Jane Grigson
Jane Grigson was an English cookery writer. In the latter part of the 20th century she was the author of the food column for The Observer and wrote numerous books about European cuisines and traditional British dishes. Her work proved influential in promoting British food.
Born in Gloucestershire, Grigson was raised in Sunderland, North East England, before studying at Newnham College, Cambridge. In 1953 she became an editorial assistant at the publishing company Rainbird, McLean, where she was the research assistant for the poet and writer Geoffrey Grigson. They soon began a relationship which lasted until his death in 1985; they had one daughter, Sophie. Jane worked as a translator of Italian works, and co-wrote books with her husband before writing Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery in 1967. The book was well received and, on its strength, Grigson gained her position at The Observer after a recommendation by the food writer Elizabeth David.
Grigson continued to write for The Observer until 1990; she also wrote works that focused mainly on British food—such as Good Things, English Food, Food With the Famous and The Observer Guide to British Cookery —or on key ingredients—such as Fish Cookery, The Mushroom Feast, Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book, Jane Grigson's Fruit Book and Exotic Fruits and Vegetables. She was awarded the John Florio Prize for Italian translation in 1966, and her food books won three Glenfiddich Food and Drink Awards and two André Simon Memorial Prizes.
Grigson was active in political lobbying, campaigning against battery farming and for animal welfare, food provenance and smallholders; in 1988 she took John MacGregor, then the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, to task after salmonella was found in British eggs. Her writing put food into its social and historical context with a range of sources that includes poetry, novels and the cookery writers of the Industrial Revolution era, including Hannah Glasse, Elizabeth Raffald, Maria Rundell and Eliza Acton. Through her writing she changed the eating habits of the British, making many forgotten dishes popular once again.
Biography
Early life; 1928–1965
Grigson was born Heather Mabel Jane McIntire on 13 March 1928 in Gloucester, Gloucestershire, the daughter of George and Doris McIntire. George was a solicitor and the deputy town clerk of Gloucester; Doris was an artist. Grigson later said that home was where she "first learnt about good English food". After he had been involved in the closure of an abattoir, George gave up eating meat. When Grigson was four the family moved to Sunderland, North East England. She picked up a trace of a north-east accent that remained with her, and what the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls a "quietly left-wing" political viewpoint. During the Second World War, Sunderland was a target of Luftwaffe bombs, so Grigson and her sister Mary were sent to Casterton School, a boarding school in Westmorland. She then gained a place at Newnham College, Cambridge to read English literature.After university Grigson travelled around Italy, and lived for three months in Florence. On her return to the UK she became the assistant to Bryan Robertson, the curator at the Heffer Gallery in Cambridge; an interest in painting, silver and textiles led her to apply for positions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, but she was unsuccessful. She worked in a junior capacity in an art gallery on Bond Street; she thought the watercolours were old-fashioned, and she later said that "I wished to rip everything off the walls and hang up Ben Nicholson". She began writing art reviews for the Sunderland Echo, covering subjects such as fine pottery, the Renaissance and the work of Clarkson Frederick Stanfield. In 1953 she became an editorial assistant at the publishing company Rainbird, McLean, a position she held for two years, during which time she was the research assistant for the poet and writer Geoffrey Grigson. He was married, and twenty-three years older than she, but they began a relationship and shortly afterwards she moved to the Farmhouse at Broad Town, Wiltshire, which had been his family home since 1945. He and his wife did not divorce; his estranged wife refused to grant him one. Instead, in the mid-1950s, McIntire changed her name by deed poll to Jane Grigson.
In 1959 the Grigsons had a daughter, Sophie, who later became a food writer and television presenter. Shortly after the birth, the couple purchased a cave-cottage in Trôo, France, and it was there, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, that Grigson developed a conviction that "because cooking is a central part of life it should be as carefully written about as any other art form".
Grigson worked for ten years as a translator from Italian, and in 1959 she wrote a new translation of Carlo Collodi's fairy tale The Adventures of Pinocchio, which she thought was "the only version of Pinocchio to transmit the liveliness and toughness of the original". She translated Gian Antonio Cibotto's 1962 work Scano Boa in 1963 and, the same year, also translated Cesare Beccaria's 1764 work Dei delitti e delle pene; the work was published as Of Crimes and Punishments, and it won the 1966 John Florio Prize for Italian translation. Jane and Geoffrey then worked on a joint project aimed at juveniles that looked at the meaning of 65 artworks in the context of their time and their enduring impact; Shapes and Stories was published in 1964. The Times and The Guardian both thought it "original and beautiful". A follow-up work, Shapes and Adventures, was published in 1967.
