Joyce Molyneux, who died last month at the age of 91, lived a full and rich life. She was one of the first women chefs in Britain to win (in 1978) a Michelin star and anyone who was lucky enough to eat at the Carved Angel in Dartmouth during the 25 years she ran its kitchen will doubtless remember even now her pioneering way with local ingredients; her gentleness both at the stove and with those who worked the room for her. As for the unlucky, they must make do with The Carved Angel Cookery Book, which sold 50,000 copies when it was first published in 1990 – and without any help at all from a television series. It tells you everything you need to know that a secondhand copy will set you back about £200.
I read the obituaries hungrily. In part, this was because I have happy memories of a day spent with her in 2017 (I was interviewing her for the lifetime achievement award she was to receive from Observer Food Monthly; she made a deliciously tart summer pudding for lunch). But for me, her career is fascinating, too, for the way it subtly tells the story of Britain and its food in the second half of the 20th century. To take just one example, Molyneux’s first job after leaving domestic science college was not in a restaurant, but in the canteen at W Canning & Co, a Birmingham-based manufacturer of electroplating machines, where she was expected to make “special” things such as roast chicken for the bosses, and to serve pies – and fish and chips – to the workers.
What a world is in that sentence! In 2022, the average work canteen – if it exists at all – offers a diet only of sandwiches, crisps and KitKats, for which reason it’s rather unlikely to be staffed by those with serious ambitions in the direction of chicken parfait and choux pastry. But the W Canning & Co canteen, as described by Molyneux, was a different beast altogether. Here is postwar Britain in microcosm: highly industrial, somewhat paternalistic and divided fairly rigidly according to social class; a place where chicken was still a treat, and where lunch (except that it was often called dinner) was eaten with a knife and fork at a table rather than on the hop in a coffee shop or at one’s desk. No wonder that Molyneux’s cooking, when she graduated to restaurant work, always had a certain unpretentious, democratic bent.
I’ve often said it. Restaurants are Britain in miniature, whether we’re talking about the open kitchen at the Carved Angel – a novelty in its day, but one that would come to mirror the slow death of the suburban dining room – or, speeding forward several decades, about the wild scenes that greeted me last week in a well-known pizza chain in a large northern city, where a short-staffed manager had taken the difficult decision not to clear any tables until the queue of Saturday-night customers had been dealt with. Gazing at the scenes of devastation all around – the long tables next to us, piled with torn napkins and smeary glasses, had a distinct winter of discontent feel – I began to sense I was looking at an art installation: a vision of Brexit as designed by, say, Jake and Dinos Chapman. All it needed to be a shoo-in for the Turner prize was a little EU flag planted in a pile of margherita crusts and perhaps a toy soldier done up as Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Two days after this, we found ourselves, for complicated reasons, in the (ugh) “fine dining” restaurant of a flashy Lakeland hotel and once again a microcosmic feeling crept over me. If many people in Britain are struggling, plenty seem still to be enjoying themselves, as happy as Larry to pay for tasting menus and flights of wine; to listen to long lectures about every dish; and to eat more than they need to, or even really want to. The place had a last days of Rome atmosphere, an obliviousness that was, to my eyes, not much more appetising than the dead pizzas of 48 hours earlier. Like two Quakers who’d unexpectedly pitched up in a branch of Paddy Power, we ordered à la carte, insisted on tap water and talked, over our warm sourdough and whipped butter, of how much things have changed: sometimes for the better and sometimes very much for the worse.
