DisasterChef

I love food. I love cooking. I love the food and drink programmes on TV. Let me stress at the outset however that I personally will never match the standards required to host a gourmet night at home, let alone compete successfully in MasterChef. MasterChef is my favourite for many reasons, but mainly because it gives amateurs a chance to shine (or fail miserably, which also adds to the entertainment. Schadenfreude.) My participation sadly would have to be as a member of the audience, rather than as a contestant: such giddy heights of culinary prowess were way out of my league even before my illness ruled it out completely (see the cookery ‘lesson’ at the end of this blog post). Even if I can’t get on MasterChef through the door marked ‘contestant’, I would still love to be involved, perhaps as a shadowy member of the TV crew. In a minor role, obviously. Perhaps I could be the ‘Best Boy’. I’ve always wondered what a Best Boy on a TV or film set actually does – it’s always baffled me when it shows up in the credits. So, whilst thinking about what to write in this blog, I decided that some research was in order to prove I take this writing malarkey seriously. So I was about to put “Best Boy” into a search engine, but quickly realised that this might not be a good career move. I continued searching with more focused keywords, and found what I was really looking for. (How did we ever manage to research anything before the internet?).

Indulge me for a moment. In a film crew there are two kinds of best boy: best boy electric and best boy grip (which again conjures up all sorts of images, but let’s not go there). They are assistants to their department heads: the gaffer (in charge of the electrics) and the key grip (lighting and rigging) respectively. In short, the best boy acts as the foreman for his or her department. How they got that name I have no idea. And, I reasoned, if I couldn’t be Best Boy (without certainly the apogee of juvenile ambition) I could be a camera operator instead, being moved around the set on rails, atop one of those mechanical behemoths that looks like a giant 1950s food mixer [would that make the programme a moveable feast? – ed.]

That yoking of a juvenile “Boy’s Own” desire (note that it is most definitely not “Boyzone”) to a blog on food via a camera resembling a giant food mixture is possibly the weakest, clumsiest and baffling segue in a blog entry that I or anyone else has ever written. (Not that I’m considering an online vote on the subject: too great a risk of attracting derision or pity, or possibly both). If on the other hand you were being charitable, you might view the longueur above as symptomatic of a wandering mind that requires immediate attention, probably medical. However, my dementia (the cheeky, teasing rapscallion that it is) hasn’t progressed so quickly that we are implacable enemies, but it has begun to drop hints, slowly and gently thus far to be fair, that this illness will not see me riding off into the sunset seated on a horse or a camera chair, but staggering, grasping in confusion, childlike incomprehension and distress, into a fog. Appearing on MasterChef, or being a best boy or a cameraman on MasterChef instead, ain’t gonna happen. This childish (in both senses) example stands as a proxy for the gradual loss of control for which my dementia is preparing me slowly and carefully, I sometimes oddly think. One such example is my becoming somewhat of a liability in the kitchen. Sadly, this process will accelerate, as my consultant psychiatrist informed me. But despite the complications and irritations that Alzheimer’s brings, my love of food and cooking endures – to this I shall turn first.

I inherited this love of cooking (my own or other’s) from my Mum as I grew up. She was, and remains to this day, a talented cook: proficient in standard English cuisine (I grew up in the 1970s after all!), but she was also a highly accomplished lover herself of French cooking, and regularly transformed our homeland staples into haute cuisine. She took sauces, ingredients, herbs & spices, and techniques that at that time were still largely unknown but which were rich and velvety and exotic and enticing. I am reminded of the scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, where the revolutionary People’s Front of Judea (all four of them) are sitting in the Jerusalem Coliseum watching a gladiator show. A snack seller passes, calling out as he passes what he has on offer:

“Larks' tongues. Wrens' livers. Chaffinch brains. Jaguars' earlobes. Get 'em while they're hot. They're lovely. Dromedary pretzels, only half a denar. Tuscany-fried bats. Larks' tongues. Otters' noses. Ocelot spleens…”

Obviously, and mercifully, we didn’t have anything like that put in front of us at mealtimes, but my brother and I were growing up in an era when people started to have more money and more imagination as regards food, and my Mum was in the vanguard. My Dad was a typical 1970s man in terms of leaving most of the cooking to Mum, not being particularly adventurous or active in the kitchen himself. He did make a mean Shepherd’s Pie to be fair, but he never reached the Himalayan culinary heights that my Mum could. I just wish that I had watched and learned more from her when I was growing up. I picked up the crumbs from some of her ideas, recipes and techniques, but I remain a culinary neophyte in comparison with her. A roux, for example. I can spell it but not make it (not that I’ve tried). To me a roux is something loved by its marsupial mother but not eaten by her (one hopes). Unquestionably however, it was her cooking that instilled in me a lifelong love of food and as I said above I also became an addict to the television programmes that fuel and nurture my ongoing affinity with the kitchen (and exciting camera equipment – have I mentioned that already?).

