I have always suspected that I’d be really good at cooking if I ever bothered to try. I feel the same about the flute.
My Granny is a good cook. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, my mother is somewhat less adept in the culinary arts. She has a repertoire of nine dishes that feature mince, and a roast chicken. Any experiments away from these often result in disaster, but what can you expect from a woman whose ideal supper is a bottle of red and a Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie? Has anyone ever tried one of these? I doubt it. She introduced me to them as soon as I was old enough for it not to be her fault as a negligent parent if I got a spongy brain or a necrotizing bug from the delightful offal and connective tissue combo. Admittedly they are delicious (if a little challenging to get down once you realise what you’re eating) but they are so obviously, dangerously disgusting as a concept that they were promptly given the nickname ‘Bad Pies’. She bought me one when I moved into my flat, as a housewarming present. The Bad Pie sits in one of my cupboards in its tin (yes, tin. Pastry in a tin, sell by date 2018) daring me to eat it.
Anyway, Mum’s triumphs, such as they are, often involve rice. Chilli and rice, meatballs and rice, leftover chicken and rice… you get the idea. She really can cook rice. I don’t say this lightly because many people can’t. I’d always admired the perfect fluffiness and how she managers to get so much flavour into it. It was only a few months ago that I caught her adding a stock cube to a packet of Uncle Ben’s. Several dreams died that day.
So yes, home was never really a place of culinary adventure or experimentation, unless you count that time that my sister blended a carton of double cream with a chocolate bar and some vodka and declared that it tasted ‘just like baileys’. Or the occasion when Mum made the now infamous ‘hockey puck pork’…“Oh. Oh. Mine’s a bit dry. Is anyone else’s?” Cue her children staring at her in bewilderment as they tried to extricate the twisted lumps of metal that had once been knives and forks from the rock hard chops.
It doesn’t help that a number of my sisters are naturally extremely conservative in their attitudes to food. You should have heard the response when it was posited that we had dauphinoise instead of roast potatoes at our Easter lunch this year. ‘You caaaaan’t have a roast lunch without roast potatoes, you just can’t, it’s wrong, we won’t have enough to eeeeeeeat. How can you possibly suggest this you BITCH, you just want to take over Eeeeeasterrr’. So the mothership and I gave in and served both kinds. Cue my Granny turning up and demanding to know why there were two types of potato on the table and did we all want to get fat.
Seriously, between my sisters the problems range from tomatoes (which are fine cooked in a sauce but raw makes one of them cry), to mushrooms, to fish (all – there’s a blanket ban), to anything that looks like it came from an animal, to most vegetables (the 16 year old still has to be made to count out individual peas on her plate), and so on and so forth.
Obviously I have my own weirdness too. My worst worst worst thing is milk. The thought of it is enough to make me shudder. Did you know we are the only animals who drink the baby food from ANOTHER SPECIES when we’re adults? Disclaimer: I haven't checked that fact. My Dad was (probably still is, but we’re too big to be sent to the naughty step now) one of those parents who believed in the ‘glass of milk a day for children’ thing. I used to sit, Paddington Bear hard stare fixed on my face, in front of these endless glasses of milk for what seemed like hours whilst my sisters (the freaks) necked pints of semi-skimmed disgustingness and ran off, laughing, into the sunset. Or playroom. I genuinely don’t believe I’ve drunk a glass of milk, eaten a milk based dish *rice pudding heave* or even had milk in the fridge of my own volition in my adult life. If you’re round at mine, the coffee is black. And decaffeinated, but that’s a whole other story.
