A post and a great-looking recipe for fried potatoes with yoghurt and feta sauce on a blog I like very much, The Wednesday Chef, sent me to this book.
The idea is a simple one, but good: many of us do most of our cooking and eating in company. There are spouses and children and colleagues and friends, extended families and book groups and sewing circles. Sometimes though, we find that we have the house to ourselves and it’s dinner time. What to do.
Many people, it turns out, have rituals. Repetition is a comforting thing and when we’re not trying to please anyone else then pleasing ourselves becomes about something other than whatever happens to be in the fridge or fits our repertoire of recipes. This is not a simple book on cooking for one, it’s about food behaviour. A glimpse into other people’s borderline depressive solitary behaviour sounds like a pretty good way to spend a couple of hundred pages to me.
We start with the things that are a bit disgusting. Something called Frito Pie, tinned chilli poured into a bag of tortilla chips (straight into the bag, no messing about with crockery here) sounds popular, as are variations on the cereal theme, drinking too much, tinned fish juice poured onto cottage cheese and bread soaked in flavoured liquids. All pretty bad.
The more elaborate cooks, those who make meals that would seem normal were it not for the repetition or solitary place setting, are examined after that. Men and women are divided into foodie groups and a style begins to emerge. Chillis are pre-eminent. Vegetables are shunned.
Salads are considered, eating standing up is mentioned, then after that I have trouble remembering what came next as this is a book that seriously loses its way after a terribly short time. I think the moment I noticed it was when I saw a note in a recipe that the authors had tidied up the cooking method and offered alternative ingredients. It was turning into a cookbook.
The interviewees started to sound as though they had missed the point. Why would I make just one thing when I have all this, said one, gesturing at the pile of seasonal vegetables they had just bought from a farmers’ market. Perhaps because that’s what I was hoping this book is about, I feel like shouting.
A man who cooks a leg of lamb for himself becomes a meditation on how lamb should be cooked. Farmers’ markets come up again and again, and wine choices appear. Not a survey of the wines drunk by lonely drinkers, but handy little hints on which Californian zinfandel would go well with this or that recipe. I have cookbooks, thank you very much, I didn’t need another.
The ‘we’ in the title, it dawned on me after a few more chapters, is not the universal we, it’s we in the sense of ‘friends of Deborah Madison and Patrick McFarlin. It’s we, the local produce and home cooking enthusiasts of a certain area of south-western America. We the undersigned, not we the people.
There’s a long chapter towards the end on what every young person should know how to cook before they leave home. I really don’t care what Madison and McFarlin think about the value of making chicken stock, I wanted an insight into hidden behaviour.
Disappointing, poorly written and self-centred. Very bad indeed. Looking back at the Wednesday Chef post I see that she was writing about a review for the book in the LA Times. I hope she likes it more than I did if she parts with cash to buy a copy.
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