My wife thinks I am too self-deprecating about my cooking skills (much as I play down everything else about myself), so I’ll try and be honest for once. I have amassed a considerable number of cookery books, and I even use them regularly. I also tear out recipes from the weekend papers if I see something that attracts both my eye and my palate. In my repertoire (French influence there!) of popular family meals, my wife reminds me, I have examples such as boeuf bourguignon, paella, chicken Caesar salad, and spaghetti bolognaise to name but a handful (the latter accompanied by a lovingly prepared tomato sauce, the recipe for which I will never share – primarily because I can never remember what goes into it and I don’t use a recipe). I also take my time when cooking, which improves the food and my mental health and even the wine if I am on a particularly slow day. In other words I do it mindfully – and I invariably listen to music as well when I cook as I find it hugely relaxing. I will turn to music and its powerful influence on my life and loves in a future entry, I’m sure.

After my wife and I were married, a significant factor in our choice of holiday destinations, even with small children, was the appreciation and exploration of national or local cuisine and produce, eating al fresco whenever possible, in beautiful and enticing locations. I generally have to rely on my wife’s memory for the countries and places we have visited and descriptions of the food and wine we have sampled, unfortunately. My inability to recall holidays due to Alzheimer’s (yet another fog trap) is an intense sadness for us both, but even borrowed, second-hand narratives make me happy in the remembrance. One memorable dining event in particular springs to mind (or rather hauls itself up the rickety creaking steps into the dusty, dark space I call my brain and then collapses in a heap). I can picture dining al fresco on the terrace adjoining our holiday cottage in Umbria, sampling simple but magnificent local produce in terms of local produce (truffles in everything – delightful!), washed down with elegant and fragrant white wine… and with pizza being one of the national dishes, the boys were in food heaven too…

I must confess at this point that the above recollection is not strictly true, as my wife gently pointed out when she was reading the draft of this text. The terrace I remember was in 2019 when we were staying at an agritourrissimo just outside the picture postcard town of San Gimignano in Tuscany, not Umbria. I can’t remember much of the holiday (with the exception of an alarming experience in the Leaning Tower of Pisa which we visited one day – but I’ll share that for a future posting). We went to Umbria in 2011 and glamped in a safari tent. There were two restaurants we frequented, one on the campsite and the other in the village nearby: both had terraces with beautiful views, and it is these that got lodged as fragments in my memory. But the enjoyment of the outdoors and the appreciation of the cuisine was real and intense and honest. But there is a serious and sad point to be made here - my memory no longer marches to my tune, my brain is a cheeky little wossname, given its proclivity to hide things from me, and even lie on occasions. It is how it is.

But my illness also engenders and directs changes in ways that are more benign. For example, all my life I have never had a sweet tooth. Anything sweet they would make my mouth pucker like an empty grapefruit half, used as a miming tool in front of someone’s mouth. Now however, I find myself craving sweets and fizzy drinks and other things I previously abhorred. This is also a recognised process in the Alzheimer’s taxonomy - dementia is not just about memory loss: it plays merry hell with your senses as well. Exciting times. On the whole, though, it’s a pain in the a**e. Which, luckily, isn’t one of the changes brought on by dementia.

Despite setbacks, however, and even when the waves of fear and nervousness and forgetfulness crash over my supine brain, I have still been metaphorically frying my eggs sunny side up in the dementia kitchen, in an attempt to keep myself sane (or functioning if I can’t have sanity). In my mind, the parts of it that are still receiving house guests anyway, I can see the comical side of forgetfulness, but sometimes humour needs to be tempered with pragmatism and carefulness. This is especially true in the kitchen. For example, and continuing in the Frozen Chips in the Salad Drawer vein, I initially treated my kitchen peccadilloes as a children’s party game. “Hunt The Ingredients & Kitchen Equipment”, I felt, could be the serendipitous outcome of my propensity for finding unusual but entirely inappropriate homes for our ingredients, saucepans and utensils etc. “OK kids, we’re now looking for a cheese grater – there’s a jammy dodger sellotaped inside for the first one to find it!!” It would never catch on however…

My wife adopts a more critical and pragmatic, but still loving, position. She believes, probably rightly, that putting frozen chips in the salad drawer was not just an hilarious one-off event, and that my forays into the kitchen at best needed to be supervised, and sometimes banned altogether. Recently, however, I have genuinely taken the bold step of recognising and accepting my illness, and the safeguards it necessitates in the kitchen. Let’s be honest; letting a pan boil dry so the enamel melts and causes a fire, or serving up e.coli and salmonella hash, could really ruin a dinner party! We are generally democratic in our household in terms of who prepares the evening meal, taking into account everyone’s work and study commitments. The responsibility and menu for preparing that evening’s meal are written down in a short(ish!) list. I gradually came to realise however that I was appearing less frequently on the chef rota, and naturally wondered why. It also dawned on me that I was becoming more and more nervous and stressed when trying to put together a meal, however straightforward. I did not however (at least at first) make the cognitive leap of linking my cooking issues with the rota assignments. Nor did I pay enough attention to the insidious, whisper-like messages that the illness itself was foregrounding, as I mentioned earlier.

