Starting to cook

I first began to cook regularly for myself at York University. My mother gave me a crash course. I fear that some of the early efforts I inflicted on friends did not go down well. I presented a beef curry to one such friend and he later dined out (in my presence) on a description of carrots in water. He also slept on the floor of my room and was distinctly unimpressed by the British Rail posters and sleeping bag which I had promised him was extra warm. Unfulfilled expectations, I fear, but we are still on speaking terms.

Although my own early cooking efforts may have been less than adequate, I did at least make an effort to cook things from scratch. Unlike a girl in a nearby corridor who told me proudly of her nightly meal: "tinned mince, tinned potatoes and tinned peas". She would consume half a tin each evening and save the remainder for the next day. Yuck.

The first French restaurant

When my parents first started taking us to the south of France in the mid nineteen seventies, they were doing something relatively unusual for the times. There was not a lot of money and - surprisingly, perhaps, for the daughter of an Italian - my mother would pack food from home which we took with us: packets of Shredded Wheat; those round flat tins containing Fray Bentos steak pies; and tins of meatballs. It might have had something to do with exchange controls.

Be that as it may, two tins of the meatballs got to the south of France. One was pronounced so disgusting that the other was shipped all the way back to London and given to harvest festival collectors who came to the door.

One year, we had arrived in northern France; the tent was up; and we were all hungry. I have a feeling that my aunt Christine was with us. For whatever reason, the idea of opening one of the tins of food was rejected and we headed out, destination unknown. It was to be my first meal in a French restaurant, indeed my first meal in any restaurant other than a Berni Inn.

I do not recall there being much choice about where we would eat. The restaurant was on a  square in a nondescript northern French town. It was dark. But the light coming from the restaurant was cheerful and the place bustled. There were probably white paper tablecloths. It was that kind of place.

In those days, my brother and I shared one adult portion between us. I can remember the menu very clearly. Cornets of ham, filled with "crudités"; stuffed tomatoes; Steak-frites. And, having said I can remember the menu, I have no recollection of what there was for pudding. If the place was anything like the dozens of other, similar restaurants we were to encounter over the years, there would have been a choice: Crème Caramel, Mousse au Chocolat, Tarte aux Pommes, Glaces, Flan. Or was "Flan" simply another term for "Crème Caramel"?

I suspect that if we had walked into such a restaurant thirty years later and been offered the same things, we would have spent the rest of the holiday reliving the appalling meal we had endured. Instead, on that August night in the nineteen seventies, we were all enchanted with cornets of plastic jambon de Paris with tinned Russian salad in thin mayonnaise; with tomatoes that were stuffed with some kind of mince; with steak that, according to my mother, was "probably horse".

So enchanted were we that a few years later, at my particular request, we returned. It was a mistake. None of us knew for certain even the name of the town, although I had a vague recollection that it was called Albans or something similar. My father only remembered roughly where we would have stopped on that first night. We spent some time fruitlessly searching for it as the night grew darker and ended up back at the campsite, hungrier than when we had left, forced once again into self-catering. A sarcastic remark I made ("Well that's great!") was misconstrued as being a criticism of others and it was not a happy evening.

The following day, we renewed our search and very quickly came upon the square in the town, to find the restaurant, and it was open. It was not usual for us to eat out at lunchtime but it would clearly have been rude not to have done so on this occasion. And my father suggested we did just that. It was perhaps an illustration of how one should never try to recreate the perfect meal. Unlike its forerunner, the menu has passed into oblivion, although my father documented the "foul mashed potato" in the holiday log. His conclusion about the meal was that it was "much less impressive (and more expensive!) than last time". Or had we simply grown more sophisticated in the intervening years?

Bolognese sauce

It seems to me that there are only four essential ingredients of a Bolognese sauce although the Bolognese themselves might well disagree - just as they would never serve this sauce with spaghetti. For reasons I have articulated elsewhere (round food) I don't rave about spaghetti much anyway. My pasta of choice with this sauce is tagliatelle. James Bond and I would disagree about the choice of pasta if not the sauce. In Thunderball, one of the "three obsessions which belonged to his former life and which would not leave him" was: "a passionate longing for a large dish of Spaghetti Bolognese containing plenty of chopped garlic and accompanied by a whole bottle of the cheapest, rawest Chianti (bulk for his empty stomach and sharp tastes for his starved palate)". This is possibly the first dish I was ever taught to cook and it got me through university. When I first published this version, I received a particularly helpful critique and have incorporated some of the suggestions from it into this revised version.

Those essential ingredients, then: an onion, about 1 lb or 500 g of minced beef, a small tin of tomato purée (I would not have added an accent but the device I am using cleverly did so) and the empty tin filled with water and stirred so as to leave the tin shiny and no remnants of tomato within it. There will be ample fat in the mince for cooking purposes. Just these ingredients will make a rich sauce far better and more cheaply than anything from a jar. One of those dishes like Shepherd's Pie which is simply not worth eating other than at home.