Mid-1960s to mid-1970s
In the mid-1960s Grigson was persuaded by her friend, Adey Horton, to co-author a book on pork. Horton dropped out part-way through the project and, in 1967, Grigson published Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery. The reviewer in The Times commented, "the research is detailed, the recounting lively, the information fascinating, the recipes complete from head to tail." In a tour d'horizon of cookery books in 1977, Elizabeth David called the book "A valuable work on the salting, curing and cooking of pork ... as practised by French households as well as by professional charcutiers", and commented on its "authentic recipes, practical approach and good writing".On the strength of Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery—and a subsequent lunch—David recommended Grigson to The Observer as their food writer; Grigson began her weekly column with the paper the following year. For her first article she wrote about strawberries, but was unsure of how to approach the topic. Her husband suggested "we'll find out what the strawberry has meant to people, what they have done to it, how they have developed it and so on". She used the same approach for most of her future columns.
Jay Rayner, one of her successors in the role, writes that Grigson "established ... newspaper's reputation as a publication that was serious about food". Nigel Slater, another successor, considers her writing "legendary". She held the position until 1990. Grigson and her husband would spend three months a year in Trôo—sometimes visiting twice a year—writing there and at their home in Broad Town, Wiltshire. While in France she "delighted in proving to ... French friends that British cooking could be every bit as good as theirs", according to her daughter. Her articles in The Observer provided the basis of further books; in 1971 her columns provided material for Good Things, which she introduced by saying it "is not a manual of cookery, but a book about enjoying food". Harold Wilshaw, the food writer for The Guardian, thought it a "magnificent book ... worth the money for the chapter on prunes alone" The Times considers it "perhaps the most popular of her books". Nika Hazelton, reviewing it for The New York Times writes that it is "a delight to read and to cook from. The author is literate, her food interesting but unaffected". The chef and food writer Samin Nosrat lists Good Things as one of "the classic cookbooks that shaped my career as a chef and writer", alongside Jane Grigson's Fruit Book and Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book.
In 1973 Grigson was invited by the Wine and Food Society to write Fish Cookery. According to the food writer Geraldene Holt, it was not common in Britain at that time for fish to be the main course at a formal meal; by the time Grigson came around to writing the updated edition in 1993, attitudes and tastes had changed, and a wider variety of fish was available for purchase.
Grigson opened her 1974 work, English Food with "English cooking—both historically and in the mouth—is a great deal more varied and delectable than our masochistic temper in this matter allows". On reading the book, Roger Baker, reviewing in The Times, described Grigson as "probably the most engaging food writer to emerge during the last few years"; he thought the book had "a sense of fun, a feeling for history, a very readable style and a love of simple, unaffected cooking". The Times later described English Food as being "a work to set alongside Elizabeth David's books on French and Italian cuisine". Holt records that with the book, "Grigson had become a crusader for the oft-maligned cooking of the British Isles"; she became an early critic of battery farming and passionate about the provenance of food. The same year, Grigson was a contributor to The World Atlas of Food. The book was described by the food writer Elizabeth Ray as "by its nature both expensive and superficial", and by Baker as containing "hectic catch-lines on every page ... a thinness in the writing".
Over the next three years Grigson returned to producing books dealing with key categories of food: two booklets, Cooking Carrots and Cooking Spinach were published in 1975, as was The Mushroom Feast. The last of these was described by Kirkus Reviews as "A beautiful collection of recipes and culinary lore"; the reviewer for The Observer noted that "Grigson gives you more than recipes. She takes you down the byways of folklore and literature". Grigson described it as "the record of one family's pursuit of mushrooms, both wild and cultivated, over the last twenty years". Unlike many of her other books it owed little to her previously published articles, but drew on her family's experiences as mushroom enthusiasts. The idea of writing a book on fungi came to her after a friend in Trôo introduced the Grigsons to mushroom gathering. For him, as for other locals, "mushroom-hunting was part of the waste-nothing philosophy he had inherited from his farming peasant ancestors. ... mushrooms have long been accepted by chefs of the high cooking tradition in France: there is no question of allowing them to go to waste as we do so unregardingly". She had gradually concluded that few available books did justice to mushrooms and other fungi: "Most cookery books—always excepting Plats du Jour by Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd—are useless". Reviewing the first edition, Skeffington Ardron wrote in The Guardian that choosing between the many recipes "will drive you wild, for there is here such a magnificent collection" ranging from simple economical dishes to "the extravagant, impossible, ridiculous Poulard Derbe with its champagne, foie gras and truffles".