Food, Diet and Eating Habits

Story · all 20 words

Thirty-One and Boiling Water

I could not cook at thirty-one. Not “could not cook well” – could not cook. I could make toast, and I could make pasta in the sense that I could put pasta into water and wait.

For most of my twenties Friday was a takeaway, Saturday was the same takeaway, and the rest of the week was whatever was on offer at the shop on the corner at nine in the evening. I did not eat out much – restaurants were for other people with other salaries – so it was mostly plastic containers on my lap.

I did not put on weight, which I took at the time as evidence that everything was fine. It is not evidence of anything. I was twenty-four and had the metabolism of a small furnace, and my diet was, in the proper sense of that word, appalling.

What changed was a flatmate called Priya who was not remotely preachy about it and simply cooked, loudly, four nights a week, in a kitchen I also had to stand in.

The first thing she taught me was that a recipe is not a test you can fail. I had genuinely believed you needed eleven ingredients and a shop I could not afford. She showed me a dal that had six, all of which cost under four pounds together, and which was more filling than anything I had eaten from a plastic container in six years.

The second thing took longer. My cooking, for about four months, was reliably bland. Everything I made tasted of warm nothing. I assumed I was missing some expensive flavour that professionals had access to.

It was salt. It was almost entirely salt, and to a lesser extent the fact that I was frightened of heat and cooked everything until it apologised.

The third thing was shopping, and this is where I had been wasting real money. I did not know what ripe looked like. I bought avocados like bricks and then let them go off on the windowsill in a sort of quiet standoff. I bought portions for a family of four because the bigger bag was better value, and then threw a third of it away on Sunday nights.

Priya’s rule was that leftovers are not sad. Leftovers are tomorrow’s lunch and they are free. I had been treating them as evidence of failure and putting them in the bin.

I would like to say I became someone with a perfectly balanced and nutritious life at that point. I did not. I still get a craving for chips at eleven at night roughly once a fortnight and I still act on it.

But I did cut down on the corner shop, mostly by accident, because cooking turned out to be faster than waiting for a delivery.

The odd result is that I became less fussy, not more. When you have cooked something yourself you are far more interested in what it tastes like and far less interested in whether it is the thing you always order. I eat things now – raw fennel, anchovies, proper mustard – that twenty-four-year-old me would have pushed to the side of the plate.

Priya moved to Bristol in the spring. She left me a handwritten card with the dal on it, which is in a frame in my kitchen and which I have never once needed to read, because I have made it perhaps four hundred times.

I make it when I get home late and I am starving and I want something in twenty minutes. It has six ingredients. It is the single most useful thing anybody has ever taught me, and she taught it to me because I was standing in the way of the fridge.