Culinary Cures

You have disregarded all the good advice which everyone gave you over the years. Never try out a new recipe for a dinner party. Stick to simple food. Making more than three courses is not a good plan. Do most of the cooking in advance. Your mother told you, your cookbook told you, your girlfriends told you, and you didn’t pay a blind bit of notice. You had an elaborate, complicated, exotic menu worked out, none of which you had made before, and you have important people coming for dinner.

And here you are: six p.m. The cream has curdled in your cream sauce, which is a perfect adjunct to your burned ragout and your scorched potatoes, perfectly finished with a little boiled wine, which will go well with the pastry with cat footprints trailing the whole length of the table. Right next to the tumbled vase, ruined gladioli and jar of tamarind preserve which has smashed on the priceless table linen your great grandmother personally embroidered. You have two choices. One is to shove the whole mess into the bin, put the tablecloth on to soak in cold water and salt, and confess all. Make it a funny story. One disaster is sad, ten is comic. Then order lots of takeaway or sweep everyone out to dinner somewhere cheap and local - Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian - where you can order a banquet. This is expensive but pleasant. And you really don’t feel like cooking after you contemplate your kitchen, do you? You may, indeed, never enter that room again.

But if this isn’t possible, if you really need to make an impression on these guests and you can’t possibly confess domestic disaster, then seize your partner and press upon him/her this shopping list, mentioning that they have half an hour, and if anything is left off the list, they will be the main course as you have just found a really good recipe for Long Pig. With chestnuts. While they are gone, clear away the mess and get a working surface back. Open some windows and let out the smoke. Change your table settings by placing a little bowl with a lemon slice in it next to each place - a finger bowl, which you will later fill with hot water. Find a big baking dish. Melt the honey, the butter and the ginger together in the microwave and set it aside and light the oven. Pierce and microwave a lot of potatoes and then oil and salt them and shove them in the oven - they are patient and take a long time to over cook. Find a big china dish for dessert and remove spiders. Find a big salad bowl and mix together 1 part lime juice to three parts olive oil in a jam jar. Shake. While waiting for the shopper, you can always chop up some fresh parsley and thyme. It will get you out of the house and into the garden, at least. Take deep breaths. This will work. Don’t get out the brandy yet.

When the shopper returns, rip the chickens into bits and put them in the baking dish. Pour over the ginger butter honey mixture. Cover with foil or a lid and stick in oven. Fling the salad mixture into a big bowl along with your chopped herbs and the pine nuts and pears. Use a vegetable peeler to make slices of the parmesan. Breathe. Your main course is now secure. Lay out the smoked salmon on a flat tray, along with capers and sour cream and a lot of the rye bread, cut into bits. Voila. Entree.

Pour all the berries into that big china bowl and sprinkle them with sugar and any liqueur you have in the cupboard (except kahlua). Put the dish in the fridge if you can make it fit. Leave the ice cream in the main body of the fridge. You now have dessert.

You probably bought cheeses and mints etc, and unless you have a really cunning pet dog or dairy cat they are probably still all right. Now you can pour yourself a restorative brandy and greet the guests. If asked about the recipes, you may tell them that they are Moroccan. Embroider freely. Let people serve themselves from the smoked salmon. Bring in the salad, the ginger chicken and the potatoes and serve with sour cream and a lot of black pepper. If you have children who are easily cowed or bribed, you might have them bring in the water for the finger bowls and hand each guest a towel. This always impresses. Don’t do this unless you are feeling lucky. And you probably aren’t, at the moment. Pour the whole bottle of champagne into the berries and give them a stir - they foam up like magic. Serve with ice cream. Then the cheeses and nuts etc and not only have you survived, but your menu will not be composed of all the recipes which everyone has just read in the latest Donna Hay or Gourmet Traveller.

Next time, make recipes you know how to make, in advance. Or only dine with people who can cope with surprises. Both are good.

SHOPPING LIST

two packets or a whole side of smoked salmon
sour cream
capers
two loaves of rye bread, sliced for sandwich if possible
packet of ground ginger
honey
butter
proportions: (half cup honey, half cup butter, teaspoon ginger, per chicken)
two cooked chickens
three packets of frozen berries
tub of vanilla ice cream
half kilo of salad leaves
lime juice
parmesan cheese (in a slab, not powdered)
olive oil
tin of pears
bottle of dry cheap champagne

COMFORT FOOD AND GOURMET TYRANNY

What do you eat when you have a cold coming on, your partner is out somewhere interesting (and you aren’t), you are grumpy and cross and you don’t bloody feel like cooking anything (and you may, at any moment, decide that your first course ought to be worms?) It’s either freezing cold or boiling hot, the house looks like Atilla the Hun has been camping in it for weeks, there’s nothing on T.V. and even your cat is beginning to give you a peculiar look. Forget gourmet stuff. You don’t want to cook. Gourmet food can be a tyranny. You can, indeed have, made bread from scratch and soup from your own stock and concocted exquisite sauces from a demi-glace which would have brought screams of joy from Careme, but not tonight. You are not going to open the fridge and stare dully into the icy depths at two old zucchini and a cheese with fur on it, wondering if you can make zucchini and cheese soufflé and feeling that if you don’t you are somehow letting the side down. Tonight all bets are off.

You need comfort food and it’s usually a childhood memory. In my case it is tinned Rosella tomato soup with cut up cheese and lots of nutmeg. Lots of people in my informal and entirely unscientific survey opted for tinned soup, Heinz cream of chicken being the favourite. Some desires are very specific; Heinz junior turkey dinner with Kraft cheddar cheese cut up in it. Some are generic, ie, a sardine sandwich. A cup of Bovril. Baked beans on toast. My mother declares that she needs toast soldiers, a nicely boiled egg, and a pot of really strong tea to be drunk with milk and lots of sugar. Others require vanilla ice cream with Milo or Ovaltine sprinkled over it. Vegemite toast is always good, with lots of butter, making sure that the butter and the vegemite reach all the way to the exact edge of the toast. Others like bread and hundreds and thousands and a chocolate milk shake. Or want to eat a whole fresh out of the woven cottage loaf, beginning with the crust.

