Tea-light in a paper bag at Angus Willis and Fergus Strachan's dinner

Tea-lights in paper bags at Angus Willis and Fergus Strachan's - why not try ?

Contrasting style: the Gay Mother's table decor

Thursday 30^th July 2009

The Gay mother came to London. She is 85 and carries her own suitcase. We went to dinner with Fergus Strachan and Angus Willis. Just imagine – the Gay Mother, 85, is separate rooms, good Wilton carpet, pretty bits of china, antique furniture, framed prints. Angus and Fergus are vast open space, polished cement floor, rough walls unchanged from when the building was a warehouse, two huge pale blue sofas, a coffee table with rock legs and a cactus.  At one time you could not open a magazine without seeing this space, as it is properly called, featured.

The Gay Mother fell silent. Afterwards, she said, ‘Well, it was an experience.’ She thought some more and added: ‘It’s not really a home, is it?’

Of course it isn’t a home. Gays don’t live in homes.

Angus Willis is a well-known food writer, stylist, photographer and entrepreneur. As we arrive he is styling the table, which is, like the floor, polished cement tiles.  I once dropped in at the Warehouse to find a stylist (not Angus) styling a tea-towel for a photo-shoot. Today the look is tea-lights in white paper bags and bashed-up tin ware from Vietnam, bunches of mint, and a stem of pink orchids laid across each place. Is this the first time Vietnamese tin pans have featured at a high London dinner? At all Angus’s dinners it is different everything – different cutlery, crockery, lighting. You too could do this if you made a bit more effort. You only need to spend a few days looking in second-hand shops for matching sets; after the dinner you can sell them on e-bay (but I don’t think Angus does this). For your next dinner you buy different ware, which might involve flying to Asia.

Angus’s early recipes include: a cake with a chocolate band. You melt choc and spread it on greaseproof paper. At the crucial moment, just before it sets but is still pliable, you tie it round the cake and whip off the greaseproof paper to view upstanding perfect stockade of chocolate around the cake. Housewives up and down the country were admitted to rest-homes still clutching their failed chocolate bands. Another recipe for an Asian salad has at least ten obscure ingredients, many layers, side-bits etc and was quite delicious. As it happens I gave it to Robin Smallmeal who said only a gay would have dreamt up such a thing.

Later Angus published a very successful book of more basic cooking such as might be carried out in families.

The dinner begins: the Gay Mother is presented with a banana leaf on a tin plate. There are little piles of perfectly chopped shallots, red chilli, ginger, some unknown white root as well as an exquisite fairy bowl containing shrimp paste.  These ingredients are to be laid on beetle (Robert Nevil tells me it is betel. I had no idea)leaves  and eaten. The Gay Mother proceeds with caution. Six courses follow: two kinds of spring roll with their dipping sauce to be wrapped in lettuce leaves and mint from the vast tin plate the size of a cart wheel in the middle of the table, a surprise soup occurring half way through – sadly I cannot describe it all. It was a Vietnamese dinner – hence the accessories.

What an extraordinary experience and what a privilege to be there!

There were also guests, most of them big names in the food world. And there was camperama: a grand lady asked the head chef of a famous restaurant if he had seen The Fairy Queen. She meant the opera by Purcell.  ‘I certainly have seen the fairy queen and far more of her than you’ll ever see, dear.’ Grand lady very excited. They had quite a stretch of naughty talk. Gay Mother not impressed. ‘If only they had been more natural,’ she said later. This is worrying. I’m not very natural myself, as you may have noticed. It’s my nerves. The important guests made intriguing statements. The grand lady pronounced the food in Scotland very badly cooked and claimed that Elizabeth David did terrible harm to British cooking at a time when it needed a boost. The as yet unfamous guests were friendly.  One was Jenny Hammerton.  She took an interest in the Gay Mother. The recipes of the stars of the silver screen are her passion. She has collected over 3000 from old magazines.  She can provide you with a silver-screen supper. I think you should try one. E-mail silverscreensuppers@yahoo.co.uk.  She gave us all packets of Janet Gaynor’s ice-box cookies which she had made herself the night before. We enjoyed them subsequently amidst the Gay Mother’s decor in the country.