Chinmayee Manjunath

I recently re-read Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin. I’d read it some years ago, when Luisa Weiss mentioned it on her excellent blog.

It is a simple book filled with stories and recipes – a food memoir of sorts, I suppose but while this genre is very common now, it perhaps was less so when Colwin wrote this book in 1988.

And one line really touched my heart – “When people enter the kitchen, they often drag their childhood in with them.”

Once I read that, I wanted nothing more than a simple white-bread sandwich of butter and jam. Or a bowl of spaghetti in Ragu sauce, with a liberal sprinkling of Kraft parmesan flakes.

Think about it. The foods we most long for offer nursery comfort. They are simple. Usually, they tell stories about our families and childhoods, memory and desire. And in the vein of the show that I love on Netflix, they are Ugly Delicious.

I would recommend Colwin’s books to everyone. And, if you’re keen, Luisa Weiss’ My Berlin Kitchen is another book I adore and in the same category fall Molly Weizenberg’s A Homemade Life and Delancey: A Man, a Woman. a Restaurant, a Marriage.

All of these books are best accompanied by a favourite, forgotten snack. I’m stocked up for now on old-fashioned jam, Ragu sauce and that cheese.

As Colwin writes – “In this uncertain world of ours, the thing about nursery food is that you can count on it. You know what it is. It will not give you any nasty surprises. It leaves you neither guessing nor lost in admiration. It fills, cheers and makes you feel it ought to be eaten from one of those metal-bottomed hot-water baby dishes with three little china sections and a picture of a gingham dog and the calico cat in each.”

The image is from this blog, and is an illustration by Eileen Soper from Enid Blyton’s Magazine Annual 3.