Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook Read online

  Dedication

  To Nancy Elizabeth Marguerite Goodway

  (1 January 1900–4 January 1984)

  My “Lion Aunt”

  Epigraph

  What country, friends, is this?

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, TWELFTH NIGHT, ACT 1, SCENE 2

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Dining Room, the Grand Hotel Mirabeau, Lausanne

  London: 1945/6

  1: Government Offices, Marylebone

  2: 34 Cromwell Square, Paddington

  3: Cromwell Square, Paddington

  4: Savoy Grill, London

  5: Cromwell Square, Paddington; Service Women’s Club, Lower Sloane St.

  Germany: 1946

  6: Blue Train, Hook of Holland—Hamburg

  7: Hotel Atlantic, Hamburg

  8: British Officers’ Club, Hamburg

  9: Außenalster Café, Hamburg

  Dori: 34 Cromwell Square, Paddington, W2

  10: CCG Mess, Lübeck

  11: CCG Billet, Lübeck

  12: CCG Mess, Lübeck

  13: CCG Billet, Lübeck

  14: Mietshaus Moltkestrasse, Lübeck; British Hospital, Hamburg

  15: CCG Billet, Lübeck

  Dori: 34 Cromwell Square, Paddington, W2

  16: Landestrasse Schule, Lübeck

  17: CCG Billet, Lübeck, Travemünde

  18: CCG Billet, Lübeck

  Dori: Paddington, W2

  19: CCG Mess, Lübeck

  20: Billet, Lübeck

  21: CCG Mess, Lübeck

  22: 44 Möllnstrasse, Lübeck

  23: 44 Möllnstrasse, Lübeck

  24: Atlantic Hotel, Hamburg

  25: Langerhorn Sanatorium, Hamburg

  26: Fischhaus Restaurant, Blankense, Hamburg

  27: Officers’ Club, Hamburg

  Dori: Paddington W2

  28: Lübeck Billet/Atlantic Hotel, Lübeck/Hamburg

  29: Billet, Lübeck

  30: Apartment 2a Schillerstrasse, Lübeck

  31: Apartment 2a Schillerstrasse, Lübeck

  32: Hotel am Zoo, Berlin

  33: Russian Sector, Berlin

  34: Bauhaus Apartment, Wannsee, Berlin

  35: Alte Küche, Berlin

  36: Apartment 2a Schillerstrasse, Lübeck

  Italy: 1946

  37: American military train

  38: Hotel Aquila Nera–Schwarzer Adler, Vipiteno Sterzing

  39: Hotel Aquila Nera–Schwarzer Adler, Vipiteno Sterzing

  40: Pensione Sterzberg, Vipiteno Sterzing

  41: Verona

  42: Grand Hotel Savoia, Genoa

  The Grand Hotel Mirabeau, Lausanne

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Dining Room, the Grand Hotel Mirabeau, Lausanne

  10th November 1989

  Fried Fillet of Perch

  Perch fillets dipped in egg, then flour, salted and peppered with a hint of paprika, fried in butter . . . Specialty of the place. A finicky fish--hardly worth eating--bones like needles. Tastes of the riverbed.

  She put down her pen and pushed her plate away. She wasn’t here to eat the food or drink the wine. She had no appetite anyway. She’d come by way of Natzweiler-Struthof, a Nazi camp two hundred miles north of here. A Nacht und Nebel place, Night and Fog. Apt name. Four British girls had died there, forgotten by almost everybody, tucked away in the back pocket of a secret war.

  She’d laid four red roses in the black maw of the rusting oven. A pilgrimage of sorts.

  If these do not die well, it will be a black matter . . .

  They had not died well.

  A ragged cheer burst from the kitchen. Through the flapping doors, she could see white-coated backs in front of a portable television. From the foyer, tinny, muffled commentary, crowd noise, clinking, and chanting, mixed with the excited chatter of guests and staff clustered round a larger screen, drawn by the need to witness the drama taking place in Berlin, history erupting into the present, breaking through the muted formality of this grand hotel. An ending? A beginning? Both? Impossible to tell.

  Not that it mattered. Very little mattered anymore.

