Photo by Joseph Gonzalez on Unsplash
You’re reading Home Truths, a newsletter from me, Susy Smith. I am many things: a parent of grown-up kids, a dog owner, a gardener and a compulsive mover of vases (I worked for years as a stylist). I am also a writer/editor and former Editor-in-Chief of British Country Living Magazine, for whom I still write a monthly column.
I write here on an eclectic mix of subjects about life, and a few of the lessons I’ve learned along the way. Subscribe now for free and join the community! You can also support me and my work by upgrading to a paid subscription at any time – for either option, just tap the button below.
I used to be a terrible cook. This was largely because I was never expected to cook at home – my mum did all the meals and I was far too busy having a good time to knuckle down and do anything so menial!
Then once, when I was a teenager, I decided to give a dinner party for some friends in our family dining room. I felt so grown up – and I was confident that cooking a three-course meal couldn’t be that tricky. I can’t remember what I served my guests, but I do remember getting very stressed that it all required so much time and preparation. I’m not the most patient of people and couldn’t believe I had to give up the best part of a day for something that would be over in a couple of hours. I had chosen recipes from my mum’s Cordon Bleu Cookery Course magazines – they built up week by week into a complete collection in binders and seemed terribly posh, but I think this was really too ambitious for a beginner.
My mum ended up making most of the meal while I got agitated again trying and failing to arrange flowers she had allowed me to cut from the garden. In that afternoon she taught me how to make flowers look good in a vase and also how to make a meal, but I’d already decided that perhaps I wasn’t cut out for cooking.
When I first moved away from our home in Belfast and came to live in London, my mum gave me a cookbook called “Supercookery” that was incredibly thorough, covering everything from beans on toast to Baked Alaska. However, I rarely opened it, existing on stuff from tins and packets. It became a standing joke that the first time I invited my boyfriend (who eventually became my first husband) round for a meal, I served up Heinz tinned ravioli!
My boyfriend and I moved in together and, joy of joys, I discovered that, not only was he a good cook, but that he actually enjoyed it, experimenting with new dishes and delighting our friends with his culinary skills. When I watched him or any other confident cook, I was amazed how they made it look so simple, as if they were making it up as they went along, adding a pinch of this and a sprinkling of that without referring to the recipe next to them.
I would follow recipes to the letter checking and rechecking the ingredients and their amounts. If a recipe asked for something specific that perhaps was hard to get or wasn’t in season, (this was before you could get almost anything all year round) I didn’t know enough to work out what I could substitute, so I’d panic and not know what to do.
I once rang my mother and asked her how to make pastry, and she told me but couldn’t give me precise amounts of the fat and flour I would need – she had been making her own pastry for so long, she just knew how to do it instinctively and at that time, of course, there was no internet to help.
So, I deferred to my boyfriend and, when we were having people round for dinner, I would do all the other prep which I enjoyed much more, laying the table – fiddling around with the right china and napkins and arranging flowers, which I was now quite good at, was much more my thing. I enjoyed acting as “mine host”, serving snacks and drinks while my boyfriend toiled away in the kitchen, juggling oven times and fussing over garnishes.
As the years went by and we were married, it just became the norm that he would cook, while I would get off scot-free. He would feed the children early before I got home from work and, once we’d got them off to bed, he and I would then enjoy the dinner he had made separately for us.
When the girls were ten, our marriage broke up and in the midst of my misery I suddenly found myself with no knowledge whatsoever about how to make any kind of a meal, whether for me, the children or any friends. I was still working fulltime and not arriving home until 7pm when I had to cobble something together for my daughters that was occasionally but not very often, nutritious. They don’t seem to have suffered too much and now cook good meals for themselves.
So I was very surprised and thrilled last week when my friend Helen, who trained in home economics and is a great cook and baker, said to me out of the blue,
“You know, you’ve turned into a really good cook”.
It is certainly not a compliment I ever imagined I would get from anyone, let alone Helen. She can make a meal out of nothing, produces fabulous vegetarian as well as meat and fish dishes, gives everyone home-made biscuits at Christmas and can prepare and bake a cake quite happily while several of us are sitting around chatting with her, so intuitive is the whole process. Her pièce de résistance is a Battenburg Cake with its pastel-coloured squares of delicate sponge.
So how, you may ask, did my amazing transformation come about? On reflection, it’s a combination of factors. First, being semi-retired and having more time, means I don’t resent giving up several hours to prepare food any more. Second, being home so much during the various lockdowns in recent years meant my husband and I began taking it in turns to cook decent meals and became more practised. But most of all, I think it is because a couple of years ago, we began using, Hello Fresh, one of the delivery services that send recipe cards and all the measured-out ingredients including spices that it’s sometimes hard to get elsewhere.
Every week we choose three dishes that we like the sound of and the following week, the box arrives with everything we need to cook the three meals. Many of them are very simple but still tasty and often take very little time to cook. We keep the recipe cards and reuse them if we have friends coming for dinner. This regular cooking has built up my confidence.
I have become a whizz with risotto and make many different types. I have perfected the art of Piedmont Peppers, a starter that was originally an Elizabeth David recipe but which I found in one of Delia’s cookbooks and I do a very simple tart (with bought puff pastry) for pudding that came from a Nigella book. I make them all so often (for different people) that I can prepare and cook them quickly and without stress. I will have to find some more recipes that I can practise enough to make them easy so they become my next go-to dishes, but in the meantime I am getting lots of compliments and, at last, finding real pleasure in making food for friends.
I’d love to hear whether you like cooking or not. Are you an expert or a reluctant rustler-up of basic staples? What are your favourite dishes? Share with me and your fellow subscribers or leave a comment on this writing and I shall respond
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Isn't it great to receive a compliment for something you've made, especially food! I get so worried and a bit stressed when cooking for others but it all works out in the end! It's worth it 🥰
You're quite right Jacky, cooking is indeed a way to bring us together with others: sharing a meal that we have cooked and others are enjoying feels like a real privilege. I love your phrase "adventures in cooking" - when I try something new it really feels like a step into the unknown and I cross my fingers it will turn out well! Thanks for reading - and for commenting.