In The Kitchen With Lee Miller

By Lucy Davies
Viva
Picture / Getty Images


She was the unrivalled beauty who modelled for Vogue, then the artists' muse who drove Man Ray and Pablo Picasso to frenzies of creativity, then a sought-after photographer in her own right, and an outspoken war correspondent, cabling London with harrowing dispatches from the front lines of World War II most notoriously from the Adolf Hitler's bathtub, in which she was photographed on the day of his suicide. And all of it before she turned 40.

But what happened next?

The subsequent 30 years of Lee Miller’s life she died in 1977, aged 70 are usually written off as an endnote: a piteous spiral into alcoholism, lived out at Farleys House, the remote Sussex farmhouse she bought after the war with her husband, Roland Penrose, the British surrealist and curator. It seems, however, that we have had it wrong.

Certainly, Miller suffered terribly from depression after the war, brought on by the things she had seen. (She was present at the liberation of two concentration camps.) But she reinvented herself one final time as a gourmet cook.

A new biography written by her 40-year-old granddaughter, Ami Bouhassane, Lee Miller: A Life with Food, Friends and Recipes has at its heart a 1973 proposal Miller wrote for a cookbook of her own, which had lain forgotten among the 60,000-odd negatives and 20,000 vintage prints left after her death. It was to be, she outlined, "a bona fide and posh guide to entertaining... a complete course in the art and science of food freezing, necessary equipment, storage times, etc".

Miller approached cooking with the same determination and, in her words, “insatiable curiosity” that she had applied when inventing solarised photography in her Paris darkroom, or defying the rules for female war correspondents by entering a combat zone (a violation for which she was actually imprisoned).

And, as might be expected from someone who had been immersed in fashion and a surrealist artist to boot, Miller’s take on food was witty tomato icecream, blue brandy butter, a guacamole spiked with rum that she christened Green Bitch.

Cooking was never a dalliance, however. Miller went to Paris for six months to study at Le Cordon Bleu. She engaged the local women's institute to teach her canning and salting, and asked the farmers to show her how to saw up a carcass. She amassed cookbooks thousands of them copying out recipes in stacks of A6 ring-binders, where her tweaks and comments spidered up the sides of the pages. She entered cookery competitions and invariably won.

Planning a dinner could take Miller four or five hours, during which she might consult 50 recipes. It wasn’t long before the piles of books and jottings led the exasperated Penrose to knock through a living room wall to build her a sort of war room from which to plan her culinary offensives.

As a photographer used to adjusting exposure times and chemicals for the perfect result, Miller must have been more aware than most of the consequences of going off-piste with a recipe. Even so, she often went on what she called “jags”, an American term for a bout of unrestrained indulgence, experimenting with cumin, Coca-Cola or Pernod, adding them to everything, including her coffee.

Having experimented with drying spinach leaves in the drum of her washing machine, Miller bought all sorts of early salad spinners, several blenders, a machine that made ice shavings, a thing that sliced a cake without crumbs and an industrial cream separator. “Most of them were so complicated to put together that they’re still in pieces now,” Bouhassane says.

Among the other objects still in evidence at Farleys House are jars of preserves Miller made in the 70s, and packets of long out-of-date ingredients, such as isinglass (from the dried bladders of fish, used to set jellies and blancmange), walnut ketchup and violet essence. Photographs taken in 1951 of the 17th-century kitchen show every surface crammed with bottles, jars and tins.

In 1953, Penrose helped design for Miller one of the American fitted kitchens she had seen in the pages of Ladies' Home Journal. Neighbours came to marvel at its sliding sycamore cupboards and revolving corner unit, topped with blue Formica and dozens of power sockets not to mention the Picasso tile Penrose had grouted in above the Aga.

Miller seems to have come into her own in that sunlit kitchen, moving back and forth over its worn brick floor, whisky in one hand, wooden spoon in the other. Pasted into some of her notebooks are cuttings of unusual stories that she could drop into conversation if a dinner began to flag about, for instance, a couple who had defied a church ban on confetti by organising a fly-by of 2000 butterflies.

And Miller adored practical jokes: a brandy glass that never emptied, patisserie made of wax, fake flies in ice cubes, even pretend puddles of vomit.

“Food was Lee’s lingua franca a bond that connected her with everyone,” says Miller’s son Antony, now 70.

“The kitchen was the beating heart of Farleys House. To appreciate her friends who had survived the war, to feed and share food with them, was a really meaningful thing to her.”

The Daily Telegraph

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