Pandemic Cooking.
“A man can live for three days without bread, but no man can live for one day without poetry”, was an aphorism of Baudelaire.
Who, indeed, on this august literary forum would hesitate between an ode and an omelette, a sonnet and a souffle? Yet the position is not entirely Philistine; cookery is an art.
We seem over the years to have gravitated from one extreme to another. Take for example the illustration of food in cookery books. The subject of a work of art has, of course, nothing to do with its beauty, but still there is always something depressing about the coloured lithograph of a leg of mutton in a Victorian cookery book. Today, the portraying of food verges on that of culinary porn; when in reality all we might really need is a recipe for making Brussels sprouts edible.
I think that at the current juncture, the real difficulty that we all have to face in life, is not so much the science of cookery as the imagination of cooks.
There are those who should for their iniquities be turned into pillars of salt if not knowing how to use this essential ingredient. But at least they have tried. Then there are those, who have discarded their heritage and subsist on take aways, chicken in a bag, or McDonalds. Perhaps the pandemic lockdown and self-isolation will spur on some improvement.
Recently I was researching Victorian recipes, and came across one book entitled “Dinner and Dishes,” the author of which went under the rather sinister name of “The Wanderer.”
As you can imagine he was not a stuck at home kind of character. In it, he describes how he had travelled extensively. He recounts that he had eaten back-hendl at Vienna and kulibatsch at St. Petersburg; he has had the courage to face the buffalo veal of Romania; he has serious views on the right method of cooking those famous white truffles of Turin of which Alexandre Dumas was so fond; and, in the face of the Oriental Club, declared that Bombay curry is better than the curry of Bengal.
Sounds like a man after my own heart.
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