I have always been the primary cook in our house. Like most women, I have a complicated relationship with food and appetite, but part of that complexity has always been pleasure. I like cooking. I like making many things – books, clothes, conversation – and there’s a particular satisfaction in making something good from materials of little promise. I enjoy designing knitwear that uses up odds and ends of yarn, making patchwork from remnants of dressmaking, reusing packaging, generally deploying ingenuity to make more of less. (It’s hereditary, I’m afraid; my grandmother used to wash and dry paper towels. I have warned my kids.)
We have a delivery of groceries every Wednesday, which means that the deployment of ingenuity peaks on a Tuesday evening. There are usually some slightly depressed carrots left, onions considering putting forth green shoots in the veg drawer, maybe a weary half-cabbage. Should imagination fail, stir-fry with ginger, chilli, garlic and soy, grill some tofu, job done.
A few years ago a dietician told me cheerfully that as long as a meal ‘meets the needs of the people’ it’s all good. The needs of the people are for wholegrains, fruit or veg and protein, and the exact form of these things is a matter of culture, tradition and personal preference. If your toddler enjoys it, there’s no reason not to combine Weetabix, cheese and kiwis. You can dine healthily on flapjack, tuna and aubergines should you feel the call. Porridge and apples are a decent lunch, and certainly better for you than the plastic sandwiches and sugary pop in a ‘meal deal’. I murmur the triumphant phrase to myself sometimes on nights when the cooking isn’t what you’d want to offer a guest.
Mostly, on a Tuesday, imagination is in good form. I tend to do my best work in response to tough constraint, which will be no surprise at all to readers with any kind of creative practice. In writing fiction, what comes first is limitation: this is not a story about everyone but about these people. It is set not everywhere or anywhere but here, in this place. It’s not any time but this time, this moment – real or invented; past, present or future – in human history. Sometimes the constraint almost tells the story; one of my novels is about what happens in six Scottish holiday cabins over 24 hours of unrelenting summer rain.
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Artistic form is constraint. A sonnet has rules. If your poem doesn’t follow them, it could still be a great poem but it’s not a sonnet. The rules of fiction are more vague but they do exist; fiction has to have narrative structure, the world it describes has to be internally consistent and it has to have an ending. These demands alone imply that fiction cannot be true, because real life lacks all narrative structure and especially fails to provide endings. It’s the limitations that make art, shape beauty out of chaos.
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I wouldn’t describe even my best cooking as beautiful, but the constraints of Tuesday night very often lead to better dinners than the wild freedom of a full fridge on a Wednesday. Our era teaches us that more choice is always better, that having more options is the sign of greater liberation, but I think that in cooking as in literature, often choice is a distraction from the real work of making good things.
Writing a novel is different from cooking a meal, but not wholly different. The all-day plenty of the supermarket is in some way the enemy of ingenuity. Sometimes convenience works against imagination. (That said, sometimes the all-day plenty of the supermarket is all that stands between exhausted cook and expensive takeaway, and obviously the supermarket is plentiful in exact relation to the plenty in your purse.)
I don’t want to glamorise scarcity. Not having enough food, or not being able to buy the makings of good food, is no stimulus to imagination or ingenuity or anything good, and it’s a disgrace to all of us that in a country as rich as this there are families in that situation day after day. I wish deprivation on no-one. But there is a happy and fruitful ground between scarcity and excess, a place of sufficiency in which intelligence and creativity make rich use of limited resources, and that’s what I mean, that’s where I think more of us might do better work.
