I was tired and a bit overworked, and that’s when it happened: the lid fell off the jar at the wrong moment, and all was lost. Or was it? For a long, despondent minute, I considered the disaster before me. In my best Le Creuset pan on the top of the oven were the sausages I was turning into a pasta sauce for dinner, and about 10 times the amount of chilli flakes I’d intended to add. Oh no! Thoughts of takeaway pizza floated into my mind. But I hated to waste both the sausages and my efforts up to this point, so I decided to plough on regardless. Some like it hot, and we two are among them. How bad could it be, really?
The answer is: not bad at all. I might not have fed it to guests, but we both ended up having seconds. It was … memorable, I guess, and later on, as I loaded the dishwasher and worried vaguely about what I might cook tomorrow in this, the busiest and craziest of weeks, I got to thinking about kindness in the kitchen – kindness to myself, in this instance. Don’t worry. I’m not about to turn into some gruesome self-help guru. All I mean is that, sometimes, I should give myself a break. In fact, we all should. If perfection is elusive, equally, seeming catastrophe is rarely that. Most dishes can be salvaged. Nearly everything is edible, in extremis. Delia Smith – Delia bloody Smith! – loved the cake I panic-baked for her when I interviewed her last year. It hadn’t risen properly. As I took it out of my bag, it resembled nothing so much as a house brick wrapped in foil. But as I heard later – she said this to her audience during an event at Conway Hall in London, and some of them were kind enough to email me afterwards – she and Michael, her husband, devoured every last cardamom-scented crumb.
Ease in the kitchen, the question of how to achieve a gentle, low-key kind of confidence, has been on my mind a lot lately, and not only thanks to chilli-gate. I’ve just finished writing a small book about food, and what preoccupied me most as I worked on it was the feeling that I wanted to be … not helpful exactly – it’s not a recipe book – but encouraging. The paradox of our present food culture, with its wall-to-wall TV cookery shows and the preposterous number of cookery books that are published seemingly every week, is that it often makes us feel not more confident, but less so. For how can we ever match what we see or read? We know in our hearts that these people (at least some of the time) fake it to make it, and yet we dread improvisation ourselves. Winging it as the dinner hour approaches is to invite risk, even abject failure, to the table, for all that we’ve laid no place for it; folded no napkin on which it might wipe its infuriating, smeary face.
Happily, it seems I’m not the only one pondering all this. The other day I somehow got my hands on an early copy of Bee Wilson’s The Secret of Cooking, and I’ve been using it ever since. A lot of cookbooks promise a less stressful, more enjoyable, life in the kitchen, as this one does. But you only have to look at Wilson’s section headings to know she is going to be true to her claims. “Cut yourself some slack” is one; “Reduce your options: the sweetness of routine” is another. She is about probability, not possibility; she wants her reader to cook for the life they have rather than for some impossible fantasy existence, because this is how she cooks herself, every day. Every page is full of tricks and shortcuts and substitutions: 15 pages alone are devoted to that simple but immensely useful and versatile bit of kit, the box grater. (NB it really isn’t just for cheese.)
This is Wilson’s first cookery book – though of course she is a well-known food writer – and I mean it only as a compliment when I say that it shows. Experience counts in the kitchen, and she has bided her time. Reading about someone else’s years of muddles and mistakes, and all that they learned from them, is one path towards the ease I’m talking about. Hard-won confidence, it turns out, may be passed on, like a beautiful bowl.
