Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Sue Lawley
A restaurant critic, five times Britain's Restaurant Writer of the Year and winner of the Glen Fiddick Trophy.
Eight records
I came across Bob Dylan, I suppose, more or less when he sang that song, which was in nineteen sixty three. That was the kind of coming of age I was having. And I think he's a wonderful poet, and the words are still relevant.
Que reste-t-il de nos amours ?
I chose it because it I'm very close to my sister and it reminds me of the period of time she spent in Paris, and that was when she was in her early twenties. And it was when we really became friends.
One of the sweet things I remember about my father is he used to sing sing to me quite a lot, and he was a great fan of Gilbert and Sullivan. And I remember him singing um Tit Willow, and this is Eric Idle singing Tit Willow in a rather more camp way than my father did.
She was a great friend of the family, and she stayed with us for a while, so she's almost like a sister to me and she's a wonderfully amusing, talented lady, which I think comes across in this um song where she is the banjo.
Goldberg Variations, BWV 988Favourite
When I met Reg Gadney, who to whom I'm now married, he was writing a film of um Glengold's life, so this music was very much kind of uh around at the time and he enabled me to discover it really.
Sally sang it at the funeral of my mother, who came from Dumfries, so it it's very moving to me.
I've chosen this because I love her voice, I love Grease. And this is set in Greece, and it's about conjugal love.
It expresses the way I feel each time Reg and I go to our house in Greece. And I just think Mel Torme's got the most wonderful musical voice and it's a song that makes me feel happy.
The keepsakes
The book
Stella Gibbons
it's one of the few books that makes me laugh out loud and It also exhorts one to be sensible and practical.
The luxury
it would [stock] my bar and it would also provide consolation for me.
In conversation
Presenter asks
How do you manage [eating out six nights a week]? Do you have rules?
I try to eat a different kind of meal each time, so if it's French one night, it might be Indian the next. It's not always six nights, but um I'm eating to find some that are either good enough or dreadful enough to make good copy.
Presenter asks
The greatest problem, surely, for a well-established restaurant critic is that the restaurant knows when you're in and you get special treatment, so therefore you're not really representing us, the consumer, at all. [Do you ever go in disguise?]
I tried it once. Um I wore a wig and looked, I thought, just like Shirley Bassey. But I was immediately recognised by Marco Pierre White, whose restaurant it was I was trying to sneak into. And he said, Meo fair, you've um cut your hair, so have I. So it was so uncomfortable, this wig, I gave it up.
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Fay Maschler
Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety nine, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.
Presenter
My Castaway this week is a restaurant critic. She eats out six nights a week and sometimes fits in lunch as well. Fashionable, expensive or simply obvious. She's eaten it and of course written about it in her regular newspaper columns, in cookery books and in restaurant guides too. She took up her profession twenty seven years ago after she'd married and had three children. It was something she could do when they were safely in bed.
Presenter
Five times since, she's been Britain's Restaurant Writer of the Year, and recently she won the Food World's equivalent of an Oscar, the Glen Fiddick Trophy. Food doesn't frighten people any more, she says. If I've been part of bringing that about, then I'm happy. She is Faye Mashler. Six dinners a week, Faye, and the odd lunch squeeze in all too much of a good thing, I would have thought. How how do you cope? How do you manage? Do you have rules? Um well, I try to eat a different kind of meal each time, so if it's French one night, it might be Indian the next. It's not always six nights, but um
Presenter
I'm eating to find some that are either good enough or dreadful enough to make good copy. So you must have rules. Are you very careful not to drink with every meal? I wish I were. But uh no, the drink helps it all go down, I'm afraid. I tend to try and make the other person eat dessert. That's one not so much a rule as a preference. But and you have a spoonful. Yes. It's very important that other person I take. You can't just take anybody, because you might take somebody who just orders a steak and a green salad, which is no good to you at all. Well, I'm quite a bully. I say to them, you can't have.
Presenter
Grapefruit or something. You know, you've got to eat something in which the chef has had a hand. But it is more interesting to go out with someone.
Presenter
who's gone out a lot, who isn't impressed by the the sheer.
Presenter
event of eating out. So what kinds of people are these? Are they always the same clutch of people? Well, I have a bunch of friends who I eat out with a lot and I go out with my husband Reg in the evenings usually and quite often we take other people. And have you got a notebook there on the side? Yes, sometimes. Sometimes I make notes. Sometimes I can remember. Sometimes I go home and scribble things down.
