Porterhouse paradox: prune to profit

Karoostew

TO BE be reduced can be good or bad. Those who at one or other time have found themselves in reduced circumstances – that charmingly English way of understating something which could in fact be a personal catastrophe – may not enjoy the word while going through it.

Losing your job, unexpectedly, despite being pretty good at it, draws you up like almost nothing else, though nothing – nothing – devastates your spirit more than the death of a young person in your family. That reduces your spirit, squashes you in a way that you feel incapable of recovering from.

It makes a mere retrenchment seem inconsequential. You can fight your way to another job or mode to make a living. You cannot fight someone back to life.

But being retrenched from a job you love is nevertheless pretty devastating. It’s not only your financial circumstances that are suddenly reduced. In your work environment, you have a circle of colleagues, some of whom have become friends, some of whom you don’t see eye to eye with. But you all muddle along together and in any one day there are those moments of camaraderie. Popping across to someone’s desk for a natter about this-and-that or so-and-so. Nipping out for a coffee to the place you like across the road, and cracking a smile and a joke with Thulani, your favourite barista. Even the routine of finding a parking spot for the day, and paying the cheeky Nigerian who always manages to find an empty space for your car. All gone. And not by your own choice or your own planning or ambitions.

I remember a magazine I worked for in 2001 suddenly going under at 12.55pm one Friday afternoon. We had the afternoon to pack away our personal stuff, and the doors would be chained and bolted at 5pm. It was a month before Christmas. We never did get our November salary.

But being reduced in circumstances does not in any way mean you are reduced as a human being. If anything, if you can muster a little dignity and a lot of resolve and perseverance; you might even be enhanced: it grows character, invigorates you. It reduced our immediate circumstances – but it also led to one of the greatest adventures of our lives. We decided to head for the UK, where we quickly found good newspaper jobs, a wonderful new home, a host of lifelong friends, and so many memories, so much untried knowledge. All unforeseen but for those reduced circumstances. The reduced becomes the increased, by chance and some effort and imagination.

Being suddenly reduced – or so you think at the time – enables movement to places you never imagined. The last time our working circumstances were so reduced, we left Cape Town for the Karoo, where there were three-bedroom houses we could afford for half the price of a studio flat in the City Bowl. But sometimes the journey is not really taking you to where you think you’re going. Where we were going was Cradock, and we’re still there now, but it transpires that the place the universe had decided to take us to was elsewhere, closer to the coast and within commute of Grahamstown.

The horizons, in that place, yield fisheries offering fish fresh from the sea, and, the best vegetable store (anywhere) packed with brilliant produce. Beaches are wide and warm, gardens enormous and full of fruit trees, to be watered from your own borehole, with rainwater collecting in big green tanks. There will be much cooking there and growing of vegetables and herbs, and with luck lots of exercise working that garden.

The kind of reducing I really like, though, is in cooking. Removing something in a pot or pan takes away, while giving so much more… just as in life. If the sauce in the pot when you start cooking represents the reduced circumstances you found yourself in, the far lesser amount, once you’ve allowed it to simmer down to something like a third or less of its original quantity, represents the far more substantial life you suddenly found yourself inheriting once you’d waded through those muddy waters.

I reduce when I make lamb, beef or chicken stocks and with almost any sauce I cook. That watery broth, once reduced with suitable flavourings along the way, intensifies as a richly desirable thing.

Here’s to the gaining of more by the taking away of much. It’s cooking’s little irony, and life’s.