Once upon a time, my granny gave me a cookbook. It was my first cookbook. It came with the provocative, and encouraging, title: Cooking is a game you can eat. I was hooked.
Before the days of needing colour illustrations for every dish, before the days of food porn, and elaborate food photography, there was a children’s cookbook with little cartoon like illustrations.
It had great chapter headings like ‘Food to run away with’. It boasted exciting recipes like 1000 year old eggs. It offered encouragement to benefit others with your cooking – like the section on making breakfast in bed for Mother’s Day.
It was exactly right. And I still have my copy. The pages are falling out a bit now, but it set an early example for me of what was possible for food. Some of it was familiar from my mother’s cooking, some of it was new and exciting.
It is also realistic. I can conjure up in my mind’s eye the picture of the little girl who has fallen asleep next to a clock, because a particular recipe take several hours to set. Cooking is not instant. But it is worth it.
I don’t remember how many recipes I tried over the years. But I do know that I still look at it at times. And I know that, like the best cookbooks, they are there as much as anything to be read, time after time, so that the food messages in there seep into you.
I acquired a new cookbook on leftovers, a year of so back, which I liked a lot. Lots of recipes. A few illustrations. I started trying to work out why I liked the feel of it so much – and realised that the visual style is very like Cooking is a game you can eat.
If you want to hunt it out, it’s by Fay Maschler. I didn’t know of her food reputation at the time – but now I realise why I was in safe hands. And I still think that many of her instincts on what kids want to cook are spot on.
But now, above all, I love the title. Cooking is one of my favourite games. I have a small sous chef who thinks the same.
And together, we go playing with food, and find that, greedy as we are, it is even better than many games because: you get to eat it afterwards.