Presenter
We're not, of course, here just talking about chic London restaurants, are we? We're to as somebody wrote that you you you're as likely to go to the laughing Gurkha in Stoke Newington as the River Cafe.
Presenter
There was indeed a Laufengurkha. It was a real place. It was yes. I didn't think it thrived, unfortunately. Yes, I like to try and find the affordable, and I like ethnic restaurants very much, and I think most people do, so uh that seems to me a useful service to the readers. And price matters.
Fay Maschler
And was always a real place, isn't it?
Presenter
Price matters hugely. Not that you're paying on these occasions. Well, I pay and I get it reimbursed, but I try to bear in mind what it represents. The greatest problem, surely, for a a well-established restaurant critic is that the restaurant knows when you're in and you get special treatment, so therefore you're not really representing us, the consumer, at all. Well, I always counter this accusation by saying that people like to go to restaurants where they're known, which is perfectly true.
Presenter
So I don't think it's such a dreadful thing that that that you're recognized and
Presenter
Sometimes I'm not. I always book under another name and I sort of slope in behind my very tall, broad husband. But do you ever go in disguise? I tried it once. Um I wore a wig and looked, I thought, just like Shirley Bassey.
Fay Maschler
But do you ever get
Presenter
But I was immediately recognised by Marco Pierre White, whose restaurant it was I was trying to sneak into.
Presenter
And he said, Meo fair, you've um cut your hair, so have I.
Presenter
So
Presenter
It was so uncomfortable, this wig, I gave it up.
Presenter
Tell me about your first record. My first record, um, Bob Dylan, Singing The Times, They Are Are Changing. I came across Bob Dylan, I suppose, more or less when he sang that song, which was in nineteen sixty three.
Presenter
That was the kind of coming of age I was having.
Presenter
And I think he's a wonderful poet, and the words are still relevant.
Presenter
And I try to bear in mind that um phrase, Come mothers and fathers throughout the land, and don't criticise what you don't understand. Thinking about my own children rather than my parents.
Speaker 4
The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast.
Speaker 4
The slowest now will later be fast As the present now will later be past
Speaker 4
The order is rapidly fading.
Speaker 4
And the first one now will later be last,'cause the times
Presenter
They are
Speaker 4
Uh
Presenter
Bob Dylan and the times they are a changing. The story of how you got the job in the first place, Faye Masher, is verging on the ridiculous, really. You won it in a competition, didn't you? Yes, I did. Quentin Crewe was leaving or was fired. I'm not sure which. And clearly they had no successor, and they were competition mad in those days. This was the Evening Standard.
Fay Maschler
This was ninety stand-up.
Speaker 3
Uh
Fay Maschler
Yeah.
Presenter
And so they ran a competition, and the prize was that you could do the column for three months.
Presenter
There was a many, many entries, I understand, and a lot of argy bargie about who's.
Presenter
To be the winner. Anyway, I won the job, and after three months, they said, Would you do another six months?
Presenter
And twenty-seven years later I'm still doing it.
Presenter
And you were the only woman, I think, in the final three. I was the only woman in the in the yes, in the short list, in the runners-up, as it were. But Quentin Crewe had really been the pioneer, and he'd made it more of an art form, as it were. He talked about the whole thing. Crew is a brilliant stylist. He actually. made it into what it was in I think it was then just Queen magazine, not Harvest and Queen. And he started writing about going to the to a restaurant as if you were going to a party, you know, describing the other people and the decor and as well as the food. And that was a
Presenter
A great breakthrough in those days. In those days it was all really linked to advertising, it was just a puff usually. So it it wasn't at all as it is now in the same realms as w television criticism, theatre, opera criticism? No, not at all. And and there was very little of it, I think.
Fay Maschler
Yeah.
Presenter
The Evening Standard was very good in that it always did have a restaurant critic, but I think pre Quentin it was again rather linked to the advertising. Can you remember what your first column was about?
Presenter
The first one one that was published, I think, was about
Presenter
looking for English food in restaurants, which is a topic you could still address actually. Um or maybe that was the one that got that got me the prize, I'm not sure, but that was certainly one of the early topics.
