Entertaining in Style | Jane Churchill
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Intro: Welcome to the one and only interior design book podcast, Decorating by the Book, hosted by Suzy Chase from her dining room table in New York City. Join Suzy for conversations about the latest and greatest interior design books with the authors who wrote them.
Jane Churchill: I'm Jane Churchill, and I run and own Jane Churchill Interiors. I have a shop in the Pimlico Road in London, where I've been for 100 years practically. And I did this book on my two aunts, my great-great aunt, Nancy Astor, the sister of my great-grandmother, and Nancy Lancaster, who was a sister of my grandmother. Because I found The Mirador Cookbook, which is where they were brought up in Virginia. And they were very influential in my life.
Suzy Chase: I'm delighted to have you as a guest on my very first simulcast podcast on Cookery by the Book and Decorating by the Book. So let's start the show.
Suzy Chase: American-born, no, I mean, Virginian, Nancy Astor, and her niece, Nancy Lancaster, were two of Britain's greatest party givers, excelling at gracious entertaining and witty repartee. Talents rooted in their upbringing at Mirador, their family estate in Albemarle County, Virginia. This book pairs archival photos with a newly discovered recipe collection.
Suzy Chase: You wrote this book with Emily Astor, who is Nancy Astor's granddaughter. And you briefly talked about it, but I'd love for you to walk me through the genealogy to connect the dots.
Jane Churchill: There were nine children or the Langhornes from Mirador in Virginia, and Nancy Astor was the youngest. And my great-grandmother, Lizzy, was the eldest. She died when my grandmother was only six-years-old, so basically Nancy Astor brought her up, which is really why we were treated as though we were her grandchildren as well. And they both absolutely loved each other.
Jane Churchill: And Nancy Astor came over to England, having been married once before and had a son, and married William Waldorf faster, who was also American. And Nancy Lancaster, who was her niece, my grandmother's elder sister, quite a lot older, she came to England too, even though she was also married to an American.
Suzy Chase: Let's start with Nancy Perkins Lancaster, who was born September 10th, 1897 at Mirador. She was said to have the finest taste of almost anyone in the world. She was regarded as the greatest influence on interior decoration and garden design in the latter half of the 20th century. Her name is synonymous with the English style.
Suzy Chase: Indeed she would come to be seen as the most influence interior decorator of her generation. And as a partner in Colefax & Fowler, was accredited with upgrading and promoting the traditional English country house style. She created the look of studied carelessness and was a percolator of ideas. Now when I was reading this, I thought this sounded a lot like you.
Jane Churchill: How very nice of you. I'm enjoying that comment.
Suzy Chase: Tell me a little bit about Nancy, and then tell me a little bit about your background because I feel like you're so similar.
Jane Churchill: Well, also the interesting thing about Nancy Lancaster is that when we did this book we went to all three of her houses, to Ditchley and to Kelmarsh, which I had never been to. I'd been to Ditchley before and Cliveden. And then also Haseley, which was Nancy Lancaster's last house.
Jane Churchill: But in those three gardens, they are exactly the same as laid out by Nancy Lancaster and have still been kept up, which is so wonderful and such a tribute to her. But also because they were done without being absolutely where you have to have 5,000 gardeners, et cetera. They were very, I mean, I wouldn't say they're maintenance free, but the way she planted. It's possible, even in today's world, to still keep them up, which is rather remarkable.
Jane Churchill: But Haseley was just wonderful because it was so comfortable, but her taste was never pretentious. I mean, her bathrooms in those days were like drawing rooms, where everywhere else you went to had cork floors or lino floors, et cetera, but Nancy's were made to be like drawing rooms. But there were always dogs everywhere. She had delicious food. There were books, there were ... It was never in any way contrived, it was a home, and she was just brilliant at making a home.
Jane Churchill: And my sister, Melissa and I, used to go almost every holidays for say a few days or a week or whatever, and spent time with her, which was wonderful. I think, without realizing it we learned far more than we ever did at school, because she was just such an extraordinary person. And I never thought of her as being older than me in a way, she could converse with you and be any age.
Suzy Chase: She kind of reminds me a little bit of Bunny Mellon.
Jane Churchill: Yes, I think ... And they certainly knew each other. I mean, and I managed to get into the Bunny Mellon house when it was being sold, in the club in Antigua where she had a house, pretending we were interested in buying it. So likely, but anyway.