Eventually, one evening I confessed to my wife that I was having problems with cooking along with all the other symptoms I’ve documented elsewhere, and, just as she did with the dementia diagnosis journey all those weeks and months ago, she said quietly and gently that she knew already that I was struggling in the kitchen. Hence the reduction of my culinary responsibilities as laid out in The List. Once again I felt wretched yet blessed; alone yet protected; dangerous but domestically sectioned. My wife felt I needed to come to conclusions myself; that I needed to be aware of, and, almost paradoxically, in charge of the spluttering cells inside my head and their impact on my love of cooking and food in general. These are not failings; you have not failed; my wife repeatedly said. My brain fails. Sometimes. OK, a lot.

That made me feel, if not better, then at least innocent and loved. Acknowledging the issues my illness causes brings some well-needed relief. My wife was simply being sensitively selective in terms of when and what I should cook and how many responsible adults needed to be on hand (and even irresponsible ones would be more reliable) for questions, reassurance and preventing inadvertent conflagrations or a salmonella outbreak. I exaggerate slightly, but you see the point. A sage (pun intended) suggestion from a wise person to one not so blessed. Holidays in France and Italy and elsewhere will also never be the same for me again. I always adopted the role of chef on holiday, as I love using local produce and reproducing specialities of the region. This is now compromised, since working in an unfamiliar kitchen brings too many challenges, such as how the hob works, where things are etc. These obstacles will become even more challenging, as it is still early days in terms of my illness. The mistakes I’ve made and the difficulties I have are numerous, not just in the kitchen, but my self-esteem would be far lower than it already is if my wife was not around to keep me grounded and peaceful.

Anyway, to cut a long finger short, thank you for your patience, and I will conclude with some of the recipe detours and faux pas that I have genuinely made at some point in the recent past, which should have resulted in a protection order being served against me earlier than it actually was. In my defence, the fact that I include the words “faux pas” should convince any remaining sceptics that I am reasonably au fait with classic French cuisine and can be trusted to deliver at least an approximation of fine dining. And as I made clear earlier, any errors, mix-ups, disappointments or hospital omissions are attributable not to me but to my “heat-oppressed brain”, a Shakespearean phrase which puts me in the august company of Macbeth, no less. He was wealthy enough to be able to hire three professional cooks as accomplices in his ambitions. 

1. Treat a recipe as a pick list rather than a sequence of mandated culinary tasks.

2. Measure liquids in millilitres when the recipe called for fluid ounces, or vice versa, with the result that sauces are either thick as an oil slick or weak and tasteless.

3. Harvest from the store cupboards a gallimaufry of vegetables, spices and condiments, including (especially?) ones not even required by the recipe. Put the superfluous ones back or include them – your choice. But keep the inclusion hidden for as long as possible.

4. Weighing or measuring ingredients is a recommendation not a sine qua non. You can end up with some interesting results if you introduce a healthy tolerance either side. For ‘interesting results’ read “opprobrium”, and possibly “divorce”.

5. Never write successful recipes down. It preserves the mystique, and possibly the danger too. Elgar didn’t name his masterpiece “The Enigma Variations” for nothing. It’s the music equivalent of Spaghetti Bolognaise.

6. Be careful with sharp knives. Especially any such utensils appearing magically before you in thin air - it will only bring trouble in the long run, trust me.

7. Be cautious with foreign cooking terms. Al dente for example, continuing with the Spag Bol theme, means ‘to the tooth’ in Italian and is a measure for ensuring that the pasta has been cooked correctly. Take it out too soon and it will be damp and soggy and the flavour won’t have come through, so it will be look and taste like water i.e. of nothing. Cook the spaghetti for too long and it will be so al dente it can give a fully-grown African lion mouth ulcers.

8. When using an electric whisk/mixer, don’t submerge it in the whisk-sentenced liquid prior to pressing the on button. It’s much more fun to switch it on and insert it gradually, but with lots of up and down motions. The effects on the surrounding work-tops, and, on a good day, the ceiling, can be deeply satisfying personally, and they might even appear in Tate Modern in a stylised reproduction one day.

9. Speaking of electric mixers, they remind me of those huge mobile cameras you see occasionally in the credits or lead-ins to TV shows, particularly news programmes. I’d love to have a go with one of those. [Now THAT’s what I call a graceful, seamless link. Not clunky or forced in any way at all]

And to conclude the conclusion, here is my recommended elixir for sound sleep, a recipe given to me by three kind and helpful old ladies I met up on Cleeve Hill one day:

Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn and caldron bubble.

Fillet of a fenny snake,  In the cauldron boil and bake;  Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,  Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,  Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing,  For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

(They missed out larks’ tongues, by the way).

So - eat, drink and be merry! for tomorrow we - something or other.

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