One family’s RECIPE for love
Smudged with chocolate and wine, the little box in Veronica’s kitchen doesn’t just hold recipes — it’s full of four generations of wisdom and memories
FOR more than 30 years, a little yellow box sat on a shelf in my parents’ kitchen. Now in my home, it may be small, but for me it has huge significance, for it contains decades of family history told through the recipes squirrelled away inside. When I open it, memories come tumbling out — of food eaten, meals shared and the people associated with them.
It’s filled with yellowing index cards, flecked with smudges of chocolate, butter and red wine, the writing in various degrees of legibility, finishing with the recipes I typed out myself when I was trying to hone my secretarial skills as a teenager. There’s the neat, navyblue ink of my grandmother, the slanting slope of my dad, my mother’s looping scrawl . . . when I read their words I can hear their voices, and when I recreate their recipes, it’s as though they’re at the table with me.
For some of them are long gone now, but these mementos bring their memory back far more sharply than any photograph can.
The oldest recipe goes back to my great-grandmother, Annie, who had a butcher’s shop and four strapping boys who helped her run it after she was widowed in the early 1920s.
It must have been a full-time job just to keep them fed, even if she did have access to endless sausages.
On high days and holidays, she made Herfordshire Dough Cake: a solid loaf made from dried fruit soaked in tea. I never knew her, but she lives on in her recipe.
We still have the cake now, thickly sliced and buttered, and I think of my late great-grandmother trying to run a business and rule her handsome sons with a rod of iron.
My granny, Joan, married the third son. Her recipes provide the post-war basics that should be part of everyone’s repertoire: flapjacks, scones and apple crumble — good old stodge.
I remember her kitchen: the tiny sink with the gas boiler that gave a terrifying ‘wump’ every time the hot water was turned on. And the kitchen cabinet with the flip-down Formica table, pale blue with black flowers, and the frosted sliding doors that always stuck. Inside was a big jar of sugar with a worrying black vanilla pod inside — I thought it was some kind of insect.
I still make her flapjacks today and every time I eat them, I think of her: a gentle nurse who fell in love with a policeman, who died too young from a brain tumour when I was four.
My mother — her daughter, Jennifer — must have taken ownership of the recipe box before Joan died.
For in the early 1960s, the recipes become more daring. My parents got married in Cyprus when my father, Miles, was posted there as an army captain. Whisked to Limassol, my mother extended her culinary repertoire by taking advantage of the local cuisine.
The cards from that era reveal how to deal with mystifying vegetables such as aubergines and an elaborate menu plan for a Greek mezze, as well as a recipe for something called a Kyrenia lunch — a melange of mince and spices and peppers that seems very contemporary now, but when she cooked it for us as children it seemed very exotic.
Yet all of these dishes would have been out of most people’s experience here in those days. My parents brought copious notes when they returned in 1963 so they could bring a little bit of Cyprus home with them once their posting had ended.
AFEW years later, my brother and I had arrived, and the influence of my paternal Irish grandmother, Edre, becomes apparent in the little box.
Paul and I would be dispatched across the Irish Sea for the summer holidays, and Edre would take a carload of cousins down to the wild coast of Kerry for a fortnight.
There, we survived on her homemade soda bread, sweet and cakey, with dollops of homemade raspberry jam.
She would bring along great tins of cakes and biscuits — melting moments, scrumptious squares and date slices to lug to the beach for sustenance.
She wrote out the recipes so I could bring them home with me. Bring her home with me.
It was from Edre I learned the power of food and family and friendship, how to bring everyone together with something as simple as yesterday’s leftover chicken and rice in a big warming soup, shoved into a Thermos flask and drunk on a picnic rug on a windswept beach. She died in 1988, but I still think of her when I cook all those recipes. In 1972, my father was posted to the US, and so we went to live in Washington DC.
My brother and I, aged six and nine, were incredibly excited. This was a whole new world. We had an enormous refrigerator that made ice — a huge contrast to the wibbly-wobbly ice-cube tray that we slid into the freezer compartment barely big enough for a pack of frozen peas and a tub of soft-scoop ice cream back home. And it was here we tasted our first Big Macs — a complete unknown in Europe at the time — and we would boast to friends back home of this new delicacy. Pizza was also a revelation —the endless strands of stringy mozzarella filled us with glee.
