Debora Robertson - Notes from a Small Kitchen Island

For my mother, Wendy Robertson, who encouraged me to cook and then to write it all down.

IVE BEEN TO A LOT OF PLACES . Ive cooked a lot of things. But I am never more content than when I am in my London kitchen, wondering what we will have for dinner.

This is a book of essays with the recipes that made me, just as I made them. I describe how I learned to love cooking, from the least promising of starts. I come from a long line of working women who viewed the kitchen as hostile territory, but from my earliest days it was my favourite playground.

On these pages are stories of my favourite meals, foreign and domestic, from baking margarita pie one golden Texan summer and cooking dinners for diplomats in my tiny Moscow kitchen to the lazy feasts I make every summer in my favourite village in the Languedoc, and Turkish-ish weeknight dinners tumbled together with ingredients foraged (this is the only foraging I do, obviously; I dont have the shoes or the temperament for the other sort) from my local Turkish supermarket in Hackney, East London.

In this book I share my secrets for creating delicious meals every single day, without pretending to weave my own water or knit my own tahini. I describe some of the life- and dinner-saving lessons Ive learned in all the kitchens I have cooked in, and share the daring tales of disaster too. Because there are always disasters the inedible in chase of the unInstagrammable.

All the chapters are shot through with tales of my London life, because London is every place, a city where myriad cultures mix, where every ingredient is available, and every single one comes with a story, once upon a dinner time.

ALMOST ALL THE GREAT COOKS I KNOW and I know a lot of great cooks have reams of family recipes to draw upon. You compliment them on the perfection of their pastry or the just-so seasoning of their noodles, and its met with a shrug and, Oh, thats my mothers, my aunties, my grandmothers recipe Their Instagram accounts and their book jackets feature pictures of them as children standing on chairs at the stove or at the kitchen counter, stirring something, flour on their aprons, chocolate around their mouths. Adorable.

Meet my family.

My grandmothers proudest and only kitchen boast was that during the Blitz in Coventry, my grandfather made her a kitchen table from reinforced steel so they could hide under it if getting themselves and four small children into an air-raid shelter in the middle of the night proved too challenging. This is literally my only family-related food story. Where others have Lancashire hot pot and fondant fancies, my kitchen heritage centres on defying the Luftwaffe.

My mother, born in 1941, grew up without any great interest in food, as what there was of it was not very interesting. As she explains, if shed loved or cared about dinner, she would have lived in a landscape of persistent, gnawing disappointment. To this day, she could cheerfully live on smoked salmon sandwiches.

When my grandfather died, my grandmother and her children my mother, her sister, Susan, and brothers, Tom and Ian moved from Coventry back to County Durham to be closer to her family. She got a job in a factory and later became a nurse in a psychiatric hospital. My first memory is being held in my grandmothers arms next to a stall at the hospitals summer fte. She often used to take me to see her ladies. Many of them had spent years in the hospital, and I was the first baby theyd seen since they had had or had lost babies of their own, decades before. Years later, they still asked about the baby. I was almost an adult by then, I think. Time stood still.

Anyway, my mother was the first in her family to go to college. When my brother, Grahame, and I were small, she was teaching, taking another degree in the evenings, going to talks on feminism where I sat on the floor with paper and crayons. Grahame wasnt welcome at the meetings despite being all of four or five years old because: patriarchy. At weekends, my mother wrote childrens novels and wrangled our large Victorian house into submission, one eye on Jocasta Inness The Paupers Homemaking Book, one eye on the clock.

There wasnt much time for carefully tended stews, despite JIs Paupers Cookbook also sitting on the shelves, somewhere. We had a lot of things on toast scrambled eggs, beans, something called, helpfully, toast toppers, which was essentially a thickened cream of mushroom soup. Even though this was the era of potato waffles and crispy pancakes, those were seen as too expensive, not quite the thing. I do, however, have an abiding love for fish fingers, which were somehow allowed.

I can cook because my mother cant. I mean, really cant. To her the kitchen is hostile territory where pans commit scorching hara-kiri and ovens spontaneously combust. She would have rather been anywhere else. Which, conveniently, allowed the kitchen to become my happily anarchic playground.

In friends houses, the kitchens were most definitely their mothers territory. We might be allowed to distract ourselves after school by making a Victoria sponge from a Greens cake mix, but that was quite enough self-expression, thank you.

At home, I could make anything. With the Hamlyn All Colour Cookbook by my side, and Marguerite Patten as my pretend mother, I worked my way through chicken Mornay (sprinkled with cheese and crushed cornflakes), crunchy-topped fish bake (plaice cooked in tinned cream of mushroom soup, finished with a handful of crisps and anchovies), sherried kidneys, Bakewell tart, devils food cake with marshmallow frosting, curried egg salad All the 1970s greats.

My parents entertained a lot. Women in flowing dresses sat around while exuberantly sideburned men played folk songs on the guitar. Or Glen Campbell (and I need you more than want you, and I want you for all tiiiimmmme) played on the stereo, though that was more something my mother listened to in the afternoon, with our neighbour Bernice, over sticky glasses of sherry or Cinzano.

For these parties, my mother might make coq au vin or spaghetti Bolognese, with more efficiency than passion. Or she might not. In that case, I would be there passing around canaps Id concocted like a tiny Margot Leadbetter. I remember a tuna fish pt which was essentially tinned tuna beaten with softened butter and a squeeze of juice from a squeezy plastic lemon, dash of pepper from a tub, spread on to Jacobs crackers, mushroom vol-au-vents (tinned condensed mushroom soup was in high rotation in the 70s kitchen), cheese balls rolled in toasted nuts, all kinds of things on cocktail sticks. And an elaborate apple charlotte made using every implement in the kitchen. I just made what I wanted. Still do. I am just a little better at putting things together and I set my own bedtime.