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My taste buds awoke from their slumber with the tenacity of Rip Van Winkle
We were eagle-eyed mini detectives, each classmate a suspect. After these sessions we didn’t see the irony in spending the whole of lunchtime talking about how many calories were in a plain bagel and who looked fat in her leotard. Awareness of eating disorders seemed American-specific; my friends in England were baffled by it.
‘Isn’t Anna Rexia a person?’ My best friend asked me on a crackling transatlantic line.
‘Duh.’ I said.
There was a pause.
‘That’s really awful. Why would anyone not want to eat when they were hungry?’
Cafeteria food in America was even worse than in England; gloopy electric-orange macaroni cheese, iron-tasting chocolate milk and ‘pudding’, a gelatinous mess meant to be related to vanilla in some way. I stuck to wholewheat bagels with cream cheese and tomatoes, because that was low-fat, and the then wisdom told us that low-fat was the way forward. On a Friday morning we were allowed to bring breakfast to school and eat it in our first class as a treat. I bought these breakfasts from the deli on the corner and did consider them treats; a fried egg sandwiched in a croissant and milky coffee (made with skimmed milk, of course) seemed deliciously adult and forbidden.
I shaved my legs for the first time at thirteen without permission and left ribbons of skin in the bath with my shaky novice hand. My mother came in and shook her head and said sadly, ‘Now you’ve started there’s no going back. That’ll be waxing for the rest of your life, my darling.’
I wondered how I might look to other people in a swimsuit, as during the summer there were pool parties where there were boys, and, perhaps even more scary, the narrow eyes of the other girls. It seemed much more complicated territory than my English boarding school, where everyone was blue from cold, clad in the same troll-like, unflattering regulation green. These golden girls wore tiny bikinis and had manicures and pedicures.
In the absence of hearty boarding school stodge and endless picking, my body had willowed. My legs were long; my skirts were short. I was a wisp with a wasp waist and pertly-chested to boot. I joined the chattering lunchtime throng, reading food labels as if they were Dostoevsky, pretending to understand, while at home I tore up steps on the Stairmaster as Jason Priestly twinkled at me from the television.
For reasons complicated and long, we left the sophisticated city when I was fourteen and fell heavily down to earth, onto England’s sodden soil, in 1991. No one seemed to have heard of ‘low-fat’ in England, not even in London where I was now at day school. They didn’t seem to care all that much. I tried for a few gruelling months to avoid the fat in food I’d learnt to be careful of, but it just kept coming back, persistent as a lover spurned.
I eventually surrendered on a half-term holiday in France with school friends who were eating their croissants and drinking their full-fat milk hot chocolate with deep abandon. Having ascertained that there really was no skimmed milk in the house (or indeed the country), I took the plunge. But oh! How delicious! My taste buds awoke from their New York slumber with the tenacity of Rip Van Winkle and they never slept again.
My body responded, and how; my cheeks plumped up like an indolent Matisse lady’s. On the street, my complicated curves and awkward wiggle sent a message that my brain and heart could not keep up with. Grown men called out to me; dark adult things in sly tones. I found this unsettling and felt naked even when I was dressed. Yet I dressed the part of the vixen in viciously-heeled shoes, breasts jutting forward proudly, betrayed only by my eyes. I was constantly followed home from school, and flashed at on the bus. My mother despaired and sent me to a progressive boarding school in Hampshire, surrounded by fields, where I could stomp around in my inappropriate clothing without being accosted by potential rapists. We lived on bread, and I filled myself brimful with it; warm and soft from the local bakery, covered in butter and Marmite.
Because of my school’s nice progressive nature, there was an abundance of personal choice and options. I discovered one could opt out of games and do something called ‘Outdoor Work’, so I opted out and tottered off to the woods in my suede miniskirts, lamely clutching a saw as I pretended to erect fences with the boys who still played dungeons and dragons. Our fences were spindly rickety efforts and our pig-tending was not much better.
