I
f there is such a thing as late-onset entertaining
paralysis, I’ve got it. I can’t remember the last
time I made dinner for friends. And yet I used
to be quite the cook. I don’t know what’s come
over me.
In a previous life, I constructed towering, glorious
croquembouches from scratch, wrestled turduckens at
Christmas, planned elaborate Indian feasts and once
spent an entire day reducing a kilo of tomatoes to an
intense, clear essence that I cut with gin and called
a Martini. Garnished with a tiny skewer of grilled
saganaki cheese, it made a killer opening salvo to
a multi-course debauch.
Now my catering barely goes beyond making
(rather good) pasta for one, my dinner of choice at
home. I will happily commandeer a barbecue at social
events, but that’s been the limit of my social cooking
for a decade.
The Booker Prize-winning author and avid cook
Julian Barnes says the motivation to feed others should
stem from pleasure: “That of anticipation, as you plan
and shop and cook; that of the act itself, as you eat
among friends; afterwards, that of contented, not
too self-congratulatory remembering.
“But how rarely it turns out to be like this,” he
writes inThe Pedant in the Kitchen. “All too often, high
anxiety destroys the pleasures of anticipation... ”
I couldn’t have put it better myself. At some point
the pleasure I got from feeding others was overcome by
panic. The prospect of entertaining now petrifies me.
Not cooking is no crime but, in my case, it does
make me look quite the fraud. I have written about
food for more than 20 years; first as a reviewer for
café and restaurant guides, later running the weekly
food section of a major newspaper and overseeing
the recipe pages of a weekend magazine. I have
edited eating guides to Sydney and Melbourne and,
more recently, contributed to two volumes on the
cuisines of Spain and Mexico. (The latter won a
World Cookbook Award in 2016. I’ve never cooked
a dish from either.)
Most grievously given my current, non-cooking
status, I conceived a cookbook to encourage others
into the kitchen.Coastfeatures dishes from a
hundred of the country’s top chefs, everyone fromWhen the pleasure of feeding others turns
to panic,KENDALL HILLheads back
into the kitchen to face his fears.
CONFESSIONS
ENTER
64 GOURMET TRAVELLER