Cooking has always been a bit of a passion of mine, one that started very young. I have very early memories of cooking with my mother, and I also remember realising that dinner with friends was an important and enjoyable part of grown-up life.
In my family there has been a lot of moving from country to country. My mother is Austrian, my paternal grandmother was Dutch, my great Uncle was Spanish, and I have cousins from Pakistan who settled in the US, Cyprus and Canada. This familial diaspora may be a factor in the importance of food. Food connects us to people and to a sense of place. It is what people reach for when they want to remind themselves of 'the Old Country' wherever that may be. Taste is closely connected smell (a subject that I commented on recently), so it is perhaps unsurprising that it carries such an emotional attachment.
It meant a lot to be able to get back to cooking after my accident. One of my assessments of independence when I was up at Stoke Mandeville involved cooking a meal in the Occupational Therapy kitchen (I did seabass stuffed with herbs and lemon with mashed potato and purple sprouting broccoli as I remember). Every time I realised something from my 'old life' was still possible, I was filled with a surge of excitement.
In the same way, everything I realised I would not to do again drove me into a pit of depression, but most of those realisations came in the first couple of weeks post-injury, and it turned out there were more ways of doing things than I had thought.
So cooking for me is reconnecting with my history, and that of my family. But there's more to it than that. It's a bit sad, but I think I get a bit of a 'provider's lift' by making dinner for the family every night, instead of wrestling Elk or whatever I'm supposed to be doing. These days, I am happy to acknowledge that I am easily pleased by anything that makes me feel 'whole' and useful, even if it is a misguided confidence that I could do something, rather that actually having to do it.
One of my recent discoveries has been breadmaking. This is not breadmaker breadmaking, although we do have one of those which has put in many years of good service. But I am talking sourdough; hand-kneaded, home-grown-leaven, proved-in-a-basket sourdough.
I think part of the pleasure is quite a primal one. Bread must surely be the first refined food that we produced as a species. Pounding grains, and making a sticky dough cooked in a fire. It would have been pretty rough, and I like to think that my efforts are a bit more sophisticated, or at least contain fewer ashes and squashed grasshoppers (note to self, new loaf idea: ash and grasshopper surprise).
But having a jar of gloop that needs feeding every day is very satisfying. Taking a blob of leaven and adding flour water and salt to produce a loaf makes me feel, well, useful. And if it helps to give my children an early, warm memory of the pleasure of cooking, then so much the better.
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