Cooking Lessons in a Bedsitter

One of my favourite cookbooks is Cooking in a Bedsitter. The recipes are simple and unthrilling, but Katherine Whitehorn’s book is appealing for its very good humour and plain common sense.

Cooking in a Bedsitter was first published in England in 1961, at a time when student accommodation, for example, was typically single-room and bare bones, particularly for cooking. There was commonly just one gas burner to cook on, possibly with water only available down the hallway. So, Whitehorn set out to write a functional cookbook, one that would work under such trying conditions. The book is in two parts, Part 1 titled “Cooking to Stay Alive”. The first chapter, “The Problem – and Some of the Answers”, begins,

Cooking a decent meal in a bedsitter is not just a matter of finding something that can be cooked over a single gas ring. It is a problem of finding somewhere to put down the fork while you take the lid off the saucepan, and then finding somewhere else to put the lid. It is finding some place to keep the butter where it will not get mixed up with your razor or your hairpins. It is having your hands covered with flour, and a pot boiling over on to your landlady’s carpet, and no water to mop up any of it nearer than the bathroom at the other end of the landing. It is cooking at floor level, in a hurry, with nowhere to put the salad but the washing-up bowl, which in any case is full of socks.

The entire book is in this vein. The majority is taken up by very simple recipes but whenever there is something to discuss, Whitehorn takes it on in a down to earth and very funny manner. For instance, on “herbs and seasonings”, Whitehorn writes,

These are absolutely essential to good food, and anyone who already knows something about it may be disappointed that I have stuck to recommending mixed herbs in most of these recipes, instead of selecting the best herb to go with a particular dish. My defence is that bedsitter people have neither the space nor the money to indulge in a really comprehensive array of herbs, and if they see rosemary on one page, thyme on the next, basil on the third, and so on, they will simply leave them out altogether; whereas if they realize that mixed herbs are wanted over and over again, they may actually buy some. Moreover, herbs lose their freshness only too quickly, and it is better to have a quick turnover in mixed herbs (which is only the poor man’s bouquet garni, after all) than to have rows of different herbs gradually turning to hay on the bedsit windowsill.

The second part of the book, “Cooking to Impress”, includes slightly more complicated and showy dishes, and discusses how to cater to the various types of guests: “the troglodyte next door”, “your parents and your parents’ spies”, and so on. This includes a long and very funny section on “The Third Paw”:

Every dog has four thoughts: one for each paw: food, food, sex, and food. Most of this book is naturally concerned with preoccupations 1,2 and 4; but the other thought has its own special problems in a bedsitter.

And on she goes. Her entire book is like this, written with sweet and sensible humour, and with a clear guiding ethos: be realistic and keep it simple.

Whitehorn’s book can be contrasted with the avalanche of cooking advice that now swamps us. Yes, bit by bit, plenty of this advice is great. And there is a wide spectrum of the depth and difficulty of the recipes and techniques. Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson are not in the same vein as Alice Waters; there seems to be more attention in recent years to relatively simpler recipes. Still, in sum, the effect is overwhelming, the message being that we should all be cooking exotica all of the time, emulating Elzar with his spice weasel. Michael Spicer has a great take-down of this demoralising nonsense.

Mathematics education seems to have way too many Elzars. “Do this! Try this great spice! Bam!” It is exhausting and the large majority of it is horseshit. But even if it were not horseshit it would still be exhausting and mostly pointless. Even when the recipes are great, teachers are way, way too busy to indulge in this fanciness in any major manner. At best, teachers are exposed to these great ideas and have essentially no time to attempt to implement them, let alone practise them to a standard that returns sufficient reward for the effort, leaving teachers with mostly the same lessons and less self-respect. At worst, teachers are trying to implement something that makes no sense and/or will make things worse.

Teaching has to be realistic. It has to be kept simple. That doesn’t mean a lesson should just be a frozen dinner grabbed from the freezer. Lessons should still be fresh and nutritious, and seasoned; they should be palatable. But it all must be real-life practical. Advice to teachers must be real-life practical. Great ideas are not great if there is no feasible way that they can be implemented. Think mixed herbs, not rosemary and thyme and basil. Think Katherine Whitehorn.