Lunch for mum

AYOUNG woman stands outside a restaurant in London in the mid1980s noting down the set menu displayed in the window.

The restaurant is Clarkes, owned by Sue Clarke, an alumna of Chez Panisse, the Alice Waters restaurant in Berkeley, California.

The woman is Diana Henry. She is in her first job and rarely able to eat at the expensive restaurant, but due to her latenight note-taking feels “as if I ate there all the time”.

Diana Henry is now a famed food writer in the UK, where she writes newspaper and magazine columns, and books. She does not however, appear on television, and so is not so well known to us as some of her contemporaries.

Her latest, 11th, book is How To Eat a Peach, menus, stories and places (Hachette $39.99). “Composing menus is still my favourite bit of cooking,” she writes. “I don’t invite people round and then wonder what I’ll cook, I come up with a menu and then consider who would like to eat it.”

This book is not in the least bit frantic. The stories with the menus can be pages long, a book to savour slowly.

We’re told that the kitchens at the Topkapi Palace once housed nearly 1400 cooks. Separate kitchens specialised in milk puddings, halva, pickles and so on. All the cooks were sacked in 1923 and their spread perhaps accounts for the fact that still, Turkish cafes and shops tend to specialise.

On every trip to New York, “a city peopled by the rest of the world” she visits the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, where each apartment represents a different family and era and the story of how they lived and what they ate.

The menus have the theme of a time — the cusp of summer and autumn when raspberries, blackberries and figs are all available for a compote — a mood, such as soothing or too hot to cook — or an ingredient, such as olive oil or pumpkin, unobtainable when she was growing up in Northern Ireland and still seen “as some kind of enchanted ingredient”.

In menus on places — Mexico, France, Spain — what goes together is observed rather than strict adherence to ethnicity.

Hot, sour, salty, sweet is the sub-heading for a menu that includes dishes originating in Thailand, Korea and Indonesia. A French dessert of sweet pickled cherries “works brilliantly with lamb, yoghurt and goat cheese”, so rounds off a Turkish spread.

A British-Irish Sunday lunch is for her dad: “From my mother I learnt skills. From my father learnt to taste the world.”

Even though I am knocking at 70, this will be my first Mother’s Day without my own mother. I think the occasion calls for a memorial Sunday lunch, and it could be nothing other than a leg of lamb.

It was Mum’s piece de resistance, perhaps because she was so practised at it — if we were not out on a picnic and Dad was not at work, it always was baked leg of lamb for Sunday lunch.

I will skip the mint sauce my mother always served with the lamb, but will do the broad beans with lettuce, shallots and mint that Henry includes with the lamb in her San Francisco menu.

Nor will I serve it with boiled baby potatoes as the author suggests — to remember those New Zealand Sundays with Mum it has to be baked potatoes and pumpkin. This lamb is smothered in a paste of rosemary, thyme, parsley and garlic the day before it is to be cooked. Henry has been making it for 30 years — recommendation enough for me.

For Mum, practice also made the perfect pavlova. Left in the oven overnight as it cooled, it was crisp and crackly on the outside and gooey and chewy in the middle.

But says Henry: “Bitterness provides a good full stop after richness” and I am going to go with a dessert of blood orange and Aperol jellies from a menu centred on pasta.

Aperol was unknown to my mother, but starting the meal with an elderflower gin and tonic (back with the San Francisco menu) would not go against her grain at all.

So apologies to Diana and Mum for playing fast and loose with your menus, but I hope this arrangement does justice to my new bestie cookbook and my mother Eileen.