Presenter
And how much did you get paid for it, do you remember?
Presenter
I think it was thirty five pounds.
Presenter
For the colon, which was the colon. What did dinner for two with wine cost then? Well, I do remember writing about Odins and apologising that dinner for two would cost six pounds, which seemed absolutely
Fay Maschler
Yeah.
Fay Maschler
Will I
Presenter
um you know, extravagant beyond all imagining. And what price would you put on it today? I mean, obviously it varies terribly, but if we're talking about a, you know, a good A comparable meal today is you don't get change from a hundred pounds.
Speaker 3
Yeah.
Presenter
So I know if it was me spending my own money, I would be extremely choosy about where I went.
Presenter
Tell me about your second record.
Presenter
This is Charles Crenet singing Cares Titilde Nous Amour and
Presenter
I chose it because it I'm very close to my sister and it reminds me of the period of time she spent in Paris, and that was when she was in her early twenties. And it was when we really became friends. Um we hadn't been very friendly as small children, and so this makes me think very fondly of her.
Speaker 3
What's the deal?
Speaker 3
Dunno Zamu
Speaker 3
Girl is the deal.
Speaker 3
Decibojou.
Speaker 3
In a photo.
Speaker 3
Yeah, you for too.
Speaker 3
The Marvenese.
Speaker 3
Current deal, debi you do.
Speaker 3
The moana rid.
Speaker 3
The rendezvous.
Speaker 3
Ah, souvenir.
Speaker 3
I'm a pour sui.
Presenter
Charles Trunnet and his orchestra performing in 1943 Correstitile de Nosamour. And that reminds you, Faye Mashler, of your sister Beth Coventry, who used to be a chef in a London restaurant and now runs a a pub with food. So it's obviously, you know, there was culinary skill in the family. Was it always obvious? Well, there was culinary skill in the family in the sense my mother was a a very good cook, self-taught, and
Presenter
One of his cooks who.
Presenter
cooked simply, but everything tasted very much of itself and very delicious, and
Presenter
I suppose that had an influence. And did she teach you both early on?
Presenter
Not really. I taught myself to cook. We moved to the States when I was about twelve and I was very lonely. I had a very lonely summer when we arrived.
Presenter
And my mother, as a sort of hangover from her days in India, used to sleep in the afternoons, and to amuse myself I started to cook, using her very complex books.
Presenter
And I found I could do it and enjoyed it, and rather enjoyed forcing my parents to eat what I'd made.
Presenter
What is it? It gave you a sense of power, did it? Yes, it reversed the situation somehow. You know, ch children are always having to accept things their parents say or do or make. And I thought, well.
Presenter
I even then I sort of thought this is interesting because they've politely jolly well got to eat it. Anyway, it was fine. I'm sure it mattered to you then, and it still matters to us now, doesn't it? When we cook for people who are coming to the house, somehow there's always a sort of
Fay Maschler
Sister
Presenter
Well, maybe I speak for myself, an underlying panic that it may not be good. It's interesting that it matters so much. Yes, it matters hugely. I suppose it's a real it's real evidence of love and nurturing, and it's awful to have it rejected, and I think chefs often feel this actually. So you got your parents into this position because uh you've described yourself as being a a very solemn little child. You obviously did feel, you know, a bit unloved or something. Well, I think it was quite lonely. I w we moved quite a bit um as a family and it always seemed to be at the wrong time for me and the right time for Beth, who's three years older.
Presenter
And I just seem to, as a result, sometimes spend a lot of time with my own in my own company.
Presenter
And, um, I don't think in retrospect I felt unloved, although my father was very
Presenter
Uh Victorian Ethical.
Presenter
Person and I think quite depressive himself, although he fought it. Um he wasn't an easy father. Didn't he once decree that you should all be vegetarians? Yes, and this was in we were living in Surrey, in a village called East Horsley, and this was, I suppose, in the mid-fifties. Not easy to be a vegetarian those days. And my mother rose to this challenge very well, making the best of it. But um
Presenter
Yeah, it was tough going to school with a vegetarian lunch in your lunch box and being different to everybody else.
Presenter
Next record.
Presenter
Well, my f one of the sweet things I remember about my father is he used to sing sing to me quite a lot, and he was a great fan of Gilbert and Sullivan.