On Wednesday we had a half-day of school to make up for the fact that we had school on Saturday and we were allowed to go into the nearby town in the afternoons, as long as we stayed clear of the pub. My interest in the pub was cursory. On Tuesday nights I planned epic gastronomic excursions, formulating the menu of what and where I would eat, the conclusion invariably involving an epic fiesta of cake and clotted cream.
Unsurprisingly, at boarding school I gained two stone. It happened quite by accident, and I didn’t even notice to begin with, but you can’t exist on bread and cake, with your sole exercise taking the form of watching other people build things, and stay thin. It didn’t occur to me how I could have contributed, or that I could do anything about any of it.
I just thought it was yet another adolescent unfairness foisted upon me. I ate more cake, read tragic French novels and hated the fields and stupid fences I was surrounded by. I longed for London, a minor Parisian appetite, lithe limbs, complication and Chantal Thomas knickers. Mercifully, the knowledge of how to acquire such things remained totally out of my reach.
My country sojourn over, I arrived back in London at sixteen with child-bearing hips and a trunk full of smocks. Everyone pretended not to notice. Sixth form was in Golders Green, and instead of café dining once a week on a Wednesday, planning lunch in the local establishments became a blissful daily affair. This is where all of my summer babysitting money went. At the bottom of Golders Hill, near the station, there was an amazing kosher deli where I ordered fresh bagels, sweet and doughy inside, smothered with thick cream cheese and smoked salmon. In Golders Hill Park, it was the sweet little Italian café where you could get a plate of al dente penne with a smoky tomato sauce and dear little cream-filled pastries for pudding. The pub at the top of the hill was all about jacket potatoes and a fine ploughman’s. But what jacket potatoes—twice-baked and filled with butter, gruyère and watercress, or the alternative: tuna, mayonnaise and sweetcorn. I think I tried to go on a diet once, and it involved, from what I can remember, eating a lot of brown rice and apples and lethicin, because a friend of my mother’s told me that they all lived on it in the seventies and that it melted fat clean away. In the sixth form games were no longer compulsory, and I began to feel the same way about school, causing an academic rift that I rue to this day.
Between school and modelling, before I met Isabella, I was first a nanny, then a waitress. Both were perilous where food was concerned. As a nanny, I was constantly picking at leftover fishfingers, Twiglets, egg sandwiches and Victoria sponge. The two girls I looked after were incredibly sweet: a round baby and a six-year-old with a voice like Marianne Faithfull. We went to lots of rather posh tea parties where the mothers greeted me as ‘Nanny’. I adored the little girls but was a bit hopeless really; not ironing their clothes, taking naps with them and trying on their mother’s scent when she was out. I was very much eighteen. We did, however, make each other laugh, and I loved Jaffa Cakes as much as they did.
I tottered off to the woods, lamely clutching a saw
And not for me the kind of waitressing job where I ran on skinny legs around a steamy frantic environment, collapsing at the end of a twelve-hour shift in sheer anaemic exhaustion. No, I went to work the 7.00 am shift in a coffee-shop bakery after the baking had already taken place. Thus, my arrival coincided happily with things coming out of the oven; a muffin with apple butter, a dark molasses banana bread. I think it was my all-time favourite job. It involved chatting, smiling, eating and concocting lovely coffee-based milkshakes which I would sip through the day. I was an awful waitress, because I was clumsy and could never remember anyone’s order. But they were terribly sweet there, and I learnt how to sweep a floor properly, and that you cannot wear five-inch peep-toed mules to waitress in.
I was dripping in diamonds and not much else
When I began modelling after those brief jobs, I was completely unprepared for the onslaught of curiosity it carried with it. I was in that funny teenage place of being both very aware of, and yet somehow forgetting I had a body. I wanted to look the same as my friends; I wanted to be able to borrow their clothes. Beyond that, I didn’t think about it too deeply.
Issy had never told me to lose weight; she had just said rather vaguely, ‘Now, my love; no more chips and puddings for you, and always wear a good bra and red lipstick.’ My concession to this advice was a DIY diet; eating instant powdered soup with dry pitta bread for three days, which was revolting, and certainly had no effect. I ended up being measured for a bra at Rigby and Peller, which had an infinitely more tangible result than the soup, and also developed a lifelong love affair with Yves Saint Laurent’s Rouge Pur, which smells of roses.
