Cheese, ketchup and chaos: the first thing I ever cooked
The first meal I can remember cooking
Hello and welcome to Not a Vegetarian. I’m Jack Faulkner, and ever since reviving my love of cooking five years ago I’ve been muddling my way through the world of food. Every week I share a different story from my culinary journey, and if you’re reading this, you’re (un)lucky enough to be reading the first ever edition.
This is the first part of a series I’m going to call How I Got Into Cooking, where I’m documenting exactly how I found my love of cooking, from my childhood to the modern day.
In this edition, I’m talking about the first ever meal I can remember cooking, which was when I was 6. It’s a slightly odd recipe for what I called cheese straws - little sticks of pastry filled with cheddar and ketchup.
But before we get onto that, thanks so much for being here. I would love to hear your thoughts on this article, and subscribing would mean the world to me!
In my childhood, I would spend every weekend with my grandparents. Although I went there mostly to play and have fun, at dinnertime I would always marvel at my grandma cooking up wonders in her bizarrely undersized kitchen.
Before I start to talk about my cheese straws, I will say that this was by no means the first cooking process I had ever seen, and it might not have even actually been the first thing I cooked. Instead, it’s special for a different reason - it’s the first recipe that I actually wrote down, and I’ve kept the tattered piece of paper ever since.
Well, I had done. Unfortunately, during a stressful tidy-up session last week, I lost the original copy of the recipe, probably ending up in the bottom of the paper bin. However, I summoned my inner artist to try and recreate it as best I can. All those lessons of using tea bags to age things at school were not wasted.
Now, a little context to why I cooked this recipe. During my childhood, I was absolutely obsessed with cheese twists - those long, crispy sticks of puff pastry filled with cheese and salt, so perhaps in an effort to save money, or maybe because there was some leftover cheese in the fridge, my grandma decided to try and make some with me.
Everyone knows that you can’t perfectly recreate things you buy from the shops, no matter how hard you try, and this experience proved that to me. As written down, this is the recipe:
Mix butter and flour;
Speaking as a 6-year-old and my adult self, any excuse to cover the kitchen in flour should be taken.
Add cheese, salt, tomato ketchup, and mix.
The more the ketchup, the more authentic the flavour.
Add 2 egg yolks, not forgetting to drop one down the sink.
This is absolutely crucial to getting good pastry.
Mix to a round ball and get flour on chin, clothes and floor.
Getting flour on your nose as well is perfectly fine, we’re not discriminating.
Cut into strips, put on a baking tray and play straw game to separate.
If you don’t know what the straw game is, I have no clue either.
Cross fingers, put in oven and steam up glasses.
For glasses-free readers, you’re welcome to break into your nearest Vision Express and steal a pair.
Take them out, not forgetting to save any lobster-shaped ones.
Actually, any shapes should be saved.
Go and listen to Grandad talking in his sleep whilst on the sofa.
If your Grandad is not yet asleep, just take him to the cinema for five minutes. That normally does the trick.
Fast-forwarding back to today, I wanted to see if the magic was still there. So, armed with an inventory of ingredients far more expensive than would have been available at the time, I decided to start on the recipe, dutifully carrying out every step as dictated by the nearly 40-year-old copy. I even cracked an egg down the sink in the name of science.
On my own, I mixed in all of the ingredients, including an obscene amount of ketchup and cheese, just like how 6-year-old me would have wanted.
And the result? Exactly as I remembered - crispy in places, soggy in others, but joyfully delicious in their own imperfection.
I have constructed a modern recipe for my cheese straws - a little more refined and without asking for eggs to be wasted. Don’t worry too much about the measurements - they weren’t mentioned in the original copy, and probably never known to me or my grandma even at the time. If you don’t do already, this is a great time to learn how to measure by eye.
Ingredients
170g/6oz plain flour (I used bread flour this time, but only because I forgot to buy plain!)
85g/3oz salted butter
Enough cheese and ketchup to choke a family of mice/Americans? (or whoever eats ketchup a lot)
A pinch of salt
A pinch of cayenne pepper
2 egg yolks
A splash of milk
Method
Rub the flour into the butter until it starts to clump together into a crumbly dough.
Add the cheese, ketchup, salt and cayenne pepper and mix with a fork until it starts to form a slightly less crumbly dough.
Add the egg yolks and mix until it starts to form a dough.
Use your hands to form it into a round ball. If it is still too crumbly, add a splash of milk until it will.
Flour your worksurface, knead the dough for a minute and roll out until a couple of centimetres thick, depending on preference.
Using a knife, cut off the edges so that it is rectangle, then cut into strips about an inch thick. There should be between 10 and 20 long strips from this dough, and each long strip should make about 2 sticks.
Roll the discarded edges into a ball and repeat this process until only a negligible amount of dough is left.
Preheat the oven to 180°C/356°F.
Place the straws on a baking tray, then brush them with milk and sprinkle on extra cheese as desired.
Bake for about 20 minutes until crispy.
Lovely drizzled in Marmite, dipped in ketchup or just eaten plain.
This recipe makes about 40 straws at 6p each.
Thank you for reading Not a Vegetarian. Next week, in the second part of How I Got into Cooking, I’m taking a look at what really launched me into the world of cooking - recipe kits and cake mix. See you then!
In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts! If you made the recipe, or just have something to say in general, please do leave a comment.
And, if you enjoyed this post, subscribing would mean the world to me. It’s completely free!
Thank you for reading. If you’re reading this far down, you’re a true fan. See you next week!
I would love to hear everyone’s thoughts on this article! Please feel free to leave a comment below.
I'll be completely real with you. I HATE food blogs. They bore me to death. Just get to the recipe. Yours is different. I think it's because you don't lead with a recipe or promise and bait and switch. The images are phenomenal as well. Consider me a new subscriber.