Afbeelding van de auteur.

Katharine Whitehorn (1928–2021)

Auteur van Cooking in a Bedsitter

11+ Werken 232 Leden 10 Besprekingen

Over de Auteur

Werken van Katharine Whitehorn

Cooking in a Bedsitter (1961) 150 exemplaren
Selective Memory (2007) 37 exemplaren
How to Survive Children (1975) 13 exemplaren
How to Survive in the Kitchen (1979) 9 exemplaren
How to Survive in Hospital (1972) 6 exemplaren
Only on Sundays (1966) 5 exemplaren
Whitehorn's Social Survival (1980) 4 exemplaren
Observations (1970) 3 exemplaren
Roundabout (1962) 2 exemplaren
Sunday Best (1976) 2 exemplaren
View from a column (1981) 1 exemplaar

Gerelateerde werken

The Penguin Book of Women's Humour (1996) — Medewerker — 118 exemplaren
Virago Is 40 (2013) — Medewerker — 30 exemplaren

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Orig. published as Kitchen in the corner.Serious staining on bottom edge.
 
Gemarkeerd
ME_Dictionary | 6 andere besprekingen | Mar 20, 2020 |
Her husband, Gavin Lyall, dies at the end of the book, with twelve pages on her life as a widow.
½
 
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KayCliff | 1 andere bespreking | Nov 3, 2019 |
I've come to the conclusion that I'm not a big fan of autobiographies, and I think I've worked out why. If the author has spent his or her life doing something in which I have no interest at all (eg being married to a footballer), then I'm bored silly. If, on the other hand, the author seems to have been living in a whirl of Doing Interesting Things then I sit there in a haze of wistful envy and get demoralised.

Katherine Whitehorn comes across as a woman I would very much like to polish off a bottle or two of wine with one summer's evening, as she has wit, common sense, and a lifetime of Doing Interesting Things to talk about. I also very much hope that if I ever go through a bereavement I have even half her self-awareness and practicality. But after some time spent perusing her life I feel rather depressed, because I have achieved very little in comparison.

You can tell it's a columnist's autobiography, as it has a tendency to fall into article-sized chunks which get a bit irritating. The other problem is the one it shares with ever other autobiography I can ever remember having come across, which is that it's a lot more vividly-painted and interesting when it talks about childhood than most of the rest of the time. It's as if everyone who embarks on the task of writing their life dives more enthusiastically into recreating that part of the past, even if the years in question weren't particularly happy. I have a theory about this, which is that it's more socially acceptable to discuss one's childhood in company than it is to discuss the first five years of one's marriage, or the decade where your job was going really well. This is possibly because we all had a childhood, whereas we can't necessarily connect to other life experiences.

She's an interesting woman to spend time with, so if none of the above caveats bother you, go for it.
… (meer)
 
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Askapart | 1 andere bespreking | Nov 30, 2013 |
A bedsitter is a single room without plumbing, as one might inhabit when living thriftily in a shared house. I've always had kitchen-sharing rights when I lived in one of these, but I certainly remember being nervous of the kitchen or of my housemates. Whitehorn writes as though one was not allowed to do more than boil tea or heat soup in one's room but also wasn't allowed to use the real kitchen. Of course, if you're poor enough to live in a bedsit, you aren't going to eat at restaurants very often. This extremely slender, practical cookbook is full of advice on hiding the smells of cooking, keeping an asbestos mat under the bed, doing the washing-up in a shared bathroom. The comedy is innate.

She also makes one of the most sensible defenses of traditional English cuisine I've ever read, while abandoning it as impractical.

"The principles of English cooking demand that first-class food should be cooked as simply as possible, and that a number of different foods should be cooked separately and served together."


Indeed, if you have an Aga (vast thermal mass, will cook gallons of food at once) in a house with a country garden (fresh truck and eggs, the best thing to do is not fuss over it too much) you would produce... something a lot like the Pacific Coast standard of fresh, seasonal, and varied. But if you have one small, weak fire, and can't chop more than one thing at a time:

"...bedsitter people have far more natural kinship with nomads brewing up in the desert over a small fire of camel dung, or impoverished Italian peasants eking out three shrimps and lump of cheese with half a cartload of spaghetti."


Whitehorn was, therefore, working with more technical constraints than was [Edouard de Pomiane]. She recommends reheating rice or potatoes every few days instead of cooking them fresh, or eating bread as a filler (perhaps that went without saying for someone in France). Casseroles work, eggs work, green salads are the easiest veg, and there's simply nothing to be done about the smells.

That said, she has practical instructions for casseroles, fried fritters, many soups, creamed this and that, and parties from the raucous and artistic to the calculatedly intimate to the truly difficult: one's protective parents.

This is more of a curiosity than a cookbook, now, and a current version would surely abandon the heating element for a microwave -- perhaps disguised as a TV. Whitehorn's voice is delightful, though, and anyone who likes [Peg Bracken] might enjoy this.
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clews-reviews | 6 andere besprekingen | Jun 1, 2011 |

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Statistieken

Werken
11
Ook door
3
Leden
232
Populariteit
#97,292
Waardering
3.9
Besprekingen
10
ISBNs
19

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