All our children follow my terrible example of covering most of their meals in an excessive amount of tomato ketchup, or dip dip as it is better known in our house. I take full responsibility for this; it’s a habit that’s stuck with me from childhood that has a very sensible reason behind it. For the majority of my youth, my mum did most of the cooking and whilst a lot of the dinners were perfectly tasty, a lot of them suffered that 80’s phenomenon that was peculiar to women of my mums generation.
A lot of the meat we ate wasn’t cooked, it was incinerated. Properly charred, dry and almost inedible. The only way I was able to lubricate my throat enough to swallow some of the meat we were fed was to douse it liberally in tomato ketchup and swallow hard.
How overcooked? For example, I never realised how delicious liver and bacon could actually be until my dad took early retirement and started doing cooking. Tender, succulent liver was in stark contrast to the inedible black lumps my mum served up that were only really good for skimming over the lake up the park. Even once my dad took over the cooking though, the habit stuck, and it’s obviously rubbed off on the kids, as you can see young Ned is finishing off his dip dip with a straw…