Jane Churchill: We got in and luckily, there was still her thing ... And my God, it was wonderful because again, and it was the same thing as Aunt Nancy. There were original things like this wonderful trompe l'oeil room as well. And it was original, but without being, oh God, this is too grand for where it is. They just always seemed to be ... They welcomed you, you didn't feel you had to stand on ceremony in any of the rooms.
Suzy Chase: Now to Nancy Astor, who was born Nancy Langhorne at the Langhorne house, in May 19th, 1879 in Danville, Virginia. She was first married to Robert Gould Shaw the second, divorced in 1903.
Jane Churchill: They were quite a well-known family from Boston actually. Because I've met various relations of them over the years.
Suzy Chase: The Shaws?
Jane Churchill: Yes, the Shaws. But he unfortunately was a ... I think he drank, he was an alcoholic so that was why that ended.
Suzy Chase: And that was kind of unheard of, to get divorced in 1903.
Jane Churchill: Well, in those days, exactly. And then end up marrying like she did. I know, you are absolutely right. I agree with you.
Suzy Chase: She was so bold and brave. So then, as a single mother with a young son, she moved to England and married William Waldorf Astor and became the first woman to sit in parliament. And like Nancy Lancaster, Nancy Astor was known as a witty, an interesting American. I love that. And neither of the women were wall flowers.
Suzy Chase: It's interesting that William Waldorf Astor was also born in America and moved to England when he was 12. They seemed like a really good match after Robert Gould Shaw.
Jane Churchill: Oh definitely, yes. And she then had five more children, all of whom I you knew well, and they've had shed loads of children. So there are masses of Astor cousins, and we were all very close to them, which is so nice.
Suzy Chase: How did she become the first woman to sit in parliament?
Jane Churchill: Search me. To be honest, I don't know, but it's really amazing.
Suzy Chase: It is.
Jane Churchill: It was so long ago, but it was very rather remarkable. And she was always incredibly elegant. You see the pictures of her. I mean, I remember her as being always incredibly elegant. And some people loved her and some hated her, but I mean that's normal, isn't it, in that kind of world.
Suzy Chase: There's this well-known portrait of her by John Singer Sargent and her arms are sort of behind her back. I'm curious to hear about this portrait.
Jane Churchill: I'll tell you why they're behind her back like that, because she had her eldest son, Bobby Shaw, in a piggyback behind her back. And they didn't like that and they painted him out. And she obviously didn't want that in, it didn't look right. So it was painted out, but she still stood with her hands behind her back.
Jane Churchill: And that picture is still at Cliveden on the left hand side as you walk into the hall of Cliveden. And I think my first memory is almost ... I remember going to spend Christmas there. I must have been four or five and Aunt Nancy was standing by the fireplace. I mean, it's so clear to me even now, and that picture is on the left. And I've got such a vivid memory of that.
Suzy Chase: It's really gorgeous. And you can't tell that it's been tweaked in any sort of way.
Jane Churchill: No, no. But you know, so many pictures are tweaked, aren't they, and you don't know.
Suzy Chase: Thank goodness. Nancy Astor died when you were 16, but she was a big influence on you. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Jane Churchill: Well, when my grandmother had a house at Sandwich, which is on the coast here, and Aunt Nancy Astor had one too. And we used to spend both every summer, with a few weeks with my grandmother and then we'd moved to the bigger house, which Aunt Nancy had. Her brother-in-law designed it and built it. And it was on three floors, and the top floor was all for children, purely just for children. So you were always there with lots of cousins of all different ages. And Aunt Nancy was sort of, she was such a strong personality. And we always went for lunch with her because we were at boarding school and we'd come up to London on the school train, go and have lunch with her. And so we saw quite a lot of her.
Jane Churchill: And then Emily, my cousin, was able to get into the Astor Archive, which is at Redding University because that's where we got quite a lot of the photographs. And Aunt Nancy never threw anything away. And so she found all the thank you letters that my sister, Melissa, and my brother, Henry, had written to her. And the one from me said, "Dear Aunt Nancy. Thank you for Harrods voucher," which is always what we got every Christmas. "I've got measles, but I'm getting up for tea."
Jane Churchill: And anyway, all this is archived, which is so funny. She was wonderful to us and she very much loved all cousins being together. And she was really fun. She had a lot of energy, so did Nancy Lancaster, as did my grandmother. I think, thank God I inherited that. Tey had lot of energy throughout their lives.
