Lifestyle

Yes, I'm filling the freezer. No, I'm not hoarding… | Rachel Cooke


When you’re a child, you tend to have more than a few unshakeable ideas about what will happen when you’re older. Some girls assume they will get married, and have a family. Some fantasise about wearing hard hats, flying to the moon, editing a newspaper or performing brain surgery. I won’t go into all my girlish dreams here; I was a strange child, and no one wants to hear about the archaeological museum I ran for a time in my bedroom (free entry, but once you had entered, it was pretty hard to leave). But of one desperately dull thing I was always convinced: that by the time I was fully grown up, whatever that meant, I would own a vast and well-stocked freezer.

In my childhood, freezers were a thing: a symbol of middle-class achievement that was almost, if not quite, as good as owning a Volvo estate. If you had the room – a cellar, say, or a pantry – the ne plus ultra of below-zero white goods was a chest freezer: the kind of model inside which dead bodies are kept in crime shows. But at a push, an upright affair would just about pass muster, especially if it had natty wire baskets on little runners.

Into these humming shrines to modern life and extreme preparedness you would place goods by Findus and Wall’s, tubs of mince, and – if you were really down with the late 70s – all the blanched vegetables and soft fruit you’d grown on your allotment. People were seriously into freezer accessories then (eat your heart out, Marc Jacobs): special self-seal bags with white labels; special pens for writing on these special bags. Interment dates were inscribed with utmost solemnity, in the manner of Rembrandt signing off his latest portrait.

Doubtless you can guess what’s coming. In middle age, it would appear that while I’m in possession of a pasta machine, a fondue set, a blender and no fewer than four different means of making coffee, I do not own a freezer – unless you count the integral one that sits on top of the fridge. How did this happen? What went wrong with me, and my life? I’m damned if I know, though when I looked inside my ice box (do people still call them this?) the other day, it struck me that this might, after all, be a good thing. I cannot even maintain a freezer the size of a shoebox. How old, I wondered, peering in, is this unidentifiable fish or foul? What prehistoric items are wrapped in these plastic bags?

I’ve used the word “look”. This is misleading. Before there was any looking to be done, I first had to bore a hole in the ice with a chisel, into which I then peered with one eye, as if I was Indiana Jones and the holy grail was to be found deep inside a Matterhorn-shaped lump of Waitrose petits pois. Shame crept over me, and so, a little later, I set to work. The ice was so thick that having been released using a hammer and palette knife, it could be carried out into the street in sheets. I was half tempted to try and sell it to the bloke at the corner shop.

Being such a slattern, however, has proved to have its advantages. My tiny freezer now seems cavernously huge, and filling it – I utterly reject the suggestion that I am hoarding – is strangely pleasurable. In the world of frozen foods, things run along at speed. On the Ocado website, for instance, you can now choose from a range of goods by Picard, which is basically Bird’s Eye for French people, by which I mean that its stuff is very upmarket and (mostly) delicious.

I fully believe that in a spontaneous let’s-throw-a-party type situation, its fluffy cheese gougères (10 minutes in the oven) would convince even your beadiest friends you really are an uncommonly dab hand with the choux pastry – and as it happens, many of us may be in exactly this position in a matter of days. I’d suggest that 29 March seems like a good date for a party, especially one featuring goods from across the Channel. Or do I mean a wake? Either way, I’m stocking the freezer with religious enthusiasm and fervent prayers for the future.



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