Lindsey Bareham's A Wolf In The Kitchen was my second cookbook, and if I wasn't so obsessed with food it could well have been the last, because any cook in possession of it could feed him/herself and others quite happily, with plenty of variety and not an absurd cost, for years, a lifetime perhaps.
My mother bought it me when I was at university. It wasn't just any university. Oh no. It was a university that hated its students so much it thought they should survive on the worst food in the country. A combination of hideous, inedible, overboiled shite pretentiously served en masse in a big fancy hall by
Hispanics (an event pretentiously known as "hall") and whatever you could cook on the one (sometimes two) electric plug in hob things provided to share between about twenty students.
They obviously thought we were far too interested in studying to worry about little things like EATING. Fools. That place was Cambridge. Boy it was crap.
Instead we fashioned our own diet.
There was no breakfast. We got up too late. Obv.
Lunch was an over-sized tuna and sweetcorn baguette from Peppercorns on Rose Crescent. Apart from the happy term I spent helping a medic out with his dissertation (I sat in a box pressing buttons next to different coloured lights for a fiver an hour). After which Rishi took me to Pizza Hut so he could eat the all you can eat buffet and I could have refills of Diet Coke.
Dinner, if we went to hall, was a big bowl of tortilla chips and two bottles of wine from Ha Ha's. Whenever we got to hall there was a queue, so we talked obnoxiously loudly for a while about how shite the place was, and how we wouldn't pay 10p for such crap (even though we already had, because you had to pay for all these awful meals up front), and then if the glares were too bad when we tried to push in, we went down the road to the bar where you got a bottle of vino and a plate of tortilla chips for a fiver before 7pm).
Or cartons of Covent Garden soup, if we were in a healthy stage. Preceded by a Mr Motivator video. Yes, a video. And yes: it was Mr Motivator.
Or we ate out at the Dome or Pizza Express. Massive spendthrifts of students we were. It was years later I learnt that everyone else was spending either the money their parents gave them or a student loan. I was the only dummy binning both and ending up in agonising debt. But then again, I did get to go on clubbing weekends around the country and drink the wine and eat the cake in Cambridge. Rather than either/or. Never really been an either/or person.
A midday fry up. Made with crazed control-freakery by AC to everyone's perfect specifications. She could get orders for nine different fry ups exactly right, for everyone, at the same time and all warm.
Sundays were white bread, ham and crisp sandwiches. Dairylea Dunkers. Washed down with white wine.
When we were stoned in Guy's room, we ate Sunbreak biscuits, or whatever his grandparents had packed in the latest food package.
When we were stoned in Jon's room, we ate whatever his mum had packed in the latest food package.
And then there was A Wolf In The Kitchen, from which, as far as I can remember, I cooked three things.
Sweetcorn fritters - still a favourite of mine. Though I usually make courgette fritters now.
Pea dhal with white fish. As you can imagine, a winner.
A lamb and apricot stew. Also great.
But I always looked at the book, and always planned to cook epic feasts. Did this book set the pattern for how I would treat each of the many, many cookbooks I would buy in the decade to come? Is there something deeper to be read into this, about making plans you never execute?
Or is it just about my greed being so intense that even I can't service it?
Who even cares. What I do know is that this is the best introduction to cooking anyone could hope for. It runs through quick dishes from Italy, North Africa, China, India and south-east Asia, with brief explanations (nothing too taxing for student brains). It isn't intimidating, but is authorative. Unlike Delia, who I do respect for her contribution to teaching us how to cook, and who this book recommends you read, there is nothing "teachy" about it. It's just: here's the food, cook it if you fancy.
The first thing it does is explain how to make yourself a proper tomato sauce, while most students were dicking about with those gross one-pot Dolmio things in little plastic saucers. And while most student cookbooks were suggesting a good way to feed yourself was to take three slices of plastic white bread, paste together with some of that putty supermarkets call "sandwich filling", and deep-fry the lot in a freshly-mixed Pot Noodle seasoned with mixed herbs.
I salute Lindsey Bareham. But at the same time it was nice to wake up knowing you could eat a fry-up, three Irish coffees, two Nadia's white and dark chocolate slices, a pizza, seven alcopops, a pizza/tortilla chips for dinner then chips at 3am, and not put on any weight.
No comments:
Post a Comment