Country life
A lesson in scrambling
Leanda de Lisle
It's true. There are families out there who really do live entirely off ready-made meals — and I mean entirely. The chil- dren's new nanny is 25 years old and doesn't know how to boil an egg. Well, she does since I explained that you have to cook them in boiling water. However, she refuses to accept that anything as exotic as scrambled egg exists north of the Trent. In her part of the world, she insists, food comes out of a packet, and scrambled eggs, if they are made at all, are prepared by placing an egg in cold water, boiling it up for as long as you dare and then mashing it with a fork. I've tried to convince her that my scrambled eggs are not 'southern style', but definitive; she, though, gives me a look that means, 'What do you know, living in your ivory tower?'
The depressing thing is that I think the nanny is right. I'm surrounded by pigs, chickens, Jerusalem artichokes and other growing things from which I create our meals, and I find it difficult to grasp that there are thousands of people in this coun- try who are confused by the sight of an egg that doesn't come wrapped in microwav- able film with cooking instructions. I've long suspected that many teenagers become vegetarians because they are shocked to discover, in the course of their studies, that lamb chops come from baby sheep. However, it's only now beginning to dawn on me that there are people who are unnerved by any food that resembles some- thing once living.
To return to the nanny, of whom I am actually very fond and whom the children love. When we took her on I explained that I expected her to make a square meal with fresh vegetables for my youngest son when he returns from school. On her first day here, I went to see what she had produced. As always, she had listened to what I had said and done her best. There were chips, there were sausages and there, on the side of the plate, were fresh vegetables — three entirely raw green beans with the dusty earth of the walled garden still attached to them. The daily and I spent months after that teaching her some basic cooking, and now she's a whizz with beans. Unfortunate- ly, somewhere along the line we forgot about scrambled eggs.
Those of you who follow Digby Ander- son's column and find relaxation in stuffing larks' tongues may wonder why, after a few rudimentary cooking lessons, she couldn't have been expected to guess that you need to take an egg out of its shell before you scramble it. Is she very stupid? Not at all. She is creative and teaches my sons embroidery. She also reads five or six books a week. No, it's just that fresh food belongs to a world of which she knows nothing at all. I may as well have been giv- ing cooking lessons to a Martian.
I told the daily what had happened, and she explained gloomily, 'That's just the way things are now. My friends think I'm a freak because I like to cook food from scratch.' I can believe it. Whilp the super- markets say they cannot sell expensively produced organic produce at premium prices, they have no problem unloading cheaply produced, pre-packaged junk food at premium prices. Which is difficult to square with the public's interest in all things environmental, but helps explain their terror of eating something that will make them ill.
Living on pre-prepared meals must be like living on pills. The consumers have no understanding of what has gone into them, but are terrified that it might be something that will give them two heads. I don't blame them for this, but it's a pity they blame the farmers. So many problems could be solved if everyone learnt how to prepare their own vegetables and scramble their own eggs.
`It has to match the sofa. Don't you have anything with coffee stains and dog hairs?'
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