Heart of the home

Unless you find yourself in a holiday home (where they tend to be disappointingly anonymous) there are intriguing clues and treasures to be spotted in even the most modest set-ups.

Her own is a higgledy-piggledy collection of ceramics collected from travels all over the world, a dark wood breadboard inherited from her father and orange Le Creuset pans on loan from a friend: “Quite shambolic but it works for me.”

It was thinking about the stories these objects might tell that inspired her 14th cook book, The Trifle Bowl And Other Tales.

On a rainy afternoon making soup, The Times writer found her eye drawn to the titular bowl, passed down through her grandmother and mother, and a flood of memories came forth of Bird’s custard, birthdays and Christmas lunches at her aunt’s house fighting over comics with her cousins.

The bowl – and other kitchen paraphernalia – suddenly appeared to her “far more a repository of memories and recipes than you might expect” and the book was born.

In her characteristically chatty style, Bareham writes about her inherited loaf tins and what she makes with them, about blackberry jelly made in old-fashioned metal moulds from fruit foraged on country walks, the griddle pan she bought after spotting one in The River Café and the casseroles and soups she’s made in those Le Creuset pans.

It makes for a fascinating read, whether or not one’s interested in actually making the recipes, and is full of tantalising tidbits of food history.

Bareham has a knack for taking a humble subject – potatoes, tomatoes, soups, the objects in her kitchen – and exploring it almost forensically.

“I do tend to get a bit, well… obsessed,” she says. “At the moment, it’s beetroot. There are so many things you can do with it.”

She reels off a couple, explaining how I might, if I wanted, make beetroot soup – or borscht – “fabulous with a dollop of yoghurt” – or cook them Greek-style with salt and garlic.

For some years she’s been harbouring plans to write a book solely about nuts but has so far been unable to inspire the same enthusiasm in her publisher.

One of my favourites of her books is Just One Pot, written when her home was in disarray from building works and she was cooking on a two-hob burner. The recipes are straightforward but delicious – and this is something of a trademark of hers.

So much so in fact that Roast Chicken And Other Stories, the book she co-wrote with fellow cook and critic Simon Hopkins, was voted “the most useful cookbook of all time” by readers of Waitrose Food Illustrated.

She worked for many years as a food critic for Time Out and the London Evening Standard and while she enjoyed the artistry of professional kitchens, as a writer her focus has always been on cooking at home.

One of her heroines is the food writer Elizabeth David, who is credited with revolutionising domestic cooking by introducing European cuisine to a post-war Britain more at home with meat and two veg.

To Bareham’s delight, David became a friend after a chance meeting in a Lebanese restaurant in Kensington.

“The bloke who ran it asked me if I knew Elizabeth David. It was like someone asking if you know the Pope – of course not! But to my amazement there she was, and she knew my work.

“We ended up seeing a lot of each other and she even came to my first book launch.”

David’s kitchen is one that still lingers in Bareham’s memory. “She had two – a winter and a summer kitchen – in her home on the fringes of Chelsea.

“There was a beautiful armoire where she kept a shop’s worth of gratin dishes and a wooden rack for plates, with a big wooden table at the heart. It was fabulous: warm, comfortable and real.

“You could tell it was the kitchen of someone who loved food and cooking but wasn’t a slave to it.” Like David, Bareham sees the kitchen as a space akin to an artist’s studio.

“I think cooking can be quite an artistic pursuit; you’re making a palette and creating different flavours and textures. Like a studio, a kitchen is dressed by what you bring into it.

“I regard a lot of food as beautiful. I like to see a flourishing bunch of flat leaf parsley on the window ledge or a pot of basil. I see that as being as beautiful as a vase of roses.”

She hadn’t expected to make a living from food. One of four children, Bareham remembers her mother cooking from scratch every day – “It must have been a nightmare for her” – and each child being assigned kitchen tasks.

She had to make pastry, “which I loathed”. Now it’s one of her favourite things to make and guests will frequently find themselves presented with a “great, big pie” when invited for dinner.

On leaving home, she thought herself a useless cook but found she had somehow assimilated techniques and recipes just by watching her mother at work. It’s proved the same for her grown-up sons, both of whom do all the cooking in their homes. A recipe for one of the first things her son Henry ever cooked – egg-fried rice – is included in the book.

Her work as a critic and food columnist filled in the rest of the gaps and Bareham taught herself to make dishes from all over the world after tasting them in various restaurants and cafes.

Reminders of these adventures are kept in her upstairs study, where she stores shelves and shelves of cookery books, cuttings and recipes.

But it’s in her kitchen where she spends most of her time. Painted custard yellow with black and white tiles, she complains that there is never enough space but everything is “more or less” as she likes it.

“I sometimes think I could live in this room,” she writes in the book’s foreword. “Everything I need is here, even a sofa to sleep on.” After decades in the same house, it has grown and evolved along with her and memories linger everywhere.

“Every time I reach for a jar of spices, I think of my former husband. He, an accomplished cook and fond of claiming he taught me everything, made my spice rack from old wine crates not long before he died.”

Her intentions for the book are that it inspires readers to look at their own kitchens afresh.

“Although all the recipes are associated with my kitchen and my memories, I hope some of the stories and all of the dishes will become other people’s favourites too.”

• Lindsey Bareham will talk about The Trifle Bowl And Other Tales (Bantam Press, £20) on Wednesday, April 17, in a City Books event at the Royal Pavilion, Brighton. For tickets, £10, call City Books on 01273 725306