Pressure Cooker
By: James Beck
Tags: Cooking, Pie, Blog, Humour, Personal Essay

Aside from hostage negotiations and taking a penalty in the World Cup final, I think cooking for other people is the most stressful thing in the world. Admittedly, I have never been in a hostage situation (or a World Cup final, come to think of it) but I have done stand-up comedy, which is basically the same.

I’d imagine if you are a bad hostage negotiator, people would get a bit miffed. Similarly, if you are bad at comedy (and I can tell you this from experience), people will get genuinely angry. If you are terrible at cooking, they will be silently angry and vocally hungry. Hangry. The worst kind of angry. Whole empires have fallen because people were hangry — I am not a historian but I have seen Les Mis and I am pretty sure that is what the French Revolution was all about (also something about hair I think?)

Wait, Les Mis was about the French Revolution, right? (Photo by Pierre Herman on Unsplash)

The thing I simultaneously love and find most stressful about cooking is the preparation to consumption ratio. Often, dishes can take literally hours to prepare and be gone within minutes. In fact, the nicer the meal is the quicker it is consumed. It is like some sort of weird punishment for doing well — to watch your hard labour smashed to pieces and swallowed down in record time.

I reckon I am an OK cook; my meals take a medium amount of time to be consumed. I am not hugely creative, but I can follow a recipe alright. And I follow it to the letter. My fiancée plays a bit more fast and loose with ingredients and instructions and that works fine for her, so maybe I should relax. But then, she did once make a cake explode so…

The fuse is lit… (Photo by Vladas Kalnys on Unsplash)

The reason I am so fastidious in following the rules is that I am not very confident when cooking. Usually this leads to me banning anybody else from being in even the vague vicinity of the kitchen. Just one of many reasons I am not a TV chef — if I am cooking that requires all my attention. I couldn’t even begin to keep up with Tim Lovejoy and Simon Rimmer’s lightning-fast banter!

Maybe it is a sign of my ineptitude but usually there is too much going on for me to have any sort of conversation as well. That said, I do live tweet a pie every year…

#LetsPie is my yearly effort to invite people, virtually at least, into my kitchen. It is almost always the the most stressful thing I do that year. It is absolutely ridiculous. This year was the fifth anniversary of #LetsPie and I decided to put it on my Instagram story as well as tweeting it. Trying to run two platforms and bake a pie from scratch (including making pastry for the first time in my life) was probably an error. I nearly gave myself a heart-attack — although that may have been the amount of butter I was using.

Apart from during The Great Consistency Controversy of 2016 (which we will not be talking about, the pie was fine) — the support people give to #LetsPie is absolutely incredible. I suppose that is why people love cooking — nothing brings us closer than food.

Looks a bit dry to me… (Photo by Rebecca Matthews on Unsplash)

For me, there are certain ingredients and dishes that remind me of certain people. Coffee cake takes me back to being a kid, in Nana’s narrow kitchen after school, reaching up onto the counter to take the lid off a Tupperware whilst my grandad fetches the lemonade and wrangles with some crazy contraption he bought to keep the fizz in.

Every time I cut a chilli I think of my friend Susie (we once had a conversation about keeping the seeds in…), every time I use tomato puree I think of my friend Jon (he once accused me of squeezing the tube ‘the wrong way’…), a Chicken Kiev will always remind me of my friend Ste (we used eat them far too regularly when we lived together and I would wonder why I was single…).

In fact, Ste had the unbelievable idea of cooking the Kiev on top of chips, so that they got coated in any garlic oil that escaped. That was probably 7 or 8 years ago now. I saw Nigella do it the other day. The man was a visionary.

Food has an amazing quality to bring people together. But as the chef you are responsible for making sure they aren’t bonding over their mutual, visceral hatred of you. We have all seen Come Dine With Me. Four strangers might become the best of friends over the course of a week, or they might not. (“What a sad little life, Jane…”)

“I hope you use the money to get some lessons in decorum…” (Photo by tabitha turner on Unsplash)

The point I am trying to make is that cooking really amps up the pressure on a relationship — especially early on. How well do you know this person? How comfortable are you in telling them you don’t like their food? OK, what about a minor critique? Think you could offer that without causing offence?

If that is the barometer, then I am pleased to say I have a lot of people who feel very comfortable around me. But also, I am pleased to say that the 2016’s pie was absolutely FINE and not “too wet” and that it was four years ago and you should all really be over it by now.