Suzy Chase: Now speaking of your grandmother, did she coin the term "Always Virginian, never American."
Jane Churchill: I think she must have done. I tell you why, because when I married Charles Churchill, obviously his grandmother was a Vanderbilt. My grandmother said to me, "How can you marry a Yankee?" So I think it must have been her who said that.
Suzy Chase: Oh, that's hilarious.
Jane Churchill: Yeah.
Suzy Chase: Like everyone else, lockdown forced you to sort through a pile of family albums that had been sitting on the floor for ages. And among them was an ancient hardbound volume with The Mirador Cookbook, WA embossed on it. I would love to hear about that.
Jane Churchill: Actually, yes. Again, they never threw letters away. My mother went to Foxcroft because it was during the war, as did her sister. And every letter that Aunt Nancy Astor had ever written to them or they'd written to her, we found all these letters that my grandmother had. And within it was this, The Mirador Cookbook. And this was at the beginning of lockdowns, we finally had time to go through it all.
Jane Churchill: And so I decided, with my brother, decided it'd be a good idea to somehow do a book about it, but I didn't want to do just another recipe book because everybody's done that. But so I decided the only way to do it was with an angle. To write about them as people and how amusing they were and the way they entertained and that kind of thing. Because after all, quite a lot of books are on Aunt Nancy Lancaster, and there's certainly ones on Nancy Astor, so it needed to have an angle.
Jane Churchill: And this is what I think has made it become successful, because they've come to life as people now, even though they've been dead for a very long time. And there's some very funny things in it. And so we published it just before Christmas and it was a huge success here. And now Rizzoli had published it in America, and they're thrilled with the way it's going there. So I think we got it right. And everyone said, "Are you going to do a sequel?" Well, I mean, no, because I would only do one if I could think of an angle for it. There's no point just cranking out a book.
Suzy Chase: There are so many good quotes in this. I read Nancy Lancaster was gifted with a rare social fearlessness, unknown in Edwardian England. Nancy said to a pompous British cabinet minister at Cliveden, having gotten the attention of the whole table, quote, "I know your wife thought you were a bore when she married you because she told me so, but nobody could have thought you'd be as bad as this," end quote. The rest-
Jane Churchill: I think that must have been said ... I bet you that was said by Nancy Astor, it's much more a Nancy Astor remark.
Suzy Chase: Oh really?
Jane Churchill: Well, that would be my ... Yes, especially if it's to a cabinet minister because after all, she was the one in parliament.
Suzy Chase: Yes.
Jane Churchill: I think that, yes, had bound to have been Nancy. That's a very Nancy Astor remark. Yes.
Suzy Chase: Another, a really great Nancy Astor quote is, "Winston, if I were your wife, I'd put poison in your tea."
Suzy Chase: And Winston Churchill responding, "Nancy, if I were your husband, I'd drink it."
Jane Churchill: It's a very famous remark that comes up all the time. Very funny. They both were very quick repartee, but in a sort of amusing way.
Suzy Chase: So amusing, so American. It was kind of, as it says in the book, fearless.
Jane Churchill: Yes, exactly. Absolutely.
Suzy Chase: This book offers up 75 recipes and showcases menus that combine English dishes like parsley soup, game pie, Cliveden baked haddock fillets, and Southern American classics such as Virginia ham and pickled peaches, stewed Creole tomatoes and beaten biscuits, to name a few. This is a collection of simple, direct, delicious recipes. And what I love about it is nothing is over complicated.
Jane Churchill: Well, that's why we very much chose ones like that, which also so showed how they mixed English food in with very American food at that time, which really wasn't done. But none of them, as you say, are that difficult and they're all delicious. And of course, they're things that I remember very well.
Jane Churchill: Aunt Nancy Lancaster often, as you probably saw at the beginning of the book, there's quite a lot of egg dishes. She loved egg dishes. We often had that egg mousse or the Mrs. Gibson's Egg Dish and that kind of thing, which I still eat now. And I certainly remember the baked haddock fillets and the Creole tomatoes, and they were just things that she always had.
Suzy Chase: I read in the book, I think, or in my research, that both of the Nancy's disrupted English menus by combining the American food and the English.
Jane Churchill: Well, they very much introduced salads and things like that, which wasn't really done then in the same way. And it was rather grand French food, because they all had ... The posh houses had French chefs. But they made it much simpler. And I think that's what people really liked. I mean, and people absolutely loved it and was very much commented on at the time.
