Larder talk: The comfort of cooking

Louise Ferreira’s banana bread, made with a recipe from a 1981 Huisgenoot recipe book. (Proof that rereading your ancient cookbooks is a good idea.)

My favourite person on the whole of Twitter is British food writer and anti-poverty activist Jack Monroe — simply the best at providing cheap, delicious, easy and nourishing recipes/ideas. Every night, in an effort to keep unproductive worry at bay, I check her #lockdownlarder hashtag, where folk tweet her pictures of what’s in their pantries, or supply her with a list of the weird things they’ve found in cupboards, and she tells them what meals they can conjure as a result. I’ve learned so much (including what pease-pudding REALLY is), and I’ve been itching to try something similar for my food posts.

At first I felt I couldn’t chirpily ask the middle classes about the contents of their kitchens in a situation as dire as ours: where desperate people are literally begging for food all over the country, as standstill wages and lockdown restrictions hit them like a freight train (I’ll get back to this).

But millions in this country are still undergoing house arrest, have odd things in their pantries, bought too much fresh stuff, and are a bit perplexed. You all know how I feel about food waste (also see journalist Karin Schimke’s excellent recent writing on this); and the only thing worse than regular food waste is food waste during a national disaster.

I’ve realised that while our water crisis felt like familiar territory for me (I was eight when the borehole on our farm ran dry), the only preparation I have for any of what we’re currently facing comes from all the World War 2 novels I read as a child: classics like Hester Burton’s In Spite of all Terror and Jane Gardam’s A Long Way From Verona; later, novels by Nevil Shute, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Rosamund Pilcher, Nancy Mitford, Mary Wesley. And they all went on at great length about food and rationing, and the importance of eating as a form not just of fuelling, but boosting morale. There was something comforting and encouraging about their accounts of how thrilled folk were to swop their turnips for a few eggs, the “victory” recipes, the hints on how to stretch food and make the butter ration last.

I’d like to visit that comforting space again, and I’d love your ideas. Eating and cooking together is nurturing, a kind of hugging we have no option but to practice. There’s also the role of community, even if it’s the tiny one of your family. As someone who LOVES to feed people but who is eating solo at the moment, sharing recipes has a resonance beyond the practical for me: yesterday, someone I love who hasn’t been in touch for ages wrote from another continent to say she was making one of my soup recipes. I was delighted — but also surprised — at the jolt of emotional connection I got.

I can’t do what Jack’s doing, but I was thinking of having days/times (announced in advance) when folk can post me pics of food they have or present lists of ingredients on Facebook, and I will TRY to come up with suggestions, or post recipes via this blog. It could also be a fun way to teach the entire family to cook (domestic science home-schooling), and when this is all over, hopefully we will be more mindful and frugal food shoppers, and less wasteful and decadent cooks. (Even before all this, I was rapidly losing patience with the preponderance of pre-prepared clementine-chevre-oyster-mushroom-stuffed-chicken meals the supermarkets were serving up.)

The trick here is simplicity, and a little relaxation of the rules. For instance, I don’t do sugar or jam; but here are two nifty ideas (well, I think so) for using jam as a means of pepping up regular meals and savoury dishes — condiments are going to be important, but you hardly want to risk your lives and those of others by popping into the supermarket for them. So make your own…

Cheat’s chutney: if you have one of those padstal jars of jam lurking with nice chunks of fruit in it, you can heat it gently (start with a cupful) with a heaped tablespoon of finely chopped raw onion (more onion is good, but I am rationing mine — didn’t get quite enough). Optional but good: add crushed garlic and a pinch of some warm spice — ginger, paprika, chillies. Now add a little bit of vinegar (a LITTLE — no more than a dessert-spoon [10 ml] to start with). Apple cider is best, but any will do, just not balsamic — too sweet. Simmer until the onion has disintegrated into the fruit mix. Keep checking; if it still tastes like jam but weird, add another teaspoon of vinegar. If you have lemon juice, add a modest squeeze. And if you have fresh lemons, grated lemon zest will do wonders for this (and almost anything else you’ll ever cook).

Sweet chilli sauce: if you have a tin of smooth apricot jam anywhere, put some of it in a saucepan with a little water and heat slowly. Add a very little vinegar (same principles as above) and a good pinch of chilli flakes or chopped fresh chilli. If it looks too thick, add more water; you want it a bit runny. Also good with ginger and lemon, as above.

Something else making me smile is that all of my friends seem to be baking banana bread. It’s a good way to cheer yourself up AND use up your rapidly ripening bananas. But if you’re too harassed to bake or don’t have the equipment, Jack has a wonderful recipe for a banana hot-pot that is super-quick and easy (as in it takes SECONDS to prepare and cook, if you have a microwave).

My favourite trick with ripe bananas: peel and freeze them to make smoothies with (you need a jug blender for this). Dig out hunks of frozen banana and combine with yoghurt, milk (in my case, kombucha because I make my own and always have masses of it), cinnamon and any other fruit you have around, if you like — I am partial to granadillas. This is also a clever way to give the kids “milkshakes” for breakfast: per person, half a frozen banana, half-to-three-quarters of a cup of milk or yoghurt, any extra soft fruit that needs using up, two tablespoons of breakfast cereal (I’ve done this with raw oats, All Bran, granola, and they’re ALL good) and blend until the banana is smooth. This is also a good way of disguising the taste of powdered or long-life milk, if your family is fussy.

I think it might be good to focus on soups and curries at first (I can’t wait to talk spices!), so all that rapidly wilting veg gets used up. And (I know I keep promising), I’ll post the Famous Vegan Stock Paste recipe soon; an excellent way of using up strongly-flavoured veg.

And now is the time to remember all those whose single food shelf is pitifully bare, whose supplies are sparse, who literally don’t know where their next meal is coming from. If you have ANY money to spare, and you try a recipe here, maybe could you put something in a “tip jar” to donate it to the many NPOS and community action networks (CANS) or education feeding schemes? They are killing themselves (quite possibly literally) to get food parcels to the desperate and the vulnerable — please help them. These are all location-specific, so I won’t post links, but please share resources you know of in your own neighbourhoods.