The Kitchen Shrink Dr Andrea Oskis: We all have the same love language… food

The Kitchen Shrink Dr Andrea Oskis (Bloomsbury £18.99, 304pp)

 How many times in the last month have you been told the gut is king when it comes to your health? Supermarket dairy aisles are crammed with kefir. TV adverts endorse any number of probiotics. Even Hippocrates, the Grecian father of medicine, proclaimed that ‘all disease begins in the gut’. 

Queen of cooking – Nigella Lawson 

But it is not all about your microbiome. In her fascinating new book, psychologist and professional cook Andrea Oskis puts forward a further suggestion – food, and the wants of your gut, might be the key to your mental health too. 

So well put is this suggestion that you’ll kick yourself for not already seeing what Oskis makes so obvious through the stories of her therapy patients: that food, and our responses to it, is linked to our psyche. 

There is Jack, the 60-year-old Cockney fireman, who would sit down with his wife Angelica for tea when he needed someone to talk to. But, rather than English tea and biscuits, their ‘T E A’ was actually ‘T I for tiramisu’ (Angelica was Italian). Over a dessert literally meaning ‘pick me up’ or ‘cheer me up’, stoic Jack would unload his troubles on his wife, feeling her love and support with every spoonful. 

(Incidentally, tiramisu was supposedly invented in Treviso, northern Italy, by a brothel madam who discovered the caffeinated pudding would keep clients going for a little longer.) 

Then there is Ella, who is distraught when her boyfriend goes for lunch with a female colleague… to the Greek restaurant where they first became boyfriend and girlfriend. She shouts, screams and even storms into the restaurant to interrogate the owner. It transpires that Ella connects the stability of her relationship, her boyfriend’s chivalry and the blossoming of their love to the meal they shared at the restaurant. For him to take his work colleague there was to dismiss the significance of all that had come before. 

Poignant and often sad, the stories of Oskis’s patients peel back the layers of the human mind and our attachments to people and things. It is no wonder that the soothing routine of Delia Smith, or the deified domesticity of Nigella Lawson, left, have instilled greater feelings of love and security than the absent father, or harassing mother, faced by her patients. Hobnob crumble (the favourite of Oskis’s patient Rose) will always trump unloved beans (the nightmare forced upon Peter by his unpitying mother). 

What becomes clear as consomme is that food is humanity’s original and universal love language