Food History

I promised Sandie, who reads these blogs to do one about food. I thought it would make sense to talk about my relationship with food since my childhood. I have no recollection of food in my first four years.  My fostered years. I do know I had a reputation for flinging food around and there’s a little feeling deep down that that was related to the joy of eating. I think I’ve always liked food in principle and I don’t think I’ve ever been difficult to feed.

My pet hates were probably not uncommon to most children and some were to do with things being poorly cooked. I wasn’t fond of root vegetables like Swede, parsnip and turnip and strong flavoured brassica like certain cabbages and cauliflower. The poor cooking related to the brassica, often over cooked so that the smell reached you way before you actually got to eat it. Grey, grey food. Things have changed in that I like Swede mashed with butter and pepper, I like small crunchy turnips and I like all brassica although my least favourite one cooked is white cabbage and I am ambivalent about sprouts. I adore cauliflower and spring cabbages particularly and one of my all time favourites is broccoli but I have no memory of eating that as a child. Another dislike as a child was string beans and that again was all about preparation. My mother never seemed to manage to get rid of the string and I found the choking effect most unpleasant.

I may have mentioned before that we had open house in Cheltenham throughout my senior school years. This meant that morris dancers, in what felt like millions, turned up, ate ad slept over…all over the floor. Mum had a speciality that she could roll out easily and extend for the masses and this was a version of macaroni cheese. Yes it had macaroni in and yes it had cheese but it also had onions, peppers, mushrooms and….a tin of tomatoes. To my mind there was so much not to like about this dish. I ate it but way too often to actually like it although my mum still maintains today that it was popular with the visitors. What did I dislike about it..apart from almost everything..well to my mind mushrooms don’t go with cheese sauce and the peppers weren’t cooked fully. Then the fact that it was pink did not fill me with joy. Peppers were another food that I was ambivalent about. I still don’t like them raw at all and pick them religiously out of salads etc but I adore them roasted and like them well cooked in ratatouille etc. The end result of mums speciality is I’ve arrived at a bizarre almost phobia where I like pasta in long thin lines or flat but will not choose  a pasta dish that is made of shapes. Oh and I don’t mind the little pasta things that look like rice. I’ve forgotten their name momentarily. I will eat those things but I would like to choose not to. In my head, ridiculous as it might seem, the shapes taste differently. But my worst phobia is parsnips. Nothing has ever made me like them and as I’ve matured I laugh at the number of people who try to tell me it’s because I haven’t tried them in a certain favourite way. WHY WOULD I? THEY’RE STILL PARSNIPS! Right glad we got that sorted.

Things at home weren’t all awful. I had favourites that still in my head are related to comfort food. Faggots, peas and mash, devilled kidneys, sausage and mash and roast chicken to name a few but may of those were only on the menu if we could afford them. Cheap cuts. Skirt was cheap…I think that was beaf stomach lining that was quite fate and you could roll it like a swiss roll stuffed with stuffing. It wasn’t bad actually. Mum was a master at making very little go very far and finding a bargain. Woolworths used to have a cheese and meat counter and on it was a tray of bacon ends and cheese ends ..you know the slightly gnarly bit near the rind. Mum would buy a bag of both and off we’d go. So one favourite dish was a bacon and cheesy mash bake. Cooked up bacon and onion that was stirred through mashed potatoes. Then the grated cheese was stirred through and then it was finished off in the oven. We loved it served up with baked beans.

On one occasion she’d heard that they were selling off tins of luncheon meat cheap. She brought a tray load part of which came on a trip. Mum had a biker boyfriend at the time called Dennis and he thought it would be fun for us to go round europe in a van for the school holidays. Mum had the van. It was my first experience of going abroad and was not to be repeated for many years. Some of that luncheon meat came with us because I remember mum invented a dish called Lake Orta. We were camping by the lake and mum used the luncheon meat, onions and tinned tomatoes to do her own take on spaghetti Bolognese. Probably a great insult to the Italians when you bear in mind that’s where we were. I wasn’t averse to a luncheon meat sandwich from time to time but it was never good cooked…remember spam fritters  at school. Yuck, yuck and yuck.

