Cooking

This dish is refreshing and super yummy. It’s a recipe that Didas (my Indian grandmother) taught me. The zesty tomato flavour makes my mouth water. You can’t go wrong with this curry. Everyone loves it and always asks for more! It’s comforting and warm, especially when it’s cold outside during Christmas time. Cook the dish like a prayer. The more you enjoy the process, the better it will taste. You can use the same recipe with different meat, or try it with vegetables. Make sure you taste the sauce as you cook, and add more spices if you desire. It’s even more fun to cook with the song ‘Curry’ by Bip Ling in the background.

In the past few weeks, on three separate occasions, I have met three different women who for years (one for more than 30 years) volunteered for the Samaritans. All three have now quit. One, Sarah Anderson, said: ‘Chad Varah [the founder] must be spinning in his grave.’ The Samaritans has changed, they say. It still provides a vital service, being the only 24/7 helpline for potential suicides or other desperate people — but it’s become a one-number call-centre, where the call goes to the next available volunteer, probably hundreds of miles away. Face-to-face conversations are now rare, and they’ve given up their old ‘absolute confidentiality’ policy.

Mary Berry’s dependable The Aga Book — a book of the last century and part of my kitchen library — is full of the good sense of a domestic science instructor. There’s little hint Mary would later be crowned glam granny celebrity judge on TV’s The Great British Bake Off; neat as a pin in floral jacket, tough but twinkly, fair but firm. The iron hand in a pastry glove. Post-Bake Off, she is still unstoppable. There has been a surge of cookery programmes, accompanying hardbacks and further explorations into her life, her garden, her travels — recently being zoomed around Rome on a motorbike. Wherever we turn, there smiles Mary, instructing us beneath eyelashes rivalling those of Barbara Cartland.

It was a close-run thing for my friend who’s having a new kitchen installed in her house in Chiswick. After a persuasive campaign by her eloquent architect, who has an induction hob in his own house and loves it for its clean lines and hyper-efficiency, she had got as far as ordering one for herself. Having placed the order, she couldn’t sleep. She tossed and turned, worrying about the imminent change to her cooking life that the induction hob would (literally) induce, let alone the need to buy a whole new set of ‘induction-ready’ pans. No more knobs to turn a fraction to the left while frying an omelette, ever again? Just a plus and minus touch-screen sign to jab with the ball of the index finger, 9-8-7-6-5-4 and down to 3?

Christmas in our family seems to guarantee tears and tantrums as well as jingle bells and jollity. Indeed, in my childhood, ‘feeling Christmassy’ meant feeling thoroughly overwrought or bad tempered, the antithesis of the ‘Christmas Spirit’. I think my father invented it when my mother, who was a terrible cook, spent all day making marmalade to give as Christmas presents and was then beside herself with anger when she burnt the lot. My earliest Christmas disaster was my first attempt at cake icing. I’d proudly come home from school with a Christmas cake. It was covered with smooth royal icing on which I’d painted the Three Kings — but I’d omitted the teaspoon of glycerine in the icing which would have stopped it drying to concrete.

I’m cooking almost full-time for my poor old Mum and learning on the job: shepherd’s pie, roast pork, cauliflower cheese. I’m slaving over the stove and recipe book for hours and she hardly touches any of it. ‘Come on. Eat up. Do you good,’ I say, not unconscious of the role reversal. The other day I tried a slow-cooked beef casserole. The BBC website advised browning the meat first. Sheer political correctness. I simply lobbed the ingredients in a pot, poured on the boiling water, shoved the pot in the oven, got in my car and drove to the pub. About once a week, I drive over to my petrolhead friend Charlie’s posh little village pub for six o’clock. His village is colonised by wealthy and well-fed Londoners who are all in love with the pub.

If Health and Safety is (are?) your thing, you must always be dreaming, like Alexander the Great, of new worlds to conquer. The next one, I predict, will be cooking at home. Recently I have noticed talk about the bad effect of ‘particles’ produced by hot food cooked in or on ovens. The sequence will go thus: a study will prove that people who cook at home inhale more particles than others, reducing their life expectancy. A woman seeking divorce will win a higher settlement because, she says, she was forced to spend hours of each day in such dangerous culinary conditions, suffering various ‘harms’. Then it will be shown that children are the innocent victims of passive cooking. Ovens, except for microwaves, will be forbidden in new-build homes.

We keep being incited to find it heartwarming that Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley were known as the Chuckle Brothers. But what were they chuckling about? Their shared success at outwitting the British state. Both, though for opposite reasons, had made their careers out of harassing Britain, and both, in their later years, had acquired money, power and status by doing so. In the case of McGuinness and his gang, Britain greatly underplayed its hand. Having militarily beaten the IRA, successive British governments could have marginalised them, but instead they accepted them as authentic representatives of the Irish people who had to be included in any settlement. The process for doing this systematically disadvantaged the moderates and bigged up the thugs.

After the Fawlty Towers incident, I decided it was best to research the origin and extraction of all future B&B guests on arrival, before the builder boyfriend got stuck in. You may remember that he accidentally on purpose got a piece of gaffa tape caught on his top lip and held some ceiling felt at a jaunty angle during the stay of the Airbnb customers from Bavaria. Thankfully, they were in another room and didn’t see but I had to shush him because he was making a bad job of whispering, ‘Don’t mention Brexit! I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it!’ A girl from Taiwan and a gentleman from Zimbabwe then came and went with no major incidents. But when a young chap from Israel booked in I thought I had better be careful.

Chefs have a problem. Think of much of the best food you have ever eaten. Caviar, English native oysters, sashimi, foie gras, truffles, jamon iberico, grouse, golden plover, properly hung Scotch beef; Stilton, the great soft cheeses: all have one point in common. They require minimal intervention from the kitchen. With the assistance of one female sous-chef, even I could roast a grouse. The chef would come into his own over pudding, and indeed with Welsh rarebit, but one can understand why this does not provide enough outlet for creativity. There are always the great French bourgeois dishes, which few of us eat often enough. Navarin of lamb, blanquette de veau, suprêmes de volaille, daube de boeuf: all splendid. But they are not a new challenge to a cook.

I enjoy reading reviews of kitchen gadgetry. Clever new kitchen products are often under-appreciated. Many rituals around food preparation are intended to signal personal effort, rather than to produce edible food with a minimum of fuss. There is hence a tendency towards bogus authenticity among amateur cooks which causes them to eschew labour-saving devices in favour of doing everything in a faux-Victorian fashion. Professional chefs, who must produce food in quantity every day, do not suffer this delusion: one Michelin-starred chef, when asked to name his favourite item of kitchen equipment, replied ‘the microwave’. Two new devices I particularly recommend are the air-fryer and the soupmaker. Both are commonplace in parts of Asia but were until recently unknown in Britain.