Do you remember Mr. French?
Was there anything he couldn't do?
Actually who I really want is Reginald Arthur Gaskin.
He was author Beverley Nichols' my man Gaskin.
"He is, among other things, the best cook I ever encountered, and like all great artists, he seems to achieve his effects with a minimum of effort. He wanders out into the kitchen garden, followed by my Siamese cat, returns with a bundle of spinach--sniffing a rose en route--goes into the kitchen, licks his fingers, and at precisely the right moment there is a spinach soufflé which would have given Brillat-Savarin quite a lot to think about. When he bottles fruit he does it casually, in an off moment, as it were, between puffs of a cigarette; but the result is a joy not only to the palate but to the eye; rows and rows of magic bottles in the larder, that gleam in the semi-darkness like jewels, and keep their summer tang even when the snow is piled thick on the roof. And my house, which is not small, he manages as though it were a three-roomed flat, almost absent-mindedly; he always gives you a feeling that it is really all too simple, that warmth and comfort and beauty are to be had for the asking, or at most, for an hour or two of elegant and agreeable diversion."
by Beverley Nichols in All I Could Never Be
Wouldn't it be nice to say to an old friend you run into at the post office, "Come home with me for lunch! It's no trouble. My man Gaskin will whip us up a soufflé in no time."
I could get so used to that. I'd even give my man Gaskin, or Mr. French, his choice of days off, maybe two.
