Like
any fashion, versions of this trickle down to our homes, too. Christ, I’ve had
a sheep’s skin lying under a heap of salt on my balcony for four weeks.
Every time a workman comes to tell us how expensive double-glazing is
(expensive), I pray he won’t comment. We’re brining the two cucumbers we
managed to grow on land that, for all legal intent and purposes, we’re
squatting, and the other day we found swiss chard growing there long after we'd abandoned it for winter. Come spring, there's talk of us putting bees there and we almost killed our kefir babies – honey is a bully.
We
are where we eat and our souls belong to those whose cookbooks we have on our
shelves. I suppose we should be happy print is not dead, long live print; but
too many of these bestsellers are formulaic. Celebrity so and so with so and so
million followers and oh, here’s a recipe for a juice and the secret to long
lasting health or at least good skin.
But
I should be fair: there are other types of cookbooks too. Next to the rows of
healthy eating girls (sorry books) with no health qualifications whatsoever,
there’re the Nordic manifestos (pine-bark cake: first, cut down a pine tree),
the science-y ones, the ‘stay in on a Friday and bring back date night’ ones,
the ‘everyone can cook, even you’ ones, the ‘you can’t cook this because you’re
not a restaurant i.e. you don’t have a dehydrator’ ones, the ‘you are man, you
BBQ’ ones and the good old ‘I’ve travelled to exotic places and you can feel
like you have too even though you haven’t and I don’t mean going to the south
of France who even does that anymore’
ones. Oh, and then we have all of Ottolenghi.
Is
it a hype? Does it matter? We don’t ask fashion to be forever.
People
cite Elizabeth David when they want to magic us back to a simpler time. But when
Elizabeth David was writing, she was the first one to tell people how to do it.
Now we have Google Jamie Oliver and the BBC losing money on it. When
David was writing, cookbooks promised you tricks and secrets, how to economise,
where to buy cheaply, how to save time, how to simultaneously bake easy pie crusts
and air the beds. They were full of remedies; they got the cooking out of the
way.
Nowadays
cookbooks still provide a sort of remedy. And as we collect remedies (in the shape of colouring-in books, pretending you're in the army on a Saturday in city parks, turmeric, cold pressed juice, apps that switch your Internet off etc.), we collect many cookbooks. We collect them as talismans of a
more leisurely existence. They help us to envisage a life where we have a day
to set aside to actually make jam. They allow us to imagine ourselves presenting the neighbours with out of the oven pies, throw dinner parties on a
Wednesday and never having to come home to a fridge that echoes. Nowadays, the
longer the recipe the better, and that stack of cookbooks by the bed’s side is all the
bigger.
Illustration by Felicita Sala.
