This month The Dialectic publishes its 200th post. Two hundred! Can you believe it?
To mark the occasion I thought I'd take a look back through the archive and share something fun from yesteryear. If you remember this article from August 2023, thanks for sticking around. If you were subscribed at the time but don't remember it, you probably didn't read it. Thanks a bunch! Do you know how much effort it takes to write this stuff?! If you're a new subscriber and you've never seen it before, good isn't it? And there's a lot more where this came from!
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This article is dedicated to
who, judging by the food pictures she posts on Notes, is an excellent cook.Love,
Jules
I COULD NEVER call myself a foodie. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate a nice meal, especially if it’s been cooked by someone else, but I’m not inclined to think about food very much at all. I do try to shop ethically if I can and I think about animal welfare when buying eggs, meat and fish. I’d like to go vegetarian but my husband isn’t keen and there’s no way I’m cooking us separate meals. I have tried instead to reduce our meat consumption, and when we eat out I sometimes choose a vegetarian option. Incredibly, I have finally found a vegetarian mince that he likes. Feeding my husband a meal that contains neither meat nor fish is a bit like trying to get a dog to take medication: he eyes it with suspicion, and after a dubious swallow he gives me a reproachful look that says “How could you do this to me?” But he actively likes this mince, so that’s progress.
A few years ago I had the idea that I might try to improve my cookery skills. I can cook, but in a purely utilitarian sense. If you were to come over for a meal and you’re not too finicky you would probably leave full and happy. If however you are a faddy eater, best leave it; I only have a limited repertoire of dishes fit to offer guests, and those with standards higher than “tasty” risk disappointment. The food will be plentiful, and leftovers will be polished off the following day. The wine will flow as freely as required, and if I don’t have advance knowledge of your preferences I’ll just provide a few choices of beverage, alcoholic and non-alcoholic, and hope for the best. My aim is to provide a homely welcome in a comfortable atmosphere. I can’t realistically hope for more than that given my skill levels.
To cut to the chase I didn’t bother with the cooking. In my defence there were other calls upon my time and I just couldn’t dredge up the enthusiasm. I’m not as bad as someone I once knew, who claimed not to like food at all. He assured me that he ate merely to stave off malnutrition and death, and I never saw him dine on anything more elaborate than a jacket potato with cheese or beans. To relieve the unrelenting dietary tedium he may have occasionally tried cheese and beans, but I can’t say for sure: it was a long time ago. I have never met anyone before or since who was so indifferent to food. I, on the other hand, do enjoy food, it’s just that I have lots of interests and they don’t include cooking. I think it’s an important skill, sometimes an art, and I have occasionally attempted more advanced recipes myself, but I usually get something slightly wrong. I just haven’t got a feel for it. Some people talk about food as if it is a religion and I love their enthusiasm, but it is an enthusiasm that I shall never share.
My husband is different. You can tell by the way he cooks that he does have aptitude. On paper, his culinary skills should not be all that much better than mine given our experience, but there is a world of difference in the way we handle ingredients. Having assembled the elements of my speciality, a dish that goes by the deservedly uninspiring name of Fish Tray, I approach the oven like a marathon runner reaching the finishing line. After shoving the roasting tray onto the rack, I turn the dial to “high” and close the door, perhaps a little too energetically. I resist the temptation to kick it shut. With my heel. It’s fair to say that I take very little pleasure in the preparation, and even less in the clearing up. It’s all just a tiresome means to an end.
Contrast this with the preparation style of my other half. He takes great care, ensuring that every morsel is given the respect and attention it deserves, from the chopping of a carrot to the blending of a marinade. He works with precision, checking on the food throughout the cooking process. What’s that all about? No, I’m only joking. Of course I check on food when it’s cooking! Usually.
If he has a fault it’s that he’s a bit of a messy cook. I suppose you shouldn’t question a genius at work so I’m not complaining. Perhaps that’s my problem: I’m too tidy, cleaning and wiping as I go, and the end product probably suffers as a result. After he’s cooked a meal the kitchen sometimes looks as if he’s thrown the ingredients into a centrifuge and sprayed them around the room. If any food falls on the floor he will immediately tread in it, and oven gloves and tea towels have been known to end up looking like side dishes, decorated with gobbets of this and spatters of that and drizzled with the sauce du jour. Leaving the kitchen looking like a Jackson Pollock action painting might disqualify him from a job at La Gavroche but nobody’s perfect, and it has to be said that the meals he produces often taste a whole lot better than mine. Perhaps it’s this focused approach that takes his food to another level. He keeps his eye on the prize and the devil take the scouring pad. No matter that I need a step-ladder to finish the washing up.
