Last week I cooked dinner. Roast chicken thighs with oranges and fennel, a much-loved Nigella recipe, some garlicky brown rice the way my friend Skye Gyngell taught me years ago, and green beans finished with butter and crushed raw garlic – a staple in our house. I laid the table, cut some roses from my garden and put them in the small glass bottles that I like to line the table with, filled jugs with water, lit the candles and felt the kitchen come to life. It was the first time I had performed this familiar ritual since my husband died, at home, in a sun-filled room that faced the garden, on the hour of the spring solstice.
“No cooking,” he said on a first date, along with “no children” and “I’m never getting married again”. With hindsight, I can see how that kind of a proclamation could be a red flag. But I was madly in love. Who listens to sense when they are in that condition? I didn’t care that Robert had been married twice and had three young children. I didn’t care that wife number two was well known for being able to rustle up a spectacular dinner for 20 at a minute’s notice – I once watched her confidently spatchcocking a chicken as a guest on The Martha Stewart Show. What I did know was that, for all her culinary skills, the marriage had ended, leaving him with a mild distrust of women who were handy in the kitchen. But he didn’t need to worry. For starters, I couldn’t cook.
