Editor’s letter

PEOPLE WHO SAY they “can’t cook” make me suspicious. Have they just never learned how? Or are they claiming they can’t because they live with someone who does the cooking? Or because they are addicted to Uber Eats?

But, if not being able to choose a few seasonal ingredients, follow a recipe and focus on the promise of something delicious is a real thing, then I feel sorry for people who can’t cook.

When I moved out of home I couldn’t cook anything. My mother was a great cook, but I’d never shown much interest in food, except in an abstract way. Food was something that sounded magical in Famous Five stories – picnics in the heather with ginger beer and boiled eggs. But then, in my first year at university, I met Polly. She was a second-year student doing a creative writing seminar and living in a flat that belonged to a couple of writer-activist intellectuals. She watched Twin Peaks and saw films at the Labia. I was in awe.

Polly was interested in food – so it was partly out of admiration and partly out of competitiveness, but mostly just because I needed to feed myself, that I started to learn to cook. Polly had the River Café cookbooks, so I bought them too and learned to make risotto, ribollita, Tuscan panzanella – the food I still love to eat most of all. Hannah’s pasta on p.118 was inspired by a River Café recipe I made often as a student – though admittedly with vastly inferior balsamic vinegar.

When I got a job editing a student magazine – which later became SL, for those who may remember – I asked Polly to write food features. Polly on pasta, Polly on garlic … They were not what you’d expect to read in a student magazine, but I was hooked and, I rationalised, students have to eat.

We started receiving cookbooks to review. I took them home and read them in bed. I made lists of things to cook and menus for weekend feasts. When a recipe worked out really well, I made it often. My sister remembers a poached yellowtail, served cold with two sauces. That was a Phillippa Cheifitz recipe. There was a lemon meringue ice-cream terrine by Ina Paarman and my first roast lamb and tzatziki came from the Reader’s Digest South African Cookbook. When I look at that spattered page now I am back in our digs in Woodstock, picking rosemary from our tiny courtyard, sitting at the Oregon pine table with friends.

Cooking made me happy then, at a time when life wasn’t always happy. I could forget my sadness when I was frying onions and peppers, then layering slices of brinjal and baby marrow on top of them for a Provençal “ratatouille” bake. It’s impossible not to feel comforted by the smell of onions cooking.

When I moved to London and missed home unbearably, it was food that distracted me. I spent my weekends browsing supermarket aisles: marvelling at the price of salmon (so cheap!), but pining for hake, which I couldn’t afford. Polly had moved there before me and she invited me to lunch one St Patrick’s Day. She’d made Nigel Slater’s sausages in a red onion gravy with juniper berries, served with home-made saucy beans.

The only time I ever attempted homemade pasta was with Polly. I’d moved back to SA, but was visiting and I had an interview with Rick Stein, so we’d gone to Cornwall for the weekend. We bought fish and chips from Stein’s fishmonger and ate it on the Padstow pier, shouting at the seagulls. Then we took a whole fresh crab home on the train.

That crab needed fresh pasta. We did start making it very late and drank too much wine, but I will never forget that pasta. It was so perfect I have never tried it again, perhaps for fear of tarnishing my happy, sweet crab sauce memory. But this month I may try Abi’s recipe (p. 68)

When you love to cook the possibilities are endless. Just when you think you’ve nailed ragù Bolognese, you come across a recipe with a secret ingredient (chicken livers) and boom! Life is never the same.

In January this year I resolved to make one new TASTE dish every week and write about it. There are at least a dozen in this issue that I am determined to add to my repertoire, starting with fresh pasta (embarassingly overdue). You can follow my progress in my column What Kate Ate at taste.co.za.

Because, for me, the best part about learning to cook is that it never feels like learning, it just feels like living.

“Just when you think you’ve nailed ragù Bolognese, you come across a recipe with a secret ingredient and boom!”