It was supposed to be so easy, so said Mike Skinner. That’s how I feel about holiday cooking.
Full disclosure, I’m in Cornwall, and I can see the sea as I write this. The seafood is good down here, right? There are farm shops and fruit stalls by the side of the road, right? Artisans of every shape and size are primed to sell you bread, pasties, chutneys, honey, and cheeses washed in local booze, right?
As is always the case, in this idyllic spot, there is a Spar. This Spar, unless you get there before the first sparrow, gets ransacked by harassed holidayers, much like yourself, so that by midmorning, swathes of the shop shelves are completely bare. Yesterday morning I overheard a mother and her daughter locked in a tense exchange.
‘I don’t know what you want me to do, this is it,’ the mother said, trying to stay calm, her voice a leashed falsetto that could break free and turn into an angry shriek at any moment, ‘go and find something, anything, any protein you can, really, anything, I don’t care how expensive it is. I’ll buy whatever you want.’
I found the use of the word protein fascinating, I’m guessing the daughter was vegetarian, perhaps, or vegan, so a bit of mince or a pack of Peperami wasn’t going to cut it. I suspect she came away empty-handed.
I did a big supermarket shop before driving down, I thought I’d arrive with the basics, the building blocks of lots of good meals, and then add the high notes down here. I had bucolic visions of happening upon a fisherman hauling in his catch, negotiating for a dozen scallops, maybe a few crabs. I imagined local tomatoes, radishes, courgettes and heads of salad of every hue and variegation. On trips to beaches or walks from one village to the next along a coastal path, I thought I’d collect my daily bounty like some chef on the telly, my hair tousled chaotically by the coastal wind, my skin kissed by the late summer sun.
So far I’ve eaten a pasty for lunch each day, and we’ve eaten a chickpea and potato curry and ham and egg and chips for supper, tonight is lasagna, all the ingredients for which came down with me in my basics shop. I will not be defeated, today we drive to Newlyn where there is a rumoured fish market. I suspect as the week presses on we will eat more and more pasties and chips on the beach during the day, and I'll be found in the queue in Penzance Sainsbury’s with a trolley full of the same stuff I buy week in, week out at home.
Last year, on a different holiday in a different British seaside town, we did find a fisherman who had just landed a haul of lobster pots. Unable to believe our luck we bought a couple of meaty-looking lobbies and carried them home, thrashing about a bit in a blue plastic carrier bag. I’m afraid what ensued when we came to cook them does not bear repeating but safe to say that holiday rental kitchens don't have knives suitable for humanely dispatching hardy crustaceans, nor pots large enough to cook them in. If you’ve never tried to cook two live lobsters in a roasting tray of water on an electric hob, I envy you.
Bleat I might, but I have a point. Sometimes the food itself is not that important. Yes, the lot on Instagram makes it look like they’ve casually whipped up pitch-perfect aperitifs, nibbles, meze, starters, big platters of bounty to share, maybe some kitsch little treats for dessert, or a hefty thing covered in cream and fresh fruit to be sythed into pieces with a kooky old sword, all for the degustation of their friends and their followers, but a) what they’re portraying is not reality, they probably didn’t even have a hand in it themselves, and b) they needn’t have bothered.
After a hard day of doing jack all, how lovely to barely consider supper, to not be left seething by a lack of implement, a blunt knife, inappropriate pot, a missing essential. How lovely to eat and not have to congratulate a harrassed chef or pontificate on the food that wasn’t quite as good as it might have been if…
How lovely just to eat, discuss the day that was, the day that might be tomorrow, to drink a little, or not, to play a game or two, or not.
Do share in the comments below how you like to approach your holiday cooking, any particular successes, helpful tips, or maybe even a disaster or two; it would be useful indeed to benefit from your infinite wisdom.