"You're getting on rather well with the examiner!"

“We had to learn to do silver service [at catering college]. I remember the exam. My tutor was standing by the door and I’d been talking with the adjudicator because you had to stand and wait, and he started to talk to me, about me, and…I can’t remember, just chatting. So, anyway, when I went past the tutor he said, ‘You’re getting on rather well with the examiner!’ And, of course, I got the highest marks, didn’t I?” We both laugh. 

“Were you nervous?”

“Well, I think because the examiner started talking to me, I wasn’t a bit nervous! And also, I knew the people I was serving because they were lecturers from the college itself. They were always very pleasant with us and especially when you were doing an exam.”

Grandma rushes off to the kitchen and returns with an oversized spoon and fork.

“You’d have a couple of things like this…” Grandma says, manoeuvring the implements in one hand so that the concave sides face each other, and demonstrates clamping them shut around a satsuma from the fruit bowl in front of us. “So, you’d have potatoes, cabbages, the lot…” Grandma moves the satsuma from the fruit bowl to the surface in front of her and back again.

“It’s almost like chopsticks, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s right, yes.”

The inside of the recipe book Grandma was given
as a prize for being the most skilful waitress.

“I remember the first time you told me about this,” I say, “You said you were all hoping you didn’t have to serve spaghetti, because that’s the hardest thing, but then it was spaghetti.”

“Yes, yes, but the girls in the kitchen,” Grandma says with a laugh in her voice, “who cooked for us – they were also students – they made sure that it wasn’t too long!” We both laugh. “They cut it up! So, you only had to lift it up a little bit. It was really nice, because they were all on our side. Yes, it was fun.”

I ask if there were any eyebrows raised over this short cut, as it were.

“The teachers were on our side, too. They didn’t mind.”

I adore this story. I love how absolutely everyone – the teachers, the kitchen staff, the people she was serving and even the examiner – were all willing Grandma (then teenage Imogen) to succeed. The sole antagonist was the spaghetti.

Pasta is also an antagonist in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Fillia’s Manifesto of Futurist Cooking (1930) as the authors blame pasta for diminishing the vitality of Italian men. Reading the text, it becomes clear that Marinetti and Fillia don’t expect readers to actually create the recipes; this cookbook is more conceptual than instructional (quite a stretch of the genre).

They write, “we Futurists disdain the example and admonition of tradition” (32). But despite their overt focus on the future – “the aesthetics of the machine” – the authors present an ancient, pre-domestic, Darwinian ideal, stating that, in the future, “those who are most agile, most ready for action, will win” (33).

Marinetti and Fillia suggest that their readers “cut a perfect cube of beef [and] pass an electric current through it” (137), thereby using the language of science rather than domesticity. They continue with instructions for how this meal is to be eaten: “Each mouthful is to be chewed carefully for one minute, and each mouthful is divided from the next by vehement blasts on the trumpet blown by the eater himself” (138). This is noteworthy not only because it’s ridiculous but because Marinetti and Fillia reject the idea of comfort being part of the eating experience. The futurists imagine dining as dynamic rather than sedate and pleasant – the opposite of a silver service experience.

By throwing out domesticity, the futurists also do away with the notion that food and cooking can be a way of nurturing others, and instead approach cooking as a way of impressing others.

I love Grandma’s exam story because it’s subversive in its gentleness. On paper, it’s a competition – which Grandma won – but, to me, the story wins by rejecting competitiveness.

I didn’t expect to draw this conclusion. I’d imagined silver service as poncey but now I think it too is an extension of the food/nurturing concept. I mean, the waiter puts the food on the eater’s plate for them. The parent/child dynamic is glaring, no?

© World Skills

The story epitomises a theme which runs throughout Grandma’s narrative – the importance of the relationships she built with people. Grandma went to catering college because, as she says:

“I got on very well with Miss Moore [Grandma’s cooking teacher in school] and she encouraged me a lot and, ugh, I wasn’t very good on the English and maths and that sort of thing, and so she encouraged me to go to catering college.”

“When it came to staying on to do O Levels, they looked at ‘Imogen’ and they said,” Grandma sharply draws in breath and says in a low voice, “‘nooo.’ I was really a bit too young to go onto this college but they made an exception for me and I was told I’d have to work very hard and I did. I worked very hard. And I got a prize for waiting!” 

Bibliography

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. The Futurist Cookbook. Penguin, 2014.