Food Glorious Food

DISCLAIMER: This article is not suitable for vegetarians or vegans.

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In France at Le Chataignier family home with Oma Jo & Co (1979)

I know I don’t look it. But I love to eat. I love to cook. I love to browse recipes endlessly on Instagram or TikTok. New York Times cooking is not included in a general subscription, but I happily pay extra for it. I watch YouTube tutorials. Master classes. Chef’s Table is food porn. Food is better than sex.

My grandmother, who eventually carried eleven children to full term, lost several pregnancies during the Second World War due to malnutrition. When the war was a topic for a school project, she sat down with me to talk about it. She pulled out a small tin from her dresser and showed me the old food stamps she had kept. They had been living in Amsterdam during the worst famine. She ate flower bulbs. She read cookbooks. Both baffled me, one especially after taking a bite from a daffodil bulb out of curiosity. The other even more so. I couldn’t imagine it. I had nothing to compare it to. 

Why? I asked her as I felt it was a cruel kind of self-torture. “Because I believed there would come a time again where I could cook.”

And cook she did. As did my grandfather. Meals at their house were feasts. Every summer when we would all camp out at the family summer house in the Correze in France, food was our thing. 

I would get up early to go with the person assigned to the bakery run that day to fetch fresh baguettes, croissants and pain au chocolat. Even thinking about it now makes my mouth water. 

By the time we got back the tables on the terrace would be set, coffee tea milk and juice made and poured. Anytime halfway through breakfast my grandfather would fold his hands and rest them on his rather formidable belly. He would look at my grandmother and say: So, Jo, what should we have for dinner tonight? 

While my cousins scrambled to get ready for a swim in the lake, I am would climb into the back seat of the car (bringing a towel to sit on because by the time we were done at the local market and various shops, the seat would be burning hot from the sun). 

My grandfather Toon (Antonius) taught me to eat everything. From brains to bellies, from tongue to toes, I eat it all. It’s also how I developed a predilection for the stinkiest of cheeses. We would take forever doing the shopping because we had to sample everything. Basically, I followed my grandfather around for years like a baby bird, beak permanently open and waiting for some morsel to drop in. Standing next to my grandfather in the kitchen while he cleans an oven fried chicken, I still believe is one of the best places a human could possibly be. I still love meat in the bone and whenever we had lamb chops as a child, I would go around picking bones of everyone’s plates and suck the marrow out. I am a cave woman when it comes to meat. 

We would “steal” biscuits together from the giant tins in the hallway. When we had chocolate mousse for dessert just before finishing he would pretend to be full and let me lick out the remaining mouse from his bowl. 

My other grandfather was a bushy bearded wild man. He taught me how to slaughter a chicken. To this day I will never forget the feeling of walking over the ferret cages to feed them the chicken intestines, still warm and slippery in my hands. He took me fishing from start to finish. Dig up the worms at sunrise and gut fish by noon . 

I wish we had photos but this was a time before smartphones. Before documenting every inch of our lives. This was just me and my opa. 

Grandad had joined the resistance during the war and hid out in the forests with his father, uncle and cousin. They lived from what they could hunt and forage. It wasn’t until much later that I realized that the fish gutting, fire making and chicken slaughter had been him passing on his survival skills. 

Lovage in boot (2023)

These experiences bonded me with food in many loving and nurturing ways. I love watching cooking shows and competitions. I love reading cookbooks (I would love to write one so if you are a cook, out there looking for a ghost writer to collaborate with then yes please!). When my neighbours slaughter one of their animals they will invariable offer me a bag of goodies like chicken legs and livers and home-made sausages. My other neighbour sneaks into my yard and leaves treats on the windowsill. Or she will sneak up on me along the fence when I am lost in thought working in the garden, do a wonderful impression of a pigeon cooing while standing their with serviettes full of schnitzels and mamaliga (a kind of polenta). It’s stuffed with cheese and delicious. In summer she will leave bags full of cherry tomatoes hanging from the door handle and stuff my rubber boots with bunches of fresh parsley and lovage. 

