It is Valentine's Day. For weeks the lifestyle pages of the broadsheet websites, and even the front pages, have been full of articles on What to Get Her for Valentine's Day, What Not to Get Her for Valentine's Day, Why I Hate Valentine's Day, Ten Romantic Places to Go on Valentine's Day, My Most Awful Valentine's Day Experience. And so on and so on. Even the most unlikely retailers climb on the bandwagon, so I have with my own eyes seen an optician's window display of spectacle frames decked with red silk roses and heart shaped balloons. I'm not sure myself that new glasses are the best present to get for the object of your affections, though not so bad as vouchers for Botox.
Back in the real world, the people I know don't seem to make much of it. The Systems Administrator and I have never celebrated the date at all, for the sad and simple reason that the SA's father died on 14th February, a couple of years before we got together. Valentine's Day was a date for the SA to remember, but not in the way the armies of journalists scrabbling around for something to write about would have us do. And if you don't go in for the whole commercial, hearts and flowers thing when you're young and in the first flush of love, you are unlikely to take it up three decades later.
I last received a Valentine's Day card in my second year at university, when I had two, one from someone I subsequently briefly went out with, and one from a friend who had sent cards to all of his female circle. The amusement of having a secret admirer faded rather quickly as we each saw identical cards in other people's rooms all around the college, but it was a kind thought. Over the years I have once given the SA a card with an arty photograph, and once a red balloon, but the idea never really caught on, and nowadays I worry that it is a waste of a valuable finite resource using helium to fill up balloons.
As it happens we are going out tonight, to a lecture about Gainsborough. It was originally scheduled for last Friday, but was moved to fit in with the lecturer's other (more prestigious and better paid) commitments. We have been asked to supper afterwards, and the organiser commented that we would all be at the lecture on Valentine's Day, and that is the only time I have heard an actual live person mention it at all. Nobody seemed to mind spending February 14th going to a lecture in the village hall, followed by nibbles and a late supper.
I gave miniature choux buns a go this afternoon, as my contribution to the nibbles, but they didn't work. I haven't made choux pastry for well over thirty years, and was worried as I mixed the dough that although I'd followed the instructions in the Good Housekeeping Cookery Book as accurately as I could, and not added all the egg, the result still looked sloppy. So it proved. They spread out too far, not so much little puff balls I could fill with a savoury mixture of cream cheese and anchovy paste, as vaguely three dimensional pancakes. They tasted quite nice, when I ate a couple to test them, but were not fit to serve as nibbles. I'd bought a packet of water biscuits as a reserve, in case the pastry didn't work, and will look on it as a sighting shot. As well as learning about how stiff the dough needs to be, I have discovered something about the cooking time and where in the oven I should place the baking sheet, which is handy given that the book says to give between fifteen and twenty minutes, but warns strictly not to open the door before the buns are done.
I am not the hugest fan of Delia Smith, being more of a Claudia Roden, Jane Grigson follower (once things get more exotic than Good Housekeeping, which is the single most useful and reliable cookery book we own*), but I am right with Delia when she says that you must allow for failures when learning to cook, and not stigmatise it as Wasting Food. People accept that we learn to drive by paying someone to teach us, and driving around on pointless journeys while we get the hang of it, but won't accept that it's OK to use up two ounces of butter and some flour in the course of practice, without getting anything edible at the end of it.
*Waitrose's Food Illsutrated voted Simon Hopkinson's roast chicken and other stories as the most useful cookbook of all time, but the people who took part in that poll were either deluded, pretentious, or had forgotten what it is like not to know how to cook. A book with seven recipes for aubergines and five for brains, which does not tell you how to calculate safe cooking times for a pork joint, how long it takes to bake a potato, or how to make shortcrust pastry, or soft boil an egg, is not the most useful cookery book you own. Amusing, yes, but not the most useful.
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