Foaming at the mouth as half-baked culinary aspirations go up in smoke
But for me to publicly admit this is the equivalent of the confession new members of Alcoholics Anonymous give, where they tell the other recovering alcoholics about how they stole the money their children had carefully saved for a visit to Disney in Paris and blew it all on booze. That ‘drunkalogue’ strips the speaker of their illusions, their pretences and co-dependency devices.
Same with me admitting to being skill-free in the kitchen. You see, I’ve spent my whole life pretending to be a great cook. Never have I made an overt claim. I’ve used faux-modesty instead.
“Wouldn’t describe myself as a gourmet cook,” I’d murmur, in a way that left it open for others to so describe me and gave them the distinct impression that I could lash up a souffle at the drop of an egg white.
The awful thing is that I should have been a great cook, because my mother was. Our house was always filled with wonderful cooking scents. She could bake everything from pineapple upside-down cake (very ’60s, but experiencing a mild revival at the moment) to raspberry tarts and plum puddings. She could roast, grill, steam and boil, although she rarely fried and never deep-fat fried anything. If I had just learned to make what she was making, I might have ended up with serviceable kitchen skills. But, no. I wanted to be modern.
“Modern”, back then, meant moving from meat, a spud or spuds and peas or cabbage to a lot of rice on a plate with sloshy stuff in the middle. Campbell’s chicken or mushroom soups played a big role in the sloshy stuff. For a while there, as long as you bought cooked chicken and warmed it up in gloop out of a can, you could cater for a party of 30 friends for half nothing and nobody would know you hadn’t cooked it from scratch.
If your catering budget ran to a couple of those oversized bottles of cheapo Mirabeau red plonk, your guests got fooled, stuffed and plastered on the cheap. In addition, the only cutlery needed was a fork.
Now, you may say that some food items, like sandwiches, don’t even require a fork, but I’ve never mastered the sandwich. When I attempt to make a sanger, the end result looks fine as a piece of still life. It’s when you pick it up the problem starts. Bits fall out from all sides, the thing leaks and if tomatoes are involved, they drop, infallibly, just as the sandwich is raised above a white shirt.
I gained no skills whatever from being around my mother, but I did pick up a lot of knowledge, most of it prejudicial, about the way neighbours and relatives cooked. My mother could taste margarine in a fairy cake at first bite, and regarded it as a social error of massive proportions. Like adding gelatine or pectin when making jam. Or putting vinegar or sugar in the water when cooking vegetables to keep them green.
All of these were so obviously evil that you never dared ask why, because asking revealed you were not born with the information in-built. She also said people with “hot, heavy” hands could never make good pastry. I never even attempted pastry for fear of finding out that my paws were warm and weighty. I mean, the shame if I got found out.
IN MY late teens, I cooked mostly in a boyfriend’s house in one huge pot for a bunch of peers who were too addled by their recent discovery of smoking, sex, and booze to get subtle about food. There was no competition from other aspirant cooks, either.
Back then, it was not considered proper for the lads to do anything but carry the keg, and all the good-looking girls did was come into the kitchen to tell me I was wonderful and ask if there was anything they could do, knowing I’d be so flustered that I’d want them to go someplace else before they caught me cheating with Mr Campbell. Him of the soups, you understand.
In Meg Wolitzer’s recent novel, The Interestings, she talks of “the early ’80s, when everyone was first learning to cook and dinners featured elaborate food within limited parameters, since they all owned the same two approachable cookbooks. Chicken marbella was ubiquitous. Prunes, those unloved things, beetle-backed and shiny, with guts like meat, finally found their context.”
Prunes never figured in any of the five dishes I cooked. You couldn’t, for example, introduce prunes into beef stroganoff or lasagne, two of the five, and they would have confused the pork steak dish. The pork steak dish required a lot of pâté and a tin of mandarin oranges. For a while there, the pork dish was my pièce de résistance, until I served it to visiting Canadians and had to ask them why they were eating around it as if it had gangrene (don’t tell me you would have done the same at the very thought of pork, pâté, and mandarin oranges). It turned out they were Orthodox Jews, which should have struck us as a possibility, since their surname was Goldberg. They were amused that it hadn’t and I did omelettes for them, which they pronounced as delicious. I’m quite good at omelettes. In fact, since I’m going for the honesty thing, omelettes may be the only thing I am genuinely good at cooking.
In the kitchen, I’ve been like that guy in the song about him giving rock and roll all the best years of his life. Just at the point where I caught up with culinary fashion, it changed, leaving me stranded. I bought syringes and books on food decoration, for example, and became competent at putting streaks of lightning in red across plates just as that became dated and towers of food replaced it. I had just come to terms with kumquats when along came Vietnamese dragon fruit. The cupboards in my kitchen could serve as a museum of past failure. Like the torch for making the sugar on the top of a crème brûlée crusty. Unused. Pristine. Still in the wrapper. No decent offer refused.
No mother likes to admit that her daughter cooks better than she does, but it’s truly humiliating when your son cooks better than you do — and never feels the need to replicate one of your signature dishes. That fact, combined with foam, led me to full understanding of how unimprovably bad I am as a cook.
Once they began to serve food with foam on it, I knew my goose was cooked, so to speak. Half a century ago, when some cooks were devoted to mushroom-stuffing, an expert announced that life was too short to stuff a mushroom. Today, life is too short to learn how to do food foam.
I’m quitting the kitchen. For good. If you want to drop in for lunch on this bank holiday, bring your own.
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