Dining with Duff

After yesterday’s quite emotional post, unlike Duff Cooper, I’d like to get back on to lighter fare.

Duff eschewed nursery food like Plum Duff. He describes in his diaries what he eats during the First World War and it is astonishing. “Oysters and plovers’ eggs and Chablis at Wilton’s”; “cold beef, lobster, plovers’ eggs and strawberries”; “hors d’oeuvre followed by exceptionally cool and delicious langoustine, cotelette de veau viennoise, a pêche melba and a petit suisse, all accompanied by a sparkling Moselle”; “smoked salmon and caviare, lobster thermidor, grouse à la crème and plenty of Perrier Jouet 1907”.

By 1918 Duff had been released from the Foreign Office and is a 2nd Lt in the Grenadier Guards serving in the trenches in France. The food was not so rich but rather more digestible. “soup, hot fish, cold beef with potatoes, peas and pickles, prunes and ‘shape’ and cheese”; “caviare, turtle soup, lobster rissoles, roast chicken, chocolate pudding, foie gras”. In 1919, when he is married, he eats ” oyster scallops beautifully cooked, roast duck, roll poly treacle pudding and Stilton cheese with Roederer 1911 and port”.

His diaries are a delight. There is much more to them than the pleasures at table and in the bedroom, both of which he confesses to candidly. He is commissioned as a 2nd Lt in the Grenadiers after four months training and serves in the trenches in 1918. It is worth reading his diaries for that part of his life alone. He was awarded a DSO. His son, John Julius Norwich, edited the diaries and in his introduction wonders if readers will warm to his father. For me, too early to say. I admire his candour but he is still a young man with a distinguished life and many rich dinners before him.

You probably know Evelyn Waugh based Mrs Stitch on Lady Diana Cooper in Scoop.

“July 18th 1919. We have been much excited in these days over our new motor car which Beaverbrook gave us. Diana drives it. Today she drove it into a milk cart in Stafford Street, upset the cart and flooded the street. The owners of the dog shop dashed out with all their dogs on leashes and immediately set them to drink in the gutter. She also slightly damaged one of the doors of the car.”

In Scoop Mrs Stitch mounted “the kerb and proceeded to Piccadilly, driving before her at a brisk pace, until he took refuge on the step of Brooks’s, a portly, bald young man”. Later she drives into a public lavatory in Sloane Street quickly thronged by a crowd. “Six of them seized the little car and lifted it, effortlessly, on their shoulders. A cheer rose from the multitude as the jet black car rose above the spikes of the railings.”

Now where is Reykjavik?