Greetings from my parents’ kitchen in north Norfolk where, despite its familiarity, cooking takes on a less predictable dimension. By some measures their kitchen is well equipped – three toast racks, countless skewers, a three-egg poaching pan, many beer tankards, and a very noisy battery-operated pepper mill – but I’ll admit to missing my knives, my lemon juicer, and my salad spinner (my mother insists that one of the latter will never “clutter up” her cupboards, to which my riposte is, “An egg poaching pan?”). And that’s before all the ingredients that don’t make it into the hurried pre-holiday essentials shop, the indispensability of which only dawns on me in their absence – the rice wine vinegar, the maple syrup, the capers, the tahini.
All this is to say that cooking anywhere but your own kitchen can feel like a paradigm shift and demands a different approach. This could mean intricate planning or, in my case, it invariably sends me running to my archive of tried-and-tested recipes, will work regardless of what shops are nearby or what equipment is in the kitchen. These have seen me through summers in various kitchens that are not my own, from this very one in Norfolk to a scattering of Airbnbs in Europe. They require little more than a knife, a couple of pans, a wooden spoon and a heat source. A box grater and a whisk are handy, too. And, as your drinks columnist, it would be disingenuous to pretend that a decent corkscrew isn’t utterly vital. (For a sound list of real kitchen essentials, which don’t include three toast racks and a battery-operated pepper mill, I have always loved referring back to Laurie Colwin’s Low-Tech Person’s Batterie de Cuisine in her book of essays, Home Cooking.)
