Whitehorn’s book rescued me as it did thousands, probably millions of others.
- She knew just what people like me wanted: “Cooking to Stay Alive,” the first part, and “Cooking to Impress,” the second. No escaping cooking to stay alive because restaurants were few and far between in the 60s and too expensive for anything but a very special occasion.
- She threw our mothers’ cooking out the window. “The first thing a bedsitter cook must do is to abandon the notion of ‘meat and two veg’, in favour of the idea of a simmering cauldron.” Her acknowledgements are to Elizabeth David‘s French Country Cooking, Mediterranean Food and Italian Food. I have come to have mixed feelings about Elizabeth David, but it was the right way to go at the time. I wasn’t the only one that (again) felt oh-so-sophisticated experimenting with bell peppers and cooked tomatoes and pasta and dishes with foreign names
- Her ‘kitchen management’ hints were really helpful. A plastic bucket for dregs and cooking water. Lots of newspaper as a work surface, splash mat, debris container. A cardboard box to hold salt, pepper, mustard, oil (preferably olive), vinegar (preferably wine), plastic lemon, tube of tomato paste, meat extract, garlic, flour, sugar, rice (long grain), three or four spices, milk bottle, coffee, teabags, jam, onion, eggs. A set of basic equipment: a sharp knife, a piece of wood, a good pan and a deep frying pan/casserole and a small saucepan, a bowl, a spatula, a tin-opener, a jug to make tea, coffee, and cook kippers, an egg beater, an asbestos mat (this was 1961), and a wooden spoon. And a brief explanation of cooking terms and basic ingredients
- Her life management hints were also on point, especially where cooking to impress was concerned because none of us were in London or other British cities just for the jobs and the culture. “Every dog has four thoughts, one for each paw: food, food, sex, and food. Most of this book is naturally concerned with preoccupation 1, 2, and 4; but the other thought also has its own special problems in a bedsitter. The chief trouble, for man or girl, is that everything in a bedsitter is so visible.” Which led her to trenchant discussions of drink from both the male and the female point of view and–back to the gas heater–the message you sent if you spent most of your meager grant or wage warming up the bed sit. Remember that the pill was not available to unmarried women until 1967 in Britain and then only if you could get a doctor to prescribe it.
- She offered a way to good cooking. The whole point of Katherine Whitehorn’s book was that the constraints did not mean that you cooked second rate food. Her book is full of refinement–your own mayonnaise, for example, which you could perfectly well prepare with a bowl and a wooden spoon. She would have cringed at sloppy cooking. Although some recipes–gringo beef–can be consigned to oblivion, most were fine.
True, the ‘staying alive’ main courses are not what many Americans, nor British today, for whom ground beef and chicken are the go to meats, would start with. Whitehorn led with sausages, bacon, liver and kidney, then eggs, vegetables (including dried beans), pasta (including risotto), and only after all that muscle meats, fish, and finally chicken as a luxury (which it still was).
Inexpensive, quick dishes first, meat and fish for the week end. Pasta was revolutionary. Apart from macaroni, which had been around for ever, it was only just becoming available in Britain. My parents used to bring back packets as gifts when they went to the Continent as you could only buy it in the larger towns.
So sausage and mash, liver and onions, omelets, cauliflower cheese, ratatouille, bacon and lentils, spaghetti bolognese, mushroom risotto, ravioli if you had a nearby Italian shop, beef stew, corned beef hash, pork chop braised with celery, herrings and potatoes, curried eggs (curry powder).
Also soups (don’t even think about stock), salads (real French dressing, real mayonnaise), sandwiches, pancakes (read crepes, these with lemon and sugar saw me through my final examination week at university).
For impressing, chicken came into its own–marengo, paprikash–followed by paupiettes of beef, osso bucco, beef stroganoff, and a slew of simple desserts such as chocolate mousse.
This little book–under two hundred pages, no illustrations, let along photos–helped a whole generation of Brits, me included learn to survive and even flourish with no more than a single gas ring to cook on. Indeed, there is, I would say, a virtue in learning to cook this way. As in so many other activities, limitations force you to concentrate on the basic essentials.
Bedsitters could be squalid and drear. For those who remained single, and were thus in many cases never able to afford a flat, let alone a house, and for old people, they could be prisons.
For a young person, though, they were liberation. No parents, no in loco parentis residence-hall dragon, no disapproving landlady. I loved all the ones I had in Bristol and London between 1963 and 1970. Whether returning from geology field trips, or a day in the North Library (rare book room) of the British Museum, or from a temporary job as a sales assistant in haberdashery at the up-market Army and Navy department store where elderly gentlemen still came to buy the elastic gadget that fastened a top hat securely to a business suit even in a wind, or from my first college teaching job, they were a retreat where I could do just what I wanted, including indulging in cooking to impress and all that went with it.
For making those years so good, for launching me on a life as a competent, confident cook, I will always be grateful to Katherine Whitehorn.
