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Why do we cook? Well, to eat, of course. But also to entertain. To learn. To remember. To kill an afternoon. To bond cross-generationally. To use up crap that's left over in the fridge. To make the whole house smell like a holiday. To do the thing that's always been done.
Rose Prince, writing in the Telegraph, gets at some of the more ambitious motivations behind cooking in a remarkably clearheaded and engaging review of the Delia Smith Christmas cake kit.
Smith, the UK's biggest-selling cooking author, has done something that's either miraculous or sacrilegious, depending upon your viewpoint: She has condensed the British Christmas cake, a traditional gastronomic marathon that results in a festive and highly ambitious fruitcake, into a three-step method that uses prepackaged ingredients.
Prince weighs in on the "sacrilegious" end of things, writing: "'Delia put my Christmas in a bag!' I sob. Her preparedness leaves me as redundant as a lollypop lady in a field. Her sack of utility has all the appeal of the cat’s pack of IAMS. I head for the brandy bottle (not included) and resolve to open my mind, delve into the bag and put Delia’s near enough fait accompli to the test."
Prince's point: The prolonged stirring, prepping, and general fussing that goes into making a Christmas cake isn't work to be avoided. It's deeply satisfying. Hell, it's even fun: The cake kit "is designed to take the pain out of making traditional cakes. But where exactly is this pain? There is none in my memory, in actual fact I have loved every moment of this tradition. There is charm even in the smaller pleasures: choosing the best ingredients, measuring and not forgetting the all-important maceration of fruits in brandy—the essential bit of course being the chance to mop up extra hooch in a pre-advent toast. But these moments are erased by Waitrose's 'prepared ingredients pack.'”
Prince doesn't see the job of making a Christmas cake as toil—she sees it as soulful, festive, and meaningful. Her essay is a wonderful (and seasonally relevant) counterpoint to the idea that faster and easier is necessarily better.
Now does this mean that we need to spend eight hours making a cake in order to truly experience the holidays? Possibly not. But getting the family and friends together and baking off a batch or three of some special cookies over the course of an afternoon, fortified with hot cider and cocoa, seems to be a hell of a nice way to embrace the meaning of the season.
Image source: Waitrose.com
Oh boy. Tina, the point of the post was that the pleasure is in the process, not the end product.
hm, i don't have a house cleaner or nanny, and neither did any of the women in the generations that came before me, and lo and behold, cook and bake they could, and cook and bake they did. perhaps it's simply a question of what is and isn't a priority and in my family cooking and baking always was. not trying to be snarky here, but it's another point of view.
I'll bet that Rose prince has a nanny and house cleaner and doesn't have long hours and elderly relatives. My sister was overjoyed that Delia's cake came in a bag at waitrose so she was able to fit making a cake into the family schedule... she writes for the Telegraph so it's a predictable attitude from someone who probably has other people to do the mucky jobs that normal people have to do for...+READ
I'll bet that Rose prince has a nanny and house cleaner and doesn't have long hours and elderly relatives. My sister was overjoyed that Delia's cake came in a bag at waitrose so she was able to fit making a cake into the family schedule... she writes for the Telegraph so it's a predictable attitude from someone who probably has other people to do the mucky jobs that normal people have to do for themselves before they can even think about christmas cake!
Tina-COLLAPSE