Review by Frank Plowright

The phrase ‘cooked with love’ is relatively commonplace, but as Jennifer Hayden’s introductory chapter explains, dinner can also be cooked with anger, bitterness and resentment. Does this affect the flavour? Hayden would convince you it does. To note she’s not a keen cook is to massively understate the case, but for budgeting reasons she has to do it anyway, and her recollections of culinary disasters are accompanied by recipes like none you’ve read before, where acrimony and grudges abound.

Cooking trauma began early when Hayden would stay well away from the kitchen as a child in case she was roped in to help her mother, seemingly a competent cook troubled by insecurities about the results. The doubts are either genetic or have transferred, as the adult Hayden has no greater facility for cooking than when younger. Where There’s Smoke There’s Dinner, a title suggested by Hayden’s husband, catalogues extensive failures unmitigated by numerous recipe books or philosophies about cooking.

There’s a feeling of release about the book, as if Hayden has stayed silent as neighbours discussed local organic produce and TV cooks extolled the virtues of al dente pasta and the versatility of quinoa, meaning a torrent of suppression has now erupted. She bemoans inconsistent advice, when of course all tips should be guides and everyone should cook to their own taste. A lifetime of culinary failure is laid bare, with diversions into gardening and spiritual transcendence, Hayden’s misfortunes recalibrated for our amusement as she relates one disaster after another. Still, she can be forever noted as inventing the pizza bomb. Just in case you’re wondering, dining out is financially out, so Hayden struggles onward.

An easy conversational, and occasionally confessional style is adopted from the start, inducing immediate sympathy, while the flat and brightly coloured art is calibrated to transmit kitchen chaos, particularly the frequent activation of smoke alarms. While other people’s misfortunes are the basis of much comedy, there will come a point where you’ll wonder if anything can go right for Hayden, so rejoice in the mushroom chapter. She may not cook them, or indeed pick them, but for once it’s a culinary treat.

Hayden surely speaks to millions with Where There’s Smoke There’s Dinner, and anyone familiar with the gastronomic catastrophe will take great comfort in her emphatic honesty.