Love & Hunger by Charlotte Wood differs from regular cookbooks in that it touches more on the act of cooking as a way to support and care for loved ones in difficult times. Close friend, food writer and journalist Stephanie Clifford-Smith says of the book: “So many cheffie cookbooks […] paralyse the reader with feelings of inadequacy. This, on the other hand is all about ease and accessibility. It’s the kind of food that works because it’s relaxed, generous and importantly not faddish.” It contains very personal anecdotes on Charlotte’s view of cooking, her family story, as well as reflections on what she’s observed in other people’s relationship to food.
In May, Wood was invited by Newtown bookshop Better Read than Dead to talk at the Newtown Library about Love & Hunger. Stephanie Clifford-Smith was also present to introduce Charlotte and interview her for the audience.
While better known for her work in fiction, with several acclaimed novels (The Children, Animal People), Wood also has her own cookery blog, How to Shuck an Oyster: “Writing novels is really hard, it’s quite demanding! [..] I feel that it’s work, whereas the blog writing is play.”
The idea for Love & Hunger was initially to offer a practical guide to cooking for people when they’re sick or broken-hearted, but it turned out to be a very personal account of her own family story.
Wood started cooking at about the same time she started writing, when she was at university. One day as she was invited to a lunch at her painting teacher’s house, she found out that the recipe used by his wife was from Elizabeth David. She immediately bought a copy of Mediterranean Food, an old copy she still cherishes for sentimental reasons: “It was like destiny. I took it home and started cooking.” For Wood, cooking is a way to create something without the fear of being judged and critiqued by reviewers, readers: “There’s just no sense of the public evaluation […]. I love that it’s a private act of creativity that has nothing to do with commerce.”
Giving food can also be a way to help distressed people (as long as it is done in a way that is not demanding or intrusive, she says), and to illustrate this, evokes difficult times for her family, when her father passed away (she was 19): “Our little town gathered around and looked after us using food.” She talks with emotion about their neighbour who had cooked a Christmas feast shortly before her father died, which in hindsight was a beautiful symbolic gesture, his own way to tell his friend that his family would be taken care of.
What makes a good host is one of the topics addressed in the book (“Don’t let your guests wait!”), but she says being a guest brings as much responsibility as hosting. The etiquette wants that the guests shouldn’t turn up late, but showing too early is also a big no-no. Never arriving empty-handed and keeping conversational energy up, are also at the top of the list: “Basically, don’t be a jerk!” she says.
The book also deals with the increasing trend to food aversions: the “Adult Picky Eaters” syndrome. She finds it rather rude, when invited to someone’s house, to refuse eating food just because you don’t like it. She cites a philosophical argument: “[B]eing a picky eater is a way of cutting yourself off from all kinds of development as a human being.”
She concedes, however, an aversion to some foods, namely offal. She decided to research it and came across the American psychologist, Paul Rosen, who has analysed the core emotions of disgust. She found out that the fear of offal was linked to our fear of death: “We are most disgusted by things that remind us that we are animals. Bodily fluids, etc., at a really basic primal level, remind us that we are gonna die. The inside coming out, that’s what we reject,” she says.
A few months ago, she had the opportunity to put into practice what she preaches and use up as many parts of the animals by cooking and eating them as part of an assignment for Good Weekend magazine. During her “weekend-long adventures in offal”, she had to work her way, nose-to-tail through a cow: tongue, kidney, liver, heart, cheek, tail … “I probably won’t do it again!”
When the question of cooking shows arises, Wood says that even though she’s quite addicted to Masterchef, it has more to do with entertainment, drama, stress, conflict, pressure, and that it represents the complete opposite of what she wants in her own kitchen: “I hate the idea of performance and competition in the home kitchen, I can’t stand it. But as long as you’re aware that those things are separate, I think it’s fine.”
