What Do You Cook?

At a social gathering some time back it came out that I am the family cook. Someone of the female persuassion very patronisingly thought that meant I'd mastered one or two dishes for when The Dear Leader was taken up with plans for world domination and didn't have time to fend for us. This person asked the stupid (in the circs) question: 'What do you cook?' Inevitably my reply was sarcastic, but a more considered one would have been that I cook from a repertoire learned over years, to which new things are occasionally added.

Yesterday's main meal was from the tried and tested list, stuffed cabbage Troo style (there should be a circumflex over the first 'o' btw, but I can't figure out how to do them on this). Slice a savoy or similar across as thinly as possible, plunge the greenery into boiling salted water for five minutes, drain, then layer cabbage, sausagemeat, cabbage, sausagemeat, cabbage in a buttered casserole with a good lid and cook at 140C - 150C for 120 - 150 minutes. Each layer of cabbage is seasoned; I add a clove or three of garlic; and the top is dotted with butter before cooking. But it is essentially simple (thank you the late great Jane Grigson).

Such dishes allow me, immodestly, to consider myself a cook (and specifically for that one, an austerity cook once again). In that case it is justified by the making of something really good (there are never any leftovers) for a small outlay (£2 for Sainsubury's Toulouse-style sausages, carefully skinned, 69p I think for the cabbage, pence for the butter and garlic. Cookerhooddomness is reniforced by the fact that I only make it once a year, or even every other year - contrary to that lady's thought, my repertoire consists of hundreds (thousands? I never counted) of dishes. It's something that satisfies in more ways that one - quite filling, but also (contrary to what might be expected of slow-cooked cabbage) enticing beforehand, the savoury sausagey smell filling the ground floor.

It's good, and healthy, to add new stuff to the list too. Midweek I made us something that definitely gets added to the roll of honour for repeating. It was essentially a salad, with rocket as the leaf, plus toms, spring onions, and yellow pepper to bulk it out. To make it more fillling and interesting I added little scallops fried in salty butter, and chunks cut from half a Galia melon. Dressed with lime juice and olive oil, and seasoned with the emphasis on pepper, it was delicious, the salty seafood and sweet melon a lovely match. Not exactly an austerity plateful, though the melon and rocket needed using up and the bag of frozen scallops set up back £4, cheaper than a burger meal for one. And, perhaps because it was so flavoursome, we needed nothing else afterwards.

Upside to Austerity

In the 1970s Christmas kids' television was special not for the content, but the mere fact that for once we had daytime viewing. Terrible Randolph Scott westerns enjoyed because they were there. Maybe it will be the same with food during this period of austerity. If awareness of value reduces food wastage all the better.

Christmas for too many of us had over the last 20 or 30 years become a time of gross over-indulgence. Familiarity breeding contempt and all that, we valued the surfeit - big turkey or goose, huge ham, tins of chocolates and biscuits, massive Stiltons - less than one imagines a wartime cook valued a pound of sausages.

I have only had one brief flirtation with poverty I'm happy to say, a year as a grantless post-graduate student when I counted every previously earned penny, and parental subs, to get me through the course. That was when my lifelong love began for bacon offcuts and their endless possibilties, when potatoes were the core of many meals, and barely a crust was thrown away. What I learned then is still part of my culinary psyche.

It may be that with changes in global economic balance Britain and Europe never return to the carefree prosperity of the 90s. In which case perhaps we will learn to enjoy what we have all the more, sententious though it is to say so. I'm sure my parents enjoyed the fleeting pleasure of their seasonal indulgences - a bottle of sherry in the house and wine with Christmas dinner - far more than someone shifting more than that every day for a week or so of festivities. Is it too much to hope that governments learn to cope in similar fashion? That wastage on unfeasibly complex IT projects that inevitably fail will end? That they won't order aircraftless aircraft carriers? If they can learn - a huge if - we won't all be as badly off as we had feared.