2 Food

'This food reminds me of the sort of thing my mother used to cook - wholesome,' Nick tells me one early afternoon in May when I nip into the park between meetings. Today I have brought a dish of steaming braised white cabbage and bacon, which I have just enjoyed for my own lunch. It is a bright, breezy day and the cow parsley is blindingly effervescent in the dappled sunlight. I am immediately transported into a luxurious world of natural crochet and lace which stretches into the distance under the trees. The acrimonious Teams meeting from which I emerged fifteen minutes earlier is already shrinking into insignificance. It is a mere flicker.

'My digestive system is working better since you started bringing us home-cooked food,' Nick continues. 'My clothes even feel like they're fitting better. And look at Pascal. I was worried he was getting thin of late but I could swear his face is filling out since you came along!'

If bringing food to the park is beginning to make a small difference to the lives of Nick and Pascal, the difference it is making to my own life is more extreme. It is not that it has changed my world view but that it is quietly altering my daily patterns of existence. But then what is our life if not our everyday patterns of behaviour? And surely food plays an important part in this. For food is about not just what we eat but also the social circumstances of its preparation and enjoyment.

As children we learn to eat from and with our families, developing collective tastes as well as individual preferences. In my own family Indian food happened to play an important role. It was not that anyone in the family was Indian but that my parents had conducted their courtship in 1950s London, principally in Indian restaurants. Coming from very different backgrounds - my mother from an obscure Protestant sect and my father from an Irish Jewish family whose origins could be traced back to Poland and Bessarabia - they shared little obvious common ground, whether in food, politics or religion. When shared taste is not inherited, it has to be created. In my parents' case, this was done through the medium of Madras chicken curry.

So significant was Madras chicken curry to their relationship and the building of a family that, throughout my childhood, every Friday evening was devoted to its preparation and eating. This may sound banal but it was very unusual in the small, entirely white Worcestershire town where I was brought up; my parents' making of chicken curry on a Friday night marked us out as different, if not mildly bohemian. It was a dish that wasn't served to guests since it was thought they couldn't cope with the heat. And they couldn't.

My sisters and I were also excluded from the meal when we were small owing to its spiciness, which in those days came direct from a tin of Bolst's Curry Powder: Hot. (These were the days before the British middle classes learned their spices and rediscovered the romance and toil of the pestle and mortar.) Since this was the only meal my parents ate without us, and the only one that was consumed in the dining room rather than the kitchen, chicken curry became some sort of passage to adulthood. Consequently everything about it - the crackle of the spices in the pan, the colours, the aroma, the novelty of the poppadoms as they inflated in the hot oil - was appealing even if the actual taste remained something of an impediment. I was determined to take up residence around the dining room table as a curry eater, and by the time I was nine or so I had managed it (before my older sister!). I had learned to like chicken curry and soon looked forward to it as my favourite meal of the week. It was never simply food.

Sometimes when I look back at my life trajectory I wonder if perhaps it was this multisensory experience of the weekly chicken curry ritual that drew me to India - first as a tourist and then as an anthropologist - beckoning me to explore something beyond my own provincial backyard. And our little corner of Worcestershire was provincial.

In the late 1980s, when I was conducting research for a PhD, I lived for over a year in a small village in Saurashtra, Gujarat, where amongst the many things my hosts taught me was how to cook a range of local staple dishes - khuddi, khichdi, bajra no rotlo, dhokla and, for special occasions, shrikhand. They enjoyed demonstrating how to make these dishes and laughed encouragingly at my laborious attempts to write them down in Gujarati script. They took pleasure in the fact that I would carry what many Indian townspeople regarded as 'village tastes' back to my home country. On my return I often cooked these dishes for friends and family, who enjoyed tasting foods you couldn't get in most Indian restaurants. For them this was a novelty; for me it was about memory and connection. These were the days when such a gesture was seen as cultural appreciation rather than cultural appropriation.

In our family, Indian food bound us together. Now that both of my parents are dead, chicken curry has taken on a memorial function. If my sisters and I meet up on a Friday evening, this is what we will cook.

When I got married, my cooking patterns changed. Having been raised in France, Denis was more inclined towards meat. It was not that he made a fuss, but for him a meal didn't feel like a meal without meat or fish. Since he was not keen on rice and since making Indian food with all the appropriate spices was time-consuming, I tended to cook Indian food less and less. Having a child altered my cooking patterns once again. At one stage the only green vegetable Julius would eat was beans, so we had beans with almost every meal. The food I bought and cooked during this period was oriented towards finding or creating dishes that might satisfy all three of us. This wasn't always easy but we succeeded in building certain tastes in common as well as maintaining and developing personal preferences.

But in October 2018, Denis was away working in India for three months and Julius had left London to go to university. Suddenly I was alone in the house and found myself confronted by the novel question of what I wanted to eat. I found it curiously difficult to answer. I was so used to purchasing and preparing food to suit our collective desires that I had forgotten what my individual ones were. I no longer needed to do a big shop, so instead would randomly enter the shops I passed on the way home from work. I would find myself standing in the aisles eyeing up the various options. Did I want to eat fish? What about some sushi? Or would I rather have a vegetarian dish, and, if so, what? Could I be bothered to spend time on cooking if it was just for me?

With the social element gone, I was left with just my own unidentifiable preferences to satisfy. In some ways it was gloriously freeing. I could eat at whatever time of day I pleased and never had to worry if there was enough food in the house. I knew I could always make do with pasta without anyone saying, 'Not pasta!' I vacillated between grazing on idiosyncratic choices some weeks and on others cooking a large casserole that would feed me every day without my having to think. When work was stressful the latter technique was effective, although by the time I got to the fifth day I was generally very bored of the dish, even if I did embellish it with added elements. It took not cooking for others to make me realise just how social cooking was.

*

Fast-forward eighteen months and a new phenomenon is affecting my cooking habits: news of a global pandemic and talk of a lockdown - a double whammy which sends people rushing to supermarkets to stockpile food. Being slow on the uptake and not prone to panic, by the time our family gets to a supermarket there is nothing edible left to buy. We wander up and down the empty aisles in amazement, wondering if we have accidentally walked into a dystopian futuristic film. The only fresh food in the entire store is a single packet of mince. We decide we might as well buy it. It is several months before I go to a supermarket again. Instead I find myself queuing at distance outside various small, relatively local shops that I can access on foot or on my bicycle. No longer a futuristic film but a backwards plunge into a street scene from communist Russia. Shopping has become time-consuming, but then again I am in the house more than ever before and so devote more time to cooking. I am back cooking for three, with my husband and son sometimes taking charge with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

When Nick and Pascal enter my life and consciousness a few weeks into lockdown, my shopping and cooking habits radically transform once more. Now when I shop I am thinking not of three people but of five. In my head I am trying to conjure up dishes that will be equally suitable for serving at home and taking to the park. That rules out certain foods - roasted joints, fish, chops - and makes other types of food more desirable: large casseroles, pulses, curries, stuffed vegetables. Most of these foods require fairly lengthy preparation and benefit from slow cooking. So instead of starting to cook the evening meal just an hour before eating it, I often begin in the morning, putting pulses on the stove at 8 a.m. before starting work at my computer. I then find myself tending to dishes...