Tell me what you've been eating!

I eat and cook a lot of really good food in January. Nigella’s cauliflower, turmeric and roast garlic soup. A perfectly cooked sirloin steak with mashed potatoes and red wine gravy. Green lentil soup made with stock from the ham I boil on New Year’s Eve. Pork, clams and pickles at O Cantinho in Stockwell with Jonathan. Sausages, baked potatoes and spinach at home with Hannah. Rich and oozy khachapuri from Aba-Ra! on Brick Lane with Jo. Salt and chilli aubergines and tofu and dry fried noodles from Macau on Ormeau Road in Belfast, a special reunion takeaway with Anna and Alison.  

I also spend a lot of time talking, reading and thinking about food. I guess this is true of all months but friends who are doing Dry January tell me it’s making them obsess about food or think about it differently and we’re all cold and craving comfort, so I do think my attention is heightened by the time of year. Me and my dad tell each other over the phone what we’ve been cooking. I send Frances a picture of a pack of M&S rollitos and ask her if I should have them for my dinner. I swap recipes with people: my friend Claire posts on Instagram about a homemade caponata that she serves for herself on little garlic toasts for dinner and sends me the recipe when I ask her for it (It’s amazing) and I share Nigella’s soup recipe with my dad. I read Layla Schlack on Alica Kennedy’s Desk Dispatch, on Jewish food and its meanings, and Thea Everett on the woeful state of food education in Britain on Vittles. Thea is also doing ‘cheese month’ on her Substack which I follow avidly and inspired by her blue cheese macaroni cheese recipe I make my own version of the dish one night (though fuck it up by using the ‘light’ cheddar I bought at the Co-op by mistake). I never do Dry January but this year I attempt a kind of moderation in and attention to what I drink. I steer clear of martinis, for example, which are usually the absolute best thing for me to have in hand while I cook; for much of the month this is because it’s too cold, but I've also got a lot of shit to sort out at the moment and there is no denying that even one martini at the beginning of the evening gives me a tiny little fuzz in the head the next morning.

For my lunch one day I put together a kind of broth, with chicken stock and mushrooms, a sprig of thyme and a bay leaf. I add some macaroni and remember the Ukrainian student I taught years ago who called them ‘macaronis’. She was in an ESOL class I taught in Islington, run by an organisation which provided services and support for refugees and asylum seekers in a church hall just off Essex Road. Because of the horrific asylum system in this country, many of the students were close to complete destitution and lunch was always provided after class – sometimes this was sandwiches and salads donated by Pret, fine and better than nothing, but sometimes it was something prepared by a member of staff or one of the students, which was generally better. On this occasion my Ukrainian student had prepared a huge pot of meaty broth – I think it was lamb - with vegetables and macaroni and it was so, so good. A week or so later, I'm making a recipe from Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diaries II, angel hair noodles with chicken, lemon and chives, but I don’t have any angel hair and I use macaroni instead. I tweet about how good it is, mentioning my pasta substitution and @-ing Nigel in; he replies – this is in 2014 in the days when such exchanges were still just about possible on that cesspit website – So pleased to hear this. Yes, macaroni a good broth pasta. I am obviously delighted, though I don’t think my student is in need of Nigel’s validation

Food and drink were important in that ESOL work. It’s one of the first topics you cover with a class, as you know everyone will have something to say and contribute, but there’s also that social element. There was another class I taught for parents in a Highbury children’s centre, when one day a student brings in the ingredients to make us all Turkish tea – a çaydanlık, the special double kettle, and a big bag of black tea leaves. She makes the tea in our breaktime, plugging in the kettle in the kitchen that adjoins our classroom. The break is supposed to be fifteen minutes, but I let it run over as we chat and drink and the student gifts me one of those special Turkish tea glasses to take away with me. (I think about that object now: I have no idea where it is, wonder if it survived the carnage of my relationship breakup or if it was one of the many, many household items I abandoned while out of my head with grief)

Food brings us together is a lazy cliché, isn’t it? It’s too sweeping – what does it mean? – and risks sentimentalising a certain type of domestic labour. ‘Recognising cooking as work, and as difficult and as something that cannot always be blithely “lovely” is useful, freeing even.’ That’s from Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires and I think about that line a lot. As with everything, we need to be specific. In those ESOL classes what did food and cooking actually mean? It was generosity, pleasure, skill and community, yes; but it was also work and scarcity and poverty and anxiety, and these things manifest in very particular and individual ways for each person. Since finishing my PhD I bore everyone with my ‘domesticity as methodology’ schtick - I think maybe this wording isn’t quite right, but what I mean is using our domestic lives as a way of understanding the world in general (and domesticity often expresses itself beyond the four walls of a dwelling, as with that Turkish tea and the macaroni lamb broth). When I was interviewing women for my research about home life during the Troubles I always asked where they ate and this usually lead to a whole load of other information, about the arrangement of homes, quality of kitchens and housing, feelings of trust and safety, family dynamics, what was on the TV or radio, gender roles, and of course class and economics.  (I've a chapter in this book that expands on some of this, along with a load of other brilliant scholars and writers – if you’re interested in reading, give me a shout!)

So, yes, let’s not get sentimental, but also let’s recognise that attention to food and how it does or doesn’t enable connection, among many other things, is important. While thinking about this newsletter I've had a line from Mary Oliver’s poem ‘Wild Geese’ going through my head: Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. I've been adapting it, and saying it over and over in my mind like a mantra – tell me about your cooking and I will tell you mine – which sounds facetious but it’s not. I love Mary and I think there’s something in this, in her call to the soft animals of our bodies and and how it fits in with what we’ve been eating and our place in the family of things. What have you been eating?