Diana Henry's feature in the Sunday Telegraph on chicken soup soothed the nerves, whetted the appetite and let forth a string of memories. More than ever, I acknowledge and appreciate the evocative nature of reminiscences triggered by thoughts of food. Later I will describe how a particular taste can carry me straight back to my childhood, when summers were sunnier and autumn days were written about in lyrical poetry. Ah, those were the days, right?
Earlier in the day we had all been talking about how, over 50 years ago, Mum made lunch of rabbit stew for "old Mr Barker", as he was universally known, our neighbour and my surrogate grandfather, tricking him into eating it by telling him it was chicken and her admission that all the highly prized, well hung game birds that she was given by her eccentric employer, Sir John, went straight into a deep, deep hole in the back garden. There may be a modish trend for eating grubs now, but back then maggots were definitely not on the menu.
My brother and I astonished ourselves with our ability to recall being pushed around the garden in Mr Barker's wheelbarrow and the long summer holidays, spent on Sir John's estate, while Mum was working. A landlocked version of Swallows and Amazons, or so hindsight would have us believe.
My mum's chicken soup came out of a tin; usually Heinz, never Campbell's and occasionally Baxters, although the latter was generally regarded as an extravagant indulgence. To this day, she has never bought a carton of Covent Garden Soup, her Yorkshire sensibilities unable to equate the higher price with, to her mind, the cheaper packaging of a cardboard box.
Thick, bland and bolstered by small, unusually shaped shreds of indeterminate poultry, these tinned soups were invariably thinned down with milk to eke them out and boiled into submission.
Not every bowl of chicken soup is a well of comfort.
Mum's cooking was solid, predictable and traditional, although not the traditions so beautifully written about by the likes of Jane Grigson. Tradition meant simply what had gone before and, it has to be said, it was never very good. She was never going to poison us, but the nourishment only went as far as meeting our basic bodily needs. My mother is not an emotional or demonstrative woman and nowhere was this more obvious than in her food.
And now she lies in a hospice, with the days slipping ever more quickly by and so I feel guilty and somewhat traitorous in writing this, particularly as she prided herself on her cooking skills and my father, bless him, ranks her above all others. She is his very own domestic goddess.
With a few truly surprising exceptions, my abiding memories are of undercooked pastry, tough, pale and often sitting soggily beneath some dubious pie filling and overcooked meat, grilled pork chops, served without any form of lubrication to help them down.
Perhaps the most extraordinary meal she ever produced was more like an abstract art installation, "Absence of Taste"; a monochrome meal of poached cod, mashed potato, cauliflower and white, not cheese, sauce served up on a white plate and with no side order of irony.
Would she have been more creative if my father's tastes had been less restrictive. Who knows, they have been married for almost 60 years and we are not going to find out now. We talk much these days about the lack of culinary skills in current generations and look back with nostalgia to a golden age when every woman could whip up a meal from scrag end of mutton and a few potatoes. Believe me, it wasn't so, the reason my father thinks so highly of my mother's talents in the kitchen is because his own mother's cooking bordered on criminal.
My (almost) lifelong interest in food has developed as a reaction to my parents' dining table. A prescient friend bought me Cordon Bleu Cookery, by Rosemary Hume and Muriel Downes for my 18th birthday. The first cookbook I owned and one which I still use to this day, always thinking of my school friend Margaret as I leaf through the yellowing pages. Food fashions and trends come and go, but classics and basics remain and I faithfully use Rosemary and Muriel's recipes for savarin and profiteroles. Here is their choux pastry.......
Which leads me back to my mother and a couple of examples which either identify her as being ahead of her time or show up some contemporary chefs, who are keen to trumpet the novelty of their thinking, as being, perhaps less innovative than they might think.
Whenever I go blackberry picking, I am transported back to Yorkshire, to country lanes and high, thick hedges, sticky purple fingers and scratched legs. Family outings in hot, unreliable cars to gather blackberries in Tupperware tubs, with the lids then tightly sealed to encourage any wildlife to crawl to the top and be discarded from the underside of the lid when we got home.
It's now called foraging, but dragged out on a Sunday, away from friends, books and the new top forty on the radio, it was once known as torture.
We didn't have a freezer in those days, so with enough put aside for a couple of blackberry and apple pies, the rest of our harvest had to be preserved.
Inevitably there were jars of jelly and I cannot eat bramble jelly now without the image of thickly sliced bread speared on a toasting fork before an open fire, the slightly charred edges speckling the butter and the jelly beginning to melt slightly and drip down my hand.
But there were also bottles of homemade blackberry vinegar, a historic throwback that no-one else we knew ever seemed to make and certainly not something you'd find sitting next to the ketchup, malt vinegar, Colman's mustard and salad cream in the supermarket.
This was the one thing that I recall Dad enjoying that was, in any way, out of the ordinary. What he really loved, but may not have eaten in years, was thick slices of bacon, served with a fried banana and drizzled, not a word he would have chosen, with blackberry vinegar. He had a point, the combination of the salty bacon and sweet banana with the vinegar deglazing the pan is hard to beat. Try it, you may be pleasantly surprised.
As Mum slowly slips away from us and Dad is clocking up the years, he is 88, I know that soon will no longer be able to share these memories with them, but will only be able to carry them around within ourselves. There are photos, of course, of the people we cherish now, the images of them throughout the childhood we have left behind and of their younger selves, whom we never knew. But photos are only one dimensional and are only brought out on anniversaries and at family gatherings.
And so it is that I have to thank Heston Blumenthal for the ubiquity of the thrice cooked chip, whose appearance on a menu will instantly evoke images of a kitchen in Yorkshire with steamed up windows and the sound of a sizzling chip pan.
Peeled potatoes, they absolutely had to be peeled, no skin on wedges here, cut into chunky chips and bathed three times in varying degrees of hot beef dripping were the norm in my mother's kitchen over 40 years ago and if she could get up now and cook you a plate of chips, that's exactly how she would do it ..... the proper way, her way and therefore, the only way. If she were to live til the harvest of the first new potatoes of the year however, there would be no chips... the right type of potato was essential and she had no truck with doing anything other than serving her new potatoes with butter and mint.
So, Mum, as your days shorten, let me tell you that I love you and that your threat to return and haunt us is no idle threat, you will live on in every gastropub in the land.
Mum died peacefully in the hospice on 17th February 2017, having waited to see the first snowdrops of the year in bloom.
© Netherton Foundry Shropshire 2017
A lovely little reminiscence, very evocative.
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