Out of the crisis came creativity

In difficult times we can look at the positives – more of us have a new-found joy for cooking

- Joanna Blythman

It happened in the blinking of an eye. Overnight, Britain got hands-on in the kitchen again. Before coronavirus, asking people to cook from scratch on a regular basis seemed hopelessly romantic, positively anachronistic, even. Voices, such as my own, that constantly opined accordingly, proved intensely irritating for many. (‘Try fitting that into my life schedule.’ ‘I’m way too busy to cook every day, or even every other day.’) And when I looked at these people’s demanding lives, I could see their point.

Book publishers increasingly based their plans on the assumption that scratch cooking was a hard sell. Titles had to have ‘quick’ or ‘easy’ prominently in the title, or look so beautiful that they could be used as a decorative item for barely used kitchens. How many of us have ovens whose bewildering programmes we didn’t bother to fathom because we used our microwaves more?