Suzy Chase: And I learned that they also brought over a cooked lobster.
Jane Churchill: Apparently. Absolutely, that's what I found. Obviously not it in my day, but certainly before. And I think they used to have the Virginia ham sent over as well.
Suzy Chase: Oh, I would love for you to talk about that recipe, that's on page 45, Virginia Ham with Pickled Peaches.
Jane Churchill: I remember that every Christmas because she always had that, but what I loved about it was that it was always absolutely sliced unbelievably thinly. And I can't look at great thick ham, because I was used to having that wonderful very, very thin Virginia ham melted in your mouth. And I think it's much nicer. And I'm amazed that hasn't completely become what people would have now, but they seem to have stuck to it being rather thicker.
Suzy Chase: Game Pie is on page 52, and that's something I'm not familiar with but it's so beautiful. It's almost like a paté enveloped by a lovely puff pastry crust. Can you please describe this? And when would game pie be served?
Jane Churchill: Well, probably for a shooting weekend or a hunting weekend, because obviously it's made with game that came off the estates and things like that. And so it's a very English thing. It's pheasant or grouse or whatever birds have been shot. There was one recipe that we didn't put in, which said, "Add squirrel for taste."
Suzy Chase: Yum.
Jane Churchill: I went, "Yuck." Yes. But you said yum, I said yuck.
Suzy Chase: I'm with you though.
Jane Churchill: Yes.
Suzy Chase: This book features the family's original China silver and decor, with previously unseen family photographs peppered throughout. An homage to joyful entertaining in the English country style, this book is surely to appeal to Anglophiles and culinary historians alike. Could you chat a little bit about the photos?
Jane Churchill: Well, we were very lucky because as we did this book during lockdown, believe it or not, you were allowed to do photo shoots in lockdown. So we managed to get a very, very good photographer, because he obviously wasn't being booked up for many things. And so he was absolutely brilliant, and we were able to go ... It was lovely. We had Cliveden ourselves and Ditchley to ourselves.
Jane Churchill: And the picture of the orchid plates, those were Aunt Nancy Lancaster's, and they belong to her granddaughter, Isabella Tree. I was thrilled with the photographs. I think they come across really, really well.
Suzy Chase: Another quote I love from Nancy Lancaster goes, "Southern hospitality started because people live deeply in the country, separated from each other by miles and miles of impassable roads. They were so lonely that when they saw people going by, they'd say, 'Damnit, strangers. Stop and have a drink or I'll shoot you.'"
Jane Churchill: Well, they lived miles away from anywhere. And I think because my great-grandfather was involved in the train lines, he managed to get the train to stop at Greenwood and so they did have people. And also they were a very big family. They were used to numbers. They were used to being with a lot of people.
Jane Churchill: And that I think went on all through their lives really. And particularly family, they were very family-minded. I mean, I can remember Melissa and I often having to go to entertain Virginian cousins who'd arrive in London and who were probably nearer our age, and Aunt Nancy would entertain them. I mean, they were very, very well ... Which is just such a nice attitude, and it was always like that, all through their lives.
Suzy Chase: I'd love to hear a little bit about your company, Jane Churchill Interiors, and what projects are you working on at the moment?
Jane Churchill: I've been here the longest in the Pimlico Road. And Pimlico Road just seems to get better and better. And we've got Robert Kime and Luca Irwin and Chelsea Textiles, and they've all come to this area. And now they're building a whole lot of new shops.
Jane Churchill: And I've been in this business for a very long time. And yes, I've got some great projects at the moment. I'm doing two big houses in London. I'm doing a house in Greece. I've just done a flat in Grosvenor Square, a big flat in Sloane Street. One's for a French couple, one's for Irish, one's for Italian. So it's all a nice cosmopolitan mixture.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Jane Churchill: On Instagram, I'm Jane Churchill Interiors. And then I also have a website Jane Churchill Interiors, where you can see projects that I've done over the years.
Suzy Chase: To purchase Entertaining in Style: Nancy Astor and Nancy Lancaster, head on over to DecoratingbytheBook.com or CookerybytheBook.com. And thanks, Jane, for coming on my very first simulcast podcast on Decorating by the Book and Cookery by the Book.
Jane Churchill: Well, thank you so much for asking me. I'm very honored that you asked me. Thank you so much, I really enjoyed it.
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