I read an article in The Guardian this week entitled “Never Drink Red Wine with Fish: 10 Famous Food Rules You Can Absolutely Ignore” by Felicity Cloake. It set out to question several well-established ‘rules’ on cooking, such as having your pasta water ‘as salty as the sea’, and sealing your meats, and even whether or not you should serve your food piping hot. (It just so happened I was eating raw cake batter out of the bowl as I read and all the old alarm bells about the dangers of raw cake batter sounded. Luckily, this wasn’t addressed in the ten rules so I carried on eating.) How did such rules come into being anyway when cooking is so subjective, so personal? Flavour is what you say it is, not what other people tell you it is.

As Ms Cloake points out, which sea are we talking about when it comes to pasta saltiness? The Dead Sea? The Caspian Sea? The Med? And what defines piping hot? My mum can drink her tea straight from the boiled kettle so her definition may be different to mine. As to never washing a mushroom, well, have you seen what mushrooms grow in? I’m definitely washing mine, not that you have to. The whole no red wine with fish deal? I long ago passed the point of trying to impress others with my sommelier skills. If I want a Baileys with my Dover sole, I’m having it. (Though I admit, the combo is a hard sell in even the most non-conformist of drinking circles.)

The article reminded me of how little I care for advice on subjective matters anymore. It’s my birthday tomorrow, and though the candles are becoming scary in number, I have found with age comes a certain ‘don’t give a damn-ery’ about a lot of stuff. I mean, there was a time when I still cared about how others viewed my cooking skills. I had to. Back in the 1980s, I worked on a private yacht and for some reason guests spending that kind of money felt baked beans on toast for lunch – sometimes warm, sometimes cold – and cereal served for dinner (with sliced banana if it was a special occasion) were not up to snuff. This sent me on a three-month course at the Cordon Bleu School in London. In those hallowed halls I was taught there was one way to do things right. I then applied those ‘right ways’ in other venues only to be told those views were no longer ‘right’. No, you didn’t have to spend hours creaming your butters and sugars together for cakes because taste testing proved no one could tell the difference between the ‘creamed for hours’ and the ‘mixed until combined’. Throwing my mixer at the wall in frustration I decided I didn’t really care enough about food to cook at the highest levels and there ended my catering career.

I rarely mention my stint at the Cordon Bleu School to others. Why? Two reasons:

1. People ask my advice. ‘Oh, then can you tell me why my (insert x, z, or z) didn’t rise when I changed my flour brand’ or ‘How long do you temper your chocolate?’ or (my favourite) ‘What would you serve to drink with duck à l’orange?’ My typical answer of ‘Haven’t a clue’ (except for the beverage with duck question to which the answer is Baileys, obviously) soon puts pause to any other questions but you can see the disappointment on their faces. I hasten to add the gaps in my knowledge aren’t the fault of the Cordon Bleu School, but the fault of my poor notetaking in class.
2. People stop inviting me to dinner. They are intimidated, they say. Couldn’t compete with what would certainly be a spectacular three-course meal, they say. At this point Hubby usually chimes in with, ‘Please feed me. She’s making rhubarb cake with tinned custard as a main course again and anything savoury would be so very much appreciated.’ (What? I don’t have a sweet tooth, I have a sweet skeletal structure.) Sometimes his pleas work and Hubby gets fed by the neighbours while I get plied with questions (see 1 above).

Most of the time Hubby does the cooking nowadays, which is great when he’s not going through a vegan stage or a red-hot chili pepper stage or a bulletproof coffee stage. (Bulletproof coffee? Coffee with butter and/or other oils in it. I know, right? And he tells me I can’t cook!)

Anyway, the article on right ways and wrong ways to do things which are completely subjective coincided with me being asked, again, by a Brit living abroad whether they should come home now. They’d heard there were so many tax rules and pension rules and homebuying rules and shipping rules, they just couldn’t decide what to do. I was also advised to stay in the US and advised to come back to the UK and given a whole tonne of reasons and ‘rules’ why either option was the right one. Well, this whole ‘Should You Come Home Again’ debate is loaded to the point of explosion. How do I answer? It worked for me so will of course work for you though our baggage is different, our reasons for leaving the UK in the first place are different, the reasons we aren’t settled in our adopted lands are different, our financial resources, pension plans, health issues, family support structures and on and on are ALL SO DIFFERENT! It’s impossible for me to give advice. I can’t help you with that. So I resort to ‘Haven’t a clue’. I admit this sounds indifferent at best or unkind at worst. I don’t mean to be unhelpful but it’s just like asking how much salt to put in your pasta water. The answer is, it depends. On you.

All I can say, as a returning expat and as a failed chef, is follow your heart on where to live and follow your taste buds on the whole cuisine thing. Drink that red wine with fish, eat cereal for dinner, get on that plane home after 40 years abroad or head off into the unknown on your 80^th birthday. If you’re waiting for someone else to tell you how things should taste, whether cake is a main course, where you should live, or when is the right time to do anything, you’ve already missed the point. It’s your life. Eat it or don’t. Do it or don’t. Come home or don’t. Just don’t expect anyone else to have the answer for you. There are so many more than ten rules that can be ignored in cooking – and in the search for home.

Right. Off to forage for dinner. Whatever it is, it will go well with Baileys. And raw cake batter hasn’t killed me yet, thought that doesn’t mean it won’t kill you. Do your own research on that one.