Super tastes at a pioneering food shop

I well remember queueing up with my father in the 1960s, along with plenty of other people of central European origin, to be sold sausages, ham or sauerkraut by Mrs Loisl Palm herself — a lady who had a real love of sausages; who really understood them, if you know what I mean.

Mr and Mrs Palm were refugees from Czechoslavakia. They arrived in England in 1938 and moved to Oxford the following year, setting up shop originally in two market stalls, before moving to the now-empty shop — where they stayed until the early 1970s when they retired, selling the business to successors who eventually closed it down a little more than a year ago.

But theirs was one of the first such shops to open outside London and it flourished partly because of the continental academics, many of them scientists, who flooded into Oxford in the years immediately preceding the Second World War, and longed for the kind of food they had left behind.

Champion of such scientists was Frederick Lindemann (1886-1957), widely known as ‘The Prof’, who during the war became Churchill’s most trusted — though somewhat eccentric — scientific adviser, who was created Baron Cherwell in 1941 and Viscount Cherwell in 1956.

He was born in the German spa town of Baden Baden, where his American mother was taking the cure. He was the second son of a rich father from Alsace who had emigrated to England in the early 1870s and had married the equally rich Olga Noble, from Connecticut. He was educated in Scotland and at Berlin University where he made extraordinary contributions to low-temperature physics, and where he also developed a certain haughty manner and forthright opinions for which he later became famous; developing into one of those people often described in obituaries as “not suffering fools gladly”. In 1919, he became Professor of Experimental Philosophy at Oxford University, and head of the Clarendon Laboratory. His chair was attached to Wadham College, though he decided to live at Christ Church where he had also been elected to a studentship. As a bachelor he lived in spacious rooms in Meadow Buildings, painted entirely white, with hideous furniture A chauffeur in full uniform drove him frequently to Downing Street in his Armstrong Siddeley for conflabs with the prime minister.

He persuaded the Imperial Chemical Company (ICI) to provide funds for scientists who had fled from Germany and other Nazi-occupied countries, notably Sir Francis Simon and Kurt Mendelssohn (who first liquified helium in Britain), and the Hungarian Nicholas Kurti — who later became famous for applying science to his cooking (Molecular and Physical Gastronomy, he called it). In 1969, Kurti gave a talk at the Royal Society on The Physicist in the Kitchen during which he demonstrated the recently invented microwave to make a reverse Baked Alaska which, of course, was cold on the outside and hot on the inside.

Such experiments went hand in hand at the Clarendon Laboratory during the war with radar research and work on the separation of uranium isotopes for the Tube Alloys Project, code name for the H-bomb.

Cherwell was a keen advocate of two controversial ideas with regard to Germany: first, he backed the policy of bombing civilians in order to “break the spirit of the German people”; second, he backed the proposal of US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau to de-industrialise Germany so that it could never re-arm itself.

As for Palm’s, which provided fodder for many of those brainy refugees, it began selling food from further afield than Europe: it was the first shop in Oxford to stock avocado pears, sweet potatoes and yams. I even remember admiring a tin of candied grasshoppers on sale there. But sausages were the main stock in trade, with Mrs Palm sometimes standing with hands on hips and informing like-minded customers: “Today they are particularly peautiful [sic].”

Occasionally she would ring up my father to tell him when an unusually lovely specimen had arrived in town.