  “Are you finished, madame?” The elderly waiter hesitated before taking her plate. “The dish is not to your liking?”

  “I’m not hungry.” She capped her pen and lit a cigarette.

  “You have been here before?” he asked as he refilled her glass. A Chasselas. Swiss wine, none the worse for that.

  “Once. A long time ago.”

  Just after the war. She doubted he would remember. How many people did he encounter? She’d been here under another name. A different person. A different time. She remembered him, though. His name was Joseph. She had a good memory for faces. She’d needed it in her line of business. A slender, solemn, graceful young man then, dark, thin-faced, with a pencil mustache. His hair silver now, the mustache still there—a thin line sketched in graphite. French, she recalled, and Jewish. He’d found safety here in Switzerland. She wondered if his family had been as lucky.

  “Anything else for you, madame? A little dessert, perhaps? Coffee?”

  “No, thank you.” She knocked the glass, her hand suddenly as useless as a bat. Wine spilled across the table. Joseph sprang forward to repair the damage. “No need.” She shook her head. “Clumsy of me.”

  She held her hands on her lap and looked around at the immaculately laid tables, the stiff, starched linen, the gleam of the heavy silver cutlery, the glittering glassware, her fellow diners. Some of them frail, in wheelchairs, she noted; the staff must be used to different degrees of infirmity. She pushed herself back from the table. Anticipating that she was about to leave, Joseph was immediately at her side, whisking her chair away, offering her his arm.

  She declined his help and made her way slowly, Joseph hurrying in front of her, nodding to two young waiters to open the double doors. He bowed as she left. She smiled her thanks and wished him farewell. This was the last time she would be eating here, or anywhere. In a little less than twenty-four hours, Stella Snelling, restaurant critic and cookery writer, acclaimed and feared in equal measure, would be no more.

  She’d taken a suite with a view of the lake. The Art Deco furnishings were just shabby enough to be authentic. She’d had the black lacquer writing desk reversed, so that it faced away from the fussy, fluted fan-shape mirror. She found her appearance disconcerting. She had never expected to get this old, to live this long. Even with ten years knocked off Stella’s passport, she was looking her true age now. She wore no makeup, her black hair an untidy gray mane; the dark eyes, deep and hooded, had seen too much; the grooved lines etched on the forehead, by the sides of the mouth, carried too much pain. She hardly recognized this person she had become. In her dreams, she was always young.

  She opened the overnight bag that she’d brought with her, taking out a small green medical case. She removed the top tray holding the bandages, scissors, antiseptic cream, paracetamol and tablets that any traveler might carry, to reveal a number of disposable hypodermic syringes, ampoules of diamorphine, and more of the drug in capsule form. She placed the drugs in the small refrigerator and took out the Koskenkorva vodka. She poured a glass, lit a cigarette, and went out onto the balcony.

  The light had almost gone. The lake was a dark pewterish-purple, the mountains opposite lost in a cold, bluish haze. A mist had risen, diffusing the last of the sunset, layering the lake with bloodied gauze.

  She sipped her drink, sav
oring the sharp, clear spirit. There were clinics here in Switzerland that offered a discreet service for the end of life. Such facilities were not openly advertised. She was wealthy, with no living relatives, and believed strongly in a person’s right to choose how he or she wanted to die. Arrangements had been made, monies forwarded (for certain services, the clinic demanded prepayment). Tomorrow at 10:30, she had an appointment. A substantial further donation had guaranteed the director’s personal attention. Nothing would be left to chance. Hence the diamorphine. The lake had turned to glittering blackness, the colored lights of the quay dancing on its restless surface. Time to go back inside.

  She opened a leather attaché case and began to lay out the contents on the desk. A brochure for the Endymion Clinic: situated on the beautiful shores of Lake Geneva, offering proven antiaging treatments and unrivaled levels of expertise in the areas of fertility and sexual health. The name of the director had been circled; Other services available on application, doubly underlined. The brochure had arrived at her Paris flat with an accompanying note from Adeline in New York. This is what we’ve been waiting for! in Adeline’s arthritic scrawl, with instructions to go ahead and make arrangements. They would do it together, Adeline had said, but she was doing it alone. Within days, it seemed, she was reading Adeline’s obituary.