That said, I have refined the sauce over the years and would add the following optional ingredients: a clove of garlic, a pinch of thyme or oregano, a bay leaf, a little freshly ground black pepper, a finely-chopped carrot or two, a stick of celery, a tin of chopped Italian tomatoes, a splash of olive oil and a splash of red wine. The imprecision of some of the quantities given is not intended to sound airy or unhelpful but to demonstrate that, unlike some other recipes, it's fairly flexible. NOT, though, when it comes to certain additional ingredients...

Let me do some explaining. This, above all, is a meat sauce. The onion, garlic, celery and carrot are condiments only, to melt unobtrusively. You do not want great lumps of them in this sauce. Nor, in my view, should other, alien ingredients, such as mushrooms, peppers or, dare I say it, sweetcorn, be added. Nor am I convinced by the addition of a handful of lardons or pancetta, which is contrary to what I said in yet another earlier version of this post. The recipe continues to evolve! I like to think I favour liberalism in cooking. And if you fancy a mince and vegetable sauce for your pasta, fine. But it seems to me that too many extra vegetables or whatever cross the line between what can legitimately call itself Bolognese and what cannot. The other thing to add, while I'm being principled, is that this is a thick meat sauce: it shouldn't be watery.

The method, leaving out steps depending on the optional ingredients...

1. Finely chop an onion. My only tip on avoiding tears is this. Peel it all first and don't chop off the ends until you've done so. You want to minimise the amount of time following the first cut which starts to release in vapourised form the (very dilute) sulphuric acid that attacks the eyes.

2. Heat about a teaspoon of olive oil in a frying pan. If you're not using any oil, leave out step 5: ie add the mince first, followed by the onion.

3. Finely chop the garlic if you're using it. Warm it gently in the oil. Remove once it's added flavour to the oil.

4. If you're using lardons, fry them at this stage.

5. Fry the finely chopped onion, stirring frequently to prevent it from burning.

6. Put the mince into the frying pan, turn the heat up and brown the mince on all sides. Gradually mix the mince with the onion. Stir frequently, breaking up any clumps of mince as you do so and stopping the onion from burning. Shake the pan every so often. If there's a lot of fat in the pan, now's a good opportunity to pour it off.

7. If you're adding any of the other optional vegetables (carrot and celery), add them at this stage, as finely chopped as you can. To repeat myself, they are condiments. Similarly, the thyme, bay leaf and FGBP can all go in at this stage.

8. Add the tomato purée. Because of its thick consistency, it may be a struggle at first to mix it with the mince. Persevere: the heat will rapidly cause it to melt. Don't add water at this stage, but stir furiously. You don't want the tomato - or anything - to burn but the direct heat at this stage seals in the flavour. I think.

9. The trick, I have decided, is to cook everything on the highest possible heat you dare (stirring furiously as burnt onions are horrid) until you add the water, whereupon you turn the heat as low as it will go.

10. Add the splash of wine and/or chopped tomatoes if they're going in.

11. Finally, add the water. Turn the heat down to its lowest possible setting. Let the sauce bubble gently. Scrape down the sides of the pan every so often. Stir and/or add a little more water every so often if there's a danger of sticking.

12. I think this should be allowed to simmer for 45 minutes or longer. There should be some, but not too much, rich red liquid on the top. Cook the pasta. Eat.

Some reminiscences. This was the first thing I was taught to cook before I went off to university. It's still a staple. On one occasion - this was before I had learned to cook it - we had all been to the theatre with an extended party of family and friends. The plan was that Mum was going to cook this when we got home afterwards. But she had to be dropped off at the local hospital, having got something in her eye. So my father took us all home and asked us what we'd like to eat. In an injudicious attempt to lighten the atmosphere, I said airily, "Oh you know, some smoked salmon, some caviar, something like that". In my defence, I hadn't appreciated my mother was actually in casualty; she happened to work in the hospital and I'd thought one of her colleagues was going to sort her out. In any event, my father didn't lose his temper in front of guests but we were swiftly banished from the kitchen and he put together a bolognese sauce about which one of my cousins was a little doubtful. My roasting came the following day after everyone had left...

Dinner at the Hamlet

Upstairs, Downstairs. Those of us in the first and second years of the Dulwich Hamlet Junior School in the late 1970s ate their dinner in the lower dining hall. Those higher up the school – I left after two years so never got there – would eat upstairs. After morning lessons, we would all hover in the school playground outside the dining hall. Over the entrance was a blackboard, listing each class, in the order they were due to go in for the meal. Every so often, a bell ringer would emerge from the doorway: one of the teachers, together with a pupil. While the teacher clanged the bell, the pupil would brandish a white card showing in black the class whose turn it was to enter. It was as though the bell was ringing out the name of the class: “1F,1F, 1F, 1F, 1F”. F stood for Francis, Mrs Francis, the name of my class teacher.

