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.