BEST BOOKS ON... HOME COOKING

I HAVE been moonlighting as an unpaid drudge. With schools closed, days have been measured out in dishwasher and laundry loads, school print-outs or meal prepping.

So, yes, I am hopeful that schools in England will return, or begin to, from March 8. And not just for selfserving reasons: it is wretched to see young children deprived of physical and social play, their only outside interaction through computer games.

But I have also been fantasising about some grown-up, solitary spring lunches when the kitchen is no longer a primary classroom.

Comfort lockdown lunch defaults have been toasties, quick egg dishes, beans and cheese on toast.

What I crave now are sharp, zingy flavours, citrussy squeezes and scatterings of herbs. A lentil and goats’ cheese salad, perhaps? Smoked mackerel and peppery watercress? Or perhaps a caramelised onion and fennel tart with a colourful slaw on the side.

I have devoted what non-foodies would regard as a disproportionate degree of thought into what I might eat or cook next. I am drawn to likeminded literary characters.

Whitney Scharer’s The Age of Light imagines the life of surrealist muse then war photographer Lee Miller. It begins in the mid-1960s, with an increasingly drunken Miller, then Vogue’s ‘domestic correspondent’, preparing a ten-course meal for the Vogue editor she suspects has come to sack her.

In Clare Chambers’ Small Pleasures, journalist Jean investigates claims of a young Swiss-born woman, Gretchen, to have had a virgin birth. The novel, set in the mid-1950s, contrasts the blandness of post-war British cuisine with the exoticism of Gretchen’s baking of sachertorte (chocolate-hazelnut cake) and spitzbuben (jammy biscuits).

Heartburn, Nora Ephron’s roman à clef about the end of her marriage, is narrated by funny, loveable food writer Rachel who, even in her darkest hour, can share a recipe for sorrel soup or peach pie.

These are hard times. If cooking for yourself or others, do it with love.