The Luards seemed a charmed couple, until their daughter Francesca died of Aids. Elisabeth Luard wrote a moving book called Family Life: Birth, Death and the Whole Damn Thing, relating how the Luards brought up their four children on the hoof, in Spain and France, husband Nicholas writing his classic travel book on Andalusia, Elisabeth practising what she eventually preached in European Peasant Cookery. Now she uncovers another layer of her story: of living 40 years with an alcoholic and adulterous husband “without actually murdering him”.

Born into the debutante class, a diplomat's stepchild raised in exotic places, Elisabeth lost her virginity to the Italian Ambassador in Acapulco, and fetched up at Private Eye, where she fell in love with its dashing proprietor, “the most beautiful man I'd ever seen” - Nicholas, ex-Guards officer, Cambridge oarsman and boxing Blue, co-launcher of the London Marathon, co-founder of the Establishment Club with Peter Cook. He had the restless spirit borne of privilege, money and luck.

But “we never did reach the sunlit uplands, my beloved and I. True love was never a match for the bottle.” Cooking (“my personal short-cut to happiness”) was her chief solution. “Food does what I tell it to do.” Painting was another: she sold pictures, and did meticulous drawings for the great entomologist Miriam Rothschild, absorbing her wisdom along the way.

While Nicholas pursued his projects with nefarious friends (the Guardia Civil came to search their house for Lord Lucan), it was Elisabeth who sustained family life during his many absences. She carried on placidly stirring her olla podrida (bean-pot), knowing exactly how many kilos of flour and sacks of onions were needed for their hazardous trip to the Kalahari: she was the only sober member of the expedition.

Part Two picks up the story from 1997, when Nicholas stood for James Goldsmith's Referendum Party against Michael Portillo, thereby helping Labour to defeat the Cabinet Minister at Enfield Southgate. It was his last strike before his slow, suicidal alcoholic decline. No longer could money rescue Elisabeth and her now stick-thin husband from the harrowing inevitable. His increasingly mad exploits (bowling down the highway on a lawnmower, having taken an axe to the home telephone line, to get to a phone box, to berate his brother-in-law Charlie Falconer, the Lord Chancellor) are no longer so amusing. He celebrates his liver transplant with champagne, and proceeds to drown the new liver.

During the ensuing crises and his stubborn resistance to dying (defying cancer and last rites) his wife stays by him, until one day “he sleeps and sleeps and sleeps until the hand in mine is cold”. Elisabeth Luard, who won a Thumping Good Read award for her first novel, joins a line of inspiring cooks who write about the everyday necessity of food as the ultimate refuge from the harsh reality of death. “I write of ordinary things. 'The mastic tree weeps silver tears when hacked with a knife; the tears when dried can be used to flavour liquor.' 'The powdered root of an orchid, called salep, when cooked in broth or stirred with boiling milk, is twice as fortifying as meat.' You see how easy it is to forget, to drown out the din in the minutiae of craft?”

Her narrative is punctuated with recipes, including Coronation Chicken (served at every deb dance); Alice B. Toklas's Hashish Fudge (“consume no more than 2 pieces at a time”) and, from her American grandmother, Aunt Sadie's Apple Pie. Elisabeth's generation were apple-pie mothers and wives: “Our duty was to support our man.” So that's the answer: endurance, forgiveness, and the consolation of Pigs' Trotters with Garlic and Parsley.

My Life as a Wife: Love, Liquor, and What to Do About the Other Women by Elisabeth Luard
Timewell, £16.99 Buy the book

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