The Secret of Cooking Show notes

Two recipes to make your own and repeat at will, thoughts on comfort cooking and eating and treating cooking as the remedy it can be/is.

Hello! what does comfort food mean to you? For some of us it’s a plain cake, or lemon delicious, rice pudding, or roast chicken, for others its a block of chocolate. For others it’s a kebab or a big bowl of pasta. In this episode we talk about how we comfort ourselves and others through food cooking, and we take as our lead, this wonderful book; Bee Wilson’s The Secret of Cooking. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to the episode yet, you can do so by clicking here.

We hope you enjoy this one,

Sophie and Germaine. We hope you enjoy it, plus the collection of links, thoughts and a recipe or two inspired by our chat.

“The secret of cooking is that there is no secret formula, no special sauce, no hidden element, the only universal secret is to find the recipes and methods that will make the person cooking feel more able to do it. Your comfort, ease and pleasure in the kitchen must come first.’ Bee Wilson, The Secret of Cooking

On the Comforts we took from reading this book

The comfort of cooking itself

Bee wrote in this article that “when you are falling apart, cooking something familiar can remind you of your own competence”. When huge change occurs and you feel blindsided by it, as Bee did when her husband left her quite suddenly, it’s a jolt to our whole sense of self and reality gets questioned. A concrete action like cooking brings us back to ourselves and reminds us that not all is lost.

Treating cooking as a remedy - because it is

There’s always a place for super-fast weeknight dinners, but sometimes, the act of cooking itself is a comfort.

‘Sometimes you want to put on some music and lose yourself in a leisurely kitchen project’

The comfort of cooking for the life you have (and making it better)

I found the reminder that we need to be more consciously aware of our life situation and that we can tailor our cooking for these moments extremely hopeful, particularly if we are going through difficult times. I remember years ago working with mothers of small babies, and I started ending their sentences with “for now”, as in “I’m not getting much sleep, for now” or “My baby is really unsettled, for now…” There was power in recognising the old saying that “this too shall pass” which can be so difficult to believe when you are going through a difficult time. There will be another stage to come but perhaps Bee’s message is to fully embrace the stage you are in and make it better! Germaine x

The comfort of bread baking