Much more than the heart of the home, a well-equipped kitchen is the home of the heart. It’s a place where the senses coalesce into the joys of craft, community, and caring, and where the simple ingredients of lovingly-prepared dishes mark the rhythm of the changing seasons.
I will always be grateful to Nigella Lawson for teaching me to escape to the kitchen, rather than from it. Over the years since I discovered her approach to food, I have been known to bake and cook the blues away, delighting in the alchemy of producing something delicious from a handful of seemingly ordinary ingredients.
The result has been the gradual settling in of a year-long kitchen cycle. I cook and eat seasonally, yes, but I also respond to the month, the ambient temperature, the yearly occasions that demand (in my book, anyway) very particular foods.
By the time I’ve wrapped my head around January’s back-to-school-and-work flurry, Valentine’s Day has already passed and it’s time to start thinking about Easter. Easter means kleftiko: Greek roast lamb so tender that you ‘carve’ it with two spoons. It’s slow-roasted for 12 hours, which means a day of living with the aroma of lemon, garlic and rosemary – also known as heaven scent.
Winter means soup – butternut, or potato and leek, vegetable or cauliflower and blue cheese, and a root vegetable soup of carrots, sweet potatoes and butternut that is so orange, so bolsteringly sweet and delicious that it can’t fail to erase the effects of the biting cold.
I make my own chicken stock from all the chicken carcasses I have stored in my freezer. Five minutes of prep and two hours of gentle simmering, and a golden elixir, such as would make any Jewish mama proud, is ready to be strained and stored for soup or risotto.
When Wimbledon starts, while everyone else is in front of the television, I head for the greengrocer’s – because it’s the start of strawberry season, and if you’ve never smelt strawberry jam cooking, you haven’t lived. It’s such a sweet, summery smell – so very berry – that it’s as if summer has arrived in my kitchen, if not outdoors.
In summer I wait anxiously for apricot season – it’s only a few weeks long, and I stagger home from the shops with armfuls of golden orbs destined for more jam. I am bereft if, somehow, I miss that small window of opportunity. Because I’m afraid that once you’ve tasted your own jam, it ruins you for the commercial version, which bears such a scant relationship to the fruit it contains.
And then, winter passes and before you know it, it’s October. Somehow the time between October and the end of the school year feels like it races past. Perhaps it’s because I make my Christmas cake in October, and the scent of cinnamon, cloves and ginger infuse the house with early Christmas cheer, hastening the festive season’s arrival.
But first, it’s time for shortbread, my go-to for teacher presents at the end of the year. Whole blocks of butter disappear into my food processor with the other ingredients, and after some pleasurable pressing and cutting and fork pricking, they emerge from the oven an hour later, crisp and comforting, and perfect as an accompaniment to a welcome cup of tea during a particularly busy time.
Then it’s the run-up to Christmas, which always includes ginger biscuits, and if I’m feeling particularly paraat, a gingerbread house. Last year’s version included stained glass windows, a fact that left me feeling quite smug, if I’m honest.
And then, finally, it’s Christmas. The star of the show is always roast lamb – you can keep your dry old turkey – but there are all the trimmings, and there must be cold, pink slices of salty-sweet gammon. Dessert is always proper Christmas pudding, crème anglaise, trifle and a bûche de Noël – because if you can’t pig out at Christmas (yes, I see the gammon pun), then what’s the point?
These rhythms, these culinary rituals, have been the guy ropes that kept my tent tethered in the past few years. They have helped me to weather sandstorms and hurricanes that threatened to leave me battered and torn.
And it’s not just that there is very real comfort to be found in the scent of vanilla, or the nourishing pleasure of hot soup with thickly buttered bread. Rather it’s that sense of nurturing, of normality, of the simple stability that comes with the predictable rhythms of a year, played out in the very ordinary acts of cooking and eating, that has allowed me to keep going, even when it felt as if I couldn’t take another step.
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