In the right circumstances, I'm a big fan of eating alone. Often, on a Sunday evening, I go to a yoga class whose charm is largely that it gives me an alibi to avoid cooking family supper for once. I return to have boiled eggs and soldiers in silence with a book. Bliss.
Learning to cook in the 1990s, I thought 'proper olives' meant black. The benchmark was Kalamata from Greece: purple-black with an almost mushroomy depth of flavour. Other fine examples were tiny Coquilles from Nice and plump round Tanches from Nyons.
I like quinoa. I like gingerbread. I feel they should be kept separate. I'm not in favor of this thing of making kind of raw, vegan chocolate cake and saying it's as good as chocolate cake. I mean, just eat cake and be done with it. And then have a separate meal of quinoa.
The great American food writer M. F. K. Fisher once wrote an essay called 'The Anatomy of a Recipe.' To have a good anatomy, in her view, a recipe should have a sense of logical progression. She despaired of recipes with 'anatomical faults,' where the reader is told to make a cake batter and only then to grease the loaf pans.
One of the rudest things you can do, food-wise, is to stare at someone in the act of eating. It draws attention to the unseemly fact that eating is a bodily function - like animals, we are trapped by our hungers, but we do our best to disguise them with such civilized props as menus and forks.
The old injunction 'Don't talk with your mouth full' is based on the presumption that, however multifunctional a mouth may be, it should only perform one job at a time. Humans have found a way around this limitation in the form of food writing.
Years ago, during a John Grisham phase, I tried to pinpoint exactly why I found Grisham's often predictable legal thrillers quite so comforting. The best answer I could come up with was the frequency with which Grisham tells us that his lead characters are sipping coffee. When it comes to food and drink, predictability can console.
Protein bars, protein flapjacks, protein granola, protein ice cream and protein coconut water... To look at the health-food aisles, you'd think that protein was a substance no one could overeat. Even bread now comes in protein-enriched form.
In theory, food writing is an aid or a prelude to actual meals: you read a recipe, and then you cook. In practice - in a 'paradox' that Michael Pollan, among others, has identified - our current gastronomic fantasies, particularly on TV, have coincided with a decline in home cooking.
What strikes me, the more I cook, is that the best recipes are ones where the basic anatomy is so sound it will survive multiple adjustments. When a recipe has good bones, you can change the seasoning, double the garlic, swap lime for lemon, and it still turns out delicious.
