Cooking while you talk

The first time it happened it was not a plan. I had said I would call at seven, dinner was not going to cook itself, and rather than choose between the two I put the phone against the flour jar and carried on. What I got was a forty-minute conversation with somebody I had spoken to twice before, conducted almost entirely in profile, punctuated by the sound of a knife on a board, and it was substantially better than the two attempts that had preceded it — both of which involved sitting still in front of a camera trying to be interesting.

I have thought about why since, and the answer is not mysterious. Cooking supplies a conversation with everything it is normally short of: something to do with your hands, a reason to look away that has nothing to do with the other person, natural pauses that are visibly not awkward, and an ending built into the process. Nobody has to sustain anything. The dinner sustains it, and the two of you talk in the gaps, which is roughly how conversation works everywhere else in life and almost nowhere on video.

Where to put the phone is the part I got wrong for months. On the counter, flat, it points at the ceiling and shows you at an angle no human being has ever been improved by. Propped against the nearest object it is usually too low and slightly too close. The rule I eventually arrived at is that the camera wants to be roughly where another person's eyes would be if they were standing in the kitchen with you, which in most kitchens means head height and a metre or two back — not on the work surface at all.

The best spot in my kitchen turned out to be an open shelf at head height, at the far end from the hob. Second best is a cupboard door left ajar with the phone wedged in it, which sounds precarious and is not. Third is the windowsill, with the caveat below about light. What all three have in common is distance: further back is almost always better, because a phone camera is wide and close and stops flattering anybody at arm's length.

The move I wish I had discovered earlier is flipping to the rear camera and pointing it at the pan. There is a small button on your own video window for switching between front and rear, and it takes one tap. Suddenly the other person is watching something happen rather than watching you exist, which is a considerably easier thing for both of you. It is also, incidentally, a very undemanding way to be on video: you are on camera, technically, and the camera is looking at an onion.

Food is the easiest subject in the world and it costs nothing to produce. Everyone eats, everyone has opinions, and almost everyone has one dish they are quietly proud of. Show somebody a pan and they will tell you how their mother did it differently, which is a better conversational opening than anything either of you could have engineered from a standing start. I have learned more about where people are actually from through this than through any direct question.

Steam is the one thing that will genuinely ruin the picture, and it does so gradually enough that you do not notice until it is done. It fogs the lens, then it condenses, and a phone that has spent ten minutes in the plume above a pot is producing a soft milky image that no amount of wiping fixes quickly. The extractor pulls that plume toward the wall behind the hob, so the far end of the counter is usually out of its path. Keep the phone out of the cloud rather than trying to deal with the consequences.

Oil travels considerably further than people expect, which is the other argument for distance. A phone next to a pan being seared is a phone that will need cleaning and, in the worst case, a phone that has taken a splash of something hot. Do not put it on the chopping board either. I did that once, moved the board with the phone still on it, and spent the following ten minutes of the conversation retrieving it from behind the bin.

Here is the thing that took me longest to understand: in the kitchen, sound is the channel that carries the conversation, not the picture. Your hands are busy and your eyes are on what you are doing, so the whole thing runs on audio with occasional visual punctuation. Which means the things that wreck audio matter far more than the things that wreck video, and a kitchen is full of them — an extractor fan roaring away, a tap running, something frying hard, the specific catastrophe of a stick blender.

The fixes are mostly timing rather than equipment. Pause the tap while they are talking. Run the fan a notch lower than you normally would, and turn it up in your own gaps rather than theirs. And do the loud jobs — the chopping, the smashing of garlic, the tin being opened — while you are the one speaking rather than while they are, so the noise lands on your own words rather than trampling theirs. That last one sounds trivially obvious written down and it took me about a year to notice I was doing the opposite.

Headphones are the single biggest improvement available, for the plain reason that they let you leave the phone where it is and walk to the fridge without dropping out of the conversation. Anything you already own will do. The gain is not audiophile quality; it is that the sound comes with you, so the call stops being a thing anchored to one square foot of counter and becomes a thing that follows you around the room.

The corollary is that you will eventually walk out of frame while still talking, and the other person will find themselves addressing your kitchen. This is fine and mildly funny the first time. It is worth saying something as you go — back in a second, going to find the coriander — because a picture of an empty kitchen with a disembodied voice in it is a strange thing to be left holding without warning.

Which brings up the etiquette, since you are asking somebody to spend twenty minutes watching a person cook. The whole thing hinges on saying so at the start. I am making dinner while we talk, is a complete disclosure and nobody has ever objected to it. What people mind is not the cooking; it is being half-attended to by someone who has not explained why. Once it is stated, the pauses read as cooking rather than as disinterest, and the entire texture of the call changes.

What you get in return is a conversation where silence is not a failure. On a normal video call, four seconds of nothing feels like a problem that somebody has to fix. In a kitchen there is a visible reason for it — a thing is being stirred, a lid is going on — and the silence reads as ordinary domestic quiet rather than as a hole in the conversation. That single difference is why I keep coming back to this format.