  ADELINE CURTIS CROFT PARNELL the celebrated female war correspondent, who covered every major conflict from World War II to San Salvador, died on Sunday in her New York West Village apartment aged 79.

  Adeline Parnell was one of the first journalists to enter Germany with Allied Forces. She reported honestly and fearlessly about events as they were happening, including the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau. She went on to report on the Nuremburg trials and won a Pulitzer for her reporting from Korea. She covered the war in Vietnam and the conflict in San Salvador until ill health forced her retirement. She continued to photograph her home city of New York, which she described as “her war zone.”

  Born Adeline Curtis Croft in 1910, in Poughkeepsie, New York, she was educated at Bryn Mawr and Columbia University. She went on to work for various newspapers, including the New York Times and the Herald Tribune, as well as Life magazine. In 1942, she married fellow journalist Sam Parnell, who was killed in 1944. She never remarried and leaves no close relatives. Her estate and considerable archive are bequeathed to Columbia University.

  It was no surprise. She had last seen Adeline in her New York apartment a month or so before. She had tried not to show her shock at finding her old friend so diminished; slumped and twisted into her wheelchair, so thin that her blue shirt and fawn corduroy trousers seemed empty, like clothes on a puppet, her thick, blond curly hair reduced to white wisps, her rings loose on the bird-claw fingers that twisted around the controls of her power chair.

  “I’m in quite a state, aren’t I?” Adeline looked up; her blue eyes, once so sharp, milky with cataracts. They both knew that this could be their last meeting. She’d turned away to hide the tears in her own eyes.

  “’s OK.” Adeline gave a ghost of her old smile. “As long as this still works—” she tapped her temple “—I don’t mind. ‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change’ and all that yada yada. Come, come over here where there’s more light.” She maneuvered herself through her “archive.” Piles of newspapers, files, and clippings stretched from floor to ceiling. She halted in front of the brownstone’s tall window that looked out onto the West Village. “Something I want you to see.”

  In the bay, the heavy wooden table was free of clutter. A Tiffany lamp, balanced by a gold and ivory Favrile vase of canna lilies, stood on a faded green-and-purple velvet runner. In the center of the table lay a book, the brown cloth cover blotched and stained, the title in faded gilt.

  The Radiation

  Cookery Book

  For use with the “New World”

  Regulo Controlled Gas Cookers

  The inside cover was flecked and rust spotted; there was a name written along with a place and date:

  Lübeck, British Zone of Occupation, Germany, January 1946.

  The name almost illegible. Time erased.

  “It was on top of a pile of other stuff, as though someone had just put it down. It wasn’t there the day before, I swear . . . Then I found these,” Adeline pointed to a folder of photographs. “Just spilled across the floor. After all these years. Gotta mean something . . .”

  She opened the folder and felt the same frisson. They both knew that coincidence, synchronicity, serendipity, whatever you wanted to call it, was not to be undervalued, that intuition counted for more than cold logic. In her experience, it could be the difference between life and death.

  “I took another look, into what happened, you know?” Adeline spoke into the gathered silence. “I think I’m onto something.” Her eyes showed a little of their old spark. “I’m waiting for confirmation. Now pour us a drink. There’s bourbon over there. Here’s to it!” Adeline lifted the glass between her two hands. “If I’m right, we’ll do it together!”

  Adeline hadn’t made it. It was all on her now. She placed the Radiation Cookery Book on the black lacquered desk and opened the brown cloth cover. Such a nondescript exterior blotched and stained with water damage, still smelling faintly of smoke. There were handwritten recipes, clippings from magazines—Stella Snelling’s dozen delicious ways with canapés—menu cards slipped like memories between pages still grainy and pilled with ancient flour. Each one perfectly innocent-seeming but so freighted with other meanings that they might have been scribed in blood. Everything lay between these covers, not least the reason why she was here.

  She put the book down, dark drops spotting the cover. Tears came more easily now than they ever had in the past.

  Blinking to clear her sight, she shook photographs from a manila envelope, fanning them across the desk, sorting them like a pack of cards.

  What she’d found in Germany, how it had unwound, was here to see.

