Comfort food and gourmet tyranny
What do you eat when you have a cold coming on, your partner is out
somewhere interesting (and you aren’t), you are grumpy and cross and you
don’t bloody feel like cooking anything (and you may, at any moment,
decide that your first course ought to be worms?) It’s either freezing
cold or boiling hot, the house looks like Atilla the Hun has been
camping in it for weeks, there’s nothing on T.V. and even your cat is
beginning to give you a peculiar look. Forget gourmet stuff. You don’t
want to cook. Gourmet food can be a tyranny. You can, indeed have, made
bread from scratch and soup from your own stock and concocted exquisite
sauces from a demi-glace which would have brought screams of joy from
Careme, but not tonight. You are not going to open the fridge and stare
dully into the icy depths at two old zucchini and a cheese with fur on
it, wondering if you can make zucchini and cheese soufflé and feeling
that if you don’t you are somehow letting the side down. Tonight all
bets are off.
You need comfort food and it’s usually a childhood memory. In my
case it is tinned Rosella tomato soup with cut up cheese and lots of
nutmeg. Lots of people in my informal and entirely unscientific survey
opted for tinned soup, Heinz cream of chicken being the favourite. Some
desires are very specific; Heinz junior turkey dinner with Kraft cheddar
cheese cut up in it. Some are generic, ie, a sardine sandwich. A cup of
Bovril. Baked beans on toast. My mother declares that she needs toast
soldiers, a nicely boiled egg, and a pot of really strong tea to be
drunk with milk and lots of sugar. Others require vanilla ice cream with
Milo or Ovaltine sprinkled over it. Vegemite toast is always good, with
lots of butter, making sure that the butter and the vegemite reach all
the way to the exact edge of the toast. Others like bread and hundreds
and thousands and a chocolate milk shake. Or want to eat a whole fresh
out of the woven cottage loaf, beginning with the crust.
Strong tastes are also popular. There is the kebab with garlic
sauce. The barbequed chicken with stuffing. The heavily battered fish.
Or the potato cake with vinegar. Cheese, bread and pickles has many
fans. So has the Australian treat of chips and tomato sauce.
Occasionally one just needs a doughnut from that mobile kitchen outside
Footscray station. Or a bowl of breakfast cereal with apricots and
cream. Devout Buddhists may revert to KFC and their signature mashed
potato with gravy, eaten with a chip as a spoon. I have Greek friends
whose mothers cook like a dream who want a triple cheeseburger, Jewish
friends whose mothers make definitive chicken soup who want a frozen
pizza and holistic health Vegan friends who need to eat a whole block of
Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut milk chocolate. One young woman craves
conventional pasta and bottled pesto, but it has to be eaten from the
saucepan.
Whatever it is, keep a tin or a store of it if you can. Don’t allow
anyone to inflict food snobbery upon you. One of my friends encountered
her first fresh asparagus at twenty and wondered why anyone would
bother when it came in tins. I craved crumbly yellow shop cake, when my
female relatives could make any kind of cake from gingerbread ladies to
sponge cakes which almost floated out the window. In an emergency,
remember the Corinna Chapman motto: OBEY YOUR HUNGER.
Most meals can be saved unless you have burned them to extinction.
Just pour off the unburned part of the stew into a clean pan, add a
handful of chopped parsley and re heat it gently. Adding a big dollop of
yoghurt to the finished product disguises any strange appearance, and
if all else fails, add a tablespoon of vindaloo paste and no one will
know what the original source might have been. And you may have invented
the world’s first goulash vindaloo. You can, if you really have to,
remove salt from an oversalted stew or soup by cooking raw potato in the
broth. You can also add sugar which disguises the taste. This is only
worth doing if the dish was good in the first place. If it’s one of
those things which have never quite worked, feed it to the dog and cook
something else. Or buy takeaways. Or make something really easy like
pumpkin soup or a roast or chicken parcels. Never allow your dinner to
dictate to you, or who knows where it will all end? I’ll tell you where
it will end. It ends in
Revenge cookery
You are in the common female position where you have no help, an
uncooperative partner whose idea of cooking is called burning pots,
clamouring children who all have their own ideas of what constitutes
cuisine and limited time. And limited money. You are exhausted by
working and doing all the housework, shopping with a car load of
screamers, hauling bags of groceries into the house to be laboriously
unpacked under the eyes of teenagers so bone idle that they can’t get up
off the sofa and help. And in any case they can’t hear you because they
are plugged into a perpetual Ipod.
You might be excused if one night you just added finely chopped
deadly nightshade to the beef stew and watched them all roll on the
ground in well deserved agony. Some women have actually taken this
unfortunate course. From their prison cells, they speak highly of
arsenic and weedkillers. But most of us will find ourselves unable to
obliterate our nearest and dearest, however much they deserve it. And
what we will then be very tempted to do is revenge cookery.
The principle is simple. Find something which no one likes -liver
is good, tripe, any offal, cabbage, over boiled spinach - and serve it
for dinner. Then - and this is the diabolical part - collect up the
leftovers (there will be leftovers) and make another dish out of them
for tomorrow’s dinner. I knew one woman who managed to produce the
world’s first tripe rissoles. Three dinners, all inedible, and all told
her rotten family exactly how much she resented them. If the secret
ingredient in good cooking is love, then the secret ingredient in
revenge cookery is hatred. It has a strange kind of slave’s logic. You
can make me cook for you, is the subtext, but you can’t control what I
cook, and you can’t make me like it, and don’t expect to enjoy eating
it.
This does have some good effects, occasionally. A solid diet of
recycled offal can make teenagers decide to either 1. leave home 2. live
on breakfast cereal and grilled cheese sandwiches or 3. learn to cook
themselves. You might find that your partner shows that he can master
that steep learning curve from the burning pots to the basic
ratatouille. But revenge cookery has to tarnish your kharma and it takes
all the fun out of making a good dinner. So why not use more
confrontational methods. You can lay out the ingredients for a simple
stew or a lamb roast on the table, provide the recipe, and wander off
into the parlour and watch Dr Who, with a sturdy gin and tonic in hand.
They will mess up the kitchen and probably burn everything, but they are
doing the washing up if they want any dinner tomorrow and is it your
problem, anyway? You can worry too much about nutrition and food. I know
of one small boy who survived to become a mountain climber but spent
the first post-weaning year of his life eating nothing but bread and
butter. As long as the stuff is cooked at home, contains a reasonable
range of vegetables and not more than one meal in ten is deep fried, no
one is going to expire of beri beri. And if they do contract it, tell
them to start on a small jar of vegemite. It’s a specific.
Easy foods which everyone likes are rare. You are the cook. The
kitchen is your domain. Make the sort of food you like to eat. A big pot
of soup, for instance. Sausages and mash. A Stephanie simple stew. A
rich chicken casserole. And if they don’t like it, they can eat bread
and butter, or cook for themselves. If you cook food that you know how
to cook and like eating, the family will probably fall in - grumbling,
of course, but if its on the table they will in all likelihood eat it.
And if they don’t, they won’t starve. For children who will only eat,
ie, white food, or uncooked food, or consider carrots an invention of
the devil, allow them to eat plain pasta with bottled tomato sauce,
which almost everyone tolerates and anyone can cook.
At least, this way, you get a good dinner out of it. And as for the
others, they can make their own arrangements. Refresh your gin and
settle back into the best chair. You deserve it.
Try some of Corinna's recipes