The Earldom of Moray, pronounced “Murray” like the tennis player, is an ancient Scottish title going back to the 14th century. We need not concern ourselves with those early holders of the title. The 18th Earl, born in 1894, married a Barbara Murray from Fifth Avenue, New York, in 1922. I wonder if they were drawn together by their similar names? I suppose not and he was drawn to her money and she to his title.
They went on a family holiday to a rented cottage by the sea in Co Waterford in 1953 when their youngest daughter, Arabella, was nineteen. In an article in The Daily Telegraph, Lady Arabella recalls that “until then family meals had been provided by cooks. “We took three books, Elizabeth David’s French Country Cooking, The Way to Cook by Philip Harben, and a pre-war book called When the Cook is Away by Catherine Ives to help us”.
Her favourite recipe of the trip was Oeufs à la Monteynard. “It consisted of soft-boiled eggs cut in half and laid on a bed of rice cooked in stock, sprinkled with melted butter and grated cheese, then browned in the oven. We had endless struggles trying to cut the soft-boiled eggs in half without letting the yolks run out,” she says, laughing at the memory.”
It does not sound an immensely promising beginning for a writer of cookery books. She married the cartoonist and journalist Mark (Marc) Boxer and encouraged by him produced a classic cookbook in 1964; First Slice Your Cookbook. The pages are spiral-bound and cut in three allowing the reader to mix and match Soups and Hors d’oeuvre with Main Dishes and with Sweets and Savouries. (Slightly surprising that she chose that word over “puddings”.) Additionally, the recipes are colour-coded, red pages indicating richness, blue for simple dishes, grey intermediate and olive green substantial but plain food. Take a look.
The recipes are a little dated and her next book, A Second Slice, is more interesting today. The pages are also chopped in three so that you can view a three course menu on one page but instead of the colour coding she has illustrated her book with reproductions of famous paintings of food. Crucially, she has assembled an anthology of her favourite recipes culled from the middle of the 18th century to the 1960s. If you like cookery books more than cooking you will love this. 