People who think about food when they’re not hungry aren’t normal, aren’t balanced. They’re not happy. What we’re thinking about isn’t food. Food is what we juxtapose when we can’t look directly at the grief. Food is our safe word, our happy place. In all the years I’ve spent writing about the groceries, peeling them, travelling to meet them, I’ve come to understand that none of it’s really about butter, eggs and sugar at all. Everybody I’ve met along the way who’s been doing excessive, obsessive things to ingredients, making restaurants, working in kitchens, writing books – they’re not happy. They weren’t happy children. We’re not compelled to examine kitchens by a Falstaffian appetite, we aren’t the jolly trenchermen with a bonhomous desire to lay a better table. One of the great misconceptions about dinner is that nice people make good food. That there is a soul in honest, loving dishes which are passed from the hand of the chef to the mouth of a grateful diner, that you could trust a good cook. But it’s almost exactly the opposite. Great food is cooked by twisted, miserable, depressive, cruel, abused and abusive, needy, compromised and shamed people. There is something in the pursuit of lunch that is therapeutic, allegorical even redemptive. There is the pleasure of the business, the mechanics, the chemistry, the physics of food that soothes and calms.
Great food is cooked by twisted, miserable, depressive, cruel, abused and abusive, needy, compromised and shamed people. There is something in the pursuit of lunch that is therapeutic, allegorical even redemptive.
There is the transformation: that you take one thing and through a series of votive actions, incantations, the applications of fire and water and air, it becomes something else. In church at the altar Catholics wonder at the transubstantiation of bread and wine into body and blood. Atheists sneer at this simple-minded delusion of faith, but none of them wonder at the equally miraculous transformation of flour and water into bread or spaghetti or a pancake or Yorkshire pudding, or papier mâché – how does it know? Or the ability of an egg to become mayonnaise, to go on and on and on transubstantiating a thin stream of oil into a thick emulsion, indefinitely. No one has discovered when a single yolk will get bored and run out of the will or the desire to transform oil. It could conceivably turn the oleaginous universe into a dip. Cooks are always a little unnerved and awed at the alchemy of cooking. You know it will happen, you’ve done it a hundred times, but still the revealed truth of meringue is a dainty relief. Making food out of earth and water and sunlight is a salutary blessing for those who have had their narrow lives made bitter and inedible, and the spell, the concoction, the offering of food is a wholly good thing from compromised hands. There is no part of it that is contaminated or equivocal or duplicitous. To feed someone is to make them, to wish them well, to add to their lives, to offer them warmth and comfort, well-being and hospitality. To give someone a diamond is to own them, decorate them, make them richer. But a baked potato gives them another day of life.
To feed someone is to make them, to wish them well, to add to their lives, to offer them warmth and comfort, well-being and hospitality.
Eight years after I got sober I was married again, to Amber who didn’t cook. Didn’t need the therapy. Didn’t have to bake the four-and-twenty black thoughts into a pie, had better things to do with her time than make lists of roots. She was starting a company. I was happy to stay home, to draw and write and cook. We had a baby daughter. One Sunday lunch an old friend of hers who had just got engaged complained that her perspective mother-in-law was offering to send her to a cookery school so she’d be able to feed her son in the manner to which he’d been brought up to expect. ‘Take the money and to go Paris for a long weekend and never invite her to dinner,’ I said. Amber, being more practical, suggested I could teach her to cook, and so started the black dog cookery classes. I came up with a ten-week course. Nick had told me that people – particularly men – are put off cooking because the ingredients and the quantum possibilities of combinations seem so daunting, like learning how to be a chemist in the evenings. And men hate being made to feel dumb in front of women. But what you should teach instead are the methods of cooking. There are only a handful of ways to cook anything – fry, grill, boil, poach, braise, roast, bake, acid, moisture vibration. Once you’ve learned the fundamental physics and chemistry, the epicureanism is fun. The first lesson I called ‘What is a kitchen?’ It was about kit. And what you did need and what does it do. Hands up who knows what the two most important bits of kitchen equipment are? They’d guess knives and ovens, pans and fridges. The answer is a chair and a radio. You’re going to spend a lot of time in this room.
I filled my kitchen with ingredients and people who said they wanted to cook for a variety of reasons – because they wanted to impress girls, feed their families, beguile their husband’s boss, for a hobby… And we’d cook – all together. No one was allowed to write anything down, we never used recipes. You don’t cook words, you cook ingredients. Mostly it was at least edible. Sometimes astonishing, occasionally laughable, like the attempt at spaghetti with chocolate sauce. I can still taste the lamb cooked in hay – one of the rare occasions when organic really makes a serious difference – you have to get hay that’s untreated with pesticide. Best to go to a pet shop and ask for hamster bedding. And the dish I made up – lamb’s brains and oysters poached in ham stock and vermouth.
The distinction between a cook and a chef is that a chef does it for money, the cook does it for love.
We would make things that came with moral health warnings: there were dishes that I insisted you should only make for people you were prepared to go all the way with because it was unfair to lead them on with food that made promises you wouldn’t honour. I told the boys that their kitchens were closer to their bedrooms than any restaurant – it was only partly facetious. You should never cook for people you don’t like but you should always cook for strangers, never for someone whose life you don’t want to improve or wish well. Who you cook for is as important as what you cook. In the classes we cooked for each other, and everybody could invite a friend, a partner, a date for eleven o’clock, and we’d eat whatever it was we’d come up with. They were some of the most engrossing and hilarious kitchen suppers. I discovered through teaching that I was a good cook. The distinction between a cook and a chef is that a chef does it for money, the cook does it for love. I also discovered through teaching that a good cook isn’t just about the quality of food you produce, that’s plainly part of it, but it’s in the making that cooks attain goodness. It’s the pleasure, the relief and the absolution of allowing things to be greater than the sum of their parts. Sometimes what you end up with is miraculous, sometimes it’s just edible, but cooking is constant, continuous, a lifelong occupation, as unending as the washing-up. You may eat a chef’s food once or twice, the cook’s you eat every day. The goodness of their craft is life.
What I cook and my commitment to the preparation of dinner changed when I had children. When Flora and Alasdair were born I understood that what a cook makes isn’t simply lunch and dinner. It is the lives that sit and eat. I know, I know, the constant comparisons between cooking and theology are awkward... no, they’re eye-rollingly pretentious. Bottom line, food is a chemical and physical composting of sunlight into shit. It is basic and practical. A recipe isn’t a philosophy, canapés aren’t prayers or mantras, they’re cheese biscuits. And food is fuel. At its most hoity, it is social decoration and all the other stuff is just middle-class intellectualising, over-wrought twaddle, and of course that’s perfectly correct. That is what food is as well. But it’s everything else too. From salt and vinegar crisps to the body and blood of Christ, from mother’s milk to your final sip of poppied morphine, food is the metaphor and the simile and the parable of every important moment in our lives.
This is an edited extract from Pour Me: A Life by A.A. Gill (Hachette Australia, $23.99, pbk).
