Aunty’s recipe book
Christine McCherry recalls the magical tastes and aromas of a vanished time
‘Sometimes you do not realise the value of a moment until it becomes a memory’
I’ve found it. Buried beneath a pile of out-of-date magazines and a calendar from 1987. It is the size of a small diary, bound in a black leather cover. Inside, the lined pages are brown with age. There is an identical book, but thinner, all tied together with a piece of knicker elastic to stop it falling apart. These two slim volumes, full of old recipes dating back to the Twenties, are all I have to remind me of my Aunty Alice. She died in 1984, aged 86. Aunty Alice had been a school cook all her working life. The recipes are in her handwriting, written with an old ink pen. They are mainly lists of ingredients, presumably because Aunty knew oven temperatures and timings off by heart. They tell how to make puff pastry, Madeira cakes, Chorley cakes, Eccles cakes, Victoria sponges and rich fruit cakes. How to ice cakes for a wedding or for Christmas. You can see when the Second World War was on, because there is a section of recipes entitled War Buns, which included rice buns, war scones, coconut buns, oatmeal biscuits and halfpenny buns. Where she found the butter from for the recipes is a mystery to me, but perhaps, as the school cook, she got to use the ration allowances of the children she had to feed. I’m reminded of the delicious tastes and tantalising aromas that used to come out of Aunty Alice’s kitchen. She cooked and baked by means of an old grey and white enamel oven, which stood on four legs in her tiny kitchen. There was a Belfast sink in the corner and a dolly tub and wringer in the wash-house in the garden. Aunty Alice was a well-built woman with strong hands and arms, no doubt helped by a lifetime of kneading dough and mixing cakes by hand. Her hair was tightly permed and steely grey. She didn’t say a lot but, when she did you sat up and took notice. Aunty appeared quite stern and strict but she always had a twinkle in her eye. When she was baking, she wore a crisp, clean, white cotton pinafore that had been made for her by her sister Elizabeth, who was an accomplished seamstress. Neither sister had ever married. They lived together in a small terraced house with a tiny front garden. The house was kept immaculate. Someone once said, “Sometimes you do not realise the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.” I can remember walking home from from midnight mass and calling into their house to be offered freshly baked warm mince pies (made with her own mince recipe) and Christmas cake that had been lovingly fed for weeks with Napoleon brandy. That and a small glass of sherry is one of my most enduring memories of Christmas past. I wish I had asked Aunty Alice how to make flaky pastry, how she got her soufflés to rise and how she made her Victoria sponge so light it would float off the plate. I wish so many things. I wish I was half the cook she was, I wish I had told her how much she meant to me and most of all I wish I could taste, just one more time, those warm mince pies with lashings of cream and a glass of sherry, in front of a roaring coal fire at Christmas. Out of those torn, faded pages of her recipe book poured all those, almost forgotten, memories. Memories are all you have left when the people you love are gone forever from your life.