TEMPERATURES — and tempers — have been running so high in the kitchen of our crowded house that last week Mr R suggested that it was time to introduce his annual summer “emergency measures”. This chiefly involves turning off our main source of cooking, hot water and downstairs heating — the Aga — and introducing some rather more primitive (and cost effective) ways of tending to our extended nouveau dysfunctional, nouveau pauvre family.
As a result the past few days have seemed like a cross between an early episode of The Naked Chef and an amateur production of Oliver! as I attempt to cook a nutritious meal for eight (there are rarely fewer than six of us round the table each night) in one pot on a Bunsen burner that is fuelled by camping gas. At the end of every supper, there is always one child who will wistfully whisper “Please, stepma ‘am, can I have some more?”
Mr R takes a particular delight in this switch from the gas-guzzling Aga to the naked flame chiefly because, I think, entertaining (beyond the children and the occasional friend) is out of the question (you can only get so much food in one wok, pot or pan). In fact he is happier than I have seen him for a long time because if there is one thing in life he hates more than my financial incompetence (paperwork remains my big weakness), it is waste.
It isn’t just in the kitchen — where thankfully the temperature has dropped 20 degrees since the Aga was switched off — that the emergency summer measures have led to a reduction in our usual levels of consumption. Now that we are reliant on a feeble immersion heater attached to a small water tank, the number of baths we can run in a day (and night) is vastly reduced.
Indeed, the main arguments at the moment — at least with the girls — are over who goes in the bath first and whose turn it is to wash her hair. Last night when I let the water out after the boys had finished there were enough gritty deposits on the bottom of the bath to make me a mudpack.
Advertisement
Meanwhile, with daylight lasting until after the younger children have gone to bed we rarely have need of the overhead lights, preferring instead to use candles and a ship’s lantern to illuminate our nights. A neighbour who popped his head over the stable door in our kitchen the other evening commented that our dysfunctional-family supper — in the gloomy glow of the brass lantern — looked like a real-life enactment of Van Gogh ‘s The Potato Eaters. Adding, as he walked away, that you didn’t get many “peasants per pound” in South Kensington.
The sneering sarcasm of our neighbours is not the only problem that we have had since the introduction of our new ecologically and economically sound emergency summer measures. On the first night, as I attempted to light the flame of the Bunsen burner after only a brief lesson from Mr R, I burnt my arm and singed my eyebrows (the smell of human flesh lingered for several days). On the second night most of the ingredients for our stir-fry, marinating nicely in a big bowl on the kitchen table, were consumed by the dog (she did leave us the bean sprouts).
But any objections I might have about our current cooking facilities are more than made up for by the enthusiasm of the children (who call it “indoor camping”) and would, in any case, be overruled by Mr R, who loves the notion of a world without modern conveniences. Our latest nicknames for each other (he refers to me mostly as Mrs R) are now Mr and Mrs Potato Eater.