There’s a generation of women in this country who think nothing of putting a
slow-cooking casserole in the oven before getting on with the housework; who
know how to turn one joint of meat into two family meals; and whose idea of
fast food is something made quickly with leftovers from last night’s dinner.
And some of them don’t even have a microwave.
Meanwhile, their daughters and granddaughters have smart kitchens full of
expensive equipment and glossy recipe books they hardly use, but which they
keep on buying in the hope that this book or that gadget will simplify their
busy lives once and for all. Even so, they are throwing away a third of all
the food they buy, which costs the average family a ludicrous £420 a year.
Time, or the lack of it, is the reason most people give for not cooking, but
we have always led busy lives. There’s no need for fancy gadgets when
everything you’ll ever want to cook (unless you’re serious about making
pasta from scratch or juicing vast amounts of fruit) can be put together
using a few basic items from the pound shop. My mother used to roll out
pastry with a milk bottle, not because she didn’t have a state-of-the-art,
hollow Pyrex rolling pin, with detachable rubber stoppers at either end so
it could be filled with ice cubes to keep the dough cool, but because there
was always a milk bottle there when she needed it.
We’ve come a long way since those days, and that, I think, is the problem.
Domestic skills, traditionally a woman’s territory, are no longer valued
and, naturally enough, modern women don’t want to be associated with a
female stereotype that, rightly or wrongly, is a bit of a joke. The downside
is that lots of women now know nothing about home economics or how to
produce a handful of nutritious meals out of store-cupboard essentials, even
though having this knowledge is not only deeply satisfying, but empowering
in a way that wasting large amounts of money in the supermarket can never
be.
Granny did know best about some things and, luckily for us, we have more
genuine convenience foods than she could have dreamt of. Basic
store-cupboard ingredients have a long shelf life and crop up time and time
again in a host of simple recipes, so if you keep plenty of nonperishable
items in stock (see below), it’s mostly only the fresh stuff you need to buy
on a weekly basis. And by simple recipes, I mean something that doesn’t take
longer than an hour to prepare and cook from start to finish.
There are some women who are too hard-pressed and high-powered — or simply too
rich — to be bothered with budgeting and cooking, and that’s fair enough.
The rest of the noncooking population are just kidding themselves. Bad
habits tend to be infectious, so there is a swath of young women who have
time to get a manicure and go out partying, but still genuinely believe
they’re too busy to cook. At the other end of the scale, there are women who
should know better, but who dish up a nonstop diet of poor-quality ready
meals to their children because it seems like the easy option.
Some say we’ve lost a generation, if not two, to fast-food culture. I recently
read that thousands of primary-school children don’t know where eggs come
from, which is probably not that surprising if it’s also true that 20% of
the 1,000 adults who took part in another survey did not know that sausages
and bacon originate from farms. I know a child with professional parents who
doesn’t recognise a potato.
Even so, I don’t believe the art of good housekeeping has gone for ever. How
could it when it’s such an integral part of human nature to want to eat
well? So many of us tried to re-create Nigella’s Christmas because we want
to hark back to the housewife’s heyday. Once people discover how easy it is
to produce a decent meal from accessible, affordable ingredients, cooking is
no longer just a necessity, it becomes a pleasure.
Learning to cook is like learning to drive: once you realise you are in
charge, not the other way round, there’s nothing to it. Every primary-school
child I’ve ever met likes making bread rolls and fairy cakes. Savvy grown-up
girls know that being clever with food and careful with the household budget
means that not only do they get to enjoy the right meals, there could be
enough money left over for spending on those manicures — which a 1950s
domestic goddess would have definitely approved of.
Gill Holcombe is the author of How to Feed Your Family a Healthy, Balanced
Diet with Very Little Money . . . and Hardly Any Time, Even if You Have a
Tiny Kitchen, Only Three Saucepans and No Fancy Gadgets (Spring Hill
£9.99)
QUICK FIXES
With these tips up your oven-gloved sleeve, you’ll never have to say “Sorry,
but it’s cornflakes for dinner” again.
1 Make “watercress” soup with stinging nettles instead of watercress.
(This also makes a great sauce for salmon or white fish.) The two are
practically interchangeable — honestly — and stinging nettles are free (pick
between March and early May).
2 With a chicken or turkey carcass, it doesn’t matter if you can’t be
bothered to add vegetables and bay leaves to the pan to make a stock. All
you need to do is cover the chicken with water in a very large saucepan, put
the lid on and boil gently for a few hours — easier than making a cup of
tea.
3 Use up half-full jars of pesto in lasagne as an alternative to
sun-dried tomatoes.
4 Make meatballs from spare uncooked sausages. Just add herbs and a
couple of pinches of curry powder.
5 For a savoury crumble add grated scraps of cheese and dried herbs to
a classic flour and butter crumble mixture. As tasty as a meat pie, but even
quicker and easier than making pastry.
STORE-CUPBOARD ESSENTIALS
TINS Fish, corned beef, tomatoes, sweet corn, mushy peas, peaches,
pineapples, cannellini and butter beans.
DRIED FRUIT Apricots, prunes, sultanas, raisins and cranberries.
OTHER DRIED GOODS Rice, lentils, chickpeas, couscous, pasta, nuts,
seeds, porridge oats, flour, sugar, salt and pepper.
BOTTLES Olive oil, lemon juice, lime juice, vinegar, worcestershire
sauce, soy sauce and sherry.
HERBS Ginger, curry powder, cumin, coriander, parsley, chives,
rosemary, sage, tarragon, paprika, cinnamon and nutmeg.
AND Tomato purée, garlic purée, mustard, stock cubes, gravy granules
and Marmite.
