My mother and I have just been discussing Jerusalem artichokes, which we both love, and which she currently has an abundance of in the garden. I tend to use a Nigel Slater recipe (the man is a god to me), which calls for pan roasting in butter, with garlic, bay and thyme. She has a rather more complex way of cooking them, which involves leaving the artichokes for 24 hours before the final cook; allegedly it removes their windy tendencies. I can’t say this is top of my list of priorities – I might change my mind if I had a hot date, I suppose, but seeing as this is unlikely to happen any time soon I’m not bothered.
Recipes are rarely written down in this house. Even if they are, they are rarely referred to in the written form once we’ve cooked the dish once. We are both quite instinctive cooks, who enjoy the process just as much as the finished product. It’s one of the reasons I adore Nigel Slater – his books are a feast for the senses. His writing borders on the erotic and I can quite happily just read, even if I’m not intending to cook.
Anyway, I started to talk Mum through his artichoke recipe, but then began to wonder how much I had changed it along the way. It’s something that I often do, not even intentionally much of the time. There have been plenty of occasions when I’ve been cooking a dish for a while and for some reason flick back to the original recipe and realise that I’ve changed various details to suit my way of cooking, or the ingredients that I tend to have in the house. I rarely measure things out, for instance – it’s all done by eye. A splash of this, a handful of that, add a bit more or less depending on my mood. It’s exciting and enjoyable and I have enough of a sense of what works and what doesn’t that I rarely have any unmitigated disasters. It does mean, however, that I’m a rubbish sous-chef. Neither, in fact, am I good at having somebody helping me in the kitchen. You may peel vegetables, sure, but once you’ve done that your most useful function will be keeping me topped up with gin and staying out of my way – you’ll only get shouted at, otherwise.
(Originally published elsewhere in December 2006)