The Readable Feast: On Fair Shares for All: A Memoir of Family and Food

Fair Shares for All: A Memoir of Family and Food
by John Haney

This has been quite the year for British food personalities on this side of the pond. We've had major works by Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson, both of whom gave us new bestsellers (Oliver's Cook with Jamie and Lawson's Nigella Express). We've seen sales of the works of Gordon Ramsay take a welcome and significant upswing as he finally attracts the public his cooking has long merited. And in the most heartening way, Roast Chicken and Other Stories by Simon Hopkinson became a surprise bestseller after receiving some of the most enthusiastic reviews for a cookbook I've seen in quite a while. Throw in some raves for Nigel Slater and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and you have what appears to be a trend going deeper than just Jamie and Nigella. Maybe we Americans are ready to truly appreciate what's been happening in the UK.

One thing that distinguishes the books of all of the authors I've mentioned is the quality of the writing. They use the English language in ways that are just magical. Even were you never to actually cook from their books, you'd find them instructive in a most charming way.

Coming fast on the heels of these successes is Fair Shares for All, John Haney's memoir of growing up in London and environs in the 1950s and beyond. The fact that Haney is currently copy chief at Gourmet magazine attests to his familiarity with the worlds of words and food. (About the title: It's the campaign slogan of Clement Attlee's Labour Party in the 1945 election, which Labour won in a landslide, defeating Winston Churchill.)

Haney's early years were pretty hardscrabble. This was the post-war world, and the memory of that war is never far from the everyday life of those who lived through the Blitz and lost homes and family during those years. These war stories are not of grand battles and leaders, but rather of average soldiers surrounded by death and filth and hopelessness, somehow managing to live one more day and then another.

But Haney also writes of parties, with plenty of hard drinking and smoking, and an assortment of aunts and uncles from the East End of London, all of whom Haney lovingly portrays at their argumentative best (his granddad is my especial favorite). At one party, the hard liquor included beer, stout, lager, Bristol Cream Sherry, Stone's Green Ginger Wine, Sandeman Port, Gordon's Gin, and Black Label. For the children to drink there was Robinson's Orange Squash, Ribena, Whiteway's Cydrax, and White's Cream Soda. To eat, there was a table laden with pickled onions, cocktail sausages, wedges of Cheddar, sandwiches of both ham and pork, dates, winkles, whelks and prawns.

If you've grown up in slight terror of the tales of English boarding schools, you'll find them confirmed here. Although Haney does not attend a boarding school, the stories of his grammar school are convincing enough. " 'Buffoon,' 'dolt,' 'dunce,' ' idiot,' and, even worse, 'cretin' were otherwise pandemic and quickly unnerved me so badly that I developed a tic consisting of an absolute inability to get out a word unless I first prefaced it with a cascade of peculiar clicking sounds. Which is how it came about that between the ages of eleven and thirteen, … I was referred to by my classmates as the Tick-Tock Man."

There is of course plenty to be said about food, especially the particular food of the British of a certain class. As a young adult visiting his dad, Haney is asked if he's hungry: "There's some bubble and squeak left over from lunch. Reheat that. Sling in some bacon. That'll be nice." He goes on:

Lunch the next day was a childhood Tuesday standard: sausages with onion gravy (a viscous slurry of lifeless onions and irrigated Bisto), mashed potatoes containing an infusion of butter that even Ferdinand Point might have found excessive, and a hillock of cannonball peas. The next day, Dad produced a dinner that always reminds me of childhood winter Sundays: chicken puffed up with a pound of butter, quartered potatoes roasted in the pan juices, carrot slices the size of silver dollars, and tepid broad beans as big as a bulldog's testicles. Tea (eggs, bacon, baked beans, and a slice of two-day-old bread pudding with a bottom crust the consistency of cardboard) followed barely two hours later.

This is Haney's life. It makes compelling reading because you come to care about the vivid cast of characters with all their quirks and foibles. No denying it is a harsh life, well lived and better told. And, as he says in the final sentence, "This is not going to be a picnic."