It was Issy who introduced me to Sarah Doukas, the founder of Storm Model Management, and when she signed me, weight loss was nowhere on the day’s agenda. Sarah is famously visionary; she discovered Kate Moss at JFK airport when she was fourteen and manages her to this day. With her customary canniness, she saw that there might actually be a place for me in fashion, given the vocal protest the media were making against the so-called ‘heroin chic’ look that was defining style. The timing, and her instinct, made a happy marriage to set the scene for what was about to happen.
My first job was being photographed nude by Nick Knight for ID magazine. They gave me five-inch long silver nails, silver contact lenses and a canvas of skin powdered silver. I don’t remember feeling naked; I felt like an onlooker, such was the transformative power of the hair and make-up, which took four hours. The overriding memory I have of that day is of being turned into someone else; some alter ego with comic-book curves and a rapacious smile. Being naked seemed almost incidental. A few hours later I was sent in a cab up to Park Royal to be shot by David La Chapelle for Vanity Fair in a portfolio about ‘Swinging London’, this time clad in a string bikini. When I went home late that night, I didn’t wash my make-up off because I wanted to wake up looking like that forever. Of course the next morning I was a smeared shell of a creature, my sheets covered in silver dust.
A few weeks later, I boarded a train to Paris, carrying nothing but a little basket with my nightdress, knickers and a toothbrush, and went straight from the Gare du Nord to the house of Karl Lagerfield, who was shooting a story for German Vogue about King Farouk. Gianfranco Ferré was playing the part of the erstwhile king, and I his bawdy American mistress. I was dripping in diamonds and not a great deal else. I felt incredibly shy around Mr Lagerfield, who was kind yet reticent behind his fan, until he roared with laughter, pinched my cheeks and kissed me like an uncle. We stopped for a proper French lunch, a stew heavy with red wine, oozing cheese and crusty bread and little pots of dense, dark chocolate for pudding. I was in heaven. The shoot went on long into the night, and after everyone else had gone home he photographed me waltzing around his beautiful library, which shone with swathes of waxy lilies and hundreds of candles. At 3.00 am I walked across the street to the old-fashioned hotel where I was staying, and I lay in bed with my eyes wide open, unable to summon sleep. There was so much to absorb and evoke, from the books that lined the walls from floor to ceiling, to the church-like smell of the lilies, the cool of the diamonds as they slipped around my neck, the food…
People had noticed me. Big women from all over the world wrote me congratulatory letters, commending my big bold form. Morning television shows wanted to interview me. Newspapers breathlessly reported my strange fleshy phenomena; a welcome backlash, finally, against the x-ray fashion industry. In the wake of the very angular, it seemed people wanted an anti-waif; a sensual woman who indulged in whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted it. By default, this became me. But reflection on what it represented and what it might mean had escaped me; no longer reliant on waitress’s wages, I was too busy skipping around London, Paris, New York and Milan, spending my modelling money in posh restaurants, city appropriate. I went to Nobu for the first time and nearly died with pleasure—that black cod! In Italy it was risotto, in Paris remoulade, and New York was just a culinary world mecca, full stop.
I remember doing shows in the early days, happily squeezed into some mini little thing. Although a walk up and down a runway is over in minutes, you can register the faces of those you walk by in slow motion. I produced such a strange mixed reaction, one that was palpable. The more formidable fashion editors would sit there with their arms tightly crossed, looking embarrassed and rolling their eyes. Others would cheer and shout. The photographers at the end of the runway would sometimes catcall and whistle. It had been a long time since the advent of tits in fashion, so they were pretty enthused. I found a sort of sad teenage validation in this—not particularly thought-out or examined—something along the lines of ‘It’s men, whistling at me. They seem to fancy me. Hurrah! That must mean I’m kind of sexy.’