He has a couple of specialities, both of which are Jamie Oliver dishes. See? He even has recipe books and a favourite chef! One is pork, potatoes, pears and parsnips baked with garlic and rosemary. The other is cod baked with pine nuts, bacon, runner beans and halved lemons which, when baked, acquire a jammy texture1. The superbly sour, fruity, jammy liquid is squeezed over the food before serving. It would drown the taste buds of the Venus de Milo. Jammy Lemons. That should be the title of a song. Jammy Lemons. It’s already a poem.
He watches Masterchef - The Professionals. Sometimes I watch it with him. It’s a good show but it seems to me that being a chef is a dog’s life. These people seem to work twenty-three hours a day just to get a Michelin star that will be yanked from their dry, cracked hands as soon as they reduce their working hours to twenty-two. No wonder some chefs don’t stop screaming. Over the course of a series, Masterchef contestants change from bouncy go-getters to hollow-eyed zombies, finally deliquescing into puddles of sweat and tears as they wilt under the gaze of the judges like overcooked spinach. By the end of the series they look like residents of Bedlam. Those kitchens are torture chambers, and the dishes created in them are so advanced that they look as if they should be exhibited at Tate Modern, not scoffed down with a tumbler of water. I’ve seen gifted contestants make indescribable meals but, well, in the end it’s just food, isn’t it? I can’t help thinking that all this fuss is slightly distasteful when a good number of the planet’s human population is, at any given moment, wondering where their next meal is coming from.
Oh well, less of the killjoy. I’m just glad that my husband is happy to cook our Christmas dinner. As sous-chef my only responsibilities will be gravy, table setting and sundry ad hoc tasks - nothing too taxing. But while we’re on the subject, why do people make such a fuss about gravy? I’ve been making it for years with very little trouble, so here’s a tip for dealing with an attack of the blobs, those floury lumps that no amount of pounding can destroy. Do not despair. Once your gravy has the desired thickness, simply decant from saucepan to jug via a strategically placed sieve. Et voilà: lumps in sieve, liquid in jug. Guests will marvel at its perfection - just hide the sieve and take the applause.
Impressed? I thought so. Perhaps I should apply for Masterchef…
If you’d like to try this recipe it’s in Jamie Oliver’s The Return of the Naked Chef, p.150: Tray-baked cod with runner beans, pancetta and pine nuts.
Author’s recipe for Fish Tray supplied on request.
Okay look, I'm Italian so food is life and all that. But I do respect and understand (grudgingly) that it's not for everyone. And cooking can be super simple. Last night, for example, I grabbed a tim of tomatoes and a piece of guanciale (speck) from a larger piece that I keep vacuum sealed in the fridge. Matchsticked the guanciale, fried until crispy, removed from the pan keeping the rendered fat in the pan, added the tinned tomatoes, chili, all the while the pasta water was boiling, then the pasta. Put the cooked guanciale back in the sauce, chucked the pasta into the sauce to cook another minute or so, stirred in some parmeggiano and that's it. That's it Jules! That's one of Rome's famous dishes, pasta amatricciana. You won't know yourself.
Love this. Beautiful piece and highly entertaining. I'm with you, Jules. The culinary arts are not for me and ironically, I even co-wrote a cookbook. Lol. My mother was a gourmet cook and I grew up watching her wile away the away the hours in the kitchen blanching and chopping and whisking. She's 86 now and no longer has the energy to prepare lavish meals, but she micromanages everyone else from her perch at the kitchen table. "You have to put the lettuce leaves in an ice bath, Hilary, if you want them crisp!" "Make sure that fish pan is very hot or the fish will stick!" There were times when I was so hungry waiting for her to finish cooking a meal, I nearly passed out. As a result of this childhood trauma, I'm all about meals that take about five minutes to prepare. I use a food processor to chop stuff quickly and most of the time, I just eat salad with some protein on top. Jared is like your husband in that he takes his time and chops everything by hand. He's much more precise and therefore, whenever he cooks, it takes him three times as long as it would take me. So yes, I married my mother. But most of the time, he's lazy and just heats up a chicken sausage in a pan, or makes a burrito. I'm vegetarian and he eats fish and poultry, so a lot of the time, we do eat different things.