Cook something. We’re alone together, socialising without contact, and we’re turning to the kitchen to keep body and soul together. At least we should.

Preparing food is one of the few things we can do right now, so it’s a good thing, then, that it’s a powerful source of satisfaction and comfort. We can make hearty food for our families, ourselves and our neighbours, even if that means delivering a tray bake inside a front gate and stepping away.

Many Australians have stockpiled food for weeks in anticipation of self-isolation. They’re hunkering down and streaming isn’t all that’s absorbing their attention. The delicious. website is seeing more visitors and traffic now than it did even over Christmas. People are searching for the likes of pumpkin soup, chicken soup and lasagne. Searches for meatloaf, for instance, are up by close to 700 per cent on the same time last year. It seems the nation is turning to nostalgic, familiar dishes that are inexpensive and simple family fare.

Cooking takes us back to our basic needs and what’s important to us, says Alex Kingsmill, who has a masters in coaching psychology and practises at UpStairs Coaching in Melbourne. “People are feeling out of control and cooking reminds us of our capacity in these times,” she says.

“We might not be able to control anything out there, but when you’re in your kitchen and rubbing butter into flour, adding a cup of milk, you can do that. It’s an element of control, and it reminds us that it’s actually okay.”

Kingsmill likens the act of cooking to the human need to gather around the hearth. “It’s not us on a computer and staying connected via Skype,” she says. “It’s people sitting around a fire – it’s going back to those primal, fundamental human things. There’s a purpose here. There might be noise out there, but here we are and we are human,” she says.

It may be hard to focus on soups, casseroles and cakes in stressful times of uncertainty, but do it anyway because cooking works. Cooking can deliver hope and offers comfort.

When my grandmother Margaret Fulton died last year, my family, after a few weeks of battling shock with endless cups of tea, started cooking again. First, I made her pikelets for my young children.

“These are GG’s pikelets,” I told the three-year-old, who wondered where his great-grandmother had gone.

Read the rest of the story, published in delicious. on Sunday magazine, here, in April 2020.