I like the Art Deco apartment block where I live; the building is beautiful and the neighbours are nice. Just one thing; they keep having their old kitchens torn out and new ones installed – two of the three nearest flats to me have done this in the space of six months.
I don’t complain about the noise as I’ve been a very noisy neighbour in my time, but this architectural fetish has made me realise how out of step I am with the national psyche. For I would no sooner have a new kitchen installed than have a minaret erected atop of my building.
My flat has its original tiny galley kitchen; like many of the swanky 1930s apartment buildings in Brighton & Hove, it once had a restaurant in the basement – Marine Gate along the seafront even had its own off-licence. Those were the days when rich people didn’t cook and I’ve tried to respect tradition, for once, by making sure that my fridge – in theory – contains only a bottle of champagne and eye serum, like the Manhattan career girls I read about in Cosmo as a tot, though admittedly a few cheeses and punnets of fruit sometimes sneak in. I take a pride in never once having used my dishwasher.
But for many, I’m aware that the kitchen is ‘the heart of the home.’ The first example I found on Google, from Turnkey Renovations, summed up this popular opinion purply: ‘Not only is it the hub and most utilised space in the home, it is where the true magic happens of sharing, communication, and bonding. There is something special in taking ingredients and spices, creating a dish that brings everyone together, and making memories that extends across all walls of a home.’ Which sounds a bit too much like a dirty protest to me, but each to his own.
When did the idea that cooking and a happy family life were indivisible come about – specifically, when did we start swallowing the somewhat sad idea that feeding people is the best way of showing love to them? It wasn’t always this way; family meals were not the norm until the Victorian era, when middle-class values became dominant and social reformers rammed home the ‘importance’ of ritualistic family meals – presumably hoping that this would curtail the desire of adult members of that family for copious sloping off to Gin Lane. Nicola Humble, in Culinary Pleasures: Cookbooks and the Transformation of British Food, writes of Mrs Beeton’s The Book of Household Management as ‘an engine for social change’ leading to the ‘new cult of domesticity that was to play such a major role in mid-Victorian life’. While Graham Nown, in Mrs Beeton: 150 Years of Cooking and Household Management, writes rather unexpectedly ‘She helped many women to overcome the loneliness of marriage and gave the family the importance it deserved.’
Here we have the key to the creation of performative meals. Women, not permitted to have careers, who married men who turned out to be wrong for them, and discovered that one way of living with someone who you had dull conversation with was by making a song and dance out of scoffing.
Though their attitude and the grub they pushed couldn’t have been more different, Elizabeth David and her ilk – right up to Nigella – carried on this tradition of presenting food as something more than nourishment, as a spiritual thing which one did for friends now as well as, or instead of, family. It was food as mystic love offering, with a good bit of virtue-signalling on the side.
I thought of this when reading the sad tale of Bee Wilson in the Daily Mail recently. Having been married for 23 years, the cookery writer’s husband walked out on her, announcing ‘All this food you cook, it means nothing to me!’ She writes ‘My mind scrolled back through a quarter of a century of shared meals and I thought I might be sick… I thought we were OK, or as OK as you expect to be when you have three children and busy lives and have been together a long time…but what if, for years, I had been paying attention to the wrong things? Food, mainly.’ Though it’s obvious which is meant to be The Good One and The Bad One here, I must say that my sympathies were fully with the horrid hubby.
I’m amazed that in this day and age that there are still women around who really do believe that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach – as opposed to his groin or his funny-bone. Wilson says ‘I am a food writer and from a young age, cooking for others has been one of the ways I express love… before he left, I had already started work on a cookbook based on the idea that cooking could be a remedy to many of the problems of modern life. Now, I discovered that this was truer than I had ever realised. If he hadn’t left, I could have spent another 20 years cooking for a man who didn’t much care about food. Now, I had a chance – just maybe – of meeting someone for whom cooking meant as much as it did to me.’
Who, for the love of Mike, wants a man to whom cooking is important? (Unless it’s made him rich, of course – money covering a multitude of sins of omission.)
Wilson quotes Nora Ephron’s brilliant novel Heartburn in her piece, as do many food writers who seek glamour by association with this whip-smart, diamond-hard writer. But Ephron states clearly in the book’s introduction ‘I am not and never have been a food writer.’ She doesn’t really need to say it; Ephron is brilliant and foodies are, generally, bores. Ephron’s heroine Rachel condemns herself out of her own hungry mouth: ‘I loved to cook, so I cooked. And then the cooking became a way of saying I love you. And then the cooking became an easy way of saying I love you. And then the cooking became the only way of saying I love you. I was so busy perfecting the peach pie that I stopped paying attention.’
I like food as much as anyone; at one point, in my 40s, I got so fat that a magazine printed a picture of Jabba the Hutt and said it was me! But I’ve never mistaken food for fun. Though I go out to eat a lot (I love my street because it has the sea at one end and the restaurant quarter at the other; once, I went to three eateries in one day) when I think of the thousands of restaurant meals I’ve noshed it’s not the food I remember but the faces of my companions showing amusement, shock and occasionally outright revulsion as I entertain them. So while I like showing love to the waiting staff by leaving a massive tip, I’m just totally unconvinced by the food-as-love thing – unless you’re a breast-feeding baby. I’m not easily spooked, but the phrase ‘A relationship is just two people constantly asking each other what they want to eat until one of them dies’ makes me feel like entering a nunnery. I’ll never let that kind of living death happen to me.
I’ve thought from a young age that something weird is going on in households where great emphasis is placed on eating together. All sorts of power games lead to a breeding ground for anorexia and bulimia as teenagers seek to establish control over their bodies. Paradoxically, the home that houses the dreaded ‘latchkey’ kid and two working parents often turns out to be a relaxed unit wherein a family seeks to create a comfortable lifestyle by spending quality rather than quantity time together – I know because I was that child, and my ‘fortunate’ friends with traditional homes regularly fled family meals in order to hang out and eat with me.
So I can’t help thinking – as someone from a home where love was everything and food was just fuel – that far from symbolising happy families, too much stress on making meals from scratch indicates an environment where food is dished up in place of true affection. I remember having a conversation with a famous TV cook and boasting proudly that I couldn’t even boil an egg and neither had my mother been able to. ‘Was your home happy?’ she asked me sadly. (I knew hers hadn’t been.) ‘Yes, very,’ I smugged. ‘There’s your answer,’ she replied – and that’s the reason why I won’t be annoying my neighbours with a new kitchen being noisily installed anytime soon.
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