Peter Robins gets cooking with Horizon

There are, I used to think, two fundamental categories of cookbook: those that could easily be staged as a West End musical, and those that couldn’t. Lately, however, I am beginning to doubt the existence of the second category.

Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cookery, which always seemed a classic category B — massive, compendious, precise, exacting and impersonal — has given birth to a successful feelgood movie, Julie and Julia. Everyone knows that feelgood movies are just a few notes away from musicals.

Admittedly, the process of turning Child’s book into a movie was cassoulet-like in elaboration. First, it had to be chopped up and tenderised for American TV. Then half was strained through the author’s memoirs, with the other half set aside to marinate for several decades in nostalgia. Then the second half was strained through a gonzo, let’s-cook-all-the-recipes-in-this-book blog, and reheated as another memoir, before the two sections were mixed back together with a little more butter and sugar. Which makes it the more mystifying that no one has yet attempted to musicalise my favourite example of category A — Katherine Whitehorn’s recently reprinted Cooking in a Bedsitter.

The secret of this book’s success is revealed in half a sentence from the author’s new introduction: “I was no great shakes as a cook — a fact I had concealed from the publisher”. She didn’t conceal it. Not if they read the manuscript. No really passionate cook would begin their section on breakfasts by admitting that readers are only really likely to use it on a slow Sunday, or their chapter on soup with the rousing: “It is simply not worth making your own soup in a bedsitter.” (She goes on to explain that tins are as good as packets, whatever you may have heard to the contrary, and that a little parsley will make vegetable soup look “quite undeservedly authentic”.) Most cookbooks, reasonably enough, are about food — stories of its conquest and exploration, as Child’s verb “Mastering” suggests. Most beginners’ cookbooks offer patronisingly scaled-down versions of the same quest. Cooking in a Bedsitter isn’t like that. This is what makes it so beloved, what kept it in print for four decades, and what files it so firmly in category A: it is mainly about making your way in the world and only incidentally about feeding yourself.

The structure makes this clear enough. Part one is “Cooking to Stay Alive”: it progresses through the traumatised wisdom of the Beginner’s Index (“EGG WHITES WILL NOT STAY BEATEN LONG. BEAT JUST BEFORE YOU NEED THEM”) through the counsels of despair in the breakfast and soup sections to the relative enthusiasm of the main meal recipes. Our heroine confronts and vanquishes a series of distinctly late-1950s antagonists: butchers who keep back all the edible steak for their favourite housewives, landladies who turn puce at the sniff of an onion, a box on the windowsill standing in for a fridge. Her weapons are “imagination, common sense and a great deal of newspaper” (that last is starting to seem very 1950s), as well as a seemingly endless supply of asbestos mats, sadly absent in the latest reprint.

By the beginning of part two, “Cooking to Impress”, you are pretty sure things are going to be all right. The injunctions — “remember there is no polite answer to the question, ‘Oh, I forgot the mushrooms — would you have liked some?’“ — seem more straightforwardly comic. The advice on how to manipulate different classes of guests — she is particularly sharp on dealing with a boy who really ought to be buying you dinner — suggest a growing social confidence. By the “Last Course” section, which opens with a near-the-knuckle gag and moves on to suggest that “One way in which you can turn your gas ring to advantage is to cook at your guests”, there is an air of, well, mastery.

There follows a chapter on drink and parties “Contributed by A Man”, which seems to make good on the happy ending promised in the acknowledgements: “and to Gavin Lyall, who contributed the chapter on drink and rescued me from bedsitters for good”. Whitehorn’s memoirs indicate that Lyall became rather too expert on drink, so this can perhaps also be taken as ominous foreshadowing, but for now all is last-big-number cheer.

We can ignore the odd little concluding fantasy about “perhaps only one man in Britain who has wholly solved the problem of eating well in a bedsitter”. Eating well was never the point, after all — we were surviving and then impressing. If there’s money left over when they finish the film version, it might make a DVD extra.

Why, then, has this musical never happened? I blame the book’s success, which led to 40 years of reprints under the care of people who mistakenly believed that it was about cooking. Successive revisions removed novelistic period detail — no more newspaper, no more asbestos mats, tuna instead of “tunny fish” — while introducing evidence of later food trends, such as woks and health-consciousness. It became just another beginners’ cookbook — and, for the very reasons that once made it charming, not the best one.

But Virago’s new version, the first in more than a decade, is a loving restoration job, right down to the pre-decimal prices. The way is now clear. I only hope the producers can get health-and-safety clearance for the asbestos mats.