Cooking up a backstory

• Published date: 06 November 2021
• Publication title: Mix, The

My weeks of late have been immersed even more than usual in words, writing and writers. Last week, lots of fun at the youth-led New Zealand Young Writers Festival right here in Otepoti; this week I’m attending the perfectly programmed Verb Festival in Wellington. My pile of to-be-read books grows to an irresponsible level.

Of course, this leads back to my feeling that everyone has a book burning somewhere in them ... which in turn leads to another feeling that just maybe, one day I should actually write one. Is it something about living in a Unesco City of Literature, perhaps, that I start then interrogating the possibilities for what exactly mine would be about; is it a gloriously photographed cheese roll-focused coffee-table book, or travel blog-based ditties from back when blogging was a thing (oh, whoops, and back when international travel was still a thing), maybe a collection of anecdotes from years of managing an open-all-night Cosmic Corner at the height of the BZP phase, or a tome of essays about the failure of our various systems to uphold the wellbeing of, in no particular order: artists, takata whenua, children, those with disability ..?

I settle on the fact it’s probably some kind of odd narrative-rambling style of cookbook. Unfortunately, I’ve watched enough food TV to know that you have to be able to name some kind of food philosophy, or some epic lineage that has made you the Cook You Are Today.

My nana was a rubbish cook. It always astounds me to hear the heart-string tugging memories time after time of MasterChef contestants, bloggers, food writers ... ‘‘My first memories of food are sitting on the kitchen counter watching [insert relevant family member]. Everything I learned, I learned from them.’’ Really?

At first I thought it was down to genetics — maybe if I had a nona who lovingly rolled floury gnocchi while stirring an aromatic and bubbly sauce ... or a gung gung who could chop veges faster than a woodchipper and produce dumplings with pastry so thin they looked like still forming sea...