FCE Reading Part 5 practice: The summer I learned to cook for forty

### The summer I learned to cook for forty

When I accepted a summer job at a mountain hut, I imagined long evenings watching the sunset with a cup of tea in my hand. I had spent the previous winter working in a busy café in town, and I assumed that a hut three hours' walk from the nearest road would be its quiet opposite. The advertisement had said "kitchen assistant", and I had read that as "someone who occasionally washes up". I could not have been more wrong.

On my first morning, the hut's manager, a small, energetic woman called Greta, handed me an apron and a list. The cook had left suddenly the week before, she explained, and until a replacement arrived, the kitchen was mine. Forty walkers were booked in for dinner. I remember staring at the list – soup, bread, a vegetable stew, apple cake – and doing the calculations in my head. At home I had never cooked for more than four people, and even then I had usually followed a recipe on my phone. Up here there was no reliable signal.

Greta must have noticed my expression, because she laughed and told me not to look so tragic. "Nobody climbs up here for the food," she said. "They come for the view. If the soup is hot, they'll be happy." I wasn't sure whether she meant this to comfort me or to lower my expectations, but in the end it did both.

That first evening was chaotic. I had no idea how long it takes to peel potatoes for forty, and the stew was served almost an hour late. Yet nobody complained. The walkers, who had been on their feet since dawn, sat at the long wooden tables comparing blisters and route maps, and when the food finally arrived they ate it as if it were the finest meal of their lives. One elderly man asked for a second helping and then, rather embarrassingly, for the recipe. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I had invented it about two hours earlier.

Over the following weeks I developed a routine. I learned to start the bread before anyone else was awake, and to plan meals around whatever the helicopter had delivered rather than whatever I felt like making. When the supplies were late because of bad weather, I discovered that I could produce a surprisingly decent pasta sauce from tinned tomatoes and the herbs that grew behind the hut. My confidence grew, though not always in proportion to my ability: there was one memorable afternoon when I tried to bake a chocolate cake at altitude without adjusting the recipe, and produced something closer to a pancake.

The replacement cook never came. At first I was annoyed about this, and I said so to Greta more than once. Later I realised that she had probably never looked very hard for one. When I asked her about it on my last day, she simply shrugged and said that I had seemed to be managing.

What stays with me now, years later, is not the cooking itself but what it taught me about expectations. I had arrived believing that I needed to be fully prepared before I could do something well. The hut showed me that preparation often happens in the middle of the work, not before it. I still cannot make a decent chocolate cake, but I am no longer afraid of a list I don't know how to finish.