Читать книгу A Spoonful of Sugar - Liz Fraser - Страница 47

When you cook food at home, you know what’s in it because you do it yourself. Flour, eggs, salt and sugar – and that’s IT! No hidden extras. If you buy everything from the shops your children consume a terrific amount of unnecessary things that are bad for them, without realising it.

Granny has finished her lunch now, but not her attack on the way we eat these days.

‘There’s nothing home made any more, like soup, or bread or a roast dinner, and many people don’t even know how to make them, and you know why?’

‘Because we’re all lazy and watch too much telly?’ Mmmmm, telly …

‘Well, there’s a bit of that, certainly, but it’s mainly because parents are both out at work all day, and haven’t the time or energy to cook when they get home. So they open the freezer and heat up any old shop-bought junk they find in it. Tins, packets, jars – you name it. I was at home looking after the family, so I had plenty of time to cook a healthy meal. That’s what the trouble is now. ‘

Aha – so this is how it feels to be one hundred per cent guilty of every charge thrown at you. Mummy works: guilty. Too tired to cook: guilty. Opens freezer and removes ‘any old junk’? Guilty. Crikey, she’s going to put me away for life.

As I struggle to reconcile the undeniable sensibleness of what Granny just said with the fact that it somewhat undoes most of what the Women’s Liberation Movement achieved and that allows me to be sitting in front of her at this moment researching my latest book, rather than chained to the stove baking cookies for my adoring children, she tells me a story of an American schoolgirl who came to stay with them as some kind of exchange programme, back in the 1960s.

One afternoon Granny was in the kitchen, doing something exciting with the aforementioned flour, sugar, eggs and so on. The poor, unsuspecting visitor asked Granny what she was doing, and received the swift reply, in a voice I can only imagine was so far beyond terse it was teetering on the brink of bone-crushing, that she was ‘making a cake!’ According to Granny, her American guest’s eyes nearly popped out of her head.

‘“Oh”, she said to me. “Do you mean you make them – from scratch? You don’t buy a packet and just add water before cooking it?” She’d honestly never seen anyone bake before, Elizabeth. And she was fifteen if she was a day. I’m sure she thought we were either very hard up or just strange! It was so sad.’

Now then, nobody but the disgustingly virtuous, irritatingly time-rich or bored beyond words can be expected to bake every loaf of bread and cake they eat. Even Nigella must nip down the in-store bakery once in a while! And nobody, least of all me, is asking that all mothers stop working to stay at home and bake! But making a simple, healthy meal from scratch needn’t take more than ten minutes, quick enough even for the busiest of us, and learning to cook is one of life’s absolute essentials – one we must, must pass on to our kids. If we never show them how to cook, or where their food comes from, what chance do they have to spot what’s healthy and what is a vacuum-packed heart attack in the making when they come to choose food for themselves?