There were other memories from that trip like seeing mum naked vomiting in the lake..wine was involved. Little bare arsed to the moon…or mooning to the…no that doesn’t work. Funny really because she has never been a drinker. She was always a vomiter though as she was a migraine sufferer. That doesn’t seem to happen to her now thank God. But we also visited some friends of Dennis’ who were an Italian family and I remember water melon being part of that. A little boy, about 2 years old was part of the family, they cut him a huge slice, put a bib round him, placed the melon slice on the coffee table and he put his little arms behind his back and then munched the melon from one end to the other no hands or utensils were used and his little face was covered in juice, much to everyone’s hilarity.

Most of my memories were not of culinary delights but experiences I hadn’t liked. We never ate out. Couldn’t afford it. I think fish and chips were had from time to time but basically it was home catering on a shoe string. It included going to the skips at the back of Sainsburies to get out the bruised but often edible oranges. She also made pastry crumble in advance to make pastry more quickly when she needed it. You basically made the pastry mix, froze it and then when you needed pastry, got the crumbly stuff out in the morning and then rolled it out at night. She also made sweet crumble mix in the same way for the same reason. Sadly she didn’t always label it properly and we had the infamous chicken pie that had been made with an actual sweet crumble mix instead of a normal pastry one. She’d pulled out the wrong one. I can tell you that sweet pastry does not go with chicken pie.

There was a solicitor who had a bit of a crush on mum and he took us to lunch in a hotel somewhere. the place was very stuffy and some kind of soup was served up with huge silver spoons. I didn’t like the silver spoons. They made my teeth feel funny.

So things could only improve really and they did. Firstly my youngest uncle, John had married my aunt..a Breton and I had been to Brittany for Christmas when I was about fifteen. My memory of that was good fresh produce like goats cheese and french bread, rabbit pate made freshly on the premises and also the goose cooked for Christmas. At home, Fi and I had decided we could cook and that helped to. One of the great things about mum was that she did come out with this stock phrase, “If you can read, you can cook”. Not something she ever applied to herself but something my sister and I took to heart and it paid off.

After Fi left home at 16, mum had a little more disposable income and we used to go to a little Greek restaurant around the corner . I always ate Moussaka with rice and salad. it was lovely.

The Old Swan Band was also responsible for widening my horizons, first curries etc. It involved travelling and that sometimes meant London. A lot of the crowd from The Empress Of Russia Folk Club used to go down to the Sultan’s Armit or Armpit, as we used to call it, for kebabs etc. I seem to remember a hot dish of sliced lamb kebab meat and chunks of pita bread in a tomato sauce served up with yogurt and everyone ate humus and taramasalata.  This was always late at night. I simply can’t eat that late now.

But it was the early 80’s where I began to learn to cook. Firstly I had been an au-pair in France for a year. This cemented what I had seen in Brittany which was that fresh was best and you could make most things yourself. It helped that the gentleman of the family was a trained chef originally. Then, on return I had to turn some of those new thoughts into meals but back on a very limited budget. I turned out to be reasonably good at it and often better than my college friends who had rarely catered for themselves. That and living with or catering for vegetarians and vegans stretched me further. Yes even on the early 1980’s may of the people I already new were vegan or vegetarian. So it was necessary to develop tasty vegetarian recipes that were colourful and nice to eat. My cookery book collection started to grow too.

One recipe that stays with me from that time is a vegetarian lasagne. I like it more than a meat one if truth be known. You sweat spinach until it wilts (basically I just wash it and then pop it in a pan and heat it. You don’t need to add any more water) and then squeeze as much water out of it as you can and you make a ratatouille in the normal way. Delia’s standard stove top recipe works best for me. Then layer up you lasagne either one layer of spinach and then one layer of ratatouille or a couple of each depending on how deep you’re going. Cover with your cheese sauce and grated cheese over the top. Pop in the oven with enough time to cook the dried pasta through. Yummy. The other nice thing about this is the Ratatouille can be made in batches to be used as a vegetable accompaniment to chicken for instance, used as a pasta sauce in it’s own right or here in a lasagne. That way you don’t need to worry about making quite a lot of ti and it freezes well.

More food soon.