A plate with colour: veg next to the cutlet

A cutlet alone on a white plate looks orphaned. Not because of a poster about how a plate “should” look. Because the eye is bored, and the hand looks for bread at once. In winter at home the colour on the stall is poorer, and I still put colour beside it: cucumber, tomato, stewed cabbage, carrot, a simple cabbage salad with oil and vinegar. The plate at once becomes a meal, not a snack eaten standing up.

I do not lay out five containers as in a café. I fry the cutlets, cabbage to the side, cucumbers from a jar to the side if our own have run out. Or warm carrot with onion, while the cutlets rest under a lid. Meat without a pause on the plate dries out. Vegetables fill that pause. Peas thrown in at the end with the potatoes — green dots, and somehow they get eaten more willingly. Beetroot boiled in the evening — in the morning borscht, or just pieces with garlic next to the meat. Garlic smells so that even the grey weather outside becomes less grey.

Colour is also a spice without a spice. Dill on potatoes, parsley on soup, a strip of pepper on fried eggs. Not for a photograph. For the nose, and so that the mouth does not tire of one fried taste. If everything is brown — onion, meat, fried potatoes — it is tasty, I do not argue. But on the second day of such a table I myself want a cucumber, simply cold, with a crunch. I do not announce to the children “eat the green”: I put it nearby, sometimes I mix peas into the potato, I cut carrot into rounds, like crisps. If they do not eat it — tomorrow there will be another colour. Today at least a cucumber on a shared plate in the middle of the table: a hand reaches by itself while people are talking. I do not make a heap “for show”: the vegetables sit where a fork can take them, without moving the cutlet like a suitcase. In winter the colour often comes from a tin: peas, sweetcorn, cucumbers. That is not a shame. Shame is leaving the cutlet alone, like a fine.

A cutlet in my house does not live on the plate without a neighbour. What most often sits next to it — cucumber, cabbage, or “later, if we remember”?