Recipe for Disaster Read Online Free Page B

was befuddled with exhaustion, blinded by
the lights, nearly deafened by the roar from the people
around them and in no condition to sift sense from silliness.
Georgia, however, was an oasis of calm and stillness. Her
ability to stand utterly still and become the focus of
attention was one of the things that had made her a great
model. But in reality, she was chronically insecure, despite
her success, because she lived in constant fear of the
competition from other models. All the adulation she got
was like a meal without calories: however much she gobbled
up she was always hungry for more.
    At first, Jake's love was like a breath of fresh air blowing
through the hothouse world of competition and spite she
moved in. Attention from Jake was freely given and honest
and straight, and so she clung to him like a vine. It took
Jake a while to realise that vines can be choking.
    When Georgia confided to him that she was an avid
reader, he was delighted – he was so busy that his
girlfriends had to have their own interests. But she didn't
make clear at first that the only things she read were glossy
magazines and pseudo-psychological self-help books. She
had nearly as many of these as he had cookery books. There
were books about women who loved too much; women who
didn't; women who loved the wrong man, and women who
loved cats more than men. They had titles like Change Is Not a Four-Letter Word (well, of course it bloody well wasn't), A Guide Dog for the Spiritually Blind , Life Shouldn't Be a Trivial Pursuit and Co-dependency – Break the Chain! . During a night
of insomnia, Jake had picked this last one up. After two
hours he still couldn't figure out what exactly the hell co-dependency
was, except that if you had it you were in big
trouble. Eventually he had filled in the questionnaire at the
back. Not only was he co-dependent but so was everyone
else he knew. In fact, according to this, it was impossible not
to be co-dependent. Enraged, Jake had thrown the
paperback into a corner and turned to the comforting and
sane thoughts of Elizabeth David in France.
    Jake wasn't lying when he told Eric that food was his
passion. His passion and his life and there wasn't much
room for anything else, even something as delectable and
irresistible as Georgia. His grandmother was responsible
for this. When he was small she told him endless stories
about her own grandmother, who had lived in a small
village in Poland. Life there revolved around the kitchen –
the children sometimes even slept on top of the oven
because there wasn't room for them in the one bed. The
door was never locked and there was a continual coming
and going of people – talking, arguing, crying, laughing –
all of which was accompanied by a constant stream of food.
What did they eat? asked Jake, who was fascinated by this
picture of a very different world. So she cooked for him the
comforting and tasty food that was part of her culture:
chopped liver, potato latkes and goulash soup. When she
was only a baby, the family had moved to Germany in the
hope that life would be more prosperous there. And at first
they thrived. She was the prettiest girl in her class and the
most popular – until the morning her best friend had given
her a Nazi salute and her boyfriend dumped her so he
could join the Hitler Youth. Then came the lean and
terrible years of persecution and flight and hunger. As an
old woman, she hoarded food obsessively. When she died,
Jake was dry-eyed at the funeral. He had done his crying
the night before, when he'd found all the tins and packets
of outdated food stacked neatly under her bed.
    He sometimes wondered if he cooked to make up for
those years of starvation and terror under the Nazis, but
when he tried to explain this to Georgia, she had stared at
him, uncomprehending. Food was Georgia's enemy, not
her friend. She waged a continual, single-minded battle
with it, starving herself for days on end and then bingeing.
But the first time Jake overheard her