Cooking in a Bedsitter remained in print for forty years and was recently reprinted by Virago Press.
Katherine Whitehorn went on to a successful, busy, varied life as a journalist, book author, agony columnist, on the boards of the British Airports Authority and the Nationwide Building Society, active in the International Women’s Forum, Rector of the venerable Scottish university, St Andrews, and wife and mother.
In a sad piece in May 2018, one of her successors Polly Toynbee wrote in the Guardian, “Katharine is now 90, living in a care home, suffering from Alzheimer’s, with little understanding left, no knowledge of where she is or why . . .She wrote a living will, which her sons say demand she not be officiously kept alive beyond her wits. Yet there she sits, in a state she strove to avoid.” Well worth reading and pondering the whole piece.
Today, January 9th 2021, Vikram Doctor who writes for the Economic Times of India, alerted me to the fact that Katherine Whitehorn died yesterday. In remembrance of her I am posting a light re-edit of my piece and adding his piece about feeding oneself in the Indian equivalent of bed sits.
“I remembered your tribute to her cookbook. I think I heard her talk once, brought to India on a British Council tour, but sadly I don’t think she said anything about cooking. The equivalent of the bedsit is still very much in use in big Indian cities for young people who come for their first jobs and they’re called PG or Paying Guest accommodations in Mumbai (of course, I’m talking about fairly privileged young people who can at least afford this option). The Delhi equivalent is the barsati, a room on the roof of a bungalow.” https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/blogs/onmyplate/crystal-the-most-famous-pg-restaurant/?source=app&frmapp=yes
I think many of us suffered these constraints in college. It was a learning experience. I was convinced that my Bolognese was as good as an Italian’s. I cringe when I think of how I threw all the ingredients into a big pot and boiled them up.
Reply. Jonell, thank you for so neatly pointing out why Katherine Whitehorn was different. I am going to use your comments to make that clear.
This made me smile, as it reminded me of a book I bought while a student in England in 1972: “The Impoverished Student’s Guide to Cookery, Drinkery, and Housekeepery.” The box of ingredients listed from the Whitehorn book reminds me of this book’s “SNOOPS” — which stood for Stuff Never Out Of Permanent Stock.” The one chapter title that comes to mind was for those in true economic distress: “How To Starve With At Least a Pleasant Taste in Your Mouth.” Very fun and very useful at the time. But during the same time, with an eye to the future, I bought the two-volume Robert Carrier cookbook collection — because I knew I had to move beyond Impoverished Cookery. :)
As for Whitehorn’s Alzheimer’s — a sad ending. Lost my father to this terrible disease long before he left us physically. I keep hoping they’ll come up with something that will help.
But thanks for sharing. Always fun to see how others began their journey to cooking.
Thanks Cynthia. I once started collecting these books but had missed The Impoverished Student. I’ll add it to my tiny bibliography. A fellow student of mine swore by Robert Carrier at the high end.
Well, when you look, know that the book I bought in London was, as it says on the title page, “Translated from the American.” So there is also a U.S. version out there somewhere.
Cynthia, I discovered the same. And I actually have the American version which was written by a philosopher colleague of ours. Small world.
Wow — Small world, indeed.
That was so evocative of those early days of being in charge, for better and worse, of one’s own diet. I had never cooked a meal when, in 1953, I arrived in Cambridge, MA, as a graduate student in a house with 9 other new people including Gillian Steel, an economist and Marshall Scholar from Girton: we were friends forever after, but it was the cooking follies that founded our friendship. My first boiled potato (oh! there are boiling potatoes and baking potatoes!) Day 2. The Joy of Cooking is a godsend. a few weeks later: events that could pass for meals… Now, here I am in an old folks’ home — don’t shudder — a full kitchen at my disposal which is never used. I am too busy, and the food here is excellent (!). How tightly what we cook is tied to our changing needs, or lack of them. I came here with lots of cooking equipment. Nearly 8 years later, It is untouched. I can dine with interesting people, who have also not spent the day shopping and cooking. Maybe we should expect to change our cooking habits as our lives change, and maybe it is a good thing.
Wonderful Barbara. My potato discovery was that they went black if not put under water. And goodness knows how many times I had watched my mother do that. And yes, what we cook does change all the time. Maybe another post on cooking periods. Best news of all is that you are too busy to cook and that you have such excellent food available, you feel no loss. I so appreciate your comments.
Hi Rachel
Fabulous memories and pictures, and thanks for the heads up about the Polly Toynbee piece.
I still have a battered copy of a Katharine Whitehorn somewhere, from a time when any bedsit I frequented would rely for warmth on a gas heater yoke called a Superser (it was so-so as a heater as its main role seemed to be to inject water vapour into the atmosphere – and upon all your belongings and creating a constant condensation on the single glazing), in a time when everyone still called flats “flats” and not “apartments”. Mind you, you rarely hear of “flats”, “bedsits” or “bedsitters” in modern living, do you?
