My neighbour Heather came over to cut herself some fresh mint and stayed to chat with me in the kitchen. She looked at the couscous grains sprinkled with rosewater, the little pyramid of julienned carrots, the golden sultanas plumping up in orange juice, the rinsed baby spinach, the strips of courgette (zucchini) marinading in lemon and oil, the glass bowls and tagine set out on the kitchen table. Saucers of sliced red onion, shards of pink grapefruit, chopped cashew nuts. Pounded cumin and cardamom and cloves in the mortar. An opened jar of preserved limes.
‘Oh you are entertaining!’ she said. ‘How nice”
‘Um, no,’ I said. ‘I’m just trying out a new dish.’
Which sounded better than saying, ‘Oh no this is all for me, my little lunchikins.’
Most people don’t bother to cook for themselves, they associate good food with entertaining, having company, being spoiled or petted with treats, cooking for lovers before bedtime.
I have always cooked complex and lavish dishes with only myself in mind. It is a kind of selfish magic for the greedy soul. This morning I am concocting a very subtle and demanding North Africa vegetarian tagine, layered like a Mughal-style breyani, studded with cardamom and slivers of cashew nut and sultanas, but with savoury undertones, a golden cornucopia of a dish. Small careful quantities so it doesn’t get wasted.
When I was very poor while doing post-graduate studies in hermeneutics, I used to borrow cookbooks from the library and read about wonderful food while I ate a lentil mash on brown bread. I made a promise to myself. Whenever I got money I would try out one of the recipes in the book. It was an unthreatening way to learn how to cook because I didn’t have to worry about someone not liking my food. I didn’t have to fuss with techniques that bored or defeated me, producing souffles or desserts with meringue or puff pastry.
I read up on French country cooking, casseroles, pot-au-feu, Egyptian and Syrian or Ethiopian stews with fiery harissa and peanuts. I stuffed bell peppers and cabbage leaves with rice and pine nuts and lemony melissa. I tried to make Japanese soups with aduki beans and bowls of strong dashi stock.
And then I began inviting friends over for meals. I shared a flat with a difficult Lebanese woman and learned from her how to do Beirut chicken with cinnamon and vermicelli, surprisingly delicious. It amused my friends that I could not make toasted sandwiches or fry an egg but would turn out earthenware terrines of pate and moussaka and happily create variations on Spaghetti puttanesca.
I began writing about food back in my student days, sending recipes with comments to friends and describing my visits to restaurants. The writing and the cooking seemed to coalesce, the same way that growing plants and writing about gardens and orchids and hybrid tomatoes and eggplants or the torrid politics of organic food all flowed together.
So I helped to write cookbooks. I edited cookbooks and wrote reviews of cookbooks. I went on cooking for myself, had a store cupboard of the ingredients nobody in the house understood, small tightly sealed jars of za’tar, anchovies, nam pla, chilli paste, dried porcini, tubes of vervet-green wasabi paste.
I began to dry my own herbs or freeze chopped basil at the end of summer. I made tomato purees from my own ripe small Rosa plum tomatoes. Diced and preserved peppers and piri-piri chillies. And I wrote about it, made notes and tasted and wrote some more. I wrote about kitchen gardens in Provence and the Napa Valley and out in the African veld. I travelled and preferred to eat out alone, in cellars off alleys in Rome or Parisian cafes or Algerian food stalls. I tried to recreate what I had eaten in Cambodia or Laos, tried to describe the taste of lotus pods or snake beans and wrote travel pieces that were really all about food and growing food and making the best of what is in the back garden or the field down the road. I talked with farmers and rice harvesters and chefs and hungry travellers with food allergies.
The pleasure lies in the fact that this is a hobby, an occasional way to earn a living in between doing other kinds of writing. I don’t think I could become a professional restaurant reviewer and go out to eat rich food every night and then come back and write reviews. I need homecooking, I need my own food, I need time to watch the lemons ripen on the trees in a sunny corner of the backyard. A friend of mine goes to every restaurant opening in the Cape and I can hear the jaded dyspeptic tones in his reviews.
This is my secret world of creative cooking and mulling over the meaning of life when I have a day to myself and an empty sunlit kitchen.
When my neighbour had gone, her truant cat, the calico Captain Jim, came out from his hiding place in the spare room. He knows that if his mother sees him, she will tuck him under her arm and take him back next door. He likes to visit and hang around me in the kitchen and go home when he feels like it.
Us solitaries understand one another.
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