Neil Cargill
23 December 2005
A comic recipe derived from disaster as would-be TV chef Tilly Kitchiner struggles to cook the perfect Christmas dinner - with the help of her celebrity guardian angels.
Tilly Kitchiner is as bitter and twisted as quince and tagliatelle. Food has ruled and ruined her life. She would have been a famous TV cook, she says, if it hadn’t been for her husband. Why she married him, she’ll never know. All he ever eats is mashed potato: dolloped, forked, or – after Tilly discovered Fanny Cradock – piped in the shape of a swan.
In her melamine and lino kitchen, she is shackled to stodge. It had been drummed into her through childhood, and now in marriage, that food as anything other than ballast is sinful. But all the while in her head,Tilly has been concocting the most exquisite miracles of nourishment and comfort and passion.
With the death of her husband, the woman whose life has been shaped by food can at last turn the tables. Tilly’s experiments, the testing and tasting, turn her home into a lab whose windows are orange day and night with a roasting-glow. One day, she vows, she will cook the perfect meal.
And when the day comes it is Christmas. And the meal has to be perfect, because it is her first ever meal alone. There is no excuse.
Celebrity chefs Antony Worrall Thompson and Aldo Zilli appear as themselves.
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