Presenter
And I remember him singing um Tit Willow, and this is Eric Idle singing Tit Willow in a rather more camp way than my father did.
Speaker 4
On a tree by a river A little Tom Tit Sang willow, Tit willow, Tit Willow.
Speaker 4
And I said to him, Dickie, but why do you sit singing Willem, Tit Wille, Tit Wille?
Presenter
Eric Idle as Coco the Lord High Executioner, singing on a tree by a river, or Tit Willow, as we call it, from Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, and that was the English National Opera, Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Peter Robinson.
Presenter
Um what did you cook? You'd have been twelve to fourteen in in in those early long hot summer afternoons in the States. What did you teach yourself to cook? What were you good at? Well, I just took down my mother's cookery books and they one was Mrs Beaton and another one was the Radiation Cookery Book, rather oddly named.
Fay Maschler
Presenter
Books applied by the gas stovemaker.
Presenter
And I just cooked really thinking back, extremely difficult things like puff pastry and meringues.
Presenter
I was just so pleased that they worked and
Presenter
Um it is magical, the alteration of of the ingredient to the finished article. Which is what children are attracted by, of course, isn't it, in cooking? Do did you have you taught your own children to cook? Yes, I have. And the first book I wrote um was called Cooking is a Game You Can Eat, because I found with my children it was a game we could play that they would actually devote some time to and concentration.
Fay Maschler
Yeah.
Presenter
And uh
Presenter
They would also eat the results because they'd made them, so it's a good way of getting children to eat when if they're finicky.
Presenter
The interesting thing is, of course, since then, and over the past two decades, there have been so many cookery books published. And yet today, the one that's selling better than other any other is Delia Smith's Teach Yourself to Cook or A Basic Cookery Book. How do you explain that?
Fay Maschler
Okay, so
Presenter
Well, people are cooking less, and I think women working.
Presenter
Explain some of it.
Presenter
So people buy ready prepared food and uh
Presenter
That scenario of of the child learning at the mother's knee just doesn't doesn't happen anymore. So sadly it seems, you know, the dealer has to teach people to boil an egg. It is quite difficult, of course, to boil an egg.
Fay Maschler
It is quite difficult to
Presenter
Well, it is if you don't know when the water's boiling, which apparently three university graduates couldn't figure out.
Presenter
But it is phenomenal, don't you find, that that people are w want to buy so many cookery books?
Presenter
Well, I suppose they they they relieve some sense of guilt by at least looking at the cookery books, um, rather than rather because they know they're not doing it. I imagine the same applies to all those cookery programmes. So they're watching the programmes and they're reading the books, but they're not actually in the kitchen doing it.
Presenter
Exactly. It's it's uh ironic and and very sad, I think. It's perverse and also people are missing out on such a terrific occupation.
Presenter
But it is is do you also blame the microwave? It is the fact that families don't eat together at the table anymore, they just come in and put the chicken kief in in the microwave. Yes, and and of course that too, I think.
Fay Maschler
Yeah.
Presenter
It's very sad because I'm sitting round a table talking.
Presenter
Is a very cohesive thing and uh it goes out the window when everybody microwaves their own meal.
Presenter
Next piece of music.
Presenter
Well, the banjo song is is sung by Joanna Carey.
Presenter
who when she was called Joanna Berry when she was a child.
Presenter
Was a great friend of the family, and she stayed with us for a while, so she's almost.
Presenter
like a sister to me and she's a wonderfully amusing, talented
Presenter
Lady, which I think comes across in this um song where she is the banjo.
Presenter
I yonaloo stoop lalale, my yonolo, band jonolo, and relala stoop.
Fay Maschler
Dull alone, my nilly, lily, lily But nullalo, the strillalings are brollalo can dollalon. It's nullalo, more you To lost to me lily lily
Fay Maschler
I tollalook it tollaloo the mellalanders shollalop To sillily what hillaly
Presenter
I'm not sure if I can do it.
Presenter
The Banjo Song sung by Joanna Carey. Um you went to work, uh Faye Mashler, at uh J. Walter Thompson, the Advertising Agency, a contemporary of Fay Weldon, who who famously coined Go to Work on an Egg. Did did you make a contribution to any of the slogans of that kind?
Presenter
Well
Presenter
I'm not even sure that this was mine, but I always think it was, and I thought it was brilliant. We we had a yoghurt account and my my line was yogurt is quite nice sometimes, which I think is how most people feel about yogurt. Did it sell any yogurt? Well, I don't think the client was very amused.
