The progress of feminism has led to a culinary crisis. Modern women tend to simplify cooking as much as possible, if not even to dispense with it altogether . . . a working woman, and I maintain that nowadays every woman works, either in the home or out of it, is often obliged to steal the time for cooking from the hours which she feels should belong to her share of leisure.”
This very modern paragraph was actually written more than 60 years ago, by Dr Edouard de Pomiane — the Jamie Oliver of his day — whose passion for simple, appetising food that could be quickly assembled from seasonal ingredients led him to write two of the most engaging cookery books: Cooking with Pomiane and Cooking in Ten Minutes.
I wonder what Pomiane would think of the way we eat now. We have come a long way from the days when the role of food, besides mere nourishment, was as the simplest kind of social adhesive. Now we think of it in medical terms, as “healthy” or “unhealthy”; as an enemy against which we must wage a battle of continual vigilance if we are to avoid obesity; we even discuss what we eat in religious terms as “good” “sinful” or “indulgent”.
At best, cooking has evolved into a form of entertainment — to be watched on the telly or read about in glossy cookery books but practised only occasionally, as a kind of weekend hobby (and an exercise in oneupmanship: you have boiled eggs and Marmite soldiers; we have coddled free-range Old Cotswold Legbar with pain Poilane and beurre d’Isigny). At worst it has become a grim household chore; yet another thing to be ticked off the interminable to-do list. And so we dash into the supermarket on the way home, spending a fortune on enticing-sounding ready-meals which we microwave and swallow in front of the telly, hardly tasting the expensive mouthfuls as they go down.
This is nutrition, of a sort, for the body but not for the soul.
What, though, if one were to make the journey home from work knowing that there was no need to stop at the Tesco Metro for a microwaveable stir-fry because the fridge at home was already filled with the makings of something nice to eat? What if you could get in, pour a glass of wine and start chopping and simmering while talking to your spouse or supervising the children’s homework, knowing that dinner would be on the table in half an hour — because you’d planned the week’s menus in advance and done all the shopping at the weekend?
And what if you could do the whole thing on a modest budget — say £25 for fresh food for two people’s suppers for a week — using up everything you had bought, instead of dropping a tenner a night on supermarket meals while the contents of the organic veg box turn to guilty slime in the fridge because you can’t face (a) excavating them from the carapace of mud in which they are authentically encased and (b) thinking of something to make that involves salsify, Jerusalem artichokes and butternut squash?
But no one (I hear you say) cooks like that any more. It sounds like the sort of thing Mrs Beeton might have recommended. Actually, it is the sort of thing Mrs Beeton recommended. There was a copy of her Book of Household Management in my parents’ house and as a girl I used to read it. Some of the tips on household management — keeping your flat-iron clean, say — are of strictly historical interest. But when it comes to the planning and preparation of food, Mrs B has plenty to teach a modern cook.
Look, for example, at her menu suggestions for “Plain Family Dinners”, arranged chronologically by month. The first thing that strikes you is the extraordinary capacity of the Victorian household for heavy English food — roast meat, boiled puddings, fruit tarts, dumplings — at least three courses at every meal. No wonder they wore corsets.
Look again, though, and you notice more attractive qualities — seasonality, for example: spring lamb in May, peas and new potatoes in June, raspberries in high summer, and so on. And then that other housewifely virtue of frugality: Sunday’s roast lamb turning up cold with salad on Monday and as haricot of lamb on Tuesday; Wednesday’s roast loin of veal resurrected as veal curry on Thursday.
Admittedly there is not much to lift the heart about cold lamb and curried veal. But it is Beeton’s principles that we are thinking of embracing, not her recipes. What if one were to marry her frugal habits and emphasis on seasonal produce with Pomiane’s conviviality and speed (no meal should take more than an hour to prepare and eat)? Might you not end up with a way of buying, preparing and eating food that ticked every virtuous box for health and sustainable shopping, yet turned mealtimes into an everyday treat — a reward at the end of the working day, rather than an expensive source of anxiety? You might also bear in mind that cooking tends to reduce the appetite, so although all these meals sound substantial, you will tend to eat less of them.
This is how I have been cooking all my adult life. I have never owned a microwave or a freezer, never bought a ready-meal — not from self-denial but from pure self-indulgence, because when it comes to food I am greedy, impatient and much too mean to pay a manufacturer for food that I know I can make myself for a tenth of the price, in scarcely longer than the time it would take to warm up a ready-meal. Because I am too lazy for the weekly supermarket “big shop” and would rather spend my time and money at my local butcher, John Charles, and greengrocer, Fenners, in Blackheath. (This is an investment that brings its own rewards, not in the shape of Nectar points but in the more useful form of a couple of extra rashers of bacon, a generous hand weighing out the fresh peas or advice on cooking something that I haven’t tried before.)
Above all, I choose to eat like this because making food at home — even if it’s only an omelette or pasta and fresh tomato sauce — is a little gesture of creativity and pleasure: nourishment for both the spirit and the body. This is how it works:
