Where Things Come From

The tomatoes are from Italy; sun blushed plump red plums. They are clicked into the basket. The aubergine is from Greece – sleek, like deep dark velvet. Goats’ milk: this is from a place where the goats live with the families – so very quaint. The lamb comes furthest, all the way from New Zealand travelling by first class freezer and bringing Commonwealth provenance with it. What else? Coffee – the sort that passes through civets. Exclusive to Harrods but only if you do not know what to look for. Chocolates – dark and bitter and containing surprises such as a chilli-coated scorpion or a gingered locust. She will cut one open for them to see. The wine is from an unpronounceable country where connoisseurs find the best for their own table and you have to know the right people to be in on the secret. Disappointingly, some labels are not distinctive but this one is. They are delivered the next day by a man from Poland and the au pair, a delightful girl from Sudan, stows them in the fridge freezer. It is bigger than she needs but once she saw who else had one – Posh Spice -she had to get it.

She thinks about preparing the meal; how to present it so the colours stand out and the aroma is almost visible. She begins with the raw ingredients, laying these out on rustic platters or tipped into rough-hewn ceramic bowls and positioning these on her kitchen worktop in view of the gleaming oven and the glass-doored cabinets. She dusts flour around the big chopping board and scatters flakes of sea salt and fresh oregano in tiny randomised drifts. The smoked garlic stands next to the pepper mill with a hinted crush of cloves in front of it. On a shelf behind is the wine and the coffee, their labels turned slightly but not completely away from the line of sight should one be standing at the far side of the counter. She takes pictures, and after checking the images, she re-takes selected ones where the shine or the richness or the finer print has not shown up and saves the best. Then she gathers up the food in spindle arms and slides it into the recycle bins. With thin marbled fingers and a pinched mouth, she makes smears of ketchup, pesto, and mayonnaise on the large plates.

She puts a half-full glass of wine and its labelled bottle, made a luminous burgundy by soft candlelight, next to the plates and lets the glow suggest the remains of food that could have come from the kitchen of a Michelin starred chef. She takes more snaps and keeps the best of these too.

She uploads them and tags them, ‘Last night’s dinner, before and after – bet you so wish you were here!’ and posts them on Facebook for friends who come from everywhere in the world, but not next door and never to her house.

First published by Ether Books, 2014.