Presenter
And is this where you met Tom Mashler, the the publisher who was to become your husband? Well, I met him during that time that I was at Joe Walter Thompson, and I'd met him at a party actually.
Presenter
I wanted to see him again. I thought he seemed like a good thing. So I was allowed to invite somebody to something called a creative lunch, which was in.
Presenter
You could invite a speaker to entertain the creative department. So I invited Tom, and since everybody was busy writing a novel anyway, of course it was quite a successful event. And then I was allowed to take him out.
Presenter
And then you were allowed to marry him. How did the partnership with Tom change your life?
Presenter
Um, it changed it hugely. When I married him, it was just when he became chairman of Jonathan Cape. So I was immediately plunged into a kind of
Presenter
Rather, well, a fascinating life actually, meeting lots of authors, doing a lot of entertaining.
Presenter
Tom was quite a bit older than me, and uh
Presenter
I seemed to get involved in a very middle-aged marriage very quickly, and then I had my first.
Presenter
child, my daughter Hannah, uh quite soon. So it was a big there was a a lot of change, perhaps too precipitous. And you had two more children quite speedily after that. Yes. And then you were twenty seven and then you won this competition and got a job.
Fay Maschler
Yeah.
Presenter
What you've been much respected for during that time is is your fairness, the fairness of your views and the constructiveness of of your criticism. It's annoying, isn't it, when the critic's individual experience seems to become more
Presenter
important in the column than the food that he or she's writing about. I think it's so unfair on the chefs who work very hard and on the restaurateurs who invest so much money when someone goes along
Presenter
and writes about, you know, how they've got a hangover or their friend's skirt has split or something. You know, I just find that little me branch of journalism
Presenter
horrible not only for restaurant criticism but but for other things too.
Presenter
Um but mainly I think it's unfair.
Presenter
Nevertheless,
Presenter
All of you food critics have great power. I'm a bit like the butcher of Broadway. You know, you can close down a a show, close down a restaurant if you're nasty enough. Have you ever done that?
Presenter
I I think if I've been really mean about a restaurant, um
Presenter
And it's closed, it's probably more to do with the restaurant being bad to begin with. And you know, you dig your own grave if you run a a poor restaurant. So no, I don't I don't like to think I could do that, and I don't think I do do that. But ha ha have you ever, on the you know, conversely, made a restaurant, do you think? Yes, that's been one of the really nice things about this job, is to find a deserving
Presenter
Restaurant and put it on the map. And I've done that, I know, for a few people, and it's very gratifying. You give me an example.
Presenter
Well, there's a restaurant um in Shepherd's Bush on Goldhawk Road called Patio, which is run by a wonderful, generous hearted Polish couple.
Presenter
And a reader alerted me to it, and I went along, and at that time it was a kind of English calf with a few Polish dishes, but I ate the Polish dishes.
Presenter
And I thought it was wonderful. And the menu then and still is was 9.95 for the whole menu, including vodka, for three courses in vodka. And they haven't brought the price up. And
Presenter
It it transpired that after my review I kind of turned their lives around, and instead of having an overdraft, they had a bit of money in the bank.
Presenter
Record number five. Um
Presenter
This is Glenn Gould playing uh part of Bach's Goldberg variations. When I met Reg Gadney, who to whom I'm now married, he was writing a film of um
Presenter
Glengold's life, so this music was very much kind of
Presenter
uh around at the time and he enabled me to discover it really.
Presenter
Glenn Gould, playing part of Bach's Goldberg Variations, numbers one and two. Faye, in the quarter of a century or more that you've been writing, food has undergone some enormous changes in this country. But you say the search for English food goes on. What do you mean by that?
Presenter
Well, I mean the search for an English tradition, a sort of culture of English food, as opposed to
Presenter
what gets called modern British, which tends to borrow and um
Presenter
Pick and mix from all kinds of traditions.
Presenter
Uh what I would like to see is the the
Presenter
This is using English ingredients that are grown and
Presenter
And nurtured in this country and using them in straightforward ways, which is just enjoyable.
Fay Maschler
That is what I'm saying.
