Pearl barley risotto with 'nduja and honey roasted squash
How I get three meals out of a roast chicken and the joy of kitchen rituals
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For me, the pleasure of cooking has as much to do with the kitchen rituals involved, as it has to do with sitting down to enjoy good things to eat. Countless sequences of tasks are involved in meal preparation, a tessellation of repeated processes that gives cooking a soothing structure and pleasing rhythm.
Let me give you an example. When I’m not working on a cookbook, I spend much of my day at the computer, researching and writing articles and in the early evening I start cooking supper.
More often than not, an onion is involved. So, I will a take a bowl from the drawer to hold the skin and trimmings, fold a tea towel in half and set it on the work bench, smoothing it out perfectly flat. A battered plastic chopping board goes on top - the tea towel stops it sliding - and I locate my onion. I slice the stem end off, then cut it in half through the root, by which time the pungent grassy notes are finding the back of my nose. The onion’s papery outer skin falls away easily, but the tougher inner layers are trickier to peel off.
It’s at this point - every single time - that the working day falls away and my mind stops whirring with thoughts of deadlines and incompleted tasks. I’m now fully immersed in the pleasure of magicking raw ingredients into supper.
I’m sure you have many of your own examples of food rituals; either in the making or eating of meals. My childhood was full of them. Every year, my father made fruit salad for Boxing Day breakfast - it was Australia, after all - and he prepared an enormous batch ahead of time. He froze the lot and defrosted some of it last thing on Christmas evening to eat the following day. It was delicious (a view not universally shared, it later emerged) despite being more than a tad slimy.
Rituals aren’t aren’t just involved in the preparation of food, but in eating it, too. At our house, a Sunday roast is always enjoyed at the dinner table but pudding is taken to the “soft” - the sofa - where we eat it in front of a movie. Friday night - never Saturday - is for takeaways. And my father in law would never allow dessert to be served unless and until the salt and pepper pots had been removed from the table. These are - or were - reassuring constants.
One of the loveliest rituals in our kitchen is the teasing out of a roast chicken into at least three different meals. We don’t eat chicken every week these days - we tend to buy a high-welfare, sustainably reared and pricey bird less often. When we do, we eat every single scrap, in essentially the same way. I love the routine of this, and my husband and I share the gentle pleasure of recreating the meals on repeat, with small variations if we fancy. We’ve been doing this so long, that we think of it like a kitchen dance.