Several years ago, it could be in 2002 or 2004, I dished out an Indian Christmas dinner. I don’t recall what I settled on as a menu, but I do recall that my tiny little kitchen at the Cheshire house was stacked to the ceiling with dirty pots and pans and an infinite number of plates, bowls, knives and forks by the time we had finished. How I even conceived of such a feat is quite frankly beyond me; the kitchen was probably 4sqm at best, the stove consisted of four iffy electric rings upon which heat control was very difficult to achieve, let alone maintain, my fridge had two miniature shelves, and I did not have a dishwasher. And yet.
And yet.
I don’t know what has changed so profoundly in my life [correction, I do know, an awful lot of things have] that I wouldn’t contemplate, not even in passing, such an endeavour today, even as my kitchen is now a bona fide room, with space for a full-sized dining table, and is fully equipped from freezer to microwave to two fridges.
I was contemplating a possible Christmas menu earlier and I struggled to grapple with the basics; do I want a starter and if so what? What truly qualifies as a main course seeing I am a veg? Could I spend twenty-odd minutes on Christmas Day slow-stirring a risotto to the required perfection? Most importantly, do I want to?
This, I think, is the crux of the matter dear reader; with every Christmas that passes, I am finding myself in a slightly more difficult life situation which has eroded quite an awful lot of the joy associated with the season. And I am still hanging on to it by the skin of my teeth because I love, love, love Christmas.
But I do not love to be even more of a slave to the home and, my God, the stove, than I already am. Several years back, I made a birthday cake for my then husband which took me three days. It was one of those super-complex recipes which, actually, did not yield anything truly special, if not a slightly wonky concoction on one side. But it was a multi-layered effort and one that required tempering, ganache, sac à poche, and lots more. I had tried my hand at none of those things up until that point; I set off blindly and undeterred by the multitude of hiccups that I encountered, chief amongst them not having any way near enough space to work with and let things rest and settle.
Thinking about it makes me queasy. Thinking about peeling potatoes for roasties on Christmas Day makes me just as queasy. I so utterly cannot be asked and what I would like to understand is why could I be asked in the past and now I no longer can?
It’s not like I catered to roomfuls of children over decades. I’ve never had more than four people, four, eating together. Now thinking of catering for two makes me break out in hives. Perhaps it is true that life changes us irrevocably and profoundly. Perhaps it is true that it softens us as it hardens us, that it makes us feel tired as in totally spent, and more often than not this takes place mentally before it does so physically. Whatever it is, I wish I could just ring up Claridge’s to order something fabulous. No, more than that, I wish Claridge’s could serve everything in my own home to then make it all go away as if it had never occurred in the first place, like all the negative, nasty things that happen through the years.