The Pleasures of Leisure by Robert Dessaix

Author:Robert Dessaix
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2017-04-18T04:00:00+00:00

Eating obviously shares a lot with sex: as the Indian food critic and cultural historian Pushpesh Pant has put it, eating, like sex, consumes all five senses and is marked by the same cycle of anticipation, ecstatic absorption and satiation. Even if you think ‘ecstatic’ is going a bit far, you can see what he means. Hindu cosmog ony’s Primal Nipple springs to mind. Actually, nipples in general spring to mind.

Eating, some have claimed, has several advantages over sex. ‘In the first place,’ my friend Chandrahas said to me recently (and he’s well placed to judge), ‘food is a sensual realm where the gulf between your imagination and reality is much smaller than it is in …’ ‘Yes,’ I said, and cast my mind back. He paused to help himself to something piping hot and creamy. ‘And secondly, with food, looks are irrelevant.’ ‘Yes,’ I said again, not much cheered – well, I’m not much of a foodie. ‘And thirdly, there’s much less mess to clean up afterwards.’ That, as we know, depends on who’s been doing the cooking.

As with most things dilettantish and amateur in modern life, the pleasures of preparing a meal and inviting others to your table have been well and truly appropriated by professionals. This is partly true of gardening as well, but gardening has been so radically eclipsed by cooking and eating in recent years, its place in the public arena now so shrunken, that it’s hard to judge to what extent the professionals have taken over. Their triumph in the very heart of the suburban home is particularly galling because, since at least Victorian times, this space has been the preserve of the non-professional occupations. To put it more bluntly, it has belonged to women. In modern usage the very words ‘amateur’ and ‘dilettante’ are derogatory. As a flagrant dilettante in virtually every department of life, most at home writing or reading at the kitchen table, I naturally take exception to this – fruitlessly, but I do.

In the kitchen, for instance, it’s now impossible to just muck about concocting things for fun without images of Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver or (even more alarmingly) Poh popping into your head: faultlessly attired, a smile on their lip-balmed lips, gleaming pots and pans in readiness on their gleaming stoves, all the ingredients they need right there on the bench, even the pomegranate molasses, even the Nepalese goat’s cheese, even the sour fish sauce from the island of Flores, each and every one of them correctly measured out in gleaming little containers. Nothing burns, nothing so much as overcooks. Everything is perfect. Nigella, Jamie and Poh all smile and gleam. In fact, Poh is often in such uncontrollably high spirits, she appears to be having a seizure. Consequently, the wind is taken out of your sails before you can so much as find a clean saucepan to fry the onions in. You – and don’t you forget it – are an amateur. You can buy their books and

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