Add A Pinch Of Nostalgia

Sharon Stephenson finds more than recipes in the tattered pages of her mother’s old cookbook

The darkness came for my mother while she was making a cup of tea. She forgot who she was, what she was doing and ended up scalding the thin, age-spotted skin on her left hand. Dementia, said the doctor who didn’t look old enough to have a licence. Dementia, repeated the Australian specialist in an accent so nasal it could have curdled milk.

There was a fall, then another. Someone in the food chain of medical professionals charged with their care decided neither of my parents were capable of looking after themselves. So, on a hot Queensland day, they were shunted from their tidy, two-bedroom retirement unit into a space smaller than my kitchen, where they weren’t even allowed to boil a kettle.

They had just days to sell their former home and wedge some furniture into an aged care shoebox that no one would describe as pleasant, not even the architect’s mother.

In the shedding of possessions, things that should have been saved weren’t. And things that should have gone to their five children ended up in other hands.

We’re not a family that traffics in heirlooms — there’s no priceless furniture or jewellery or artwork in my backstory. And the few things of sentimental value — the gold ring Dad’s colleagues gave him when he left India decades ago, some sandalwood figurines that had long given up their musky scent — were already mine.

The only thing I got from the move was Mum’s old cookbook, which my sister saved for me. My sister could never be described as a foodie: her only interest in food is as fuel and cookbooks are about as important to her as stamp collecting.

So she handed over Mum’s cookbook, her eyes a particular shade of boredom.

It had been years since I’d seen the tatty A4 exercise book that started life as my brother’s third form home economics workbook. About five recipes in (sausage rolls, chocolate cake and a lettuce salad featuring frozen mixed veges) he clearly lost interest, so Mum claimed the book as her own, scribbling recipes in her cursive script. It became the Bible of a woman who had to feed seven mouths on a limited budget for a very long time.

I brought the book back to New Zealand and then forgot all about it. I was also moving house, from inner-city Wellington to a 6ha lifestyle block an hour up the road. There was a renovation to do, a garden to tame and a major life adjustment to be made.

But a few months ago, when the tradies packed up and the delivery trucks that sheared branches off the blossom trees finally disappeared, I found the book, its pages tattooed with butter and egg yolk.

In a flash, I was back at my childhood dining table, a yellow Formica one we weren’t allowed to leave until we’d eaten all of Mum’s inedible macaroni cheese (even Cujo, our family dog, couldn’t be persuaded by the congealed lumps of pasta and cheese).

Most of the recipes are the stuff of practical, quick midweek dinners — devilled chicken, meatloaf and parsnip soup — but Mum was an immigrant and, like so many immigrants, there wasn’t much room for whimsy.

There are, however, some detours into the bizarre — chutney butter, which is probably as gag-worthy as it sounds and a recipe for tuna and jelly pie that should never have left the test kitchen. There’s an overcomplicated seafood mousse I’m certain my mother would have scribbled down in a fit of aspiration but never made, because raising five children and holding down a full-time teaching job didn’t leave much time or energy.

Next to that is a truly odd recipe for prawn-stuffed apples. As far as I’m aware, my mother has never made or eaten prawn-stuffed apples in her life.

There are also pockets of joy: a lemon meringue pie I’ve since made several times, grateful to find a home for the avalanche of citrus found on an old tree in the far reaches of our property. There’s a recipe for the perfect chocolate mousse I’m sure Mum found on the back on a cocoa packet, the cheese ball I made for a seventh form progressive dinner and a one-egg chocolate cake I once unsuccessfully entered into a local baking competition.

About 15 years ago I gave up eating meat, so I sail past recipes for chicken with mushroom cream sauce and instructions to “gently rub the flank with spices”.

But I linger at Mum’s notes, scribbled in the margins: add a dash of vinegar here, some lemon rind there. And then there are the unanswered questions: who was Grace and why are their multiple question marks next to her recipe for sugar biscuits? And what’s with the big X, underlined several times, next to steamed carrot pudding?

My mother may be lost to the gloaming in her head but she can still reach out to me through her recipes, those staples that saw her through a lifetime of meals. As the late American food writer M.F.K. Fisher said, “It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.”