In Ireland I guess the demise must have happened around the turn of the century: bedsits were becoming outlawed by the planners, or were now “studio apartments” – or “units in HMOs”, which meant houses of multiple occupation – although I’ve yet to meet a real person who actually says “I live in a HMO.” On top of that in the past three or four years there has been a growing trend in cities such as Dublin for “student apartment” complexes. These are allowed to have lower planning standards than other apartments, and the kitchen and dining areas are all part of the shared spaces, so cooking – and eating – is possibly a bit less solitary and more communal. And despite all this the rents seem terribly expensive.
The late great Biddy White Lennon had several recipe books on similar themes of bedsitter living – when bedsits were still bedsits and flats were still flats – such as her “Leaving Home Cook Book”. I don’t want to harp on too much about the title, but you must agree that there’s an unintended tinge of sadness in there, a bit like the Paul McCartney song. A subliminal hint that you are going away from your “real” home and destined for a new home that will not be a “proper” one, as it will be far from decent home cooking.
It was all about independent living of course, and in Ireland such books seemed to tie in with the demographic changes of the 1970s and 1980s – more and more young people leaving the countryside for work in the towns and cities, and a growing proportion going to third-level colleges, often as the first in the family to do so.
But talking of connections between social history and culture, last week I came across a new collection of essays called “Living With Strangers: Bedsits and Boarding Houses in Modern English Life, Literature and Film”. Alas, it has a price tag way beyond me, but I did find out that Ms Whitehorn gets a brief mention in the intro.
– Mel
Mel, I’m deeply grateful I missed the Superser. Many thanks for the memories and the analysis. Yes, definitely a touch of sadness about the title of the Leaving Home Cook Book. I’m beginning to formulate a hypothesis that the change in British and Irish cooking that began in this period wasn’t just about a wave of cookbooks and high end cooking but about all of us out there doing our best in bedsits.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for your appreciation of Katherine Whitehorn’s “Cooking in a Bedsitter”. You said it all so much better than I could have done. I well remember leaping for the Observer on Sunday morning to see what she had written. Heart-wrenching to hear of her suffering with dementia.
Thank you Augusta. I’m so struck by the shared memories being related here and on other social media.
When I was at the U.Illinois around 1960, they had little two room apartments into which four girls were literally squeezed. One room held two bunk beds with tiny bath and the main room was where we studied, hung out and cooked our meals in a tiny kitchen which did have a stove, fridge and sink. My roomies were to become my best friends. One of Italian heritage who looked like Sophia Loren, a Jewish gal who came from a kosher home and two WASPS (white,Anglo Saxon Protestants) i.e. myself and another typical Midwestern er. Everyday one of us was in charge of shopping and cooking for the other three. The challenge for us inexperienced cooks to produce a tasty meal in our mini kitchen that didn’t have pork or pork product’s..
Of course there were many calls to our Moms but somehow it worked.And the variety was amazing. What laughs we had at those shared beginners meals. Will never forget them. Thanks Rachel for bringing back those lovely memories.
I am getting great pleasure from hearing all these memories. Thanks for sharing, Linda.
As newly-marrieds we had a flat, basically (second story of a duplex). It had the kind of oven I have today so I’m not comparing this in any way to the English bedsit of that time. But one analogy was learning to cook decent food, learning what the equipment you did have was capable of. One thing that strikes me now is how many of the tools or tableware don’t exist or don’t look the same. The lazy susan, the moulds for Jello, the little hibachi, the crockpot (slow cooker), the fondue pot with its ghostly lamp flame, where did they all go? Even the tableware seemed different, more unadorned earthenware, chunky forks and knives, coloured glassware. Seems like a different time. For instruction we used Joy of Cooking, Time-Life Series recipes, Julia Child’s 1970s books based on her American cooking shows, Craig Clairborne, James Beard. Those I still have!
Gary
I agree. I am equally struck by the things that we now take for granted that were only just appearing in the kitchen: aluminum foil, saran wrap, dishwashing liquid, cooking oil, for example.
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Katherine Whitehorn passed away recently and I remembered your tribute to her cookbook. I think I heard her talk once, brought to India on a British Council tour, but sadly I don’t think she said anything about cooking. The equivalent of the bedsit is still very much in use in big Indian cities for young people who come for their first jobs and they’re called PG or Paying Guest accommodations in Mumbai (of course, I’m talking about fairly privileged young people who can at least afford this option). The Delhi equivalent is the barsati, a room on the roof of a bungalow. I wrote this piece about feeding oneself in a PG place:
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/blogs/onmyplate/crystal-the-most-famous-pg-restaurant/?source=app&frmapp=yes
As always, fascinating Vikram. As an aficionado of cream crackers, also used by British bed sitters, I have never abandoned them. I added your revised piece to a re-post of the Katherine Whitehorn post. Hope all is well with you.