It was in my early years of bachelorhood that I discovered a feeling for the culinary arts.

Some men resist kitchens as they might the main computer room at Cape Kennedy, but I have never been one of those. My attitude to that traditional female preserve is: If you can’t beat them, scramble them.

In this mood last weekend, my family in town at a matinee, I decided to whip up a Quiche Lorraine for us for supper. Now a Quiche Lorraine, as any gourmet cook knows, is a tricky little dish in that one has to achieve just the right blend of bacon, cheese and seasoning, being in the process extremely canny with the salt. A pinch too much will spoil everything.

I had just finished this delicate preparation, had just popped the flan into a preheated oven, when the doorbell rang.

It was a young man from a commune down the road, though I hardly recognised him at first behind a flour-mask that extended from chin to eye-level. He seemed equally taken aback to find me in my ruffled apron but recovered to ask if I could let him have a bouquet garni, mispronouncing a name I could see was as foreign to him as colloquial Kurdish. He also asked if I knew anything about pastry-making.

Is the Pope a Catholic, I said to myself, but aloud I told him, “I think you’d better take me to your recipe.” We picked up the bouquet garni on the way out.

The kitchen in the commune was enviably large but in a state of devastation. Unwashed utensils lay about as though distributed by a hurricane.

At the centre of things was a pastry board containing a very solid lump of dough and surrounded by ingredients that indicated a production line for a steak and tomato pie. The recipe was there to prove it, though half hidden under a jumble of plates and pans.

It seemed my new friend George (for the sake of anonymity) had drawn the short straw in the cook-of-the-day stakes. His commune mates were all down at the beach.

Thus far, George had followed the recipe in good faith, taking care to prepare everything before the actual baking process. But the tomato looked as if it had been garrotted, the onion chopped by the simply process of throwing it under a bus. The garlic had been butchered skin and all.

I set all this aside, suggesting it might be saved for some future soup, and called for a new lot. I began by showing George how to skin tomatoes by immersing them in boiling water, then in cold.

Next I demonstrated the best method of slicing onions, halving them first to stop them rolling around. Then I tapped the garlic to loosen the skin.

“Now the way to crush a clove of garlic,” I told George, “is to place it in salt. After that, it comes apart at the point of a knife. Like so.“

Having adjusted the oven, I trimmed and floured the meat and placed it all in a pie dish with salt, pepper and the bouquet garni. I rolled the dough to the thickness of a five-rand piece, set it with a hole at centre, decorated the top with pastry leaves and brushed on the beaten egg. I considered breaking the egg with one hand, as I am able to do, but rejected the idea as possibly too ostentatious. Then I put the pie in the fridge for ten minutes to relax.

“That’s a good tip to remember,” I said to George. “A lot of cook books don’t tell you to do that.”

While waiting for the pie to settle, I put on the kettle with George’s permission and made us some tea, pouring the tea into the milk to scald it. Somehow tea never tastes the same the other way about.

George had seemed most impressed at all these goings-on and said as much. “Look,” I told him, “cooking’s just a matter of knowing a few basics, then being able to read the recipe.

“Women deliberately load the whole thing with mystique. It’s a defence mechanism. They’re afraid we’ll think less of them. If too many men came to realise how easy it was to cook, the stature of the woman slaving over the hot stove just wouldn’t be the same.”

George said he saw.

After ten minutes, I took the pie from the fridge, baked it for 30 minutes at 220C until the pastry was well risen and golden brown, then lowered the heat and left the rest to George. I told him the meat should be done in about two hours and suggested one or two accompaniments. Perhaps just cauliflower and peas, if George could manage those.

George could hardly thank me enough and rushed out ahead of me to buy the frozen vegetables.

Outside, a light rain was falling but the world seemed an exceptionally good place. I got to thinking how right that axiom is, about it being better to give than to receive.

In these spirits did I whistle my way home, back through the front door and up the stairs. Back to the acrid and highly distinctive smell of burning Quiche Lorraine that emanated from the kitchen.

Still, the tinned spaghetti we eventually had for supper was opened to a nicety.