KITCHEN ANGELS

Around this time every year, a few miles from a butch bull-fighting town called Aracena in Andalucia, a group of strangers will gather at the hilltop Spanish home of a Scottish novelist. Overlooking the views of chestnut clad hillsides, they will imagine the finest ingredients, create astonishingly simple flavours and aromas, gather them in fascinating combinations and ultimately share in a banquet of dishes.

These are the Dark Angels. Not cooks but writers. And I was once lucky enough to be among their number. Indeed it was this experience at the Finca el Tornero, after years of wanting to write, that helped me to find a voice as a writer.

Most of the participants are in advertising, marketing and corporate branding. But with a few exceptions. The experience is about finding a language that means something. Dispensing with cant and jargon, we were encouraged to concentrate on the way we communicate with others, using precisely the words with which we each speak our truth. The airing of that voice through words is the hardest task for the writer. No bullshit. Allowing what is already there to emerge. With simplicity, clarity and profound impact.

For me, there is an exact parallel between writing and cooking. Some of you may be reading Cooking for Men, inspired by the relationship I rebuilt with my adopted father, as a widower, in his kitchen. Half-memoir, half journey through the habits and execution of cooking, this is a kitchen treatise based on principles I learned as a Dark Angel, which equally apply to both to writing and cooking.

1. Recipes are cooking by numbers. If you want to learn to cook, you must first learn to understand ingredients.

2. Only picking up a fish by the tail will tell you how to cook it. Cooking is about that confidence and creativity. Two qualities you find within yourself.

3. Your mood will determine the success of your undertaking. If you have no affection for your ingredients your efforts will be rendered inedible.

4. Bring to the surface what lies within, entice the senses and please the appetite without unnecessary embellishment or distraction.

5. Successful cooking is to completely satisfy both yourself and those who eat your food, with comfort and ease.

My cousin Jamie Jauncey, a novelist and himself a Dark Archangel, has recently started a blog called A Few Kind Words. In his first post, he writes:

'We must remember that when we write something, the person who reads it will be another human being probably much like us. And if we use language that fails to make a human connection, that reduces people and ideas to abstractions, we might as well not have bothered.'

The same can be said of cooking.

The Aracena lunch was a large loin of local pork. Lift the rind and layer celery long ways along the joint before retying it and studding with oregano and garlic. Roast in a hot oven. Lavish with white wine throughout cooking. Serve with patatas bravas and a dusty Tempranillo.

Find out more about Dark Angels

TENDER WORDS

Tender (2009) tells the story of Nigel Slater's love affair with his garden in Islington and the many seedlings he has raised in his box-hedged vegetable patches. It’s a magnificent volume, like a medieval knightly treatise with pictures of his Eden, its produce and many of the recipes he has created from them.

23 May, 2010

FOOD FROM THE HEART

Cooking is a basic human instinct. We’ve been eating, chopping, shaping, flavouring, enticing ingredients into something delicious since time began. But as the way many of us live has changed, the basic skills we require to cook, are no longer valued and it’s often easier to let others take control of what we eat.

21 April, 2010

IN A RIGHT FISH STEW

This week we had sustainable fish stew. It’s a quick and easy way to feed a gang of hungries on a Friday night and doesn’t need much else but some good bread and wine. Like all stews, you need balance, rich liquid and a range of potent flavours steaming from your pot.

15 March, 2010