The stomach for the fight: cooking for Churchill during the war

Georgina Landemare cooked for the Churchill family in all their kitchens, during the 1930s and 1940s. She got as close to the inner workings of the prime ministerial stomach as it was possible to get for a non-family member. At Admiralty House, Chartwell, Chequers, Downing Street and even in the hastily put-up fitted kitchen in the Cabinet War Rooms, she eked out the rations into seven-course meals and accommodated both Churchill’s gluttony and his fussiness. There seem to have been plovers’ eggs in abundance.

The food historian Annie Gray’s previous books include an examination of the life of Queen Victoria through that monarch’s enormous, indiscriminate appetite for eating. In Victory in the Kitchen she recreates a corner of early 20th-century domestic life through the recipes and menus that Georgina left behind, supplemented by the copious records of the Churchills’ entertaining and, particularly, of Winston’s keen interest in both his food and his digestion.

For the latter he received conflicting advice from various doctors. One told him to avoid red meat, pickles, offal and mushrooms, and another ordered the removal of cheese, cucumber, pineapple, marmalade peel and strong coffee. Consommé, however, was recommended all round, and Churchill imposed exacting standards as to its clarity, often eating it in jellied form last thing at night. It is diverting to learn that the lunch Georgina cooked for the Churchills on 11 December 1936 included vanilla and fig ice cream with cherry sauce. It may not have been crucial to the unfolding of the abdication crisis that week, but it sounds delicious.

Landemare was already a successful professional cook by the time she was employed by the Churchills. What little is known of her childhood comes from the first 16 pages of a memoir she wrote in her nineties, her daughter and son-in-law having persuaded her to destroy the rest of it.