Email newsletters aren’t really my thing. I’m overwhelmed enough by the thought of all I desperately want, and need, to read - I was going to say before I die, but let us not be too melodramatic - without adding to the pile. But I do like to see Oliver Burkeman’s The Imperfectionist land in my inbox every month, a missive that has been known to work on me as a cool palm might work on a fevered brow. And it’s to him, the thinking person’s (non) self-help guru, that I owe the idea for this column, which has to do with perfection in the kitchen, and how we might best liberate ourselves from its tense-making grasp.
Like most people, entertaining-wise, I’ve struggled to get back into the groove post-lockdowns. Having lost the habit of having friends over, even the idea of doing so is exhausting now: the planning, the shopping, the cooking. Sometimes, I get as far as drawing up a list of names, and looking in my diary for a date. But like icing that refuses to set, things never get … concrete. Thoughts whirl, as if in a food processor. Will everyone be disappointed if I serve pasta? Will they consider my tomato sauce infra dig? And what about the pudding? Are memories long enough that people will think: “Oh God, not pavlova again?” I picture the oven, and wonder whether it should be deep cleaned. I examine the kitchen light, and consider how fast it might be fixed. On and on it goes, and so another weekend flips by.
What to do about this? In a recent edition of The Imperfectionist, Burkeman alerted his readers to “scruffy hospitality”: a term coined in 2014 by, of all people, an Anglican priest called Jack King. What is scruffy hospitality? For a moment, I pictured Pig Pen in Peanuts, trailing a cloud of dust. But, no. Scruffy hospitality is, in essence, a welcome that involves no fuss.
It prioritises people and jokes, warmth and connection, over performance and whatever it is you usually serve with drinks (salt and vinegar crisps from now on!). It is impulsive, reflexive and generous, and in the end it will make everyone very happy, and no one more so than you, the host. To sum up: don’t worry if things aren’t perfect. The best is the enemy of the good. You are not starring in MasterChef, and Gregg Wallace is not (thank God) among your friends.
Something about this advice hit home for me, and in recent days I’ve acted on it more than once. J came for supper, and I gave her pasta, and she liked it. G happily stayed on after the final of the women’s Euros, and ate two portions of the previous night’s chickpeas (she’s a vegetarian; we were having roast chicken). S came for a drink that turned into a long and slightly tipsy dinner, food I’d cooked for two feeding three with perfect ease. Spontaneity! It makes life so much better: richer, fuller, less costive and clenched. King and, by extension, Burkeman are absolutely right: no one is going to look under your fridge for crumbs; a meal cooked by another hand is (with certain dishonourable exceptions) nearly always delicious; ice-cream or a Tunnock’s caramel wafer will do perfectly well for pudding.
Now I’ve started this, I can’t stop. Or at any rate, I don’t feel like stopping. I’m dying to see people – ‘What about tonight? Is tonight good?’ – and I’m hell bent on making sure that, when I do, things are pared down. Yesterday, for instance, I was looking through a new favourite cookbook, Notes From a Small Kitchen Island by Debora Robertson, in search of ideas for something chic to give people with drinks (OK, I admit it: I’m not yet quite scruffy enough for crisps). A recipe appeared before me for gruyere and anchovy puffs, which sounded right up my strasse, until I realised it involved making bechamel. Sigh. I turned a few more pages. Ah, this was more like it. Anchovy butter. A cinch! I pictured a wooden tray. On it was a bowl of this gorgeously umami butter, another of radishes, and one of my granny’s bone-handled knives. Perfect, but not – if you see what I mean – too perfect.
• This article was amended on 21 August 2022 because an earlier version misspelled Gregg Wallace’s first name as “Greg”.
