If food is important to you, the planning, the choosing of ingredients, the careful prep, and the eating and sharing can all be as revealing as any verbal or physical exchange. Clare Finney talks to chefs, food writers and a psychologist to examine how something as simple as making scrambled eggs can become a significant marker in a relationship
After 20 years of marriage and 10 years running restaurant group Honey & Co with his partner Sarit Packer, Itamar Srulovich is sure of one thing: “There aren’t many people in your life whose food you could taste and know that they made it – but I would always be able to tell Sarit’s food.”
Itamar can see his wife’s signature in any salad, soup or pastry. “I’d know it from the way it looks, the personality, the sheer Sarit-ness of it,” he continues, his eyes shining. “She is a huge talent, so to have her cooking at home, just for us, is pure joy.”
Before meeting Sarit – in a restaurant kitchen in Tel Aviv – Itamar didn’t cook at home. Or if he did, it was to experiment for restaurants he worked in. It was Sarit who taught him that home food was just as delicious. And it’s out of the home food they created together that their relationship – and, eventually, business – was born. To sit in Honey & Co in London’s Bloomsbury, tearing into one of Sarit’s orange blossom buns and listening to Itamar talk is to feel the extraordinary connection between food and love; between cooking and romance.
It’s the same feeling eating at José – Spanish chef José Pizarro’s Bermondsey tapas bar – savouring his partner Peter’s tarte de santiago while José talks: “Some of my best memories are times shared with Peter at home, in the kitchen with the dogs settled by us, cooking together, then catching up over a meal.”
THE WAY TO SOMEONE’S HEART...
I’ve spent the past few years researching, talking and writing about why food has this power to forge new connections and cement old ones. The result is my new book, Hungry Heart: A Story of Food and Love, in which I explore the many ways in which food touches all relationships, from parents to partners, colleagues and friends.
I finish the book on romantic love: the love we associate with food more than any other thing, thanks to film, music, literature and advertising, which suggest the most romantic foods are strawberries, chocolates and oysters. Yet as I spoke to psychologists, anthropologists and couples and reflected on my own relationship, I realised the real romance of food lies less in the grand gestures and more in the little things:
