by Tim Dowling
The dog walks into the room looking guilty. It’s not a facial expression as much as a certain postural cast, a way of lowering and extending the neck.
‘What have you done?’ I say.
‘When?’ my son says.
‘Not you. I’m talking to the dog.’
One of the MasterChef contestants is learning to make a tear-shaped dessert garnish out of glucose syrup and chocolate. Suddenly the dog coughs up something that resembles a large, freshly peeled potato. Before I can recoil in horror, she devours it again, whole, and walks out of the room.
‘Oh my God,’ I say. ‘Did you see that?’
‘You just lift it up with a spoon until the sugar hardens,’ my son says. ‘It’s not that big a deal.’
‘Not that. The dog just …’
For a brief moment I doubt what I have witnessed with my own eyes: a family pet regurgitating one of its own organs, and then resorbing it. I follow the dog into the kitchen.
There I find a scene that more or less explains everything. There is a child in pyjamas standing on a chair in front of an open cupboard, in the act of easing a biscuit tin off the top shelf. Behind him on the table is an empty plate, and on the floor a distressed wrapper that once contained a large block of supermarket cheddar. It is immediately obvious that the cheese’s distinctive, hard-edged, trapeziform profile must have taken on a more potato-like shape as a consequence of its two trips through the dog. Three trips now, I think. And then I think: three trips so far.
‘Where’s the cheese?’ the child says, turning round.
‘You left it on the table and now the dog’s had it,’ I say. ‘Why are you even eating cheese at this hour? You’re supposed to be in bed.’
‘I didn’t do anything!’ he shrieks, and storms off.
I lock the dog in the garden, as both punishment and precaution. Over the next hour, I allow myself to slip into a quiet fury, broken only occasionally by the sound of the dog thrusting its head through the catflap and whining. This episode is emblematic of our familial disregard for food, I think: children and animals helping themselves to handfuls of whatever they fancy all day long. Things must change.
The next morning there is a shredded, empty cat-food box lying on the kitchen floor. This latest crime smacks of something beyond the cat’s tiresome persistence or the dog’s opportunism. It appears to be the product of an unholy collaboration. It occurs to me that I may have neglected to feed either of the animals the day before, but I decide not to say anything.
That night my wife makes supper: chilli from a posh grocer’s, heated up. I turn the telly to face the table, so we can watch the last instalment of the MasterChef final.
‘There’s no cheese,’ my wife says. ‘Sorry.’
Thinking about the cheese again puts the absurdity of the situation into perspective. We are eating a ready-meal while watching people train in three-star Michelin restaurants. ‘I hate to say it,’ I say, ‘but I think we need to start having supper with the children. As a family.’
‘Don’t be mad,’ my wife says. ‘Not in the week.’
‘They eat nothing at mealtimes,’ I say, ‘and they help themselves to rubbish all day. I’m worried we’re not setting a very good example.’
‘I do hope,’ my wife says, pointing at the telly with her fork, ‘that you’re not going to talk all the way through this.’
My wife and I never did officially set a starting date for eating with the children – family-style, if you will. But as time went on their supper hour got later, ours got earlier, and the two began to collide. A separate sitting for adults began to seem like a poor deployment of resources – it was reserved for special occasions when we wanted to eat exotic foods the children would not countenance. Finally even that phase came to an end: if we cared to experiment with food, the children became unwilling subjects.
One night I come downstairs to find a large, rarely used pot on the hob and a cookery book next to the sink open to an unfamiliar, unstained page. Three boys lope warily into the room behind me.
‘What is this?’ says the youngest one, staring at the plate that’s been handed to him.
‘It’s poison,’ says my wife. ‘Sit down.’
‘Not there,’ I say. ‘I sit there.’
‘What the hell,’ says the youngest.
‘Don’t speak like that,’ says my wife.
‘I always sit here,’ I say.
‘Where am I supposed to sit?’ says the youngest.
‘Just sit anywhere,’ says the middle one. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Shut up,’ says the youngest.
‘You shut up.’
‘Stop bickering,’ says my wife, before turning her attention to the oldest one. ‘And you – hold your fork like a normal human being.’
‘This is pleasant,’ I say. ‘Who would like to tell us something about their day?’
‘Today,’ says the middle one, conducting the air with his knife, ‘I built a little bird house.’
‘In your soul?’ I say. He stares at me with blank eyes.
‘No, in DT.’
‘I’m finished,’ says the youngest.
‘No, you’re not,’ says my wife. ‘Eat some more.’
‘Oh my God!’ he shrieks, collapsing dramatically.
‘In certain highfalutin’ circles,’ I tell him, ‘it’s considered impolite to rest your forehead on the table.’
‘Yes, sit up,’ says my wife.
‘But I’m done!’ he shouts, jumping to his feet. As a social occasion, the family supper still has a few procedural details to be negotiated.
‘Right, then you put your plate in the dishwasher,’ says my wife. ‘And then you come back and sit down and chat nicely.’
‘What?’ he says. ‘Why?’
‘It’s a punishment for eating too fast,’ I say.
‘No,’ says my wife, ‘it’s not.’
‘No, exactly,’ I say. ‘It’s about being together as a family.’ He slouches to the bin, then the dishwasher, before returning dejectedly to his seat. A long silence follows.
‘I had an interesting tweet from a reader today,’ I say.
‘Oh good,’ says my wife, ‘your father’s going to talk about himself.’
‘It said – I’m paraphrasing – “How do you get paid to write this shit?”’
‘Swearing at the table,’ says the youngest one.
‘And I wrote back, “By BACS.”’
There is another long silence.
‘I’m finished,’ says the middle one.
‘Which is a sort of automated clearing system, so it was—’
‘Me, too,’ says the oldest, leaping from his chair.
‘I give up,’ says my wife, refilling her glass and standing up. ‘Everyone has to help clear the table.’
I am the only one who remains seated. ‘Don’t take the wine,’ I say.
‘Leave the pots and pans for your father,’ says my wife as she heads for the sitting room. ‘He can wash up.’
‘That’s like a punishment for eating too slowly,’ I say.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It is.’
My wife has other culinary punishments, particularly if she feels I haven’t been pulling my weight in the kitchen. On Fridays, for example, she sometimes comes home with a load of random ingredients and presents them to me as a meal-in-waiting, as if I were a contestant on Ready Steady Cook.
‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ I say, peering into the bag.
‘That’s for you to decide,’ she says. I never, ever, do this to her.
As suppertime approaches, I am overtaken by a failure of imagination. My wife, sensing this, steps in. I find her in the kitchen doing something experimental with leeks.
‘I thought,’ she says, ‘you could make this.’ She points to the open page of a cookery book, to a recipe for potato rösti. The ingredients are few, the instructions relatively straightforward. My only objection at this point is to the word ‘rösti’.
&nbs
p; ‘Yeah, OK,’ I say.
I peel and parboil several potatoes, and leave them to cool while I watch the news and think up better names for the side dish I am about to add to my repertoire. ‘Who wants potato pucks?’ I will say. My children will remain silent, wondering where to look.
When the potatoes reach room temperature, I grate them, add salt and pepper, and form them into shallow rounds, disregarding, as the book instructs, their unwillingness to hold their shape at this stage.
I transfer the flattened blobs to the frying pan. As I watch them cook, I decide that the effort expended has been insufficiently transformative – I am staring at something that is transparently still just a bunch of potatoes. Why bother? It occurs to me that existence is futile.
After a few minutes I attempt to turn over the rösti using that kitchen tool for which the English have no good word, having already assigned the term ‘spatula’ to a large and virtually useless knife. As I lift the first one, the cooked portion sticks to the pan, exposing the raw grated potato beneath. It happens with all four of them, on both sides. This could carry on, I think, until I’m left with nothing but a pan that needs washing up. I slap one of the rösti with the flat of the kitchen tool, deforming it.
‘I hate you,’ I say.
‘How’s it going?’ says my wife, who has somehow materialized behind me.
‘They’re a failure,’ I say. ‘I’ve failed.’
‘They look all right,’ she says.
‘No,’ I say, ‘they don’t.’
She leaves the room. As the rösti continue to disintegrate under my care, I experience a rising anger. I’ve yet to look up the word ‘rösti’, so I don’t know the term Röstigraben – literally, ‘rösti ditch’ – referring to the cultural faultline between German-speaking Switzerland, where they eat rösti, and the French-speaking part, where they don’t. But I am coincidentally thinking about tossing my rösti into a ditch, pan and all.
In my frustration, I whack the worktop with the tool. This is incredibly satisfying. I throw the tool at the wall, which is less satisfying. I consider throwing the pan, but the kitchen has been recently painted. My indecision tips me over the edge. You, I tell myself, are worthless. I go upstairs and lie curled on the bed, allowing a bottomless Röstigraben of despair to open beneath me.
It’s not an auspicious start to a breakdown, I think, but my wife and children will excuse that once they realize the extent of my collapse. When they find me here, a hollow-eyed, gibbering wreck, they won’t ask what happened to the rösti.
Except that, after a few minutes, I start to feel better. My heart stops pounding; my breathing slows. Instead of contemplating my own unravelling, I begin to wonder if I can get back downstairs before anyone notices I’m gone, and make rice.
Clearly it wasn’t really about the rösti at all, but just the same I make a solemn vow never to eat one again.
Eventually children reach an age when they wish to develop their own dysfunctional relationship with food, through cooking. I never encouraged this, but that didn’t stop it happening.
‘Dad,’ the middle one says, ‘can I make something?’
I look up from the sofa to see him holding a cookbook under each arm. ‘It’s nine o’clock at night,’ I say, ‘so it’s not really—’
‘It won’t take long,’ he says.
‘What is it you want to make?’
‘Sushi.’
‘No. We don’t have any—’
‘Fine,’ he says. ‘Croissants, then.’
‘Shall we just see what’s on the … Oh, look – Wife Swap USA!’
The lesson he drew from this exchange was: don’t ask. The next time he decides to cook, I don’t hear about it until he arrives at a crisis.
‘Dad!’ he shrieks. ‘I need help!’ I go downstairs to find the kitchen fogged in airborne flour. The cupboards are flecked with chocolate and the floor crunches under my bare feet.
‘What happened in here?’ I say.
He points to a bowl on the worktop. ‘I used double the amount of sugar in the recipe,’ he said.
‘Why?’ I say.
‘It was a mistake! And it’s already mixed up with the eggs!’
‘Then just double the amount of everything else,’ I say.
‘We don’t have enough of anything else,’ he says. The mathematical nature of the dilemma appeals to me. I grab a pencil.
‘How much sugar did you put in?’
‘Er, 350 grams,’ he says.
‘How many eggs are in there?’
‘Five whole, two yolks,’ he says. I put the pencil down.
It was inevitable, given their closeness in age, that the cooking bug would eventually infect his brother.
‘Dad, I need money,’ the youngest says one morning, shaking me awake. It’s a Sunday. The clock says 7.30.
‘What for?’ I say.
‘Marshmallows,’ he says. Some time later I detect a strange, sickly-sweet burning smell. I get out of bed and go downstairs. Once again, the kitchen looks as if it has been the subject of an attack – a warning left by angry mobsters. The youngest is in the sitting room watching Wife Swap USA.
‘Want to try?’ he says, holding up what looks like a rough-hewn chunk of MDF with one gnawed-off corner.
‘Bit early for me. What is it?’
‘A Rice Krispies square,’ he says.
‘Ah,’ I say. ‘Why does it look like that?’
‘They only had pink marshmallows,’ he says. ‘And we were out of Rice Krispies, so I used Shreddies.’
‘This is my house and you will follow my rules,’ says a man with a Tennessee drawl. The boy turns back to the telly and resumes gnawing.
‘What’s it taste like?’ I ask.
‘Bit weird, actually,’ he says.
By this stage the middle one has grown bored with cooking, but the hiatus lasts a matter of months. The sudden restoration of his enthusiasm stems directly from a fresh glut of cookery shows: Celebrity MasterChef, The Great British Bake Off, Lorraine Pascale. He watches them all. Over the course of two weeks printed recipes from the relevant websites chug out of Darth Vader’s head while I’m working.
‘What’s that one for?’ I say when he comes up to retrieve his pages.
‘Lemon posset,’ he says.
‘Ugh,’ I say.
‘It’s good,’ he says.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘It’s just that word: “posset”.’
‘I might make something else as well,’ he says.
When I go down to the kitchen, there are stacked bowls on the table and pools of yellow stuff dripping from the worktop. The boy is at the hob, staring into a saucepan full of apples.
‘They’re still hard,’ he says.
‘How small did it say to cut them up?’
‘I just guessed,’ he says.
‘What does Mary Berry of The Great British Bake Off say?’ I ask.
‘“You’re fired.”’
‘No. Mary Berry says, “Follow the effing recipe.”’
‘Mary Berry doesn’t swear.’
‘If Mary Berry saw this kitchen, Mary Berry would—’
‘Gotta go,’ he says, handing me his wooden spoon. His renewed passion for cooking has unfortunately coincided with the imminent closing of the football transfer window, obliging him to divide his time between the kitchen and Sky Sports News.
My wife walks in. ‘Look at this mess,’ she says. ‘It’s your fault for making him do two puddings.’
‘I’m not making him do anything,’ I say.
‘He’s doing the whole apple thing because you said posset was disgusting.’
‘It’s just the word,’ I say. ‘It means “baby sick”.’
‘Are they still hard?’ the boy shouts from the other room.
I go back up to my office. An hour later, a recipe for salmon saltimbocca drops into the printer tray, but no one comes to get it. When I eventually drift back downstairs, the kitchen is empty but the oven is on. I find the middl
e one in the sitting room watching The Great British Bake Off.
‘They sit down on the floor to watch their ovens,’ I say.
‘I know,’ he says. ‘Weird.’
‘Whereas you watch them watching their ovens, leaving your oven on its own.’
‘Shit!’ he says. ‘The apple things!’ He runs into the kitchen. Mary Berry accuses someone of having a soggy bottom.
The boy comes back in.
‘They’re a bit burnt, but it’s cool,’ he says. He puts The Great British Bake Off on pause to cook the saltimbocca. On my wife’s instructions, I hover behind him, offering advice.
‘I think you’re supposed to put the sage on the inside before you wrap them,’ I say.
‘I didn’t actually read the recipe,’ he says.
‘I know,’ I say. ‘But I did.’
‘You’re supposed to be encouraging,’ my wife says.
‘But firm, like Mary Berry,’ I say.
Supper isn’t ready until some time after nine, but the salmon, thanks in no small part to my timely intervention, is an unexpected triumph.
‘Who wants posset?’ the boy says.
‘I will try some,’ I say. He puts a tall glass of yellow stuff in front of me. Under everyone’s eye, I take a cautious mouthful.
‘It doesn’t taste at all like I thought it would,’ I say. ‘How much baby sick did you put in?’
‘A surprisingly huge amount,’ he says. ‘And you still have your apple thing.’ He slides some form of turnover towards me.
‘I’m not sure I can manage that.’
‘You have to,’ my wife says. ‘He made it specially.’
They all go off to watch the rest of The Great British Bake Off, leaving me alone with my second pudding. The edges of the pastry are slightly singed, but the apples are still quite hard.
CHAPTER SEVEN
When I was young, my father came home from the office at 6.30 p.m. every day. On winter evenings, he would stick his cold hands down the backs of our collars when he arrived, and we would squeal with delight. I never got to do this with my children; I’m a freelance writer. I rarely leave the house during the day, and my hands are always slightly clammy.
Instead, it was my children who came home in the evenings, with loosened ties and free newspapers tucked under their arms. I would greet them excitedly at the door, while they tried to edge past me. If I asked them about their day, they would mumble something about the people in charge being idiots. They knew better than to ask me about my day. They didn’t need to hear another monologue about someone calling me a prick on Twitter.