Long before the age of the takeaway (unless you include the much feted but generally disappointing British delicacy, fish and chips), and the malign influence of the microwave TV dinner, most people cooked their own food. I came from a working family, one of three sons so you can imagine that home-cooked family meals were a focal point for filling a belly.
My mother coming from an Irish background did great slow cook stews and casseroles and my father with his half Chinese roots added a distinctly pleasant mix of other more exotic ingredients and spices to our dinner table.
We were caught between the axis of rice and potatoes and both are staples of my cooking to this day.
My brothers and I share fond memories of Saturday visits to my Chinese grandmother who bustled around her chaotic kitchen with its encrusted gas cooker (which she lit with an antediluvian flint wheel), and enormous enamel sink complete with dripping tap to create masterpieces like char siu pork, and intricate fried rice (move over Uncle Roger). Another great favourite was her signature banana cake (this humble pudding as you are probably aware, has been raised to new heights during the Covid lockdowns) washed down with diabetes inducing sweet chai using condensed milk, of course (the same drink she served my one-leg-down, bed bound diabetic grandfather topped with a few saccharine tablets for good measure).
Like all nostalgic memories, it wasn’t all as good as remembered but for its ability to gather a family around the table, there was little to compete with good home cooked food. Since my mother spent a fair bit of her day in the kitchen, I was curious to see how things were put together. By the time I was 18, I was ready to apply the lessons learned in the kitchen in the next phase of my culinary journey at university.
So convinced was I of the charms of good food, I recall that in my first year I had invited an attractive blonde study mate called Claire to enjoy a carefully-prepared meal at my shared digs. Bedding was changed, the table was laid but I wasn’t. Perhaps I should have gone for the oysters instead of chicken? It’s all a matter of conjecture now.
On the side topic of aphrodisiacs, those horn-inducing magic foodstuffs, I’ve often wondered why oysters are on the list. The closest I’ve ever got to one is in oyster sauce (which is of course an incredible flavour-booster) but I struggle to understand how a sediment-filtering bivalve which threatens food poisoning at every turn and has the consistency of phlegm could inspire anything other than revulsion.
If I could offer any advice on the subject, I would humbly tender the tonic effects of dark chocolate (it’s not just for Valentines), the mood boosting delights of saffron and, depending on the legal status in the country where you live, Cannabis Sativa in edible or combustible form.
But back to my reflections on cooking, I can hand on heart state that cooking for me is an everyday act of creation and sharing as powerful as any bond of blood or oath. From the hectic spin of sandwiches, frothing coffee and frying eggs in the morning, to the noonday meal of refried rice and veggies, to the set piece bravuras made for dear friends and family, the alchemy of cooking is its ability to bring people together around a table again and again, to transform hunger into satiety.
My favourite time to cook is Saturday afternoon — without time pressure, the hours pass pleasantly as you do the food prep, reveling in the cut and thrust of a good blade against crisp vegetables and the scent plumes of frying spices and oil. For me, it’s a form of meditation that ends in a meal on the table. As I grow older, I like to layer the table with smaller dishes in the manner of dim sum or tapas and often blend different national dishes to fit. I don’t like the constraint of the measuring cup or the lockstep of one national cuisine, but I do gravitate towards East Asian and South East Asian cooking for their complexity and spicing.
I make no claim to being a great cook, but I love to see people eat well and am happy when the sum of my daily meditations is received with gratitude — it’s the greatest reward possible. I recall a conversation I had once with a Michelin-awarded Finnish chef about the importance of food and cooking. His enthusiasm for good ingredients and the act of cooking was unbounded but he noted wryly that no matter how well made or presented it is, in 24 hours it’s all shit. True that.
I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t add a note of urgency in my musings. We are most likely living in the last decade of food abundance and the specter at the table is climate change. The Cavendish banana you are eating or turning into a cake is an endangered species. The great rice crops watered by the melting snows of the Himalayan mountains may yet wither as global warming advances and so too, the great global staple, wheat.
A recent report on global food production states that one-third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted globally on its journey from farm to fork, which amounts to about 1.3 billion tonnes per year. Make this part of your daily meditation when you raise your fork or your chopstick to your mouth and honor the food you eat for hunger, like gluttony is a crime against humanity.
