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The roads meandering around rural Chiddingly, near Lewes, are quiet. Fog hangs off the hedges, and it’s an unlikely place to have attracted such famous artists as Joan Miró, René Magritte, Pablo Picasso and Man Ray, but come they did, and frequently. They arrived by boat, landing at Newhaven, and were transported by taxi; the driver didn’t need to ask where they were heading, knowing that anyone obviously eccentric or artistic would be going to one place only: Farleys House, the home of Lee Miller – photographer, Vogue war correspondent, artist, model, muse, Surrealist and, latterly, gourmet cook.
Lee Miller’s early life is well documented, but less so her later years, when she settled at Farleys House and a combination of post-traumatic stress, rationing, motherhood and the time to indulge her passion for cooking led her to create a kitchen, garden and artistic home. When Miller and her husband, the Surrealist artist and collector Roland Penrose, first arrived at the house in 1949, it had a range for heating and cooking, a few open shelves and a farmhouse table. She fell in love with this new life immediately, and plans were made for fruit and vegetables to be grown in the garden and people to be invited down for dinner: a treat indeed in a time of rationing.
While her early days at Farleys were marked by enthusiasm for the idyllic simplicity of rural life, by the winter of the first year Lee had had enough of the rural cold and damp. Plans for a new kitchen were drawn up, as were London itineraries for herself and Roland, which saw them working, attending cultural events and socialising in the city during the week before becoming countryside hosts from Thursday to Sunday. Roland was by now deeply involved in establishing the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and Lee was fast becoming a fashionable caterer, with cooking assignments in London, Paris and New York.
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And so again their network grew, and before long they were attracting the great and good of the art and food worlds to this sleepy little hamlet sandwiched between the sea and the rolling South Downs. Given her career and the couple’s involvement in the Surrealist movement and the art world generally, it is little wonder that before long their artistic friends and associates were making the pilgrimage from the Continent to be fed and watered.
The house’s rudimentary existing kitchen was never going to do. Lee was an avid collector of kitchen gadgets, which she ordered often indiscriminately, sold on the promise of convenience for the cook. Patsy, the Penroses’ housekeeper, recalled hours spent cleaning devices that shaved barely a few seconds off simple tasks and only a handful of which were used after their exciting debut. Other gadgets quickly become central to the workings of this productive kitchen, including the blender, which Lee loved and used to create all manner of treats. But it was the freezer for which she was the keenest advocate. Long after her death, a manuscript was discovered for a book to be entitled The Entertaining Freezer, containing recipes that Lee hoped would help liberate women from the daily grind.
The kitchen at Farleys, designed by Lee herself and created by local craftsmen, was one of the first fitted kitchens in the UK and is a paragon of simplicity and style. The materials – Formica and plain, sanded plywood – were timeless, and the design is economic, with ingenious solutions to the space problems of a small kitchen.
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The worktop along the far wall, for instance, is asymmetrical, narrowing from its widest point furthest from the cooker to its slimmest point next to the hob. This gave the cook at the stove enough room to manoeuvre, while at the far end maximising preparation space. A trapezoidal worktop creates difficulties, though, which are compensated for with a clever solution: as the shape of the drawers is irregular, each contains a secondary sliding tray that sits squarely across it, meaning that on pulling out each drawer you have a layer that holds its contents in a neat and orderly fashion, as well as a view down to the interior space of the drawer and all the utensils within. And beneath the narrowest end of the counter, next to where the cook would be at work, is one of the UK’s first in-cupboard revolving shelf systems, in as perfect working order today as it was when it was built. Among the plans for the kitchen were pages torn from the American magazine Ladies’ Home Journal that detail the potential of a brave new world of fitted kitchens full of mod cons.
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Here she got to work. At her bedside was an already overflowing cookbook library and she resolved to channel her creativity into an area of her life unsullied by war and trauma. Already a curious and proficient cook before coming to East Sussex, once here she started entering culinary competitions and winning. A modern hob, which can still be seen in the kitchen today installed next to the classic farmhouse range, was her first prize, won in a cornflour cookery competition. She also famously came top in a Norwegian smörgåsbord competition dreaming up mushrooms stuffed with reddish foie gras, a concoction she called ‘Penroses’. Many of the creations from this period of her life – pink-coated cauliflowers in the shape of breasts or brandy butter coloured bright blue to cut through the ubiquitous red and green of Christmas – are the stuff of legend.
She became a master preserver of everything grown on the farm, evidence of which still lines the cupboards at Farleys. She eventually added two rooms to the original kitchen, one being a large pantry created by knocking down a wall and chimney breast next to the Aga. This houses, now as it did then, her dry goods, spices and cookware. She also built a library for her cookbooks, a retreat where she could lose herself in one of the more than 2,000 tomes while drowning out the outside world with opera played loud on her gramophone.
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Nowadays, visitors to the house can sit in the same chairs where Picasso sat to peel potatoes and pod peas. There’s a tile by the artist embedded in the splashback of the stove and a couple more behind the kitchen table. But to focus on these is to miss the real genius of the house: it was the host herself. Not only was Lee Miller central to the Surrealist movement in her own right, but one of the finest photographers and war correspondents of her age, an original thinker, an engineer, an inventor and a very fine cook; she was also a legendary entertainer and host. She revelled in the theatricality of dinner parties, insisting on wearing a pressed kitchen pinafore over her clothes whenever she was photographed during this phase of her life. And her guests – no matter their status – would have had a knife or a peeler pressed into their hand and an apron tied around them, their contribution to some aspect of the meal being the price of admission.
It is easy to imagine raucous weekends in this house and kitchen, and easier still on a frosty morning to imagine festive meals and celebrations. When I arrived at Farleys, a group of local women were practising carols en plein air. And in that moment I am transported: approaching the house, the carols filling the garden around me, I can already imagine the scene inside in Lee Miller’s day: the beams hung with holly; a tree covered in lights; local craftsmen, farmers and the bell ringers from the church intrigued and bemused by conversations with artists and intellectuals visiting from Paris, Cairo or New York. Knocking on the back door, I imagine myself whisked inside, a glass of something cerise and fizzy placed in my hand, a tea towel thrown over my shoulder as I am ushered to the kitchen, a vegetable I’ve never seen before placed in front of me and instructions for its preparation shouted at me across the room. Whether I am Joan Miró, Dorothea Tanning, Max Ernst, Roberto Matta, Pablo Picasso or James Beard, I want to be nowhere else in this moment. And neither does she, our host, one of the leading photographers, artists and cooks of her generation, tonight holding court for pure pleasure – hers and ours.
Farleys House and Gallery. For more information, visit farleyshouseandgallery.co.uk
For more on Lee Miller’s life at Farleys House, visit the Lee Miller Archives: leemiller.co.uk
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