Cupboard Love or Mother’s Love

Recently, while explaining the concept of Dear Doris to a friend, a cookbook dedicated to my grandmother Doris and her delicious recipes, I had one of those eureka moments. This friend is a well-respected psychoanalyst and told me of his mentor who had developed an individual technique of exploring whether his patients found their mother’s food delicious as he made a connection between a parent’s cooking and a parent’s nurturing.

Nourishment is not only nutrients and chemistry, but nourishment also has a strong emotional component.  We have all heard or read articles about emotional eating and overeating when we are in search of comfort, so this theory sounds very interesting to me.

Doris’ brothers used to always tease her when she was a young single woman. They would say that when young men made eyes at her, they were only after one thing, ‘cupboard love’, meaning her sensational cooking, and nothing else.  Her brothers of course were afraid to lose their favourite cook. Doris not only supplied them with their physical nourishment but emotional nourishment too, something they weren’t keen on giving up any time soon.

Since that conversation with my friend, the importance of home cooking and taking the time to select, prepare and cook has taken on a completely new and much more profound meaning to me. When I titled one of the recipes in the book ‘Love on a plate’, I did not understand just how true this simple statement could be. How much we can give our loved ones by taking the time to cook.

Oscar Wilde once said, “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing”. Well, cooking is priceless and goes far beyond the nutrients, the flavours stimulate our mind and support our emotions.

My grandfather Dick, grandmother Doris and me. Mid Wales, 1977.