FIFTY SOMETHING:No person I've met will admit they bought a timeshare in Florida, writes HILARY FANNIN
I BOUGHT another cookbook. This one is different. This one has a photograph of a modest collection of kitchen equipment which is, apparently, everything I need in my kitchen to produce seasonal healthy meals.
All these years of coveting a glistening appliance garage, full of things that whirr and dice and blend, and it seems I was all right all along: the only things an honest cook needs are some artfully chipped enamel, a trusty paring knife with a melted plastic handle, and a seasoned chopping block that doubles as a doorstop.
This book isn’t going to stop at cooking though, oh no. I have unwittingly purchased for myself a bible of palatable frugality for the newly skint. This is a post-boom cookbook. This is a book with a message, and the message is: you blew it, suckers.
There you were, tucking into the auld bottle of Sancerre on a Tuesday, with your pre-packaged rogan josh zinging away in the microwave and Gary Lineker blowing kisses at you from the 40in flat screen, and by Wednesday you were posting back the keys. Hey ho, kiddies, it’s time to suck up the organic sackcloth and compostable ash.
This cookbook, not content with deifying the lowly lentil and rubbing my nose in my profligate ways with a pound and a half of round-steak mince, will also teach me to shop and, importantly, this book is going to punish me for waste.
The next time I chuck six past-their-sell-by-date rhubarb yogurts into the non-degradable bin bag I’ll have to spend a month at a cheese-making workshop wearing a calico smock and a pair of felt clogs.
And this book is going to make me work, and I don’t mean having to put on my rubber gloves to open the lid on the marmalade jar.
This book will have me on my bicycle at dawn, foraging dewy hillsides for edible fungi. It’ll have me gutting my own mackerel on oily granite steps. This book will have me chasing young lambs through springy pastures and filleting them with my teeth. Sooner or later this increasingly sanctimonious tome will have me knitting my own shagging muesli.
The book cost €40. I figure that if I follow the advice, plan every meal, tie-dye my T-shirts with the leftover beetroot juice, clean the bath with pumpkin seeds and pummel the cucumber pulp into face cream, I just might, over the course of a prudent year, reimburse myself.
Speaking about the old days, when cash ran like tears and we were feeding honey-roast ham to the cat, I’ve been engaging in a smattering of post-boom analysis myself recently. A lot of these there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-go-I conversations seem to happen over the mangos in cut-price German supermarkets. It seems that nobody got caught up in the boom after all; it was a mirage.
I haven’t met a single person yet who will admit to having foolishly bought a chunk of Leitrim and a timeshare in Florida. Time was you couldn’t reach for the eggs without someone in Lycra telling you how they popped over to Budapest for a spot of root-canal treatment and picked up two city-centre apartments while they were at it.
I was in Budapest a couple of years ago, standing in the middle of ornately beautiful steaming outdoor baths, watching octogenarians playing chess on floating boards, while a cultured Hungarian, with cheekbones you could ski down, told me that an entire street in Budapest was colloquially known as “little Ireland” because every square inch of it was owned by one of us.
There is a certain comfort in this post-boom banter, in squeezing the mangos and shooting the breeze with some bloke who used to buy his chinos in Martha’s Vineyard and his non-chafing designer swimwear in St Tropez and who has just discovered the joys of purchasing 24 loo rolls for the price of a glass of Pinot Grigio. There is a certain easy familiarity, a gallows camaraderie to be had in the refrain, “Oh, we never got caught up in any of that nonsense, oh god no, oh god no, not at all.”
Anyway, back to the frugality bible. My days of chucking out the mouldy jam with impunity are over. The takeaway menus are in the bin (the recycling one).
I am henceforth dedicating myself to the pursuit of durability and functionality.
That jar of artichoke hearts – picked in Bolivia, bottled in Kathmandu, and flown to my supermarket via Vladivostock – is back on the shelf, along with any notions I may have indulged of spending my dotage in a steaming outdoor Hungarian bath, playing floating chess in a rubber bathing cap.
Next time I bin six past-their- sell-by-date yogurts I’ll have to spend a month at a cheese-making workshop
Hilary Fannin’s column will appear on Fridays in the Life page of The Irish Times