Margit’s stuffed cabbage rolls

(I kid you not: While writing this she is outside yelling my name … Leeleekaaaaaa…. And I have returned with two sarmale… stuffed cabbage rolls)

For some time during high school, I fell out of love with food. It still makes me sad thinking of it. I don’t know what specific event triggered it, but I recall getting out a tape measure with my brother and best friend and measuring our bodyparts. Control, insecurity, adolescent self-hatred, whatever led me to daily weigh ins, counting calories and obsessive workout sessions, it luckily only lasted a few months. One morning when I was standing naked on the scales in my mother’s bedroom, I had a moment of clarity: “What the fuck am I doing”. I went downstairs and opened to fridge and later that day had a double helping of my mother’s apple pie. With cream (this is still my culinary golden rule I live by… whipped cream goes with anything sweet, may goes with anything savoury … and I refuse to eat apple pie or fries without it). 

When I got sick my attitude to food changed again. The food list I was given as a guideline for chemo was full of high calorie processed foods full of sugar and saturated fats. Chemo was cancelled and I wanted to eat as healthily as I could. Family and friends showed up at the hospital like a long procession of private caterers as the hospital food was so bland it was not enticing. 

During two surgeries I had a horrible infection, and the antibiotics were making me puke and making it impossible to eat. Within thirty minutes of the changing the IV bag the vomiting would start. They couldn’t stop the antibiotics, but one doctor found some medicine that stopped me puking so I could eat. And gain some strength. 

After hospital my mother religiously made me juices and smoothies. I didn’t drink alcohol because weirdly I was afraid to while carrying around a Supra pub catheter. I don’t know what I thought but I was scared to drink wine with a hole in my belly. Even though all I had dreamt of in hospital was steak, fries, salad and wine. The wine had to wait until my mother handed me a glass of champagne in the bath, where I sat six weeks after having the catheter removed to celebrate. 

I continued to eat extremely “healthily” and I followed the advice of David Servan Schreiber. Until my parents took me on holiday to Tuscany where I ate everything I could find (and I vowed that one day I will move to Italy. To eat). I am forever grateful for this experience as my relationship with food was becoming unhealthy again like it had briefly in high school. Having cancer made me so scared to burden or harm my body with food that I was way too vigilant. I had forgotten that the joy that food brings me also is essential for my quality of life. 

Since then, I have balance. I indulge when I want and make sure that I have a solid foundation of foods that nurture me like fresh veggies and fruits, seeds, nuts and mushrooms. I rarely cook meat or fish at home, but I will eat whatever is given to me. I am grateful for food and for that reason love to say grace before a meal. 

I love being fed. I love to feed. I learned to cook after moving out and moving to London. I really learned how to cook when I friend roped me in to come work as a waitress at the cafe she was working at. It was going ok and then one day the chef quit. And for some unfathomable reason my boss threw me into the kitchen. My instructions were literally: this is where the pots and pans live, this is where the recipes live, this is where the dry goods live, this is the fridge. Good luck. Then she left to the wholesalers, and I was left to figure out how to bake all the staples (sour dough bread, lemon merengue, cheesecake, carrot cake, scones) and create the specials: a special cake, a quiche, a soup, and an open-faced sandwich. I checked the pantry and fridge to see what I had to work with. I baked a triple chocolate cake, made a salmon quiche, and cooked a potatoes and garlic soup. The only thing I had for the open-faced sandwich was vacuum packed dried fish. 

I called my cousin who was very young at the time and ordered him to get my grandmothers cookbook out (all members of our family have one) and look up a recipe for fish cakes. He read it out as fast as he could, and I scribbled down notes. 

The next day a food critic for the national newspaper showed up, Van Dam. He ordered cheesecake, soup, and the open-faced sandwich. We got a raving review. He even liked my slightly solid cheesecake (I had forgotten to add the whipped egg whites). 

Thank God he didn’t order the carrot cake. We had been out of sunflower oil, and I had substituted this with olive oil. The expensive imported slightly bitter kind from Greece. Oops. Do not try that at home. 

LIVE LIFE LOVE FOOD 

(And don’t throw away food. Or my grandmother will come and haunt you until you change your wasteful ways).