A DAD'S LIFE:CONFESSION TIME. Delia Smith was my first crush. I'd sit in front of the telly as a small boy and take in everything about the perfect Yorkshire pudding and how best to roast a goose, but all the time I'd be gurning loonily at Delia.
At a time when the only touchstone for the opposite sex was the mammy, Delia was the uber mammy; a wonder in the kitchen with a coquettish glint in her eye. I was smitten.
My love for her waned, but in a Pavlovian side effect, my appetite for cookery programmes grew stronger. I’ve watched them all: Floyd, Gordon, Jamie, Nigella, and now Saturday mornings are spent flicking between Soccer AM and Saturday Kitchen.
A year in Australia introduced me to Ken Hom and the internet made me a fan of Epic Meal Time. If you don’t know what Epic Meal Time is, and you like bacon and cheese (who doesn’t?), get online now. Your ventricles will clog just watching the clips on YouTube.
Anyway, all this preamble is to highlight how cooking can be caught up in a sort of Oedipal mishmash, combined with an evolutionary desire for fat to take you through the winter. I love cookery programmes. But I can’t cook.
This inability is no good in the competitive world of parenting. Everywhere my kids go, they return with tales of baking. They come home with cupcakes and lasagne and brown bread, proudly bearing their gifts up for inspection.
“Look what we made in other people’s houses, where they can use their oven for more than re-heating pizza. Turn off the TV, Dad, step away from Ready, Steady, Cook and do something worthwhile with your life. We can bake together, Dad, and be a real family.”
I took the beating for as long as I could. I tolerated the taunts from the other houses, with their home-made pizza crusts, their simmering pots of bouillabaisse. But one day I could take no more and announced, “Oh yeah, we would cook. We would cook all day, a damn feast for the ages.”
You’ve got to understand the effect this had. It was like I had told them we would all sing live on the X-Factor final and go on to party in a glass bubble floating above the earth, held aloft by a team of unicorns. But what shall we cook? came the little voices. Whatever you want, my dears. Go research.
They returned with a menu twisted towards a Mexican theme. It opened with guacamole and chips. Fair enough, we can do that, then moved incongruously onto tomato soup. But, again, yeah, no problem. So far so good.
Next up chicken fajitas. Easy peasy, this cooking malarkey is for the birds, what’s the big deal? They finished with a crescendo of desserts: truffles doused in sprinkles and marshmallows, combined with chocolate cookies, ice-cream and cream.
The day was set, food-Santa was coming. I hit the supermarket and, as we had to buy as many utensils as foodstuffs, regarded the bill through half-closed eyes. Dragged the loot home, fired up the furnace.
It’s at this point I should regale you with visions of family harmony dusted in icing sugar and framed with yeasty dough. A parade of images as we beat and mix, laugh and frolic, chop and fry and, most of all, do the big cookie bake. Flicking flour at one another, licking mix off wooden spoons, generally being all Walton about it.
Maybe, if I knew my way around a mixing bowl and a scales . . . if we had a scales. I spent three hours holding my breath, attempting not to use the word “Don’t!”. All I saw was danger, spillage, breakage. Don’t lift that, don’t touch that, don’t move that. Let me do it.
My inner control freak choked me from the inside out. You’re supposed to let them do it, I thought, don’t get in the way. Every time the younger grabbed the mixing bowl she tipped eggs on the floor. The elder figured the easiest way to clean melted chocolate and butter off her hands was to run them through her hair.
It was all too much. I retired to the living room for some Masterchef therapy, loaded up with onion rings from the chipper. By the time our feast was ready I was passed out with grease sweats on the couch.
God bless you Delia, but cooking should be kept where it belongs. On the telly, not in the kitchen.