Honour and Obey

I do not do emotions very well; tend to keep a lid on my heart and be quite reserved. I do not like to cloy or cling, and can as a conequence, at times, appear a bit chilly. I am aware of this problem; and try to express myself in other ways. My modus operandi is: to cook.

I will give my love a red, red consomé, and give back flour for flowers. If I like you I will put honey on your plate and vingegar on your salad and generally try to spice up your life. The language of flowers may be dead, but a hearty snack will still communicate all that is sub rosa.

This love-affair is not only with those that eat, but also, obviously, with the process of loving and leavening itself. My relationship with the kitchen and the actual cooking has been one of the more dependable, fulfilling and reciprocal I have had. While men last a summer, clear their plates and get sent on their way, mergues is forever.

For the past fifteen years or so, I have spent countless blazing winter days cooking for christmas: stuffing sausages and rolling meatballs, browning sugar and adding cloves. For many an blustery easter I have been beating eggs and pickling herring and baking bread and shredding anchovy. And all through the scorching summers, I have been shelling and chucking and poaching and going at it with demiluna and thongs and hands stained and stung by berries and thorns. 

Get me right: I like to do it. I like to looks on the eaters face when the fifth type of shortbread is brought out of the oven and the third type of jam is cooling in the larder. I like the smell of the kitchen, be there unpasteurised cheese in there or no. But in any long relationship – be it with a man or the burner – the flame is bound to dwindle. For a while now, I have been feeling that the love I put into the sauce is not given back to me, save in the form of love-handles. Feeling more and more like my merengues and lemons were taken for granted, the salty sting of the anchovy omelette less poignant, and the garlic of the aioli, once an earthy and direct hit, now more of a nostalgic memory; an old note, stale, badly punctuated and tasting of cupboard.

Never one to labour on when the icing is off the cake: I decided to take a break. That this would be the summer when I would be contented, with my book, watching the cherries ripen and left to rot. No extra cooking for me. Staying far away from the kitchen. For those few and all too brief summer weeks I would try to find other channels of communication than the hummous. And maybe even finding time to do my nails.

Only…Last night my brother and his long-time girlfriend arrived. They have been hitchhiking across Sweden, bringing a giant steak that her farming parents sent as a pagan-ritual-style greeting. We all sat down to tea and Scrabble, the octagonarian+ grandmother winning as usual. The glow of the lamp and the faint creak of the staircase, the soft stripe of the carpet and the layerings of ancient postcards on the fridge, the thudding of a fly against the window and the lilt of the basil on the sill: it was all sooo lovely, all so very much home.

And as we fell back into our roles, like pebbles would fall into theirs (lodged somewhere hard to reach, in your shoe, when in a hurry)  I fell back into the apron and the scraped back hair, the mealy hands and the mustard stain. There really is nothing for it: today is a big lunch for my sisters birthday, the steak is in the oven, the miniature tarteletts are cooling, the salsa verde is picking up speed, the walnut bread has a crispy crust and the many salads and the homey orange glow of shellacked carrots is only a matter of time.

Because that is the way it is once your hooked, isn’t it? The fruit may be overripe and the baking soda slightly off, but you still do your best, with what you have, to keep the home fires stoked. Somewhere between melting the chocolate and grating the lemon zest over the strawberries, I realised: this is one love I want to keep feeding. For better or worse, in richness or on a diet: I do want to keep the heat up in the kitchen. It may require a bit of extra effort, some new influences (have not really learnt any creole cooking yet), a quick dash to Cordon Bleu to pick up a racy new sieve: but it doesn’t matter. I am staying in my apron.