I don’t follow recipes. In fact, I think anyone who does is a giant baby.
Which isn’t to say I hate cookery books. I have several in my kitchen. I look at the pictures and sometimes even read the list of ingredients. But a step-by-step set of instructions on how to cook dinner? What’s wrong with you?
I learned to cook by watching my mother fly through the kitchen in a typhoon of after-work efficiency. Things were frying, baking, grating and boiling at my eye height while she listened to the radio at ear-splitting volume and shouted the occasional order to pick up our socks, do our homework or lay the table.
She had learned much of how to cook from her Indian mother-in-law. Perhaps as a result, there were no recipes, no photographs of finished dishes and no lists of ingredients. Nothing was weighed or measured. She didn’t explain what she was doing or talk me through the “correct method”. She would simply open the fridge, stare at its contents for about six minutes and then start feverishly peeling, pouring, crushing and chopping until, about an hour later, a meal appeared.
Watching her in the kitchen was, I imagine, a little like observing the boiler room of a turn-of-the-century battleship: fires spitting, clouds of steam, incredible smells and loud banging. But it taught me what it takes to feed people. Being there, helping her where I could, showed me that every meal should involve something dry, something wet, something green; a carbohydrate, a protein and lots of veg. To this day, she uses butter and salt like other people use water. As a result, everything she makes is delicious.
People who can’t make a bowl of pasta or a cake without poring over a book or a website make me feel like a flat tyre. It’s food, not science. There is no single “right” way. Like kissing, cooking is something you have to practise until people stop gagging.
• Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood
