My phone sent me absolutely mad during the first lockdown in 2020. It was my primary form of connecting with other human beings but it was all very slippery and unreliable: I sent messages to friends that were seen but not responded to, made contributions to group chats that were ignored and at times these gaps and silences made me feel as if I didn’t exist. After this existential doubt came the second guessing and the ‘pull yourself together’ self-scolding: At least I'm not sick/ homeschooling my kids/ caring for a sick relative/ grieving a loved one - all this time to myself is a privilege! And it was true – I wasn’t dealing with any of those things - but that didn’t take away from the fact that I was definitely going mad.
It took me about a month to face up to this fact at which point I deleted WhatsApp (for nearly two years!) and started to follow a series of extremely rigid daily routines designed to root myself in my lived physical reality - this was, after all, the only thing that was in my control at that point. I did yoga – one of Adriene’s sun salutations – every morning then sat in the garden to eat my breakfast, but it was the pre-bedtime rituals that were really crucial: a hot bath, after which I did some more yoga, then sat on the sofa and drank a cup of herbal tea while listening to an audiobook of something familiar (Persuasion, Wolf Hall and The Line of Beauty are the ones I remember). Then bed and, if all went to plan, sleep, often to the soundtrack of some wacky ASMR recording or other, of bed sheets being smoothed down or hair being brushed (I was going crazy from not being touched at this point, and ASMR sort of helped. My god what a wild time)
I was supposed to be finishing my PhD but like everyone at my university had been granted an unconditional 6 month extension due to Covid and I do see now that I was lucky to have that space to focus on becoming more mentally strong. And as well as all that babyish sensory self-soothing, I did quite a lot of cooking. Complicated recipes were good; I found a a sweet spot one day while making Nigel Slater’s pear and ginger cake and listening to an episode of This American Life, a crazy story about a feather heist. I was absorbed! Not checking my phone for messages or doom scrolling. Just doing and concentrating on a task.
‘Quick and easy’ is an overused phrase in the world of food writing, applied to curries, chocolate cake, bread dough and so on. The actual speed and ease of such recipes is often debatable – they might require kitchen equipment you don’t own and ingredients you can’t find or afford. A well-known purveyor of the ‘quick and easy’ is Jamie Oliver, with his series of 30 Minute/ 15 Minute/ 5 Ingredient books and TV shows and it’s unsurprising that most of these recipes take a lot longer than billed according to many people who’ve cooked them. Worse in my book is that they’re dependent on a whole load of expensive, ready prepared, and packaging-heavy ingredients. I admit to a residual and deeply unfashionable fondness for Jamie, but it sets my teeth on edge watching him tear open all those plastic packets of pre-chopped veg on the telly. I'm all for convenience but not in the service of a gimmick, which all this seems to be. And anyway sometimes I don’t want quick and easy. I want slow and complicated – like Nigel’s pear and ginger cake and all its different processes – and I want new, hard-to-find ingredients. A little quest.
One of the many things I love about Meera Sodha is that hers are recipes to concentrate on. And while they can often be cooked in quite a short time, there is none of your casual, bish bash bosh chucking a bit of this or that in. When I cook Meera I get out my teaspoon and tablespoon measures and read her instructions closely. Is it a low or a moderate heat for the groundnut oil? Am I mincing or chopping my garlic? Exactly what kind of chillies do I need? Some of this, I think, is because the methods and ingredients she writes about are slightly unfamiliar to me– Indian, Sri Lankan and Sichuan dishes that are outside the modern British-European cookery comfort zone I've occupied since I started cooking in the 90s and which supermarkets and food programmes have generally catered to. Were they recipes I’d grown up with I might take more risks and cut more corners. But as it is I follow her recipes almost to the absolute letter.
I came across her recipe for dry fried beans with minced tofu in the Guardian Food supplement one Saturday in 2021 when I was still living in Belfast; I'd eaten and loved the meaty minced pork equivalent in Sichuan restaurants and had been meaning to cook one of Sodha’s recipes for ages, so decided to give it a go. Tofu is easily obtained these days, even in chicken goujon-loving Belfast (iykyk), but for Sichuan peppercorns and Shaoxing wine I needed to go to Asia Supermarket on Ormeau Embankment. A trip to Asia Supermarket always felt like a proper outing to me; from my house, I could walk most of the way there along the peaceful eastern bank of the Lagan, and during lockdown when shops were the only public buildings open it became a bit of a destination for me and one of my friends, as we went there a few times to catch up while we slowly walked the aisles. Opened in 1983 by the Pau brothers who moved to Belfast from Hong Kong in the 1970s and now occupying a huge warehouse-style premises, it’s a Belfast institution and I am desperate for somebody to write a social history of the place, as it seems to tell so many hidden stories about the city, the north of Ireland generally and its relationships with food and migration (histories that are overshadowed, though not necessarily unrelated to, that conflict that everyone knows about.) So I went to Asia Supermarket, found what I needed, and the ingredients sat in my cupboard until I was ready to make the dish.
In Small Fires Rebecca May Johnson explores how through the repeated cooking of the same recipe you can chart moods and think things through. And like her tomato sauce, Meera’s beans and minced tofu has become something of a totem for me and my life over the last few years. It calms and absorbs me and is the recipe I turn to when I need to settle my mind. The evening I first made it was an anxious, solitary Friday; I had been in a text exchange that was abruptly cut off and I was checking my phone every 30 seconds to see if this person had replied, while simultaneously hating myself for doing it. I sent a follow-up message and another one, then saw that the messages were not getting through. Their phone must be off. Intolerable! The phone madness had surfaced.
Cigarettes are my first port of call at such times, so I went out to the Centra and spent 14 quid I didn’t have on twenty Marlboro Lights. I must’ve had a drink as well, though I can’t remember what, and while I’d earlier planned to make a wholesome evening of my cooking, this sudden spike of anxiety, of obsessive phone-checking, put the whole thing in jeopardy. Fuck this, I thought for a while, I’ll just have twenty fags for my dinner. I eventually pulled together the will from somewhere, though – I can’t remember how, maybe I was just hungry, or some self-care impulse won out – and began making the dish. It was perfectly complicated: the tofu needed to be minced with mushrooms in a food processor (I used the small chopper attachment that came with my stick blender), the beans needed to be fried in hot oil in batches then put aside, the Sichuan peppercorns needed to be crushed in a pestle and mortar. All these processes had to be done quite quick succession so it needed absolute concentration. It calmed me down. And was also an absolute banger of a dish.
I turned to it again last Friday night after a bit of a shitty week – nothing dramatic, just professional frustrations/ disappointments and the most tedious, low-level but energy-sapping cold I just could not shake off. I could feel my dissatisfied brain leaning towards phone-checking mania but I told myself Enough! And put the object out of reach. I was missing some of the ingredients this time – mushrooms and an electric blending tool (most of my kitchen equipment is still in storage in Belfast) but had everything else. I also had something to listen to, an episode of the New Yorker Fiction podcast: Lucinda Rosenfeld reading a short story by Annie Ernaux and discussing it with editor Debora Treisman. I bashed up the peppercorns, and painstakingly broke up and crumbled the tofu by hand and as I did so listened to these brilliant women discussing a brilliant woman and just generally being brilliant. I’d hit another sweet spot.