A Spoonful of Sugar. Liz Fraser

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СКАЧАТЬ – so this is how it feels to be one hundred per cent guilty of every charge thrown at you. Mummy works: guilty. Too tired to cook: guilty. Opens freezer and removes ‘any old junk’? Guilty. Crikey, she’s going to put me away for life.

      As I struggle to reconcile the undeniable sensibleness of what Granny just said with the fact that it somewhat undoes most of what the Women’s Liberation Movement achieved and that allows me to be sitting in front of her at this moment researching my latest book, rather than chained to the stove baking cookies for my adoring children, she tells me a story of an American schoolgirl who came to stay with them as some kind of exchange programme, back in the 1960s.

      One afternoon Granny was in the kitchen, doing something exciting with the aforementioned flour, sugar, eggs and so on. The poor, unsuspecting visitor asked Granny what she was doing, and received the swift reply, in a voice I can only imagine was so far beyond terse it was teetering on the brink of bone-crushing, that she was ‘making a cake!’ According to Granny, her American guest’s eyes nearly popped out of her head.

      ‘“Oh”, she said to me. “Do you mean you make them – from scratch? You don’t buy a packet and just add water before cooking it?” She’d honestly never seen anyone bake before, Elizabeth. And she was fifteen if she was a day. I’m sure she thought we were either very hard up or just strange! It was so sad.’

      Now then, nobody but the disgustingly virtuous, irritatingly time-rich or bored beyond words can be expected to bake every loaf of bread and cake they eat. Even Nigella must nip down the in-store bakery once in a while! And nobody, least of all me, is asking that all mothers stop working to stay at home and bake! But making a simple, healthy meal from scratch needn’t take more than ten minutes, quick enough even for the busiest of us, and learning to cook is one of life’s absolute essentials – one we must, must pass on to our kids. If we never show them how to cook, or where their food comes from, what chance do they have to spot what’s healthy and what is a vacuum-packed heart attack in the making when they come to choose food for themselves?

      FACT BOX

      HOME COOKING VS READY MEALS AND FAST FOOD

      

      

We spend around £2 billion a year on ready meals.

      

In 2006 Britons spent more than £52 billion on food – with more than ninety per cent of that money going on processed food. Ugh.

      

In 2007 we spent £39 billion on fast food in Europe’s top ten outlets.

      

Home cooking is cheaper, healthier (you control the amount of fat, salt etc) and you even get some exercise preparing the meal and cleaning up!

      

Cooking can relieve stress and it’s satisfying (assuming you don’t burn it all like I often do).

      “The evidence is now undeniable that poor nutrition is putting children’s physical health at risk. Many children are now expected to die before their parents – as a direct result of their unhealthy diets and lifestyles. Many children’s diets are high in sugar, refined starches and the wrong kinds of fats, as well as artificial additives. They are high in calories (energy), but lacking in essential nutrients. The risks to physical health of such a ‘junk food’ diet are now recognized, [and ] the effects of food on behaviour are… very real.”

      Dr Alex Richardson author of They Are What You Feed Them

      Fewer and fewer of us spend time cooking in the kitchen with our children, which is sad enough from a bonding and life-skills point of view – children learn not only how to look after themselves, but also how to count, measure, weigh, and look suitably irritated when it all goes wrong – but what makes it even worse is that it’s been shown that when kids help prepare a meal, they are much more likely to actually eat it. It’s a complete no-brainer in other words!

      And just look at what all of this ready-meal culture has done to our kids’ education: In a study in 2007, eleven per cent of eight year olds didn’t know that pork chops come from pigs, eighteen per cent had no idea where yoghurt comes from (it’s from bats’ teardrops, obviously…) and eight per cent of children growing up in cities didn’t know that beef burgers come from cows. And when you realise that two per cent of children think that eggs come from cows, and that bacon is from cows or sheep, you really are left wondering: do they even know what food IS?!

      The facts above are not so much surprising (and, let’s admit it, more than a little funny) as brow-wrinklingly depressing. When more children think honey comes from Tesco’s than know how to crack an egg, you know something’s gone seriously wrong not only with their education, but with their home life. I’m not suggesting we should all keep our own bees and hens, of course, but when you cook with a child, even using shop-bought basics as most of us do, you can have those lovely little conversations where matters such as bee keeping, pollination, and Great, Great Aunt Muriel’s perfect method of egg beating crop up, and where such knowledge is passed on to the next generation. And if time for cooking (or the lack of it) is a big issue for you then try this one for starters: go without the television and computer games for a week. Seriously, try it. If you don’t find at least an extra hour in your week to cook together, I’ll eat my hat (and it’s a nice one).

Spilling the beans – was it really all home made back then?

      Much as I am enjoying the discussion, I can’t help noticing that in this picture of domestic bliss, something smells fishy. And it’s not fish. Much as I am prepared to believe that Granny cooked almost every meal for her family from basic ingredients and slaved over the stove more than I ever will, surely even morally upstanding people Back Then used to skip the home baking and indulge in a little corner-shop Battenberg or Victoria sponge every so often? Surely they too occasionally cried ‘Oh to hell with these bloody domestic chores’ and gathered around the wireless instead? Granny thinks about this for a moment. I wait for a confession.

      ‘Well,’ she says at last, ‘it was a little of both, I suppose, but only where you couldn’t make things yourself. You’d never have thought of buying a cake, for instance, and I always made sure there were home-made sweet treats the kids could eat. But we’d buy butteries (the Scottish equivalent of croissant – in other words as much fat as science will allow you to squeeze into a pastry before it explodes – and possibly even a little bit more delicious) from the bakery, and bread was usually bought, but that was it.’

       Granny’s Pearl of Wisdom

      You don’t need to be a genius to cook for a family. People get so frightened about it, but anyone who can read a cookery book can produce something edible. You just have to have a go!

      I am beginning to feel more than slightly inferior now. The last time I baked was only about a fortnight ago, but СКАЧАТЬ