Steve_Bamlett_blog

Write about your most epic baking or cooking fail.

I was a student at UCL in the early 1970s and in my first year had a room at a single-sex University of London residence near Kings Cross (it’s lost to history now in lots of ways and replaced by a glossy privatised version of student rooms). I had at the time acknowledged I was gay but not ‘come out’ as such, so I found being with an all-male group intimidating. That isn’t surprising for in those days my experience of all-male company was summed up in endless tales told by boys, most of them fantasies I believe, of ‘scoring’ with a girl, who were the available ‘slags’ amongst these women and obsession with manhood as displayed in penis size. No wonder, that at school all my friends were women.

It took a long time to see the vulnerability under masculinity in general and many nights of uncomfortable sitting in dope-smoke filled rooms listening to head-banging rock music that I neither understood nor liked to see some glimmer of what to now makes some men seem beautiful inside as well as outside – sometimes! But I did identify such a guy. He was straight of course. Maybe, I was attuned to that. In those days to love a man was to want a ‘real man’. The thought that this made oneself not such a being and constructed a self that was isolated and ‘abnormal’ was only sensed in bad dreams.

He, though, seemed to me, like a dream of a different kind; his unavailability only part of his appeal. Anything hard, even ‘hard’ meaning difficult, was the essence of a man, the stereotype went. It was even thus in Mills and Boon novels I found later in life when I taught the Novel of Romantic Love. Yet here was no mere meathead. Like me he studied Literature but at King’s College . This meant sensitivity, I thought. His preference for Jonathan Swift over Spenser was surely only an accident of that KCL course. And, when he read Shakespeare’s Owen Glendower, from 1 Henry IV, having Welsh roots, it was magical. A socialist to boot: his Dad was a friend of Barbara Castle.

Thus at the end of Year 1, I was cock-a-hoop at him agreeing to share a flat, together with other lads in his group off the Holloway Road. I invited him to check the flat out when he was at home near Oxford and I was staying over in London. But how to impress him? A gay friend I had made, an older man, a lecturer, suggested I make a casserole, for that would challenge me least, for in those days few guys professed an ability to cook and the lack of profession was a self-fulfilling prophecy. So casserole it was.

But you have to imagine what London houses in the Northern area were like in those days of rack-renter dominance and poor housing regulation, especially for students. The floorboards in our room were so rotten that very often one or other of us experienced a bed leg going through the floor and were fortunate it was not followed by the whole bed with or without a young man in it. The kitchen was a lean-to extension to the yard, built possibly outside of what regulation there was and with a roof made of sheets of corrugated plastic and the kitchen equipment Spartan and possibly unsafe, especially the gas oven, whose flame was anything but reliable.

My man arrived on a day damp with drizzle that got progressively worse as we took the bus from Paddington. Before leaving I had chopped the beef and vegetables, even an aubergine, which I had salt dried first as one once did, for my stifado (for Greek stew was surely romantic). I left it in the oven. The additional.potatoes for mash and vegetables sitting ready in pans for boiling 20 minutes before serving.

Of course he wanted to go to the pub. Both of us then were heavy drinkers. I went into the flat long enough to put the stifado to cook for a couple of hours and we went to a place we knew in Finsbury Park to start off a night of pub-touring.

I could feel inside me an over-the-top kind of besotted romantic feeling, as well as a kind of reserve. On top of that, I felt the effects of too much drink (beers and whisky chasers seemed de rigueur to play the masculine card, though little of that play was as conscious as I now make it sound). But the emotional music inside me with all its current dissonance, was roused to shattering crescendoes when, as we tracked darkening streets between pubs, Lear-like ‘hurricanoes’ seemed to sweep us down the empty wet streets, enough I thought that it would:

All germens spill at once

That make ungrateful man..

But the man that was me, as I felt then, was not ungrateful. Soaking cold and wet outside, my heart burned like fire inside; after all, soon we would be in our room, the one we would share properly next term, feasting like panthers on alien meats. He, however, though, as always in my eyes, wonderful (deep, serious but with a smile that could kill) was not I think on the same page as I nor acting in the same drama. Whether I knew that then or not I cannot tell!

Many drinks later and both inebriated, as only students in those days of full grants and government paid fees could be, we opened the door. He went to dry himself and sit upstairs, I went into the kitchen. A blast met me at the door, but not of the heat of an oven, soon to be joined by hot rings for vegetables. The blast was ice-cold and had a wet edge to it. Inside the kitchen instead of a cooker, and surrounded with the smell of escaped gas, which at least I turned off, was a rusty heap of painted white metal debris receiving, and equally returning with splashes reminiscent of a Baroque fountain in Italy, a torrent of water from the corrugated roof, now bashed inwards and directing it’s privately accumulated deluge on the container of my poor stifado.

It must have happened shortly after we left, for none of the stew was cooked. The meat tough to a knife, though perhaps a little less bloody; coloured grey rather than of the wine in the stew. A congealed hard topping of butter gave the appearance to the pot of an antique skate-park surface. It was a surface no-one would choose to see, let alone eat.

We got to the kebab shop just before it closed, but sobered now and shocked into, on my part, the kind of realism that never sustains romance and makes the possible accident of love seem as if were preparation to enact a scene from Therese Racquin minus the requisite sexual murders Zola seems to wade into. We slept fitfully through the continuing storm that night.

We remained friends. Indeed , I became best man at his wedding after university – to an old school friend of mine, one of those women who relieved me of too much male company at school. But what, I wonder, if my stifado has been a success? What then? Students then were younger than they thought they were, driven by delusion, especially if you constructed, as I did then, my queerness as a negation, attempting to replicate the relationship structures that in fact oppressed me with people who didn’t, for they were just themselves growing into options.

Nothing I think would have been different. But it’s a tale to tell of, at least, near romantic-epic failure in cooking, ain’t it?

Love

Steve