A week or two ago, Baroness Jenkin said the trouble with the poor was “they don’t cook”. I would have thought the standard Tory view was that the poor ought to be working too hard to be constantly leaning over the stove, but there’s no doubt that cooking is not as compulsory as it used to be, even for those who don’t marry or employ someone else to do it.
When I wrote a book about cooking in a bedsitter in the 60s there was almost nothing you could buy ready made, except fish and chips – the book even had a recipe for a home-made and rather explosive pizza which no one would dream of making today.
The fact that you don’t have to cook or con someone else into cooking to stay alive I’d have thought was a plus. Of course, the act itself can be fun or sociable, when you’re stirring the Christmas pudding or coughing round the barbecue, and it can have other advantages: my husband Gavin Lyall’s cooking was as complicated as possible – Chinese, Indian, he even did a rijsttafel; his cooking was “a work-avoidance scheme”: when he was cooking no one could say he was not Doing Good.
But we don’t all want such distractions. Once, when I was teaching English as a foreign language, I was offered a piece of a “self-made cake” – now a cake that makes itself, that would be a benefit to us all.
What do you think? Have your say below