This was quite new. My two previous schools, both in Coventry, had been reassuring places at mealtimes. This was noisy, chaotic. Beyond the tables, at the opposite end of the hall from where we trooped in, was the kitchen, the long serving hatch and the dinner ladies. Memories of the first day are acute. One of the white-capped dinner ladies had purple hair. My mother was highly amused at me when I reported this to her agitatedly when she collected me from school that day. “What charming people you have at your school”, she told me, reassuringly. The next day it was a smiling woman with pointy black eyebrows who made me nervous: she seemed to be staring at me; I couldn’t take my eyes off her. But the dinner ladies gradually became friends. Particularly Ivy, “the pudding cook”: orange-haired; squat; a dry, bark-brown, powdery, wrinkled face with a lipstick smile. "There’s a dinner lady called Ivy at every school”, my father explained to me. Ivy signed her name elegantly in my autograph book on my last day at the school: “I. Smith”. She was the provider of Arctic Roll, of chocolate sponge and of my very favourite, jam sponge: a crispy top, a little jam underneath the sponge. I always refused custard. I also blenched one day at sickly rose hip syrup and, another time, a revolting thing called "Queen of Puddings", cold, slimy and flabby.

The food took some getting used to: day one introduced me to grey, heavy, strong-tasting, meaty lumps of beef burgers. I couldn’t get through mine and was reprimanded by Mr Holmes, the master in charge, but he permitted me to get away with it on that first day. I grew fond of the burgers over time and even of Mr Holmes. The thought of having male teachers for the first time had made me anxious before I joined the school. Dressed in a green suit, Mr Holmes was a tall, lean and scathing schoolmaster, with a slightly sinister, hungry grin and a voice that carried. “There is a boy here who is not allowed to eat flour”, he bellowed on that first day, and everyone fell silent. “Would he please go to the kitchen and discuss what he can eat with the kitchen staff”. The singled-out boy in question quickly obeyed his instructions and I saw him a few moments later at the hatch in conversation with an earnest-looking dinner lady.

Puddles of mince – soya mince – I could not eat. On another occasion, it was Miss Ware who was in charge in that lower dining hall. I had bizarrely and stupidly chosen “spam fritter”, something I had never tried before. The first mouthful, strange and foreign-tasting, was manageable. But I realised quickly that I could not eat much more. Our plates had to be inspected before we were allowed to return them to the kitchen hatch. Miss Ware was unimpressed with the amount still on my plate and told me to eat just the spam. “But it’s the spam I don’t like”, I told her, plaintively and truthfully. She took pity on me. “Well just eat the fritter then”, and I returned to the table, relieved and did as I had been told. Another teacher, Mrs Selvum-Holly, used an alternative, kindly, technique on pupils who had not emptied their plates.“Just three more spoonfuls”, she would cajole and it was not hard to obey, by making the spoonfuls particularly small. Rounds of mashed potato, crisped on top, which I soaked in vinegar, I remember as being edible, but I cannot remember what they were called.

Yet the thought of going without lunch, however foul the food, once filled me with raw misery. It happened on about my second day at the school. Every morning before assembly, Mrs Francis would collect each member of the class’s “dinner money”. But that day I had been given no such money by my mother and was alone in the class in not handing up my little brown envelope with its coins inside that were to pay for lunch. Nobody had noticed, seemingly, and nothing was said to me. I sat through assembly, in miserable fear, as the teacher read us a story about Simon and the Witch, generating gales of laughter from everyone except me. Back in the classroom, either I approached the teacher or she came up to me and I was told that my mother had already paid for a term’s school dinners by cheque. I felt a fool, but a relieved fool.

After we had finished eating lunch, we were not allowed to hang around and so “I’ll wait outside for you” became a familiar thing to say to the slower eater. I fantasised once that I would persuade everyone in the dining hall to wait outside for me; two lines would then grow along the school playground; and I would emerge and process all the way between the two lines (is there a word for such a concept?) to the end. Of course, I admitted to myself, there would be some who would not be there as comrades but as enemies, no doubt sticking out an unkind leg to make me fall. Now the word for that is gauntlet.

Once, I emerged from the dining hall to find not a procession but everyone rooted at various spots in the school playground, booing loudly. Knowing nothing about what was going on, I joined in. The reason emerged when, later, the Headmaster, Mr Dartnell, summoned the school to the assembly hall. The purpose of this was not to say “Jolly Good Well Done”, his conventional words when congratulating individuals for winning a prize or similar. No. Those who had started the jeers had been insulting visitors from another school and we were all admonished. By contrast, on another day, those of us who volunteered to clear litter from “Sainsbury’s Field” after a sports day, were rewarded with a can of drink: my first 7-Up.

At another assembly, there was an announcement from Mr Dartnell. It must have been winter of discontent time. The kitchen ladies were going on strike and we would all have to bring packed lunches. Cheers erupted. Mr Dartnell was indignant: “You have the best school dinners in the whole of South London”, he insisted. But we never saw him at lunch, except for once a year at the Christmas lunch when he crept into the dining hall and said a few words in hushed tones beginning “Ah...this is…er...our Christmas Dinner…” and ending in an invitation to us to raise a cheer for the dinner ladies.