Bad Cook - Esther Walker

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pudding (if you’ve been arsed to do one), or put a lot of bars of Green & Black’s on the table and let nature take its course. Come to think of it, my friend Henry – a terrific host – doesn’t even bother with hot drinks after dinner and I never notice.

      16 DO NOT COMPLAIN ABOUT YOUR OWN FOOD. This is absolutely the worst, most annoying and irritating thing you can do as you present people with their food. It is very hard not to do, which is why so many people do it, but it is very important not to because it is pathetic and self-pitying and also rude: why are you serving people something that hasn’t quite worked? If you’re such a shit cook, why have you invited people round?

      When someone says ‘This looks great’ YOU SAY (repeat after me): ‘Thanks so much! It’s such a terrific recipe, I love it.’

      It’s very hard to say this when in your head you’re screaming ‘FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! THIS IS A BIT COLD … OH GOD I FORGOT TO ADD THE CORIANDER … !!!!!’ but you must hold it in and start making conversation about absolutely anything other than the food.

      Do not say:

      ‘Chuh, took fucking long enough.’

      ‘Chuh, yeah, sorry cabbage is a bit burnt.’

      ‘Oh God, this is such a disaster.’

      Just don’t, okay? Have in your head, if you must, a topic you are going to start on as you sit down: ‘So Nigel says that Paxos is just ruined by tourists these days,’ or ‘I don’t know about you, but I thought Fifty Shades of Grey was a masterpiece!!!’

      If you moan about your own food, it means that everyone has to sit about not only eating your horrible slop but bloody talking about it, reassuring you that it’s not that bad, when it is, making stupid ‘mmm’ noises as they eat it, freaking out that you’re going to start crying etc.

      That’s not what a dinner is for; it’s not about you and your fragile ego. It’s for seeing friends, chatting, drinking. Every cook – you, me, Delia, my mum, Giles – feels compelled to apologise for something as they present food and it’s really annoying and everyone hates it. So. Just. Don’t.

      Meat Fear Part 1

      I have become the kind of person who doesn’t like raw meat.

      I don’t know how it happened, but I think it started after I learned to drive, which was quite recently, and was able to take myself to Waitrose. It was the meat aisle that did it. All those rows and rows of plastic packets of formerly happy bouncing lambs and docile cows and perky chickens. I felt dizzy and ill and every time I go there now, I have to rush through.

      Giles has very little sympathy for me on this. His argument is that you should always, always go to a local butcher whose meat comes from little farms and isn’t sold in plastic cartons. I agree with him, but the butcher doesn’t also sell deodorant and light bulbs and bok choi. And, even then, butchers have started freaking me out too. I’m finding it increasingly hard to prepare a chicken for the oven without feeling just awful and guilty and sad. What is wrong with me? I don’t want to be a vegetarian, I really don’t. I don’t think it’s necessary.

      It’s not like I don’t buy absolutely the most expensive, premium, grass-fed, free-range stuff I can. But my uncle used to have a farm and it was an excellent small farm in the Welsh hills, where old-fashioned husbandry was practised. Friesian cows, free to roam the blustery hills, patted, named and cared-for, used to hang their heads over the garden wall and look at you with their big brown eyes; we hunted for hens’ eggs in the wood where the chickens scratched and buck-buckawed free from fear of persecution, housed in fox-proof mansions.

      And, despite all that, the process of slaughtering the animals was still fucking barbaric.

      So I don’t know what to do. I think the answer is to buy less meat. Or get therapy.

      My Husband the Eighties Hero

      I often get asked how my husband and I met. I don’t know why. I’m never interested in how other people met and never ask. I’m always too busy being very worried to ask people questions like that. Worried about my face – has it gone red in the heat? Am I dressed in a lunatic and embarrassing way? Is anyone else going to eat that last mini Thai fish cake? Fuck it, shall I just get really drunk? Or shall I switch to lime and soda now in order to feel smug in the morning?

      Other people don’t seem to have these concerns and instead calmly turn to me and say: ‘So how did you and Giles meet?’

      Perhaps it’s because he is eleven years older than me and people assume that we met on some sort of website that matches desperate men in their late thirties with desperate girls in their late twenties. But we didn’t.

      It was a set-up, an arranged marriage of sorts. My brother-in-law, who is an old friend of my husband’s, despaired of Giles’ impractical choices of girlfriends – none of whom found his drinking or swearing amusing beyond the first three honeymoony months – and my impractical choices of boyfriends, who were either gay or mad, or both. So he set us up, thinking that however disastrous a match we were, we would be almost certain to choose much worse on our own.

      Well that’s what he says. I think it’s more a case of he thought it would be a laugh if Giles was his brother-in-law.

      Giles and I had met once before we started going out. When I discovered he was friends with my sister’s husband I emailed him, being then as I was a fidgety and ambitious young journalist (i.e. a receptionist at a magazine). I briskly cited our connection and demanded a free lunch, as if that would get me anywhere in newspapers. Okay, said Giles. We went out to a pizza restaurant in Golders Green and Giles told me the funniest joke I’ve ever heard.

      The waiters in the restaurant didn’t speak very good English and getting what we ordered throughout lunch had been a bit hit and miss. As the end of lunch drew near, Giles asked for a double espresso and the bill. The waiter looked confused. Giles repeated his request and smiled. ‘Ok’ said the waiter, and left.

      Giles turned back to me and said ‘He’s probably going to bring us a steak.’ I fell about laughing.

      We went our separate ways: he back to the tail end of a failing relationship and me home to my parents’ house, to pick my cuticles and fret about my spots. Giles was a terrific lunch companion and had a lot of advice about journalism, but we basically then forgot all about each other.

      Two years after this first meeting, one hot dusty night in July, I got a phone call from my sister, instructing me to be at a friends’ book party that evening because Giles was there, and he was single. ‘Don’t wear that black jersey thing,’ she said. ‘Okay,’ I said, picking it out of the laundry pile.

      Along I trotted to the party. It was sweltering. Giles was there looking like a man on the run, his hair standing on end, in a ratty old T-shirt and rattier jeans. He was brown from some holiday or other and was still drunk from lunch. His father was dying, he said, his fiancée had run off. ‘I wish it was the other way around,’ he added. Everyone laughed.

      At first we liked each other for purely superficial reasons, being as we are both monstrously shallow. He had a thing for foul-mouthed, tarty, big-bosomed twenty-somethings in the media and all my references for what is handsome come from eighties movies: Judd Nelson; Rob Lowe; Tom Cruise; Charlie Sheen; John Cusack. You must have big muscles and look your best in a wife-beater and Wayfarers with your hair slicked back. You must also be able to do manly things like change a tyre on your own and get to the front of a bar queue. Memo to Zac Efron: you are adorable but I do not want my boyfriend to know all the words to ‘I Will Survive’.

      So Giles and I fell in together easily. And when the shine came off things, we still, somehow, didn’t come unstuck. There has never been a crisis in our relationship that hasn’t been solved by a colourful slanging match, apologies and then a trip out for Chinese food.

      We

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