We began to gather new culinary experiences: freshly picked cornon-the-cob cooked on the barbecue, steaks the size of a 33rpm record, candied yams (no, no, no!).
We began to collect new recipes feverishly. Blueberry cheesecake. Mexican casserole: a curious dish made with chicken, mushroom soup and grated cheese with crushed Doritos on top. And the piece de resistance that became a family favourite: chocolate chip cake.
Despite all the glamour and
excitement of this new world, we experienced moments of homesickness.
Another family reached out and invited us in. Mrs Thompson provided spreads of such magnificence we still talk about them now, and chocolate chip cake was her signature dish, made with sour cream and dark chocolate chips in a bundt tin, which seemed impossibly elaborate.
I demanded the recipe, and I have lost count of how many times I made this cake as a weekend treat for us all. I didn’t need the recipe card in the end. I can recite it in my sleep.
I’ve since tried to make it back home and it doesn’t quite work — perhaps the cup sizes are different, or the flour not right. I’m determined one day to play with the ingredients and restore it to its former glory.
We left America after five wonderful years and settled into what became the family home in Berkshire, England. It was the late 1970s, and dinner parties were all the rage.
I would hover by my mother as she made poulet au vin and hazelnut gateau, truite Normande and meringue pyramid pudding, longing to be old enough to sit at the table with them but having to be content with handing around peanuts, then listening to laughter drift up the stairs. If I was lucky, there would be some leftovers.
By the time I was 15, I was allowed to hold my own dinner parties. I plundered the recipe box for inspiration and added my own inventions.
MY friends would arrive, dropped off by their parents and dressed up to the nines, clutching bottles of Paul Masson wine (these empty bottles graced every kitchen in the 1970s, filled with rice, pasta and kidney beans).
Somehow our decadent behaviour was overlooked because the table had been properly laid: a folded napkin and a candlestick covers up many sins!
I’d make Hungarian goulash and Marie Biscuit chocolate pudding — a heart-stopping concoction of chocolatey, creamy stickiness.
The record player was turned up to ten and everyone stubbed out their cigarettes on their plate. Nowadays, the music would be streamed wirelessly, no one would smoke and the pudding would be vilified for being far too calorific . . .
Later, I kept the box alive with my recipes when I started my own family: I got married in 1989 and soon had three growing boys of my own to feed.
There are endless favourites: my signature cassoulet, which has evolved from a scientific trial of every recipe I can find for it.
The Coca-Cola cake I make for every child’s birthday, as it’s the easiest and most forgiving cake recipe I’ve ever made — enhanced by the addition of a can of cola instead of sugar, and it never fails, not even when you are desperately trying to organise a party for 20 small boys.
The glorious lemon tart which is perfect for picnics. The tarte tatin which always looks a mess, but which is a melting pile of butterycaramelised apple heaven.
Cooking these favourites is my way of holding my family together, whatever the occasion.
But I still go back to the recipes of my grandmothers. For my father’s 80th birthday party, I ordered a side of smoked salmon from the village where he’d spent his childhood summers. There was only one thing to eat it with: my grandmother’s soda bread, with cold butter, a squeeze of lemon and a sprinkling of black pepper.
HE had all his family around him as we devoured this simple reminder of our heritage, his childhood; little did we know that this would be the last time we were all together before he passed away.
And now as my older sons, Jake, 27, and Sam, 22, go out in the world and are catering for themselves they phone me up. How do you make crab linguine? How do you get that crispy topping on your fish pie? How much wine do I put into a beef bourguignon?
I’m proud they want to know, that they remember what I have made for them, that they want to recreate those meals for their friends.
So I’m writing all the recipes they remember on to the remaining few cards in the box, ready to pass on for the next generation.
The box is an heirloom, but is more precious than diamonds — for it is food that holds us all together. Recipes remind us who we are and what we all mean to each other.
The box on my shelf contains so much more than recipe cards: it contains wisdom, and glamour, and hospitality, and security, and history. But most of all, it contains love.