Bites of the past

A trip down the tastebuds of my childhood years

My usual March diet has started a little earlier this year, prompted by the daffodils and the warmth of the sun through my kitchen windows. The field behind our house has heavily pregnant ewes in it for the next few weeks, until they are taken inside to lamb, and the bucolic hopefulness of it all makes me want to peel off woollen layers and gambol joyfully. Maybe not quite yet – still pretty chilly out there – but soon! The diet is not so much the losing of a few pounds (though, yes please) as the shedding of wintry feasting habits: deep glasses of red wine; slow-cooked stews and mash heavy with butter; Friday night curries; slabs of milk chocolate studded with hazelnuts. I’ve been cooking a little more adventurously with aubergines lately but nonetheless looking forward to more than root veg on the chopping board.

What do you remember from here?

In short, edible lovelies are on my mind. And as I’ve been on a somewhat memoir-ish track lately, it follows that I’ve been thinking about my early food memories. (Apparently, so have a lot of us, because of a resurgence of love for Bridget Jones.) For those of us who have lived through a few decades, the landscape of food has radically changed in Britain. We are far more gastronomically sophisticated than our ancestors were (my grandfather thought spaghetti was exotic, my mother could remember hearing about yoghurt for the first time when she was a teenager), not to mention conscious of lab-made additives and intensive farming – and praise be for that, though I do sometimes have jealous visions of my mother going around the supermarket gaily chucking into the trolley anything that looked colourful and fun with none of the angst that I have: Is it UPF? Got corn starch? Too much sugar? Enough protein? Is it organic, farm fresh, harvested according to the cycles of the moon?

Lovely 1970s cover for Crank’s book

I had an odd culinary start to life because my mother was diagnosed with MS in the mid-70s and, being an alternative type, looked for cures (now, thank goodness, there are drugs that control it brilliantly but back then there were none). She had a lot of acupuncture and when someone said to her that diet could help, gave up meat and fish for a few years. I think she stopped because it was so hard to be a veggie then. At restaurants you could only order the sides, and hosts would say things like: ‘If I cut up the bacon very small for the salad, wouldn’t that be alright?’ But we went to Crank’s restaurants and ate nut roasts for Sunday lunch, and, amazingly, had a large health food shop near us, in Blackheath. We’d swallow enormous vitamin pills and my treats were carob chocolate and Sesame Seed Snaps. I grew up actively preferring brown bread and brown rice.

Simultaneously – jarringly – this being the ’70s and ’80s, we also enjoyed the garishly colourful and easy-to-cook foods that paraded the supermarket shelves and came with earworm jingles in the commercial breaks. Frosties and Sugar Puffs for breakfast, butterscotch-flavoured Angel’s Delight, Smash potatoes made by the friendly Smash Martians (‘just add hot water!’), Fray Bentos tinned steak and ale pie with its flabby, pale pastry, tinned beans and sausages, frozen potato waffles, Findus Crispy Pancakes with cheese sauce that burned the roof of your mouth every time, bright orange fish fingers.

My mother cooked from scratch too, with varying degrees of success. I remember her meals as delicious if usually coming with burned bits, and she enjoyed a reputation amongst her friends as a good cook. I think this is because she cooked with complete love and generosity, so you couldn’t help fall upon it. But to our tastes now it would be awful – no fresh herbs, no olive oil (sunflower oil only), hardly any seasoning. And there was, of course, the rhythm of repeated meals each week. I did not love Corned Beef Hash night, but did love our takeaway from the local chippy – a night off cooking for mum every Thursday, because Minder was on. I can still remember the chippy’s server with the beehive she’d been backcombing since the ’60s, doubtless dense with the smell of the deep fat fryers. I always had chips – soggy from brown vinegar that stung – and a saveloy, with acid pink meat I could squish out of its tough red skin. (Mouth watering, eh?) Every Friday supper was fish, a nod to some sort of Christianity in the household: fish cakes made with tinned red salmon, kedgeree with burned crispy bits, fish pie with crisps and grated cheese instead of mash on the top. I remember the tremendous excitement in the household at new-fangled gadgetry that meant we’d eat using that thing for weeks until we finally bored of it: the toasted sandwich maker; a wok; the microwave.

We rarely ate out. It wasn’t a habit then as it is now, and my father resented paying for food that would be cheaper and better at home (to be fair to him, he was right). I can recall the raffia-covered wine bottles with candle wax dripping down them heavily in the local bistro, red-checked tablecloths and, probably, rude waiters. There was a time when waiters were hired for their sneering abilities and refusal to get you ketchup. My mother would take me to a café after school for Welsh Rabbit (Rarebit, but I didn’t realise for a long time), with lots of Worcester sauce. Pizza Express was always a winner, mine’s a thin Veneziana, please. We went to Wendy’s for a treat after we’d done the sweep of Mark One and Miss Selfridge at Lewisham shopping centre. Or there was a greasy spoon (for US readers: this is what you call a câfé not noted for its culinary pretensions) that served enormous sausage rolls and tea, so hot it took the skin off the roof of your mouth.

We went because it was next door to Our Price (mum killing me with embarrassment when she asked the spotty boy on the till for ‘the song that goes “doo-de-doo-dum-da-da-da-daaa”’– she did this for Jimmy Sommerville’s You Make Me Feel Mighty Real. I died). When McDonald’s opened down the road everyone in my school almost lost their mind with excitement, and there were rumours of families who would go every week. The extravagance! This was when you sat in the ‘restaurant’ itself – no takeaways, no drive-ins – with bright yellow leatherette banquettes and a thin foil ashtray at every table. The servers wore red and white paper hats, and I wanted one so much.

I remember my parents throwing dinner parties pretty much every week – I wonder if that is true? But they were young (only 24 and 27 when I was born), and had lots of friends, and throwing a dinner party wasn’t a pressurised event with tablescaping and Ottolenghi. They’d start late – a friend wrote recently and told me she’d once had to leave after the starter because it wasn’t served until 10pm – and go on until the small hours. If guests left before 1am, even on a week night, my parents thought the evening had failed. The wine came in boxes, with an in-built tap, and I would hand round the pre-dinner nibbles: Bombay Mix, salted peanuts, crisps. My mother’s usual menu was smoked mackerel pâté with toasted white bread triangles or Stilton soufflé to start, some kind of stew with mashed potatoes, finished with chocolate mousse (and a joint). She liked to use a recipe book called ‘Darling, You Shouldn’t Have Gone To So Much Trouble,’ because it had shortcuts involving tinned consommé or puddings made with shop-bought lemon curd.

I used to bake a lot with my mum, both of us pretending to present a cookery show, with me, maddeningly I’m sure, pre-measuring out all of the ingredients into small bowls – anyone else remember how they always did that? But I got good at cakes, biscuits and puddings. We had pudding every night: ice-cream and chocolate sauce; tinned peaches and Bird’s Eye custard; treacle tart and cream; bread-and-butter pudding; Viennetta’s Waltz; Betty’s Apple Strüdel. As I got older, I was encouraged to follow recipes for supper – I remember a successful turkey au gratin by Josceline Dimbleby. But it wasn’t really until I moved out and fancied entertaining in a grown-up way that I tried harder. For my first ever proper dinner party, when I was 19, I telephoned a godmother of mine who was a very good cook. How could I make a dressing for the salad? ‘I’ve got the most wonderful tip for you,’ she said, ‘but you have to go to Harrod’s Food Hall for it: Balsamic vinegar.’

That moment marked the start of a new chapter of food for me but we’ll save that for another time, perhaps. Hope you enjoyed this and please do like, share and subscribe if you did. Thank you.