Hunger is the mother of invention
Before MasterChef, there was Mrs P Hunt, a woman who had impeccable manners – I never once heard her mutter ‘‘bollocks’’ like that foul-mouthed Mr Ramsay – and no time for airs and graces.
When she made choux pastry profiteroles, she called them cream puffs and served them sprinkled with icing sugar, rather than hog-tied with spun sugar in a croquembouche castle.
Mrs Hunt had more important things on her mind than television ratings. As head of the home economics department at our country school, she was tasked with teaching all the first-formers how to cook. (Some of us were clearly more proficient than others at turning out savoury scones, cinnamon pinwheels, chocolate fudge, and pikelets because, in 1986, Mrs P Hunt gave me the only B on my school report.)
By the time I’d left high school, I’d extended my culinary repertoire, though not by much, to include mousetraps (aka Marmite and grilled cheese on toast), spicy nachos, and stir-fried two-minute noodles. These three dishes largely sustained me through three years of tertiary education.
Three decades on, the humble cheese toastie remains one of my work-from-home lunchtime staples but I can turn my hand to most things in the kitchen. I can roast a turkey, roll out fresh pasta, smoke a fish, stuff my own sausages, whip up a perfect pav, and pickle and preserve everything from gherkins to gooseberries, though my hollandaise still has a maddening tendency to curdle.
Although Mrs Hunt’s home economic classes taught me the basics, I’ve progressively upskilled through curiosity, Cuisine magazine, and osmosis, for necessity isn’t the mother of invention. Hunger is.
Irish domestic doyenne Darina Allen, of Ballymaloe fame, says she was ‘‘fortunate to catch the end of an era’’. Her ancestors were masters in the art of thrifty housekeeping, she writes in her homage to the old ways, Forgotten Skills of Cooking, unlike the ‘‘alarming loss of skill’’ she sees in many of her current cookery students.
Darina blames convenience foods: ‘‘Every time we go to the supermarket, an increasing number of items are oven-ready or ready-to-eat: cheese is grated, mushrooms sliced, fruit segmented. I swear if they sold toast we’d buy it.’’
But I don’t blame supermarkets for giving consumers what they want. Shopkeepers can’t be blamed for the increasing obesity of generations X, Y and Z, not to mention those hapless digital natives who would sooner Snapchat their paleo snacks than actually eat them. No, I blame the appliance manufacturers and grocery magnates who fired all the permed and pinny-clad ladies who formerly populated their retro test kitchens.
Remember when all kitchen appliances – not just the expensive French icecream churns and fancy sous-vide machines – came with their own recipe books? From Mirro Matic’s pressure cooker to Fowlers Vacola ‘‘for better bottling’’, appliance merchants once knew better than to assume their customers could actually cook. Quite the opposite, in fact.
This week, my friend Fiona turned up with a box of vintage cookbooks and instruction manuals from her godmother’s octogenarian cousin’s kitchen cupboards.
Many appear to presume that yesteryear’s average housewife was as thick as two planks of processed cheese. How else to explain General Electric’s Toast-R-Oven recipe for an Open-Face Cheese-Tomato Sandwich: ‘‘Place toast on oven tray. Place cheese and tomato slices on toast. Top brown until cheese is bubbly. Serve immediately.’’
Or Panasonic’s Genius Microwave Oven Cookbook, with its freshly ground recipe for the perfect cuppa: ‘‘Ingredients: cup water, 1-2 teaspoons instant coffee. Method: Pour water into a heatproof cup. Add coffee. Stir. Cook on high for 1-2 minutes. Add milk and sugar if desired. Stir. Serves 1.’’
Then there was the ‘‘new kind of carefree living’’ promised by the purchase of a new Frigidaire, which included this pearler of a weekend brunch idea: ‘‘For a Sunday morning party, set out sherry glasses, paper table napkins and large ash trays. Dice some cheese and spike on cocktail sticks. It is wise to serve a sweet as well as a dry sherry. Lastly, and most importantly, one has to drink it.’’
Getting sloshed on a Sunday morning? Those really were the good old days.
Lynda Hallinan [Old cookbooks] presume that yesteryear's average housewife was as thick as two planks of processed cheese.