It’s just as I’m about to start seasoning the rib of beef, massaging it with mustard powder, salt and lust like it were the thigh of an eager lover, that the question occurs to me. It’s one of those blunt, heavy-browed questions that forces you to stop what you are doing, palms forward over the meat. It is: why am I doing this? Why am I about to embark on cooking a meal of such intricacy? This fine rib – and it really is a marvel of marbling and crimson muscle – is only the advance guard. Alongside will have to come batter for Yorkshire puddings, the parboiling and roasting of potatoes, the grating of fresh horseradish, the tricky endgame of the gravy and so much else besides. There is work here.

The blunt answer is that we have friends coming for lunch and we must give them something. But that’s not good enough. The “something” really doesn’t have to be all this. Am I trying to flatter them, prove my deep affection through searing and seasoning, peeling and chopping? I hope not. We’ve been friends for long enough without all that malarkey. Hell, we’ve done takeaways together. If I sent out for lunch now they wouldn’t complain.

I could do some extended riff here on my own greed; how the other people are an irrelevance, that in truth the person I’m really feeding is me. Obviously that’s true. Only a good eater can be a good cook. But while I’m not beyond going to some effort to feed just myself – when I’m eating alone at least I know it’s a meal with someone I love – there are some dishes that have to be prepared in bulk. A fully accessorised roast rib of beef is one of them. You can’t do that for one. At the end of the process I will benefit from the pleasure of getting to eat it.

But I’m not convinced that really answers the question either. I look around the kitchen, which I know will, over the next coming hours, deteriorate until it looks like a bunch of especially foodie burglars have been in and ransacked every spice rack, condiment shelf and vegetable store. No matter. It’s only a bit of tidying up.

That’s when it strikes me. Cooking like this is about control. It’s about bending the world to your will. Modern lives are horribly complicated. They are full of uncompleted tasks and open-ended commitments. There are children who will insist on growing up and becoming people with ideas of their own. There are work colleagues who don’t do quite what you hoped, and bank accounts that will keep on emptying and sock drawers full of orphans which refuse to be reunited with their nearest and dearest. There is life.

And then there is cooking. You step into the kitchen, set a goal, and complete it. You take the chaos of raw ingredients and you bring order. You make them do exactly what you want them to do and they don’t answer back. Most importantly there is an end point: you will plot and scheme and connive. Finally you will eat all the evidence, do the washing up and be left only with that blissful sense of a job done. Children may refuse to do their homework. Colleagues may fail to pull their weight. But in the kitchen you are God. In the kitchen I am God. Slowly I lower my hands and begin to anoint the rib with mustard powder. We’re damn well having beef for lunch, and nothing will stop me.