In this book a psychologist recalls how a woman ended a relationship over the ‘wrong’ chicken soup

My own attachment story started on an island. My father is from a largish one in the middle of the Mediterranean: Cyprus. He came to the UK in the 1970s and settled in a little suburb in north London. It was here that he met my other attachment figure, my mother. She also has Greek Cypriot heritage, but the strongest connection she had to the motherland was the fact that her hometown was an area in London officially called Palmers Green, but known as “Palmers Greek”. My mother and father became attached, got married and lived happily ever after. After they sorted out my father’s visa problems, that is.

You could say that food actually saved my parents’ marriage. This is because food was the thing that stopped my father from being deported. Many marriages end over food, but my parents’ is not one of them.

One day, a few months after they were married, my mother heard a knock at the door at around 9 pm. It was a man from the Home Office, and he wanted to check to see if my father was there at home with her. Apparently, the way to verify that my parents’ marriage was not a marriage of convenience was to pop by at an inconvenient time. The Home Office man came in, my mother made him a cup of tea, and then he said he wanted to ask my mother and father some questions individually, to see if they really knew each other.

The Home Office man asked my parents all sorts of things, but there was a standout question that he greedily wanted not one, not two, but three answers to. He asked each for the other’s top three favourite foods.

I mean, it’s not exactly Jeopardy!, but it is a profound question. Then again, I am biased because this is a food book you’re reading right now. This was how they answered:

My mother said my father’s favourite foods were: avgolemoni (chicken soup with eggs, lemon and rice), gemista (stuffed vegetables) and galaktoboureko (syrup-soaked, custard-filled filo pastry).

My father said my mother’s favourite foods were: tinned chicken soup, pie and mash, and treacle tart and custard.

From their responses, I can imagine the man from the Home Office was quite confused about their marriage. But the story ended well. My parents’ answers were cross-checked, and they passed with flying colours. They had the green light to get on with being married, so my mother fully embraced her newfound wifeliness and got on with being a domestic goddess and learning how to cook. Because my mother, as you’ll have noticed from my father’s answers, is not your typical Greek mama when it comes to food. Neither was her mama. Lovingly prepared, home-cooked food wasn’t a big thing in my mother’s upbringing. There is no story about how she stood at the kitchen counter as a child next to her mother, watching and helping her cook. I didn’t see my maternal grandmother much at all during my childhood. The only kitchen-relevant memory I have about my maternal grandmother is that she often gave my mother knives as birthday and Christmas gifts. There is certainly some symbolism there, but I was just a child and not a therapist at that point.

Despite learning how to cook, there was no way my mother was giving up her first love – convenience foods – when she married my father. She adored anything tinned or canned or vacuum-packed. My mother didn’t enjoy home-cooked food that much. But we did. By the time my brother and I were born, she’d certainly perfected my father’s favourite dinner dishes, and she had a range of handy kitchen gadgets to help. She still loves using her “vegetable drill” to make gemista. Also, her avgolemoni is so good; the eggs in this soup need tempering so you have to do a lot of whisking, which my mother has a real knack for (I once tried to whisk eggs like my mother and ended up quite knackered from it). The secret to her recipe is pudding rice, which makes the soup really creamy. I think it’s one of her best dishes, but my mother still prefers tinned chicken soup.

One day, chicken soup came up in the session with my patient Brontë – both the homemade and the tinned variety. That day, Brontë had news to tell me: she said it was “over” with her boyfriend, Eliot, whom she had been with for just over a year.

In therapy, Brontë had said plenty about what was wrong in the relationship – or really, what Eliot was doing wrong in the relationship – from the moment she came to see me a few months prior. In fact, she spoke a lot about Eliot in general. I had got to know him quite well; in some ways, perhaps better than Brontë. I knew that Eliot was a chef and that he’d worked in some really well-known restaurants all around the world. He enjoyed exploring new cuisines, discovering new ingredients and developing his repertoire of tools and techniques. Now Eliot was getting ready to open his own restaurant, a fusion place in a trendy part of London where he would showcase all of his culinary expertise, including molecular gastronomy.

Brontë, on the other hand, wasn’t very exploratory. At that time, she was getting ready to celebrate her ten-year anniversary at the company she had worked for since graduating from university. She was an interior designer, and she’d met Eliot while working on his restaurant space. Brontë’s job was to make things comfortable for other people, but she liked to do this for herself too. It made Brontë uncomfortable to “rock the boat” in any way – at work or at home, and especially in her relationship with Eliot. Recently, Eliot had raised the possibility of them living together. Eliot already spent a lot of time at Brontë’s place. In the last few months he had moved utensils and equipment (a sous vide machine and a KitchenAid) into her kitchen and a “shit ton of recipe books into the living room”. Brontë felt “uncomfortable” because he was invading her “space”.

But she also said that Eliot “invaded her headspace” when he wasn’t there, and that she missed him and thought about him all the time. I noticed that Brontë talked about space a lot. Suffice to say, she liked her space. In our session that morning, Brontë told me Eliot had done something that made her feel very distressed on the day their relationship had ended. Brontë had spent all of last week bedridden with a nasty bout of flu. She’d cancelled everything in her diary, including our session. As soon as Eliot heard Brontë was ill, he dropped everything and went straight over to look after her. He brought several bags of fresh ingredients with him and spent all afternoon in the kitchen cooking up a storm. Hours later, Eliot came into Brontë’s bedroom holding a tray laden with a large bowl of steaming soup and a freshly baked roll. There was also a paper napkin folded into a swan and a little vase with some flowers from the garden.

The soup Eliot had cooked for Brontë wasn’t anything trendy or modernist or molecular gastronomical. This soup was original, yet traditional, and the recipe had been passed through the generations of Eliot’s family. It was his Jewish grandmother’s “penicillin”: chicken soup with matzo balls. This was Eliot’s comfort food.

But it was uncomfortable for Brontë. “I told him straight, no soup was going to make me feel better. Not even his bubbe’s,” said Brontë.

“I’ve never seen chicken soup like that before. He should’ve just opened a tin.” She looked confused and inconvenienced all at once.

Later that day, it was Eliot’s turn to be uncomfortable as, for some reason, Brontë’s upset about the soup increased. She didn’t eat it. She also didn’t mince her words about Eliot (“you’re an idiot, spending all day making it”) or his grandmother (“she’s silly calling it ‘penicillin’ because it looks toxic to me”). She threw some gastronomical bombs too, big ones, about the matzo balls (“there are fatty lumps floating around in it”) and the soup’s greasy, shmaltzy surface (“there’s so much oil, maybe the American army will invade the bowl!”). Brontë’s verbal attack on Eliot and the soup went on for the entire afternoon. Eliot told her he’d had enough and that he was leaving. Brontë was assailed by her emotions of anger, sadness and fear, so she exploded and said, “Fine, it’s over then.” After he left, she stormed into the bathroom and flushed the soup down the toilet, and all her hopes for their relationship along with it.

Excerpted with permission from The Kitchen Shrink: How the Food We Eat is the Key To How We Love, Andrea Oskis, Bloomsbury.