A Greedy Girl

The endearing appetites of Agatha Christie

‘My favourite thing has been, is, and probably always will be,’ wrote Agatha Christie, ‘cream.’

Agatha was a self-professed ‘greedy girl’, whose appetites (to me at least) form a not insignificant part of her charm.

I’m writing to you from a holiday this week, during which I’ve done an awful lot of swimming and eating.

Agatha Christie as an alarmingly self-possessed little girl.

Having a holiday doesn’t come naturally to me, but Agatha would have approved.

One of the things I really like about is her joie de vivre.

She liked skinny-dipping in the sea, and driving really fast. Her nephew remembers her bombing along the newly-built M4 motorway at the maximum speed of her new Wolseley 1500. And, of course, she loved to eat!

Here’s a passage from one of her letters:

‘I ate too much today. But what is life without an orgy now and then?’

In her youth she was tall and blonde and slender.

But once she’d passed through her ordeal at the hands of her husband and the media in 1926, which I’ve written about here, things changed. She settled down to being a wildly successful author and playwright, a wife who found extreme satisfaction in her second marriage, and an endearingly gluttonous eater.

It was, to be fair, something she’d been brought up to be.

A very early surviving letter to her father is extremely characteristic.

She wrote it from the substantial family home in Torquay in the 1890s, and it mentions Jane, the family’s cook:

‘Jane let me make cakes in the kitchen… I had Devonshire cream for tea!… your loving Agatha.’

The words ‘add half a pint of cream’ appear over and over again in a handwritten book of recipes collected by her mother for Agatha’s future use, in dishes ranging from chicken in sauce to ‘Chinese rice’. She kept her mother’s recipe book until the end of her life.