Life in the Slow Lane

McHamlet and home cooking

This week I saw a cinema screening of the Donmar Warehouse production of Macbeth. I say Macbeth: my friend had absent-mindedly told me we were going to see Hamlet so I was all ready for Hamlet drooping about, Rosencrantz and the other one on the battlements, the rat behind the arras, all of that. Imagine my surprise to see Claudia Winkleman in her Traitors gear David Tennant in long black kilt with boots and a hairband. It’s a fabulous look: top marks for wardrobe; every member of the cast wears this black kilt/cool jacket combo except for Lady Macbeth who wears a white dress (a bold choice given what’s coming her way). I didn’t love the set as much. This was a stark white cube, like a massive table, and I worried throughout that somebody was going to step off the edge during one of those sword fights and do themselves a mischief. Maybe they were so thrilled with the kilts and the Chelsea boots that they thought nah let’s have a blank stage and no trees or anything.

It’s possible that I nodded off in some of the fight scenes. In my defence I have to say that this is an MRI defence mechanism: the noise in a scanner is so intense that I automatically opt out and fall asleep, and battle cries and child murders seemed to have much the same effect. So there were bits that passed me by, though the denouement was as cathartic as ever and the creeping bloodstain on the white stage had me worried me all over again about accidents in the workplace. Mrs Hinch would’ve been out of her seat and up there in a flash with a mop and some Zoflora.

Oddly enough when I was in my 20s I also wore a dark kilt and a hairband, though I didn't look nearly as good as David Tennant. My friend Renira and I were discussing this lately and we realised that at the age of 22 we were dressing exactly like the late Queen: long skirts, curly hair, pearls, headscarves; I’m not sure that there weren’t even twinsets involved. I mean, what were we thinking?

I caught a few moments of Nadiya’s cooking show the other day. We love a cookery programme, don’t we? We love them so much we don’t leave ourselves time to do any actual cooking and have to send out for an Indian takeaway. Regrettably Nadiya was making that most repulsive of dishes, macaroni cheese. And don’t get me started on people who call it Mac’n’cheese: there is no punishment too harsh for them. I was on the point of switching channels when she did something so grotesque that my hand froze to the remote. Not only was she making this gluey concoction in the first place, but she then proceeded to crumble up and add orange cheesy whatsits as a fun twist. I can see you’re shocked as I am.

I’m being unfair to Nadiya: at least she is encouraging her audience to cook something fresh from scratch. It just seems wrong to me to add not just any old UPF but a Queen of the UPFs, containing about twenty ingredients. It’s right up there (my children will be rolling their eyes) with buying a nice piece of white fish and then cooking it with chorizo. Why spoil a fish with spiced pork spleen?

They used to give us macaroni cheese for our Sunday supper at boarding school, after chapel. It was a dispiriting end to the day. I remember that once when it was dished out we recoiled in horror because there were little red specs in with the pasta. The consensus was that one of the cooks had accidentally grated her red nail varnish into the sauce with the cheese, and to a woman we refused to put it anywhere near our lips.

It was only quite recently that it occurred to me that no amount of scarlet nail varnish could’ve been fairly shared out between 300 girls. The cook must have decided to go off piste and add some chilli flakes. Poor deluded fool: I could’ve told her that adding something different would cause outrage. It’s the same with my chickens if the wind blows a alien bucket into their run. They huddle around it, jerking their heads, and have low clucky conversations. Many years ago I cooked in the canteen for Post Office workers in Oxford. One day the man who made the custard didn’t turn up for work; I offered to make it and they thought I had lost my mind. No Custard Man, no custard, those were the rules.

Suspicious item alert

Teaching us how to cook the basics from scratch is important, and it’s a huge loss that it’s no longer taught to school children. At my school we did cooking from the age of about 11. It was known as Domestic Science and we wore white coats and had a marvellous book: there’s a clue in the name, and we should all know about nutrition and a balanced diet. We are in the grip of an obesity epidemic that has forced shopkeepers to put up signs saying ‘Only two schoolchildren’. This is because children have become so stout that only two will fit into a small newsagent’s shop. The pensioners have to wait outside for their fags and copies of the Racing Post until the children waddle out, their cheeks bulging with strawberry shoelaces.

Still use it

I love Bake Off and especially Junior Bake off. It never ceases to amaze me that those small children can make brilliant cakes and decorate the hell out of them but they can’t for the life of them do up their own aprons. Yes, cakes contain fat and sugar and wheat and every sort of horror. But teaching us to make cakes at home is going in the right direction. I once worked in a café where plastic-wrapped commercial tray bakes with terrifyingly long shelf lives, such as millionaires’ shortbread, were delivered. We reckoned that when the end of the world came those tray bakes would outlive all of us, even the cockroaches.

Got the recipe from Junior Bake Off

Our diet when we were children in Kent would nowadays be considered meagre. My mother was a good plain cook but only thought about food in passing, when she had to. It was purely fuel, and if anyone had talked to her about a passion for food she would’ve thought they were bonkers. There was plenty of mutton, homegrown vegetables, our own milk from a Jersey cow and the fish man came once a week in his van. (It’s not strictly relevant but he had only one arm.) I don’t remember that we had any other puddings apart from stewed apples, stewed gooseberries or plums (if my sisters had not sold them all to the neighbours) with home-made shortbread and home-produced cream. It was a very lucky start for us children but naturally we would’ve given anything for some shop white bread or fizzy lemonade.

My mother could knock up a cake or a plate of scones in minutes, and her early farming experience in the land army stood her in good stead because for all of her life she bought organic wheat from a Kentish neighbour and ground it into flour herself. She wouldn’t have known what to do with a neon orange cheesy puff and the colour alone would’ve told her it was a wrong’un.

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