Kitchens and I just don’t mix. I hate cooking. I hate touching food. I love eating food. I think that I probably picked this up from my mother who saw cooking as a chore. Coming home tired after a hard days teaching, she would have to prepare a meal for the family. Three vegetables and chops or sausages or perhaps some mince type meal would be our average meal. Of course we had roast for Sunday lunch. My favourite meal of the week was always Sundays where we ate left over meat battered and fried as fritters or had cheese on toast.
My grandmother on the other hand loved cooking and we served up exotic meals, desserts and delicious biscuits. Mind you on occasion she would serve totally inedible meals of offal of all descriptions. Everyone else enjoyed these but without exception we all hated tripe. This we were never given at home. My mother also had a total hate of all baked custards, a taste I shared, so luckily we also never had baked custards, bread and butter puddings and the like. We did have frogs eyes which was sago in a lemon sauce – delicious and blanc mange which was a white custardy type of thing with red arrowroot jelly on top of it covered in coconut. My mouth is watering just thinking about these treats which I haven’t had since I left home.
Having such a sweet tooth, the only way my mother could make sure that she had items left on the rare occasion that she baked biscuits for guests was to leave a note on the packaging “Irene don’t touch” and I didn’t dare. At some point I must have received the wooden spoon for disobeying and I had learnt my lesson.
The only cooking that I did as a child was not done at home. An American couple who were exchange teaching at the high school rented the little cottage which abutted the church grounds. One day Mrs Stroud invited me in to help her bake some cookies. We made chocolate chip biscuits which consisted of a sausage-shaped roll that she had bought at the supermarket. We cut this into rounds which we then put on a greased baking tray and popped in the oven. Ten minutes later we had the most delectable cookies imaginable. This was my style of cooking. I had never seen anything like it. She told me it was common in America. When the baking completed we climbed over the fence and came and shared them with the rest of my family. (photo of the fence climb).
The only other place I went, apart from the fridge, in our kitchen as a child was the sink. My brother washed and I dried. We used to fight constantly about this as I felt that it was unfair that I always wiped. And then every-time I had to wipe up I felt incredibly nauseous. The cause put down to psychological reasons with an easy solution: my parents sat me on a high stool by the bench so I could carry out my duties.
Reflections and Nightmares- Irene A Waters (writer and memoirist) 
Back in my dating days, I dated a woman who was a terrific cook. For entirely different reasons, I almost married her. For some reason of all the people I dated, she is the one I compare my wife to when my wife and I have a spat. Most of the time the comparison is unsaid, in my head, but way back I used to say the “others” name. Often enough that my wife still knows who she is and they never met. Something in my own psych believes that one who cooks would never argue with me. My mother was a terrific cook and we argued all the time. Maybe I was looking for nirvana. In the present tense, my wife is cooking most of the time. This, after years of me doing it. She is a great cook, but in truth it no longer matters. Either one of us could be the cook and that is fine by me. She does make a better sandwiches than I and she makes casseroles, I don’t. Whatever. I think of the “other” much less.
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In my cooking days I was happy with simple things like baked beans, sardines, sweet corn and salads. When my husband and I were courting I invited him for dinner and I served my favourite meal, one that I had to put some effort into. Curried tinned sardines. Unfortunately something went wrong with the mixture and it wasn’t very nice. I invited him again and just to prove that curried sardines was nice, I served it to him again. I have not cooked since. I prepare sandwiches and he prepares dinner. Luckily he loves cooking. There is nothing wrong with looking for “nirvana”: for me as far as cooking goes I think I’ve found it.
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