Ten years ago I didn’t even know how to chop garlic, nor did I care to try. My explicit domestic policies included the refrain I do not cook, or clean, or care. When challenged by a family member I would frown and reply I’m not your housekeeper – I already have a job!
In my mid-twenties Polly predicted I would have an epiphany and be a master chef by age forty, but I always scoffed. Stella later spent a good number of years trying to teach me, supplying tempting treats and training and cookbooks, but again – I never made much progress.
I loved our champagne breakfasts on the beach, but had no inherent capacity to learn how to recreate the experience.
This makes sense since I lacked a sense of smell; food made almost no impression… because I couldn’t taste it.
Right around the time my olfactory capacities were restored I moved to the International District of Seattle, had money for the first time in my adult life. I discovered sushi, the burrito bus, pho, Vietnamese delis, all the wonders of the culinary world that had formerly been beyond imagining.
One year later I moved to a very odd corner of England, where the food lives up to all the bad stereotypes you have ever encountered in the media.
It is true that I have had excellent meals in London, Oxford, Edinburgh, and Bristol. Heck, I’ve even had good food in Margate and Cromer. I recently visited an awesome outdoor market in Norwich – there are high quality options for food in all sorts of unexpected places.
Cambridge is just the city where I live and shop, and thus the place I feel the pleasures and perils of both most keenly. The fact that this particular city fails so spectacularly cannot easily be explained – even my bougie or decadent friends are uneasy when pressed to name a restaurant that is truly worth spending the money on.
This is good in the sense that we all save a lot of money, and inevitably throw more dinner parties.
However. It isn’t just hard to find good salsa; it is nearly impossible to find the constituent elements to make it. Ditto nearly all the staple ingredients I was accustomed to, even in the bland years of greens and tofu.
I’m lucky enough to have the money to scamper off to Rome or Paris or Barcelona (flying to another city is literally cheaper than dinner at the only good local restaurant) when I start to crave the simple delicious foods that Europe offers. Those adventures have been great fun.
But during the course of an average day, I have had to start from scratch, learning not just basic cooking techniques but also conquering major barriers like, you know, the metric system. Four years and four months into this experiment, I still can’t tell you the difference between a gram or kilogram, and I have no idea why some foods are weighed while others are measured, yet I have persevered.
Thanksgiving was of course the main challenge, and Stella came one year to help, Marisa another. Then I was on my own, and somehow managed to pull it off, right down to bribing farmers to scour the countryside for a bird and a pumpkin.
Then I extrapolated that to baking chickens, and making stock, and even soup – loathed all these decades – then tortillas, and onward!
Last night without any particular effort I made a four course dinner featuring a reasonably authentic chili con carne Byron swore was the best meal ever served in England!
I’m sure the compliment was excessive, but it is a dish otherwise not available in any legitimate form on this quadrant of the green island. I’m not bragging – I am, instead, surprised. My mother can assure you that I could barely make toast and certainly didn’t even knew how to cook an egg when I left home.
Of course I still stand by the premise that I am not a servant and will only cook for my own idiosyncratic pleasures, regardless of any other factors.
The fact that I learned how without paying all that much attention is baffling.