Then there is the ending, which nobody counts as a feature and should. Dinner is ready, and there exists no more natural exit line in the medium than I am going to go and eat this. Nobody has to invent a reason to go. Nobody has to do the graceless thing where a conversation is wound down over five minutes because neither party can find the door. The food ends the call for you, on time, on good terms, which is worth more than it sounds if you have ever sat through the last ten minutes of a call that should have finished at the twenty-minute mark.

The alternative is to eat on the call, and that one depends entirely on the person. I would say it out loud rather than simply beginning — are you eating too, or shall I let you go — because otherwise one party is chewing and the other is watching them chew, which is a specific kind of intimacy that not everyone has signed up for on a second conversation.

When something goes wrong on the hob you will need both hands and no camera, and it is useful to have decided in advance what happens then. The picture is the expendable part: the switches for the camera and the microphone sit together behind the more button on the call screen, in a small panel labelled Operate, so covering the picture is a couple of taps — the other side is told your camera is off — and the conversation carries on with sound. If you already know the evening is going to be that kind of evening, a voice call — started from the private message screen rather than the video button — never opens a camera at all, which sidesteps the question entirely.

Choose what you cook with some regard for the fact that you are also talking. Anything you have made ten times before is ideal, because it runs on the part of your brain that does not need supervising. A long simmer is the perfect format: twenty minutes of active work at the front, then a pot that mostly wants to be left alone while you do the interesting part of the conversation. What does not work is a recipe you are reading for the first time, and I offer that from experience rather than theory.

Get the knife work done before the call or in a deliberate pause. Not as a safety lecture — you are an adult and it is your hand — but because chopping while looking at a screen produces both bad chopping and bad conversation, and you can hear the divided attention in someone's voice from the other end. Prepped ingredients in bowls before you dial is the single most useful piece of preparation there is, and it makes the cooking half of the evening look far more competent than it is. It also front-loads all the parts that require silence, so that what remains is stirring, watching and talking, which are three things that fit together comfortably.

Kitchens usually have better light than people assume. The overhead is unflattering, yes, but under-cabinet lighting is close to ideal — soft, in front of you, aimed at the work surface — and a window over the sink at the right hour is probably the best light in the place. If you are cooking in the evening with only the ceiling light on, moving one lamp to the far end of the counter does more for the picture than any adjustment inside the app.

Your kitchen is on display, which some people care about and others do not. The fix is deciding in advance where the camera points rather than tidying anything: aim it at the hob and you get a person cooking, aim it at the sink and you get everything you did not wash up at lunchtime. Nobody has ever commented on my kitchen. They comment on what is in the pan, which suggests the anxiety is misplaced. The one thing I do move is anything with an address on it — a letter propped behind the kettle is legible on camera at a surprising distance, and that is a different consideration from tidiness altogether.

There is a good version where one of you is following the other, too. Somebody talks you through a dish from their part of the world, at their pace, with corrections; you hold up a pan and get told it is not hot enough. It is the only situation I have found on video where being bad at something is an asset, because incompetence generates questions and questions generate conversation. I have made two dishes this way that are now in permanent rotation, and I could not have told you the name of either one beforehand.

The middle of a long recipe has a distinct phase that is worth anticipating: the twenty minutes where the pot needs nothing and there is genuinely nothing to do. The call changes character at that point — you sit down, the picture stops moving, and it becomes an ordinary conversation with a smell in the background. Some of the better stretches have happened right there, in the gap between the work and the eating, when neither of you has anything to attend to and the evening has not finished yet.

There is a version of this where both of you are cooking, and it is the best version. Two people in two kitchens, doing different things, talking at whatever rate the tasks allow. Nothing has to be performed and there is no pressure on either side to hold the floor. If you have ever wondered what the natural form of a long-distance conversation is, I think it might be this — two people doing their evening in parallel with the sound on.

The bolognese call remains the one I would point at. Forty minutes, most of it in profile, a bad angle and an audible extractor fan, and neither of us made a single attempt to be impressive. I could not tell you now what we talked about, which is the point. It was an evening, with a person, and dinner at the end of it, and it took no more organising than deciding to leave the phone against the flour jar rather than in the other room.

One practical footnote if you are on a mobile connection: video is the expensive part of any of this, and an hour on the hob three nights a week adds up in a way that an hour of talking does not. I measured this on my own phone and the difference between video and sound alone is roughly twentyfold, which is worth knowing before the last week of a billing cycle rather than during it.

So prop it further back than feels right, keep it out of the steam, put something in your ears, say what you are doing, and let dinner decide when the call ends. It is free to start, it runs in a browser with nothing to install, and if the evening includes a pot that needs stirring anyway, that is not an obstacle to the conversation. It is most of what makes it work.