Below Stairs by Margaret Powell Page A

clean with tissue paper. She said that if you washed hares or washed game of any kind it took the flavour away. She didn’t like you washing anything, she always reckoned that you washed the flavour down the sink.
    Mrs Bowchard loved cooking jugged hare because of the port wine. This was always sent down into the kitchen when we had jugged hare. The parlourmaid used to bring it from the dining-room, two wineglasses full, but never more than one glass ever went into the cooking. Mrs Bowchard always used to try and drink it secretly so that I could never say afterwards, ‘Well, Mrs Bowchard had some of it.’ I used to watch out of the corner of my eye. One glass used to go into the jugged hare, the other glass went down Mrs Bowchard’s gullet. If she knew I’d seen her she’d say, ‘Oh well, it’s the cook’s perks. Everyone does it.’ Perhaps everyone did; I remember doing it myself later.
    Still Mrs Bowchard was a very good cook. Cooking was really something in those days because you had unlimited materials. There was none of this business as in the war when they told you how to make a fatless or eggless cake which was the most appalling thing you ever ate in your life; you used vinegar and lard. People just deluded themselves if they thought it was worth eating.
    Even nowadays when you see an economic recipe and they say you can’t tell the difference from the original, well probably you can’t if you’ve never eaten the original, but if you have there’s a vast difference. It’s like using margarine instead of butter, the top of the milk instead of cream, having cheaper cuts of meat instead of the best, and having frozen salmon instead of fresh salmon. None of it tastes the same.
    The food was marvellous then because it was always fresh even butchers and fishmongers never had things like deep freeze. They used to have a cold room but it didn’t freeze things, so that all the food you had was fresh; it had a flavour.
    Nowadays they are at their wits’ end to put things on the market to put back the flavour into food, the flavour that’s come out with freezing. But it can’t be done. No one can delude me into thinking that it can be, but of course if you’ve not had it the old way you don’t know the difference.
    Today when people talk about their jobs they always mention the ‘fringe benefits’. As I’ve said cooks used to get fringe benefits from the stores they dealt with. You’d have thought that cast-off clothes might have found their way downstairs, but they didn’t. They didn’t care to give them to the servants because they wouldn’t want you to wear them while you were living in their house, and of course they wouldn’t want you to leave so that you could wear them somewhere else. They preferred to give them to societies.
    All these people interested themselves in charities, they were all on this board and that board. If you read the papers you would see Lady this, and Mrs that, had a stall here and a stall there.
    Mrs Bowchard used to make cakes for the stall Mrs Cutler ran for helping fallen women. Mrs Cutler used to be very keen on helping the fallen women, from a distance. Like a lot of people, she could be generous if she was not involved. It was to charities like this that they used to send their old clothes.
    I remember the head parlourmaid being very annoyed once because there was a nice coat with a fur collar which Mrs Cutler had had several years. The head parlourmaid knew that she’d very soon be getting rid of it and she felt sure it would come to her because she’d dropped a few hints which seemed to have had an effect, but no, it was packed up and sent to a charitable institution.
    There wasn’t very much given away to us. At Christmas, we got presents of cloth to make things with, aprons, and horrible sensible presents.
    Although I’d made such a fuss about going there, during the two years that I stayed in Thurloe Square I saw very little of London. I was always too