Kitchenella: The secrets of women: heroic, simple, nurturing cookery - for everyone. Rose Prince
been the unwritten, hand-me-down knowledge given to children by their mothers.
If this knowledge is not already there, Kitchenella, the heroic, modest feminine cook is a workable surrogate. Useful good ideas can become easily lost. Unless passed on they float in the ether, the verbal tradition looking for a receptive ear. The pity is that ideas can disappear forever, because they are typically the notions of people who would never have thought to write them down.
By the time I left school, I knew what I was bad at, but I was aware that information about cooking, especially when it linked to something good, would always stick in my mind. I am not even sure how much of it got there, or when it began to fill my head. Food was important in my family, discussed often. Snippets, thoughts, exclamations of pleasure – clocked. A mistake: a burned pan, an overdone roast – registered.
This is a recipe book but it is also a book of answers and ideas, a conversation between people who share an interest in solving problems. Much of what is inside its covers has been learnt from others: people I love, writers I read and individuals I meet every day. Good food should naturally lead to a moment of chat, a chance to ask, ‘How did you do that?’ The opposite is silence. Listen carefully for Kitchenella’s voice, though. It is not the loudest. She won’t show off, but nor will she bully you. She just wants to leave her mark: indelible, delicious influence.
QUICK, CHEAP AND FILLING
Lettuce and courgette ‘butter’ soup
Toasted garlic bread and squash soup
Golden broth with parsley and pearl barley
Autumn vegetable ‘harvest’ soup with grains
Mushroom broth with sausage, oats and parsley
Leek and potato soup with cream
Green cabbage and pickled duck garbure
Chickpea and tomato ten-minute soup
Clam, cider and potato chowder
Coconut spiced soup with chicken
Roughly mashed haddock and potato with spring onion
Mashed sweet potato with green chilli and coriander relish
Spiced butter and yellow split peas
Instant polenta and grilled polenta, with variations
Is that the time? Time to cook – again? Keeping up a supply of food, among everything that needs doing every day, is a lot to ask anyone new to cooking. When you decide that good food matters, you enter a conflicting world. Loving food is bittersweet. A passion that is painful without guidance from someone who really knows how hard it can be. You need someone to say, ‘I know. I know what to do – it won’t be showy or hard to make. It is not the kind of supper that costs a lot or needs a trip to a special shop. It will not mean you have to grow your own, rear pigs or catch a mackerel on a line. But everyone will be full, and remember how good it was.’
These are the secrets of women for you to use every day when it is time to cook. Big, good dishes in one pot to get ready quickly: modest, nurturing, heroic food that solves a daily dilemma.
Reality, pitched against aspiration. That is the sum of my daily life. Of course I would like to bake cupcakes or cure hams all day, but the truth is that under the roof of my home, the daily summit of my cooking ambition is simply to provide enough good food for us to continue to exist. It is not that I do not make forays into more extreme areas of cookery – it is my job to do that – but the recipes I want are very different from those I need. My dilemma, shared by millions, is that I am short of time, I do not have unlimited funds to spend on food yet I – and everyone in my home – need real nourishment.
What can I make that is fast, economical and filling? This is the trinity of subsistence for most people in full-time employment, those who turn the key in the front door in the early evening aware that their day’s work is a long way from done. Not everyone feels this way. That is why ready meals were invented. Yes! Those things that taste good while watching a cookery show on telly!
Knowing how to make soups with delicate white beans, an ingredient that is rather wholesome yet seems so glamorous, so well dressed, when eaten with transparent splinters of crisp smoked bacon. Understanding how to cook a pan of faultless, smooth mashed potato, or make a dish of spiced pulses that tickles with interest. A lot of us want to do the right thing but not all of us have the tools to do it. There are many lost domestic skills, but while life will go on without darning the children’s socks every night, it is threatened by the loss of home cooking that uses fresh ingredients.
More bizarrely, this is not the result of there not being enough to eat. In the West, the loss of cooking skills does not cause starvation – but it is the root of serious ill-health epidemics. A few clever ways to feed ourselves, our families and friends with food that is cheap to buy, quick to make and fills the tummy with goodness would do much to change lives – and that is what this chapter is about.
The verbal tradition
I am a self-taught cook and I, too, have my disasters, some of them highly embarrassing. But I love to pick up secrets from others. There are people to meet in every part of this book whose knowledge I want to pass on to you. Some were women who have been very much part of my life, like my mother, a perfectionist