Strong tastes are also popular. There is the kebab with garlic sauce. The barbequed chicken with stuffing. The heavily battered fish. Or the potato cake with vinegar. Cheese, bread and pickles has many fans. So has the Australian treat of chips and tomato sauce. Occasionally one just needs a doughnut from that mobile kitchen outside Footscray station. Or a bowl of breakfast cereal with apricots and cream. Devout Buddhists may revert to KFC and their signature mashed potato with gravy, eaten with a chip as a spoon. I have Greek friends whose mothers cook like a dream who want a triple cheeseburger, Jewish friends whose mothers make definitive chicken soup who want a frozen pizza and holistic health Vegan friends who need to eat a whole block of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut milk chocolate. One young woman craves conventional pasta and bottled pesto, but it has to be eaten from the saucepan.

Whatever it is, keep a tin or a store of it if you can. Don’t allow anyone to inflict food snobbery upon you. One of my friends encountered her first fresh asparagus at twenty and wondered why anyone would bother when it came in tins. I craved crumbly yellow shop cake, when my female relatives could make any kind of cake from gingerbread ladies to sponge cakes which almost floated out the window. In an emergency, remember the Corinna Chapman motto: OBEY YOUR HUNGER.

Most meals can be saved unless you have burned them to extinction. Just pour off the unburned part of the stew into a clean pan, add a handful of chopped parsley and re heat it gently. Adding a big dollop of yoghurt to the finished product disguises any strange appearance, and if all else fails, add a tablespoon of vindaloo paste and no one will know what the original source might have been. And you may have invented the world’s first goulash vindaloo. You can, if you really have to, remove salt from an oversalted stew or soup by cooking raw potato in the broth. You can also add sugar which disguises the taste. This is only worth doing if the dish was good in the first place. If it’s one of those things which have never quite worked, feed it to the dog and cook something else. Or buy takeaways. Or make something really easy like pumpkin soup or a roast or chicken parcels. Never allow your dinner to dictate to you, or who knows where it will all end? I’ll tell you where it will end. It ends in

REVENGE COOKERY

You are in the common female position where you have no help, an uncooperative partner whose idea of cooking is called burning pots, clamouring children who all have their own ideas of what constitutes cuisine and limited time. And limited money. You are exhausted by working and doing all the housework, shopping with a car load of screamers, hauling bags of groceries into the house to be laboriously unpacked under the eyes of teenagers so bone idle that they can’t get up off the sofa and help. And in any case they can’t hear you because they are plugged into a perpetual Ipod.

You might be excused if one night you just added finely chopped deadly nightshade to the beef stew and watched them all roll on the ground in well deserved agony. Some women have actually taken this unfortunate course. From their prison cells, they speak highly of arsenic and weedkillers. But most of us will find ourselves unable to obliterate our nearest and dearest, however much they deserve it. And what we will then be very tempted to do is revenge cookery.

The principle is simple. Find something which no one likes -liver is good, tripe, any offal, cabbage, over boiled spinach - and serve it for dinner. Then - and this is the diabolical part - collect up the leftovers (there will be leftovers) and make another dish out of them for tomorrow’s dinner. I knew one woman who managed to produce the world’s first tripe rissoles. Three dinners, all inedible, and all told her rotten family exactly how much she resented them. If the secret ingredient in good cooking is love, then the secret ingredient in revenge cookery is hatred. It has a strange kind of slave’s logic. You can make me cook for you, is the subtext, but you can’t control what I cook, and you can’t make me like it, and don’t expect to enjoy eating it.

This does have some good effects, occasionally. A solid diet of recycled offal can make teenagers decide to either 1. leave home 2. live on breakfast cereal and grilled cheese sandwiches or 3. learn to cook themselves. You might find that your partner shows that he can master that steep learning curve from the burning pots to the basic ratatouille. But revenge cookery has to tarnish your kharma and it takes all the fun out of making a good dinner. So why not use more confrontational methods. You can lay out the ingredients for a simple stew or a lamb roast on the table, provide the recipe, and wander off into the parlour and watch Dr Who, with a sturdy gin and tonic in hand. They will mess up the kitchen and probably burn everything, but they are doing the washing up if they want any dinner tomorrow and is it your problem, anyway? You can worry too much about nutrition and food. I know of one small boy who survived to become a mountain climber but spent the first post-weaning year of his life eating nothing but bread and butter. As long as the stuff is cooked at home, contains a reasonable range of vegetables and not more than one meal in ten is deep fried, no one is going to expire of beri beri. And if they do contract it, tell them to start on a small jar of vegemite. It’s a specific.

Easy foods which everyone likes are rare. You are the cook. The kitchen is your domain. Make the sort of food you like to eat. A big pot of soup, for instance. Sausages and mash. A Stephanie simple stew. A rich chicken casserole. And if they don’t like it, they can eat bread and butter, or cook for themselves. If you cook food that you know how to cook and like eating, the family will probably fall in - grumbling, of course, but if its on the table they will in all likelihood eat it. And if they don’t, they won’t starve. For children who will only eat, ie, white food, or uncooked food, or consider carrots an invention of the devil, allow them to eat plain pasta with bottled tomato sauce, which almost everyone tolerates and anyone can cook.

At least, this way, you get a good dinner out of it. And as for the others, they can make their own arrangements. Refresh your gin and settle back into the best chair. You deserve it.