In the years following my mother’s work as a war photographer for Vogue, she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and became an alcoholic and a depressive. Part of her recovery process was to reinvent herself as a gourmet cook. We were living in Farley Farm House in East Sussex, and food was a way for Lee to return to the real world, and be creative, fun and experimental.
I was born in 1947; she and I had a very conflicted relationship. For the first 20 years of my life she was a pretty heavy-duty alcoholic, which created a gap between us. But she loved to encourage my curiosity, and one of the main ways she did so was through food. She and her friend Bettina McNulty would hang out in London, discovering new dishes and hunting down Egyptian, Greek, Turkish and Syrian ingredients. In those days food and cooking wasn’t nearly as diverse as it is now.
One day Wells Coates, a friend of my mother’s, came over. He was a successful modernist architect who was a great fan of Chinese cooking. I asked him, “What do Chinese people eat?” and as a joke he replied “Bird’s nests – bird’s nest soup.” It was to wind me up, as I was only a child at the time. But Lee seized on the idea and took us down to the farmyard, where we gathered hay and took it to the kitchen to make a bird’s nest.
Lee’s cooking was like a military operation. Everyone was press-ganged into it; if you showed up, you’d be given a huge drink, sat down and given a pile of vegetables to peel, slice and dice and so on. There were endless jobs and everyone would be sitting around, telling outrageous jokes, in a room absolutely filled with cigarette smoke. I was treated as an honorary adult. There was never a requirement to shut up and behave. Some of the people who came were the key artists of the 20th century, but it was all very casual and friendly. Lee was incredibly good company, but her guests had to be interesting, with some slightly exotic twist to them. Then she’d be your friend for life.
The hay “bird’s nest” was put into a big dish of consommé, and in the middle were these beautiful little orange eggs that she had whittled out of carrot.
We were used to dramatic moments around the table – some sort of wonderfully weird thing would often be ushered in. But these little bits of theatre weren’t done in a “hey, look at me” way. It all felt natural. Pleasing her friends was important to her. In the summer, she’d make this wonderful pudding, with little plain biscuits soaked in rum, like a brick wall of overlapping biscuits encased in chocolate sauce. It was the most fabulous dessert.
And as for the bird’s nest soup… it just tasted like consommé with a bit of hay in it.
Vogue 100: A Century of Style is at the National Portrait Gallery until 22 May
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