Every woman in my family had been through a tricky adolescent over-spilling phase. The difference with mine was that it became both representative and a matter of public record, rather than something to look back on with tender mirth when presented with a family album. We always joked as a family about our greediness. We described events by what we ate. There was and is, a total ease and pleasure around food and cooking. My path has been a funny one; having come from such a background, to then find myself at a formative age dropped into the middle of an industry not exactly renowned for its epicurean appreciation. There’s something sort of fun and subversive about it. It was a slightly wiggly trajectory, but one full of interesting stuff.
And guess what? I’m now right back where I was at seven, bar the penchant for coral lipstick and bad hats. I just couldn’t get away from the siren call of the kitchen that is an inherent part of me. The kitchen of which I speak is both literal and metaphoric. It’s the sum of what I’ve learnt so far, and am still learning.
This kitchen is a gentle relaxed one, where a punishing, guilt-inducing attitude towards food will not be tolerated. In this kitchen we appreciate the restorative powers of chocolate. The kitchen would have a fireplace, and possibly a few dogs from Battersea Dogs’ Home curled up next to it. There might be a small upright piano by the window, with an orchid that doesn’t wither as soon as I look at it. On long summer days, the doors to this kitchen are thrown open, while a few lazy, non-stinging bees mosey by. Children stir. When it rains, there is room in this kitchen for reading and a spoon finding its way into the cake mix. Serious cups of tea are drunk here; idle gossip occurs, balance and humour prevail. It’s the kitchen of my grandparents’, but with some Bowie thrown in. It is lingering breakfasts, it is friends with babies on their knees, it is goodbye on a Sunday with the promise of more. This kitchen is where life occurs; jumbled, messy and delicious.
There is room in this kitchen for a spoon finding its way into the cake mix
It is lovely.
Poached eggs on portobello mushrooms with goat’s cheese
SERVES 2
2 generously sized portobello mushrooms
Salt and pepper
Olive oil
2 thick rounds of soft goat’s cheese
2 eggs
1 teaspoon of white vinegar (for poaching)
1 sprig of fresh tarragon
I make this when I’m a bit breaded out, but hungry. Portobello mushrooms have a satisfying meatiness about them that sates without the heaviness of a full English.
Preheat the grill. Wash the mushrooms and remove the stalks, season with salt and pepper and give them a glug of olive oil; a spoonful should do. Crumble the goat’s cheese.
Pop the mushrooms stalk-side up under the grill for about 5 minutes. While they are searing away, poach the eggs in a pan of gently boiling water (a teaspoon of white vinegar should stop them separating).
You can do one of two things with the goat’s cheese: you can add it on top of the mushrooms when you put them under the grill, so it browns; or you can put it on just after they come out.
You should poach the eggs for about 3 minutes if you want them soft in the middle (5 if you want them stern and unyielding). Drain them, put them on top of your crumbly goat’s cheese/mushroom mix, scatter some chopped tarragon on the top, grind on a bit of pepper, and voilà!
Rice pudding cereal with pear purée
SERVES 2
375ml/11/2 cups of the milk of your choice—I’d use semi-skimmed or soya
100g/1/2 a cup of basmati rice
2 cardamom pods, lightly crushed
1 stick of cinnamon
Honey or maple syrup, to taste
crème fraîche (optional)
For the compote
2 pears
60ml/1/4 of a cup of apple juice
1 teaspoon of cinnamon extract
There is a theme to my cooking that tends towards baby food. This is a perfect example.
In a heavy-bottomed pan, bring the milk and rice to the boil. Add the cardamom pods and cinnamon stick. Take the heat down to its lowest flame, or use a heat diffuser, cover the rice, and simmer for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.
While this is cooking, peel and core the pears and chop into slices. Bring the apple juice to the boil; add the pears and cinnamon extract. Cook until the pears are tender, 5 minutes or so, adding more juice if needed. Remove from the heat and transfer to a blender, or purée them with a hand-held blender.
