IT'S ALWAYS the quiet ones. And there is nothing quieter than a good cook. Not a good chef, but a good cook. Good cooks are often, in my experience, tough realists with a tobacco problem, but I don't know if Rose Gray smoked. She ran the River Café in west London, and died last week aged 71, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
There is a lot to be said about Rose Gray, and most of it appeared, several times, in the British papers during the last seven days. That she changed the way that we eat. That her influence is felt in every kitchen. That she brought Italian cooking to your kitchen – and this is true of Irish kitchens just as much as British ones, because of course we share the same supermarkets. That because she changed our food she changed our lives.
I wouldn’t be a major River Café fan. Their cookery books were far too complex as far as I was concerned, and the food, although lovely, always seemed to cry out for a perfectionist male cook to prepare it – the hero of an Ian McEwan novel, perhaps, rather than a chaotic female who would rather be watching rubbish television than growing her own kale.
But now that we are surrounded by culinary superstars who yell and lecture us at every commercial opportunity, you have to admire someone who did not enter one of the toughest businesses in the world until she was 50 yearsold, and then became one of the exemplars of that business.
Perhaps because she and her business partner Ruth Rogers were so old when they opened the River Café, there was not so much yelling and shouting in their kitchen. The bullying which is the norm in so many professional restaurants was not so noisy in theirs.
And Gray was an excellent teacher, according to some of her former young employees, of whom Jamie Oliver is only the most famous. She and Ruth Rogers used to visit the new restaurants of their graduates and solemnly have lunch – a terrifying but morale-boosting experience for the new young proprietor.
The point which has not been made about Rose Gray, I think, is how very English she was. English in that unsung and extraordinarily low-key way which really brings about change, almost as a by-product of itself. English in that unthinking way which nevertheless has established and maintained vital institutions as dissimilar to each other as the AA and Amnesty International. English in that modest, problem-solving way.
It was Orwell who first identified the pursuit of hobbies as one of the distinguishing characteristics of the English. The devotion and thoroughness the English brought to a subject which could not possibly profit them was something which set them apart, he thought.
Long before she became a professional cook, Rose Gray became an expert in Italian cooking. She was an expert gardener and grew a lot of her own ingredients.
Her time living in Italy – after a bankruptcy in one of her many modest money-making schemes – allowed her to research the subject, talking to the growers, the home cooks and the people who jealously guard the flame of regional cooking in Italy. She was English also in her confident bohemianism – she had attended art college and had worked as an art teacher; not, of course, that this is what makes a person a bohemian.
What the general public in several countries bought from Rose Gray was her impeccable taste, and this was unbeatable. She mixed her husband’s sculptures into her restaurant, she wore expensive clothes but was not dominated by them, she created an impeccable garden on the roof of her flat.
All of this is very redolent of the English middle class who once ran the Empire so efficiently, but now run the lifestyle industry instead. Indeed, Rose Gray was a soldier’s daughter: if it’s not Kirsty with the property show, or Trinny Susannah telling us what not to wear, it is some other blonde in a Boden frock instructing us how to stencil wallpaper while preserving the ozone layer. It is literally a blonde in a Boden frock, for example, who runs the phenomenally successful chatroom, mumsnet.
These people, with their love of order and their insistence on individualism, in short with their sweet reasonableness, are unstoppable. And we are happy subjects in their empire of good taste, where the must-have accessories are, besides a credit card, fresh herbs.
Rose Gray was one of the more impressive of this lifestyle army, and we must admire her hard work and her discipline, and the very Englishness which helped her to achieve so much and to make life nicer for a good many people.
There is a play on in London at the moment, Jerusalem, by Jez Butterworth. It concerns itself with the nature of Englishness and is set on St George’s Day. It stars Mark Rylance as its gypsy hero, who lives in a trailer, deals drugs and knows what life is about. With his love of freedom and his uncomfortable good sense, the Rooster Byron is said to embody all that is best about England, and under threat from modernity.
But there is an argument to be made that a white-haired cook who worked on the Thames was just as English. In an unassuming way she had a big impact on our unconsidered, everyday existence.