I'm just out of the shower, and I was sitting drinking coffee and watching this daft cooking programme with Richard E Grant on it, and at some point, someone said something along the lines of 'I cook what my mother taught me', and I suddenly realised, I'd written all that stuff about cooking Sunday Lunch, and it being Mum's birthday, and I'd not written a word really about where I learnt to do all of this.
My Mum was the most incredible cook. She tells this story (or she used to do, she's not into reminiscing these days at all, which is sort of odd) about how just after she and Dad got married, they started having these dinner parties. They decided to cook foods from different countries, and ended up trawling around Birmingham, looking for the ingrediants of Jamaican cookery. She told wonderful stories of plantains, and spices on market stalls, and how most (white) people at the time - the 1950's - wouldn't have touched these foods with a barge pole. But she and Dad were down there, buying up almost everything they could get their hands on, and trying to remember how the stall holders told them to cook it. Needless to say, they hadn't taken a notebook with them! Anyhow they somehow managed - they had a good selection of cookbooks, chief of which was the Andre Simon. It's a kind of food bible, entries for every conceivable ingrediant you can imagine. Her copy is still in the kitchen - I have my own now, I think she bought me one for a birthday or christmas or something. I still use it now. If civilisation fell, it'd be the first thing I would haul from the ashes - there's a recipe in there for rat, concocted by someone in the French revolution (so it claims.) There are extraordinary recipes for bizarre little - well I don't know what to call them, but they're made essentially from flour and water, sewn into little bags and stored in the celler. They come from Eastern Europe, and I'd guess that they and similar foodstuffs hold the key to the survival of the population through the endless revolutions, upheavals, coups etc which seemed to be all about the richesse, and not do very much for the people at all. Anyhow, enough politics.
Virtually all of my memories of childhood seem to revolve around food. We lived in a big house - there were a lot of us, three kids from my father's first marriage, of whom only Nick was at home really throughout my childhood, three of us, the children of my father's second marriage - and others. All of my life there were others - home helps, au pairs, included willy nilly as members of the family. Visitors. People who simply came for the meal, those who came for the weekend, for Christmas - people like Uncle Dave. I didn't know him as an adult, so I can't really say what he was, but he was some sort of relative of my Dads, and it was he who went on these cycling holidays with him as a young man when Dad got into Churches. Dad would take one, or two of us with him and drive over to pick him up - an elderly man, terribly sweet and never seemed to complain about suddenly having hoards of kids roaming his house. Somehow he'd managed to survive the first world war, and must have served in the second as well. Never married, perhaps he lost a girlfriend to the influenza epidemics, or of course, he may not have been interested in girls. Who knows? Too late to ask now.
Anyhow, we'd take him back with us for lunch. We'd arrive back home to the smells and scents of lunch on the go, Mum in the kitchen, always in control, never seemed to be flustered. I have to say that to cook for a mere ten, or eight of us, was relatively normal, and you do get used to that sort of thing. To track the truly extraordinary cookery exploits of my mother, you have to go to Christmas. As a young girl, there seems to have been a regular pattern to Christmas. Christmas Eve, we'd go to the Melvilles - who lived in the same village. They had drinks. Terribly smart drinks parties, where people go politely merry and children milled aimlessly and rather bored, but too frightened of their surroundings to make mayhem. I remember the house more than anything else - very old, at least 16th century I'd say, perhaps even older. A farmhouse come mini manor house of some sort, black and white, with the interior a cavern of wood panelling. I rather suspect we were banished to another room of some sort, where we had our own drinks and stuff, but I think boredom nearly always drove us out of there and into the more exciting presence of people. And as we got older - eight, nine or so, people began to talk to us.
Christmas Day itself has a collection of stories/myths that deserves it's own blog, nearer to the time!
Boxing Day. Yeah boxing day was our turn. We were banished pretty much to the library, although pressed into service as we got older. Mum cooked, Dad did the table. You've never seen such a vast expanse of silverware, fruits arranged in decorative piles, bottles - glasses, plates, knives forks, cheese boards - yep, more than one. Cold meats would be put onto boards, or I think we may well have had two or three carving dishes as well, but since there would be the remains of the turkey (sliced up) a good peice of beef - I'm talking a huge chunk of rib here, and a ham, specially prepared for the occasion which would take mum two or three days worth of preparation. I know, because not only did I see it, I do a sort of mini version most christmasses myself these days. You soak it for a day at least, in cold water, change the water, bring it to the boil, give it a good few hours boiling before changing the water and repeating, then get it out, cool it down, peel off the rind, make the glaze, slice up the oranges, check on your stock of cloves to find the ones with a stalk still remaining, arrange a decorative pattern, brush the glaze over, roast, re-glaze, bake for further, re-glaze again - and you do end up with something that people look at and go wow. Often there was a salmon as well. Or I seem to remember one, but perhaps I'm thinking of summer parties. Bowls full of salad. Multiple loaves of bread, warmed in the oven, sliced up & wrapped in clean teatowls, put in a bowl and hauled to the table not two minutes or so before people started to eat. Mum would make baked potatos in one oven, perhaps twenty, thirty maybe even forty baked potatos. They were fruit and cheese people at these sort of do's, I don't remember any huge puddings, but I do think they used to prepare a bowl of fruit salad for those who wanted.
And Sunday lunch was a sort of mini version of this sort of thing. Dad would lay the table - he seemed to be very attached to a nicely laid table. He went in for proper cloths, linen napkins, all that kind of thing. Mum cooked, and we went between them, fetching things Dad wanted, getting under Mum's feet mostly. But as you grow, you notice more. You take in the details of how gravy's made, how to know when meat is cooked, how long to boil vegetables for by a kind of osmosis. I don't recall making anything worth eating in my domestic science classes (dear God, did they really call it domestic science? they did.), well not much beyond cake at any rate. Yep, I mastered cake somehow. But I learnt to cook well enough in Mum's kitchen to have earned a living at it a couple of times. They just loved food, and bought/grew good ingrediants. Huge kitchen garden that Jo and I would raid for peas from the pod, tiny strawberries - and the gardener (there were a series of them) would report us for nicking his produce!