Presenter
Well, there's a restaurant called St. John in Clerkenwell where the chef Fergus Henderson does very straightforward food, I mean as as simple as mince and tatties, but does it with well brought up ingredients, well bought, and has a real
Presenter
point of view and a and a rigor about about what he serves and what he doesn't serve. But why do you think it is I mean I agree with you, a good Lancashire hot pot, a good roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for him sake, a good cream tea are great. They're quite difficult to find, aren't they?
Presenter
Well, they would become easier to find if people searched for them more. I I think lots of regional ingredients just just go go out of sight, out of supermarkets, because people aren't demanding them.
Presenter
And supermarkets are too busy importing ingredients from Kenya and Holland and so on. I I think, you know, they th they're not hard to find, really. They're only they've been made hard to find. But are there the cooks out there to cook them anymore?
Presenter
I think women cooks are out there ready to cook them. I think there should be far more female chefs because they're they're more content with making simple food. I think I mean this sounds a bit sexist, but it's meant to be a compliment. They don't need to show off, they don't need to do dramatic looking dishes that have been endlessly fiddled and touched and
Presenter
Messed around with. I think they're more content to do straightforward the sort of food my mother used to cook. But isn't the problem with and how can we generalise, but still, English cooks who tend to think, well, let's spice this up with a bit of Tabasco or Worcester sauce, or let's throw a handful of dusty old dried herbs in here? Yes, there is that tendency that the English have that it doesn't really matter what you do, you can biff it into the pot and, you know, plonk in this and that. You can't. You have to stay within certain tried and true combinations. We're a bit heavy-handed, in other words. A bit heavy-handed and a bit apt to think a stalk of lemongrass would be a good idea. Well, usually it isn't unless you're cooking titles. Or a sprinkle of coriander or something. But of course, we're encouraged in all of this by a lot of these television chefs, aren't we?
Fay Maschler
Or is it
Presenter
We are indeed. I mean Ready Steady Cook has a lot to answer for, I think, putting together ingredients that should never have a relationship.
Presenter
So what's your message to the the the good cook or the or the potentially good cook? It's it's get back to basics, go very carefully. Yes, to read a lot also and to eat out a lot and and to understand how food should taste. It's very hard to cook if you don't know how it should taste in the end, and I'm afraid a lot of English chefs grow up not eating
Fay Maschler
Gas
Presenter
good food and then don't have the money or the opportunity to go to a restaurant. So often they're cooking something that they don't really know how it should be. And actually things like people becoming aware of genetically modified food makes them think about what they're eating. And the more you think about what you're eating, perhaps the more
Presenter
The more you choose, the better the better ingredient. And the organic market is growing. That's growing. Very fast. It does mean people care much more, doesn't it? Yes, and it they'll pay a bit more to get something good and something healthy. And something tasty. And something with real flavour. Absolutely. So to that extent, we are much better than when you began writing your column in nineteen seventy six. Indisputably, and we're much better at every level. Yes. There's no doubt we've made progress. It's just that.
Fay Maschler
And
Fay Maschler
Very fast.
Fay Maschler
So
Fay Maschler
Oh yes, indisputable.
Fay Maschler
There's no
Presenter
will never be like the French or the Italians or the Spanish.
Presenter
But we'll always have choice. We'll always have a huge choice. Which is not what you were told in nineteen seventy two when you began, is it? You were told you'd get bored, not to say fat, very quickly, because there wasn't anywhere to go. That's right. The feature editor said to me, you know, you'll just run out of places, won't you? And I didn't. And certainly now you could eat in a different restaurant every day of the week.
Presenter
Record number six.
Presenter
Oh, this is um Sally Bradshaw singing a a
Presenter
Scottish song John Anderson My Joe. My Joe is Lowland Scotts for My Love and
Presenter
Sally sang it at the funeral of my mother, who came from Dumfries, so it
Presenter
It's very moving to me.
Fay Maschler
John Anderson by Joe John
Fay Maschler
We would've got a stuff paint. Utilogs would've liked the rain.
Fay Maschler
Limb is born, your marks are like the snow.
Presenter
Sally Bradshaw singing John Anderson, My Joe, accompanied by Frantz Zebinger and Gertrude Gammarith. What don't you like in a restaurant, Fay? What aspects of a restaurant set your teeth on edge?
Presenter
I don't like um pretentiousness and fussiness and uh over elaboration. I like there to be
Presenter
The emphasis really on on on the food and the wine.