Fluff the rice and put into a bowl. Pour the compote on top with a drizzle of honey or maple syrup and, if it’s a particularly grim morning, stick in a spoonful of crème fraîche.
Omelette with caramelized red onion and Red Leicester
SERVES 1
1/2 a small red onion
Olive oil
2 eggs
Salt and pepper
50g/2oz of Red Leicester cheese (any good, sharp, hard cheddar like Monterey Jack will do as an alternative)
I cry like a baby when I chop onions. A few years ago I found a brilliant device from Williams Sonoma online which does all the work for you. You simply peel the onion, put it in the top of the contraption, pop the lid on and turn the handle. Voilà, diced onions without tears.
Roughly chop the onion. On a low flame, heat 1 tablespoon of olive oil in a non-stick frying pan. I use a small fat pan as I like my omelettes tidy and plump. Gently fry the onion, letting the edges brown but making sure the middle stays softly purple. This should take about 5 minutes. When it looks to your liking, take it out and reserve on the side. Remove any crispy bits from the pan.
Beat the eggs and season. On a low heat again, heat a scant bit of olive oil in your frying pan and add the eggs. Let them settle for 30 seconds. Either grate or break the cheese up into rough chunks and put it in the setting omelette. As it melts, pour in your onions and gently fold the omelette in half with a spatula. Depending on how done you like your omelette to be, you can then fry the other side. I like mine very slightly oozing.
Delicious with a dollop of mustard! (And if you are my pernickety brother, Ned, without the onions!)
Tawny granola
SERVES 4-6
Oil for greasing
200g/2 cups of rolled oats
70g/1/2 a cup of pumpkin seeds
50g/1/2 a cup of flaked almonds
50g/1/2 a cup of desiccated coconut
2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
160g/1/2 a cup of agave syrup or honey
2 tablespoons of apple juice
1 tablespoon of ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon of ground allspice
1 pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
100g/1/2 a cup of chopped dried apricots
You can eat this with milk as a cereal, sprinkle it on yoghurt or porridge or simply stick your paw in the jar throughout the day. It makes one feel very fifties housewife, because as it bakes the house is bathed in a warm cinnamon-y glow.
Preheat the oven to 180°C/160°C fan/Gas 4 and oil a large baking tray/cookie sheet.
Combine in a mixing bowl the oats, pumpkin seeds, almonds and desiccated coconut. In a separate large mixing bowl, mix all of the wet ingredients and the spices. Combine the dry ingredients into the wet.
Spread the mixture out evenly on the baking tray/cookie sheet, using a spatula to smooth it down. Bake for around 40 minutes, keeping an eye on the granola. When it starts to brown, turn the mixture over with the spatula to make sure it toasts evenly on both sides.
When it is ready, take it out of the oven, let it cool, then add the apricots.
Store in an airtight container and serve with milk or yoghurt, or eat as a snack when the whim takes you.
Musician’s breakfast (home-made bread with Parma ham)
MAKES ONE LARGE LOAF
450g/4 cups of wholemeal/whole wheat flour or spelt flour
100g/1 cup of rolled oats
20ml/1 large tablespoon of quick yeast
1 teaspoon of sea salt
600ml/21/2 cups of warm water
1 tablespoon of sunflower oil
1 tablespoon of runny honey
My beloved is a musician. This, a strong cup of tea and Miles Davis on the stereo makes him a happy fellow of a morning.
In a large mixing bowl, mix together all the dry ingredients with a wooden spoon. In a large Pyrex jug, mix together the warm water, sunflower oil and honey. Add the wet to the dry ingredients in the large bowl, mixing them together. Cover and put in a warm place, like a plate warmer or airing cupboard. It should stay there for 20 minutes, or until it’s doubled in size.
Once it has doubled, take it out, stir it with the wooden spoon until the air is gone and it is back to its original size. Trust me on this. Place the dough in an oiled 1.5-litre/63/4-cup (23 x 13 x 6cm/9 x 5 x 21/2-inch) loaf pan, and banish it back to the warm place for another 20 minutes. Preheat the oven to 190°C/170°C fan/Gas 5.