I should have known when I was excitedly looking up how to make butter from scratch one day at work instead of drawing construction details for a cinema that I was in the wrong profession. I suppose I did know that, I just didn’t know what to do about it. Ideas pinged into my head like small fireworks while sat at the computer;‘BUTTER!’ my brain would shout, and then I’d be lost online, looking at different opinions on butter making;‘RICOTTA!’, thumbing through books at home trying to find the best thinking on fresh cheese. ‘VERMOUTH!’, wouldn’t it be lovely to have my own house vermouth… I should have realized sooner.
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My family have always been into eating and gathering round a big dining table, but I only started to dabble in the kitchen when I went to university. My efforts prior to that were poor to say the least, my signature dish being one of tinned tuna, rice, cheese and toast.
My childhood memories of food are classics: my mum made a great shepherd’s pie and peas or toad in the hole. My favourite meal was chunky chicken and rice – tinned chicken in a white sauce from Marks & Spencer, heated through with plain rice; or ‘picky bits’, which meant slices of strawberries, cheese, garlic sausage and cucumber made into a face on a plate – I couldn’t get enough of those faces.
I stayed at my granny and grandad’s house quite often and my granny was always cooking. She had one of those little hatches that opened up between the kitchen and the dining table and we would play shops while she cooked. I’d go to the hatch and ask her what was on sale today and she would list the entire contents of the cupboards and fridge and then I’d say, ‘Nothing today thank you!’ and walk away laughing every time. I found it hilarious.
There were no rules at their house and I was allowed anything I wanted. At breakfast, while my grandad ate his half grapefruit with a sprinkle of sugar followed by a full English, I would construct my Weetabix bowl. This was comprised of a layer of sugar, two Weetabix, another layer of sugar, milk and then extra sugar to fill in any gaps that didn’t look sugary enough. No one commented.
My granny made a brilliant sticky blackberry and apple crumble. We would gather blackberries for hours while walking the dog and fill the freezer with them. Banana syllabub was the fancy dessert that came out for guests; you just helped yourself to a choc-ice on more casual occasions. Other favourites at their house were really tasty lentil soup, a funny spaghetti bake thing that I loved and white baguettes with as much butter as I fancied. I always helped in the kitchen and my favourite job was to make the Yorkshire pudding batter, which had to be beaten in a certain way with a wooden spoon until it made just the right sound: a repeating plop, plop, plop like someone was doing little belly flops in it.
There was always a Club biscuit on the go, or a Penguin, a big bar of Fruit & Nut or a small bowl of peanuts and raisins on a table, not put out for people, just there all the time. We would have big family gatherings for Sunday lunch where there were sometimes so many people that anything in the house that could be used as a chair was employed. Often a tall uncle would end up on the ‘pouffe’, his chin level with the table. Plates of food just kept appearing through the hatch, and even the dog got his own full Sunday dinner in a bowl. I think this is where my love for gathering and eating began – I remember my grandparents’ house and everything I ate there very fondly.
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I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I was nearing the end of school. I went to see the careers advice teacher and she did a little questionnaire with me and at the end told me I should be a geography teacher. She was a geography teacher. Maybe she just said this to everyone? Who knows, but one thing I knew clearly was that I shouldn’t be a geography teacher.
I wanted to study fine art, and after school enrolled on an art foundation course. I was good at graphics, lifedrawing, portraits and photography. I wanted to go to art school, but my parents’ fears and, to some extent, my own led me to looking at courses with ‘a job at the end of them’. Sitting round on a Friday night with a take out from the ‘Golden Curry’ in our bombshell of a post-school flat share, surrounded by piles of university prospectuses, my flatmate Sarah said,‘Why don’t you do architecture? That’s a job,’ and it was decided…
I now know it was never the right thing to have done, but I didn’t know what else to do and felt quite panicked by it all. It seemed a sensible decision at the time… I got through the course; I didn’t love it, except that initial stage of design, which was research, sketching, drawing and looking at beautiful works by other people. Details of how to actually build the thing left me cold. My course was at Edinburgh College of Art and I watched the art students with envy, but soldiered on regardless.
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This was when I began to cook, however, albeit with low levels of success. We lived next to a really good deli, fishmonger and butcher, which I was always wandering into with interest. I remember a ‘dinner party’, which was a thinly veiled excuse to invite over a boy that my flatmate had an eye on, with some additional guests and food as cover. I don’t remember if love came to the fore that evening but I do recall the laksa-style prawn dish that we accidentally made so incredibly hot, it was basically inedible. We gradually added more and more milk to cool it down until it was just a fiery milk soup with some overcooked prawns in the bottom.
As part of our course we were meant to work for a year in an architectural practice, so when the time came I found a job in Newcastle. I found myself in a large office, seventy or eighty people, all in one room – all men, except for the secretaries. No one spoke to me, I might as well have been a pot plant. It was utterly depressing. I don’t know how long I lasted, maybe a month, but it was torture. I left and booked a flight to Greece. I spent the rest of the year working in a chaotic Mexican restaurant in Corfu for a pound an hour, blissfully happy.