  Images of a ruined city: acres upon acres of devastation; tumbled bricks under a dusting of snow; a few distant buildings showing black, fretted against the sky; a house number—24—painted on a chunk of fallen masonry. A man stared at tangled twisted steel girders that reached toward him like the arms of some toppled metal monster. Capsized ships lay in a harbor, half-submerged, funnels flush with the water. Snapshots of some terrifying dystopia taken in Germany, 1946. A Caspar David Friedrich frozen sea, the Baltic presumably, frost-foamed waves looking uncannily like the snow-covered masonry piled in jagged heaps. Niflheim, the realm of ice and cold.

  The photograph of Adeline herself was the one that had accompanied her obituary. Taken by somebody else on some moving battlefield. Adeline with her combat-jacket collar turned up, most of her face obscured by her Leica, blond curls stuffed under a forage cap, a tank in the background.

  Adeline was never without her camera. She had an eye for a picture, was famous for it, but it was more than that with her. It was as though she felt compelled to catch memories in the net of time. Here they all were. Snap. She’d caught them all.

  There she was, smiling, happy, sitting at a table in a sunlit square, the photograph taken in three-quarter profile, blue-gray eyes looking off to the right, the dappled light catching the planes and shadows of her face and the sun glinting on her golden hair. It was a good picture. The last one taken of her.

  And a younger self, looking glamorous in a low-cut Schiaparelli she’d bought for a song from a Parisian countess living in a cold-water flat in Maida Vale. New Year’s Eve, 1945.

  There was handsome Harry Hirsch at the same New Year’s party. Jewish Brigade and, later, Mossad, looking boyish, if slightly sunken-eyed, a bit disheveled, black hair flopping in his eyes, tie loose and shirtsleeves rolled. He had been acting as bartender, dispensing hooch to the spivs, émigrés, service types, and general ne’er-do-wells there assembled. Next, the American, Tom McHale, in need of a shave and hungover, the photograph taken the morning after
, no less boyish but looking altogether more slippery and deceitful, which, of course, he was. Then Leo Chase. Came to a bad end. Dying in some ghastly Moscow flat, liver turned to foie gras. She smiled slightly, proud of the part she’d played in his demise. Adeline was lucky to get him. Leo didn’t like being photographed—now everyone knew why—but here he was, eventual disgrace far in the future, his collar turned up against the New Year’s Eve drizzle, raindrops glistening on his bowler and overcoat collar, photographed coming into the party, pale eyes shifty, peering sideways behind his glasses, weak mouth caught between a grimace and a smile.

  Next, the von Stavenows. Elisabeth in evening dress, head tilted to one side, large eyes gazing off somewhere, as lovely as a Nordic film star. She placed her next to the first photograph and looked from one to the other. Take away Elisabeth’s gloss and glamour and they could have been sisters. Apart from the eyes. Hers were icy; the other’s kind. Below them, came Kurt as Sturmbannführer, handsome as a viper in his black and silver. Underneath this, a much younger Kurt von Stavenow, looking very fetching in a cricket sweater, all blond hair and chiseled cheekbones. No wonder she’d fallen for him. The photo was passport size and had been paperclipped at some time: a long hook of reddish-brown spots marred his white shoulder. Rubbing with a thumb made no difference. Some stains are impossible to erase.

  She’d laid out the photographs in a pyramid, like a tarot spread. She placed the smiling woman in the sunlit square at the apex, the others ranged below. A reading would be impossible. There were no good cards here.

  Oh, my dear girl, what did we do to you?

  There was a reckoning to be made. A debt to be paid.

  London

  1945/6

  1

  Government Offices, Marylebone

  31st December 1945

  “Do you know this man?”

  Edith Graham looked back at the implacable black eyes staring into hers, then down at the photograph. A Greek kouros in a cricket sweater. A young man caught in the full beauty of his youth, or so she’d thought when she fell in love with him that very afternoon. She remembered the photo being taken. 1932. The University Parks in Oxford. He was standing at the edge of the pitch, hands in pockets, face in profile, fair hair waving back from a high forehead. Shadows showed beneath his brows and defined his high cheekbones. He was frowning slightly, his mouth a straight line.