A Russian visitation revives the spirit of pancake days past, writes MICHAEL HARDING
MOST PEOPLE make their pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, but this year I broke with tradition. Natasha, my Russian friend, came down from Dublin and cooked an entire banquet of crepes and cakes, with lemon and butter and oodles of cream, last Saturday evening.
It’s not the first time that someone has taken over my kitchen. In Leitrim we had a friend from Scandinavia who arrived one year with a suitcase of burgers and onions and marinated chicken legs, and cooked a barbecue in the garden, just to wish me happy birthday.
He was an eccentric chef, and he carried the meat in plastic containers inside his suitcase.
“I hope that’s not a body you have in there,” a Dublin taxi man muttered when he saw blood dripping from the case.
“It is flesh,” the chef admitted, “but not human.”
The chef took over our kitchen in Leitrim with the merciless authority of a colonial officer on a remote posting. He opened his suitcase and laid out containers of sausage, burger, and chicken legs with the ostentation of a magician on the verge of a big trick.
But Natasha was less military. She washed her hands, cracked a few eggs, heated a few pans, and all of a sudden the miracle began. And, like all great cooks, she washed up as she went along, so there was no need for the dishwasher. Which is good, because personally I’ve always had an issue with dishwashers, ever since my wife and I disagreed on the ontological puzzle of when exactly a dishwasher is full. I think it’s a gender thing: what looks like a full dishwasher to a man is entirely different from a woman’s point of view, and in my experience dishwashers have been the cause of more divorces than mobile phones.
Women invariably want to stuff a dishwasher, just to see exactly how many pots, pans, plates and cutlery can be squashed in. Whereas men make a fetish out of it: instead of filling every nook and cranny to the satisfaction of their partners, they are constantly testing what the machine can do for humanity. I know some men who put their toothbrushes and razors in the dishwasher, and I once caught someone taking a hairbrush out of the cutlery tray. Recently I even saw a friend putting in a computer keyboard that had been destroyed by a smoothie.
I said: “Do you really think that will work?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “but let’s find out.”
And he closed the door, pressed the button and gazed in admiration as the machine hummed into action.
“It’s a pity it doesn’t have a window,” he said, “like the machines for washing clothes, so we could see what was going on inside.”
“My friend,” I said, “you need to change your life.”
I once knew a lonely woman who used to stare at the clothes in her washing machine, as if she was watching television. She would sit in the utility room, with a cigarette in one hand and a mug of warm tea in the other, brokenhearted with unresolved grief for the love of her life, who had died suddenly some years earlier. “I’ve no one to cook for any more,” she’d say.
Her fridge was a clutter of mouldy saucers and her predicament often reminded me of lines by Michael Hartnett: “Sentenced in the end to eat thin diminishing porridge in a stone-cold kitchen she clenched her brittle hands around a world she could not understand.”
My own mother was also reduced to bowls of porridge from the microwave, after her children grew up and her husband died. Her devastation was enormous because when we were young she was queen of her kitchen, and all her passion and joy was expressed exclusively through the making of things in the oven or on the stove.
She so loved to cook that instead of smothering us with big cuddles and hugs, we were lovingly stuffed with rice puddings, roasted hearts, pork chops and apple dumplings.
I’ve been in many beautiful kitchens over the years since, but there has never been anything to compare with the rapture of being with mother at the kitchen table on Pancake Tuesday long ago, watching her mix the flour and whisk the eggs, and squeeze the lemons and melt the butter; just like Natasha did last weekend, as she pronounced the Russian word for pancake. And then I repeated the word, like a child discovering a new language all over again.