Sam Hepburn is, by her own admission, a useless cook. For the acclaimed children's author, former BBC documentary-maker and now crime fiction writer, food is, well, just fuel. Which is why she really doesn't get the new 'foodie' generation...
Sam Hepburn
That's right - I'm anti-'foodie'
Posted on: Thu 23-Feb-17 12:30:32
(22 comments )
In Edwardian novels it's a dinner gong that summons suburban families to the table. In our house it'sthe fire alarm. Why? Because nine times out of ten the meal I'm cooking ends up boiled dry or singed to a blackened crisp.
It's not that I don't try. I do. I pick out recipes from cookery books and wander around supermarkets tossing lumps of meat and bundles of herbs into my trolley, but somewhere in the weary scramble to get the ingredients from raw to edible, I lose interest and wander off - sometimes mentally, often physically, particularly when a dish takes longer than the duration of The Archers to prepare. So I ramp up the heat to get it over with, turn away to make a phone call or glance at the paper and shazaam, all I've got left is a smouldering pile of ashes.
Don't get me wrong. I don't like being hungry and, if the meal has been cooked by someone else, I love eating with friends. But these days they're all so obsessed with textures, subtleties and sources that if anyone is coming to dinner I plunge into days of panicked, dry mouthed agony that result in the production of some tasteless shrivelled offering. How I envy those hosts who turn, immaculate and smiling, from the kitchen counter, fresh dough in hand, to engage in witty conversation while knocking up a few last minute walnut loaves to serve with the sustainably sourced squid.
Years ago, as a single mum sorely in need of weekend adult company I often used to throw caution to the wind and cook a traditional Sunday lunch for up to a dozen people. I did it by creating three complete meal plans – meal plan A, meal plan B and meal plan C – each one prepared to a strict and unwavering regime. All that peeling, chopping and par boiling made bearable by the lengthy duration of the Archers omnibus.
I kept insisting it was a local speciality only to discover that I had been demanding olive oil flavoured with tortoise
I still kid myself that the attendees at these Sunday extravaganzas were happy to sacrifice flavour for the stodgily predictable comforts of my Paxo stuffing and Bisto gravy spiced up with half a bottle of wine.
It was fine when my children were small and feeding them was all about nutrition – steam that broccoli, flake that salmon, dice those carrots, ice a nose and a pair of ears onto that (shop bought) muesli biscuit - but they've now grown up into foodies for whom the pondering, purchasing, preparation and ingestion of food is a sheer - and, to me, totally alien - delight.
My elder daughter and her boyfriend seem to structure whole weekends around food, barely finishing one meal before fetishising the next. When everyone comes home, the simple task of ordering a take-away turns into a tense full-on debate that puts the Trump-Clinton spats to shame, with my son shaking his head at every suggestion and muttering 'I'm not feeling it.'
Not feeling what? You're hungry. You eat. Then you stop being hungry.
As for holidays, for me they're all about lazing on the beach with a pile of books. They are not a chance to indulge in bizarre culinary experiences or traipse out into the burning sun in search of strange local ingredients.
On the pretext that I speak some Italian, an old friend once dragged me around Tuscany in search of olive oil flavoured with truffles. In every shop my request was greeted by horrified head shaking. Hot, cross and desperate to get back to my book and sun lounger I kept insisting it was a local speciality only to discover that I had been demanding olive oil flavoured with tortoise. For all I know I was ahead of my time and Olio al Tartaruga is now the latest must-have ingredient.
Luckily for me, my husband feels the same about food. When I first met him his diet, like some winsomely undernourished Lewis Caroll character, consisted entirely of toast. In fact, he hates it when I try. I once served up a dish of grilled sardines, only to realize that this time, far from overcooking them I'd absent-mindedly turned the cooker off half way through. He glanced into the pan, caught his meal staring back at him, limp, half raw and mournful and actually shuddered. But without a word he patted me good-naturedly on the shoulder and reached for the bread and toaster.
Is there something wrong with us? Is our lack of interest in food a shameful marital secret we should admit to only on some specialist website accessible through the black web? Or are there other non-foodies out there who share our bewilderment and pain?
Sam's new book, Her Perfect Life (whose central character is a TV chef), is published by Harper Collins and available from Amazon now.
