UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
Kitchen Viewpoint
By MARY COSH (St. Anne's Society, Oxford)
IT is ill-advised to be penniless in summer unless one has planned it beforehand. On the reduced labour market the answer to temporary job-hunters takes three forms: " I'm sorry. You should have applied last May," " If you'll look after six chil- dren . . .," or "Hopeless unless you know typing and shorthand." Very well, I said, I will become a domestic servant—one profession where vacancies never fail.
It was fatally easy. The innocent morning job I took cleaning bed- rooms in a block of service rooms was by an overnight crisis meta- morphosed into cooking and catering for all the occupants of those rooms, namely the kitchen end of ten or a dozen breakfasts and five to eight dinners at night. "Yes, I can cook," I agreed, "but I've never cooked for more than three people in my life, and I've had no training." The crisis was such that They did not think this very important.
Surprisingly, too, it did not seem to matter, for most of my efforts apparently went well, but the first ten days were a nightmare of anxiety. Had I forgotten something vital ? Would I ruin the main course ? And, worst of all, just what was the meal going to be ? If it is short-sighted to be penniless in summer, it is equally so to take a job as cook, inexperienced, in the middle of a drought plus a dock strike, when the price of green vegetables soars and eggs dis- appear from the market. I soon revised all my ideas of domestic work as a mere dull and tiring routine. It was exhausting at first, mentally as well as physically, to design and carry out three-course dinners of a particular standard for a dining-room of impersonal strangers on whom one could hardly inflict the cavalier culinary manners which one's friends were willing to suffer. But, fortunately, there were no tragedies. The nearest I had was my pouring into an apple fool out of a red bottle taken from the flavouring shelf. I remarked that " this cochineal is very poor quality "—and was told by the horrified maid that I was using someone's throat gargle (how it got there is still a mystery). As it was then too late to make another sweet, I hurriedly disguised it with vanilla and lemon essence, and reminded myself, none too confidently, that gargle was antiseptic and health-giving. We all ate and survived ; perhaps it added that distinctive je ne sais quoi.
Women generally enjoy cooking ; it is the rest of domestic work which nearly everyone finds tiresome. When girls grow up unable to cook, their mothers are often to blame for not telling them as one of the facts of life that cookery is not the great mystery or the dangerous gamble which vanity sometimes makes them try to picture it. Preparing a joint and vegetables is simply a matter of timing, and cakes made by beginners do not inevitably sink in the middle for the smug gratification of their elders. The first time a girl suc- cessfully follows a recipe in a book, if she has been deceived by the hoax of the Grand Mystery, she has a delicious, surprised feeling of having pricked a large bubble. Cookery is common sense, practice and a few basic rules like how long vegetables take to cook, and a certain amount of organisation to avoid letting the toast burn while the kettle is boiling over and the bacon frizzling dry.
My partner-in-toil, the housemaid, a cheerful, forthright young exile from the Irish lowlands, and the most hardworking girl I ever met, waited at table and dished up the meals with me, patiently reminded me every evening to make the gravy, gave unfailing good advice and told me how to make white sauce. Looking through her eyes, and by my own new experience, I began to form an outlook on a household which is, I suppose, peculiar to "below stairs," unsuspected by those on the other side, whose only contact with it is their accepted expectation that well-cooked meals will appear regularly on the table, bath-water will always be hot (presumably because some fire is stoked up somewhere), the place will always look clean and tidy, and the beds be made and sheets changed—services so taken for granted that they are seldom thought of. During the first few days I, for one, did anything but take them for granted ;
they seemed miracles of achievement, and usually not my achieve- ment. I looked with increasing admiration on hotel and restaurant chefs and waiters, dustmen, shopkeepers, milk roundsmen, any of the thousands of men and women on whose continuous, efficient per- formance of jobs depends daily comfort of all kinds, yet whose work we never dream of praising because we never notice it—unless it stops or goes wrong, when we instantly complain. I hereby attest my humble admiration of everyone who efficiently carries out any work in service of whatever kind to others.
To return to the domestic outlook in particular, I found that the occupants of the house inevitably tend to represent to the staff, not Individuals or personal lives, but room-numbers attached to certain idiosyncrasies: tea-drinkers or coffee-drinkers ; in-to-dinner and out-to-dinper ; early down to breakfast (how we blessed them) and tiresomely late ; the ones who fold up their laundry and the ones who don't. Number 6 has breakfast in his room ; Number 8 doesn't cat fish ; Number 4 doesn't take after-dinner coffee. In the kitchen, concerned only with whether they would like what I cooked and how many would be in to each meal, I felt a slight shock on realising that they went to jobs of their own at 9 a.m. and came home tired at night, had friends and went on holidays. To me they were my bundle of ration-books and the potential eaters of meals. Their lives began and ended in the dining-room. They were "They." The kitchen attitude to a household of people is, inside its own privacy, seldom complimentary and often—alasl—rather stark.
So that for a person unaccustomed to the job it means subduing a whole part of oneself which is not required either by what one is doing or by conversation in working hours. Two-thirds of life is dormant, waiting, one supposes, to be called out again when the tima of limitation is over; for even inner thoughts adapt themselves so as to lessen the moment's inadequacy and make it more tolerable—a serious danger when people are permanently fixed in uncongenial jobs. Until this defence has made things dull and familiar, one tries to avoid interests outside working hours which would make tha return harder, and to do as little actively as possible—quite apart from the martyrdom of aching feet. Later, of course, work becomes routine, irksome but less anxious, and the heightened per- ceptions fade. Standing over the ubiquitous sink, I could not believe that six weeks ago the textual problems of the Battle of Maldon had been so overpoweringly important. Then I forgot them altogether.
But enough ; it is all very well for the amateur to enlarge on a philosophy of the kitchen world and the outlook of domesticity, happy in the knowledge that after a few weeks the trial will end and life return to the above-stairs viewpoint, pleasantly normal hours of rising and small-scale cookery. The professional domestic will scarcely bother with such reflections. Why should she? Life goes on the same, an endless vista of mornings at 6.3o, tramping stairs with the same trays, sweeping the same floors, washing the same dishes. I take off my hat to the professional. And—as a tribute of more practical value—in future, when staying at an hotel, I Will Always Be On Time For Meals.
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