Presenter
And on a good time. There's not too much hush. Not too much hush, and also not too much noise, not too much racket. I mean, there's so many restaurants now where you can't hear yourself speak, and
Presenter
I think, you know, part of the enjoyment of eating out for me is the conversation.
Presenter
So you like small restaurants, you don't like these big canteen jobs? I don't like these big canteen jobs, and I don't like the way you can never form a relationship with any of the staff because they're always there one day and gone tomorrow. And I don't like the way they treat people when they ring up and try to book. And I yes, I like I like restaurants that that serve a sort of familial fun function. Don't like timed sittings?
Fay Maschler
Don't like
Presenter
Don't like time sittings, don't like having to give my credit card number, don't like having to be rung up to confirm a booking and then turn up and find the restaurant half empty. All those practices I think are very counterproductive. What's the ultimate test of a good restaurant?
Presenter
Um
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I suppose the well, consistency is one, so that it doesn't vary wildly from day to day, week to week.
Presenter
And somewhere where you could eat almost every day. Um that would be the ultimate test.
Presenter
But your idea of luxury, of course, is a good night inn. What what do you cook for supper on those occasions?
Presenter
Well, usually some of the things that we're doing.
Fay Maschler
Perhaps you just don't
Presenter
I don't know. I love cooking and I miss cooking and every time I cook, which is seems to be less and less these days, I think, why have I constructed a life for myself which um has elbowed out this one thing I really enjoy doing? Um I haven't managed to answer that question to myself. But I usually cook something quite complex just because I enjoy doing it.
Presenter
Oh, it will depend a bit on where I've been able to shop and if I've read a recipe or if I've looked at a recipe book recently that something's inspired me. Could be anything. Go and make my mouth water.
Presenter
Well, I did the other day I bought a boiling chicken in Selfridge's because I like making um nice stocks. And then for one reason or another, that was the only thing in the fridge, so I boiled it with a l with a lot of vegetables and herbs and made a nice sauce. And you don't get boiled chicken very often in restaurants, and I like to make things that you don't get offered in restaurants. Record number seven.
Presenter
Number seven is
Presenter
Maria Callis singing an aria from Gluke's opera Alcest, Divinité d'Ostiques and
Presenter
I've chosen this because I love her voice, I love Grease.
Presenter
And this is set in Greece, and it's about conjugal love. Alcest is.
Presenter
Appealing to the gods of the underworld and saying that nothing that they can do to her matters because she's dying for the man she loves.
Fay Maschler
For a second without music for
Presenter
And everything
Speaker 3
Uh
Presenter
Uh
Speaker 3
Uh
Presenter
Yeah.
Fay Maschler
Just wanted a f
Fay Maschler
True.
Presenter
Maria Callas, singing part of the Aria Divinite d'ustiques from Gluck's opera Alceste, with the National Orchestra of Radio Diffusion Francaise, conducted by Georges Pretre. Um do you have Fay Mashler, an all time favorite restaurant?
Presenter
I don't really like giving an answer, but I will.
Presenter
There are several, but perhaps top of the tree is Riva in Barnes. Um it just fulfils the things I've been talking about. There's one man who runs it with passion. He's always there, Andrea Riva. The food's very good. It comes from a a well defined area of Italy.
Presenter
You can talk there.
Presenter
He receives one like a friend and uh
Presenter
That's that that to me is what a the function of a of a good restaurant. And do you have a an all-time favorite meal, one that you would, you know, dream about on your desert island? Your desert island dinner. What is it? Um perhaps I could catch a crayfish and grill it. It'd be something quite simple and with some excellent wine.
Presenter
What sort of wine? Name the wine. Well, I'd have a really, really good white burgundy with that.
Fay Maschler
Yeah.
Presenter
And will you on this island be able to to build, make home? Um uh is that sort of thing you're good at?
Presenter
Um
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I think I could probably just about build a shack.
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It's not something I'm good at, but um
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If needs must, I I think I could sort of
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get some palm fronds and build a sort of shelter.
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Build a little lean to of some kind.
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What would you stock it with? Well, you'll see, that's my luxury. Ah, I see.
