The Secret of Cooking sprang from personal experience. I wanted to crack the code of how to fit cooking into the everyday mess and imperfection of all our lives without it seeming like yet another un-doable thing on the to-do list or yet another reason to berate ourselves for falling short. My own relationship with cooking changed, suddenly, about a year into this project. In June 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, my husband of 23 years, the father of my three children, left me for another woman. For much of that year, I resembled Munch’s painting The Scream (or at least, that is how I felt). I tried anything I could think of to take my mind off the grief – watching box sets, yoga, reading novels, vodka – but almost everything reminded me of him, especially the vodka. With social distancing in place, I couldn’t hug friends. My mother, who had dementia, was in a care home where I wasn’t allowed to visit. To cap it all, I suddenly had to do all the laundry and all the cooking. This wasn’t such a shift; we never divided the cooking 50/50. But there is still a difference between being the person who does the majority of the cooking and being the person in charge of all of it.
To my surprise, I found that my enforced new role came with benefits. In my lonely state, the kitchen was one of the few places I felt better rather than worse. Cooking anchored me to the person I had been before I met my husband. I could make myself a chicken stew with the sweet scent of parsley and white wine which reminded me of the stews my mother used to make. No matter how tearful I had been the night before, I still had to get up in the morning and cook breakfast for my son, who was then 11. The act of cracking eggs into a jug to make his favourite pancakes or waffles felt steadying and gave me back my appetite.
