UNDERGRADUATE PAGE

Pot and Gown

By JAMES A. MACDONALD (Edinburgh University) T HE exigencies of their time have required many male undergraduates to acquaint themselves to some extent with the art of cooking; but, despite this salutary trend, there are probably very few of them really capable of feeding themselves adequately—far less enjoyably—for any consider- able length of time. Far too often, indeed, the student cook is a specialist, a one-recipe Cordon Bleu who can braise larks' kidneys to perfection or produce a unique and memorable gaspacho, but who is utterly helpless in the face of a couple of kippers or a rice pudding. Of course his ignorance of the facts of kitchen-life is fairly understandable, and even forgiv- able, since the man who has never been presented with the daily headache of devising a - different " breakfast or an original high-tea tends to rationalise his ignorance by persuading him- self that culinary activities other than those demanded by his own proprietary masterpiece are beneath his creative abilities. In fact, he may well have convinced himself that if he can, for instance, turn out a faultless Camembert in aspic, he knows all about cooking anyway; and that, having attained the pinnacle, he is bound to find anything on a lower level of achievement easy.

But experience, if ever it comes his way, will soon show him that the one-course dinner (sandwiched between tinned antipasto and frozen fruit-salad) that he has laboriously pre- pared to impress a cosmopolitan aunt or an admiring girl-friend is something less than the brilliant accomplishment its creator planned it to be. The beginning of this melancholy process of disenchantment is marked by his landlady's unexpectedly early return from her weekly visit to the cinema. She discovers with horror that her kitchen is pretty nearly in ruins—by the looks of it, at least. Flame-blackened saucepans cram the sink, their insides encrusted with various almost-ineradicable residues that will take weeks to wear completely off. Bits of chopped onion litter the floor between the kitchen-table and the cooker; the dish-towels bear witness to hands hastily wiped after peeling tomatoes; a bottle of oil lies horizontally on top of the cooker, its contents dribbling down the smooth enamel and puddled on the floor. The windows are steamed; the walls dripping. A heavy, complex, unidentifiable smell hangs throughout the whole house; the wallpaper, curtains and upholstery will absorb and retain it for quite a time."

The disillusionment goes a stage further when the evicted and frustrated cook teams up with two or three like-minded fellows to rent a furnished flat where they will be able to cook to their hearts' desires. For the first month everything is just fine. Breakfast (cornflakes, toast, tea) presents no problem; lunch is eaten out. Then each man takes it in turn to cook the whole dinner, and, since none of them knows how to cook more than one dish, the rota is operated on a four-day basis. The first day brings a steaming, satisfying Milanese risotto; the next an accomplished fried chicken, Southern style; the third evening's dinner is built round a peppery but solid Hungarian stew, while the fourth day's main attraction is mussels done in white wine.

It takes the young chefs the best part of a month to begin to suspect an element of monotony in their diet. This point marks a crucial stage in the gradual disenchantment, for it is here that the tense period of experiment, of trial and error (mainly the latter), begins its course. First of all, just to gain experience, they try cooking each other's speciality. This is a particularly trying time, for many a close and amicable friend- ship has been wrecked by jealousy at the table or spite in the kitchen. The trace of oil in the batter, the soaking of the meat in wine vinegar, the chicken broth (from a tin) for the risotto, the technique of cleaning mussels—all these have hitherto been master-touches performed in secret, known only to the cook himself, and carefully guarded from his fellow-tenants; and it is a painful experience to reveal such priceless tricks of the trade even to the friendliest of competitors.

So, for the sake of prestige and self-respect, the experts give each other faulty or misleading directions—wine, .instead of wine vinegar, two spoonfuls of oil in the batter, instead of just one, and so on, till every meal becomes an emotional ordeal. " You've left sand in the mussels, George," says the shellfish expert, dangerously calm. " They're meant to be cleaned, you know." " This rice," grunts the risotto expert. " Bit on the soggy side, don't you think ? "

The bickering and back-biting continue till one of them determines to branch out for himself and find out how to make something completely different. Perhaps he has tired of canned tomato soup; perhaps he simply wants to try something not too difficult. So he buys a cookery-book in secret and studies it alone and furtively. But whether or not his first attempt turns out to be a success, the others—merely in self-defence— are immediately and savagely critical of it.

" I suppose you used Canary tomatoes ? " accuses one.

" Matter of fact, I did nothing of the sort," retorts the cook, counter-attacking at once. " I made a particular point of using English ones, though they're twice the price."

The other pounces. " Hah ! I thought as much," he sneers. " Don't you know that you can't make decent tomato-soup except with tinned Italian ones ? "

" In that case," huffs the cook, " we might just as well go back to tinned soup."

" I couldn't agree with you more," snaps the critic.

And that marks the end of that experiment.

Indeed, after the first month's kitchen honeymoon, harmony returns to the household only when its tenants give a dinner, which, apart from the various odds and ends served straight from tins or packages, is always the samerisotto, mussels, stew and fowl. Unfortunately- a dinner of this size—covers for eight, four major courses, and a peripheral assortment of hors d'oeuvres, fruit, cheeses, nuts and wine—involves a good deal of sound organisation and smoothly systematic production- control; so that, although the four cooks start out promisingly enough with all-round gestures of compromise and amity, their strongly individual desires for recognition make real co-opera- tion impossible.

An intelligent division of labour—one man preparing all the raw materials, perhaps two doing all the cooking and the fourth looking after everything else, from table-decoration to decanting—would cut hours off the time they take working individually, besides eliminating most of the chaos in the kitchen that takes such a lot of trouble to clean up afterwards. But such an arrangement postulates something very much like a perfect society, free from envy, jealousy, suspicion, pride and malice—which in this particular context effectively rules out co-operation, since the cooks' kitchen emotions are precisely these. So they go to work in a glorious atmosphere of free- for-all, struggling for pans, for kitchen knives, for oven-space, striving in a Darwinian jungle of steam and smoke and heat to bring forth the most memorable dish, the course that will make the guests crowd round its creator with praise and congratulations.

This is the crowning moment, the supreme hour; for cooks, like women, live only for adulation. But this moment is so rare, since in their day-to-day existence the student cooks refuse to praise one another's dishes, that, when the brief exhilarating limelight fades,-they begin to be menaced by a dark and looming doubt. Is it really 'worth it after all ? The first defection is sudden and unannounced, the renegade packing his bags one morning while the others are in college, and hustling off to lodgings by taxi before anyone can find out. Then one by one the others do the same, creeping penitently (and relievedly) back to digs where plain, dull meals are once more laid before them, but where the consumption and pro- duction of food are unaccompanied by tension, excitement or worry, and where—above all—food becomes once again nothing more &than a routine. Disenchantment's circle is complete.