Presenter
Um doing it all alone, though, wouldn't matter. Wouldn't worry you too much. You would you be all right? I'd much rather do it with a chum, and preferably with Reg. Uh I'm not p I like solitude, but I I wouldn't like endless vistas of solitude. So you'd try to escape?
Presenter
I think so. I tried to attract someone to my bar, who also had a boat.
Presenter
It's lost record.
Presenter
Ah, well this is Mel Torme singing Mountain Greenery, and it expresses the way I feel each time Reg and I go to our house in Greece. And I just think Mel Torme's got the most wonderful musical voice and
Presenter
It's a song that makes me feel happy.
Speaker 4
In a mountain greenery where God paints a scenery, just two crazy people together.
Speaker 4
While you love your lover, let blue skies be your coverlet. When it rains, we'll laugh at the weather. And if you're good...
Speaker 4
I'll search for wood so you can curp while I stand looking.
Presenter
Mel Tome and Mountain Greenery. If you could only take one of those eight records, Faye, which one would it be? It would be Glen Gould. I think he would keep me good company on the island and I think it would get me going. I might otherwise sink into a torpor. And I like hearing him in the background on the on the humming and grunting away. It would be yes, what about your book? Um I think I'm going to take Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons because it's one of the few books that makes me laugh out loud and
Fay Maschler
Coming
Fay Maschler
Flaming and growth.
Presenter
It also exhorts one to be sensible and practical.
Presenter
And that luxury? The luxury is a huge supply of ouzo.
Presenter
Oozo. Oozo. This is the Greek influence. Yes, and it would stop my bar and it would also provide consolation for me.
Presenter
Faye Mashler, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you.
Fay Maschler
You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co. uk slash radio four.
Presenter asks
The story of how you got the job in the first place, Faye Maschler, is verging on the ridiculous, really. You won it in a competition, didn't you?
Yes, I did. Quentin Crewe was leaving or was fired. I'm not sure which. And clearly they had no successor, and they were competition mad in those days. This was the Evening Standard. And so they ran a competition, and the prize was that you could do the column for three months. There was a many, many entries, I understand, and a lot of argy bargie about who's to be the winner. Anyway, I won the job, and after three months, they said, Would you do another six months? And twenty-seven years later I'm still doing it.
Presenter asks
What did you teach yourself to cook [when you were twelve to fourteen in the States]?
I just took down my mother's cookery books and they one was Mrs Beaton and another one was the Radiation Cookery Book… And I just cooked really thinking back, extremely difficult things like puff pastry and meringues. I was just so pleased that they worked and um it is magical, the alteration of of the ingredient to the finished article.
Presenter asks
How did the partnership with Tom [Mashler] change your life?
Um, it changed it hugely. When I married him, it was just when he became chairman of Jonathan Cape. So I was immediately plunged into a kind of rather, well, a fascinating life actually, meeting lots of authors, doing a lot of entertaining. Tom was quite a bit older than me, and uh I seemed to get involved in a very middle-aged marriage very quickly, and then I had my first child, my daughter Hannah, uh quite soon. So it was a big there was a a lot of change, perhaps too precipitous.
Presenter asks
What aspects of a restaurant set your teeth on edge?
I don't like um pretentiousness and fussiness and uh over elaboration. I like there to be the emphasis really on on on the food and the wine. And on a good time. There's not too much hush. Not too much hush, and also not too much noise, not too much racket. I mean, there's so many restaurants now where you can't hear yourself speak, and I think, you know, part of the enjoyment of eating out for me is the conversation.
“I taught myself to cook. We moved to the States when I was about twelve and I was very lonely. I had a very lonely summer when we arrived. And my mother, as a sort of hangover from her days in India, used to sleep in the afternoons, and to amuse myself I started to cook, using her very complex books. And I found I could do it and enjoyed it, and rather enjoyed forcing my parents to eat what I'd made.”
“I think it's so unfair on the chefs who work very hard and on the restaurateurs who invest so much money when someone goes along and writes about, you know, how they've got a hangover or their friend's skirt has split or something. You know, I just find that little me branch of journalism horrible not only for restaurant criticism but but for other things too.”
“I think women cooks are out there ready to cook them. I think there should be far more female chefs because they're they're more content with making simple food. I think I mean this sounds a bit sexist, but it's meant to be a compliment. They don't need to show off, they don't need to do dramatic looking dishes that have been endlessly fiddled and touched and messed around with.”