From Mum, with love

Cooking a recipe handed down through the generations doesn’t just fill your tummy. it feeds the soul, as Diana henry discovers

Much-treasured recipes passed down through the generations

The house smells of chicken stock, a smell so familiar I always detect chopped parsley at the same time, even when it’s not present. I walk to the hob to inhale a deeper draught but find only a small saucepan containing a chicken leg and some wings. my mother used to make huge pots of chicken soup and the sight of this, a shrunken version, is painful. my dad is in hospital and my mum is making this just for him. my family aren’t given to displays of affec- tion (we’re Northern Irish – tough and no-nonsense) but in this pan I see a care that speaks more loudly than any declaration of love.

This prompts me, over the next few days, to go through my mum’s recipe collections. The notebooks written in her hand and stuffed with pages torn out of magazines interest me most. many are scribbled on, most are stained; I can see splatters I made myself( with chocolate-cake batter ), and the place where she changed the amount of sour cream in the beef stroganoff. some are written on the back of envelopes, some on pages from a spiral jotter. Together with worn books of recipes published by charities and the Women’s Institute, these are the books from which I first learnt to cook. my g ra nny ’s recipe for wheaten bread, ca ref ully stuck into one book, is t he only thing I ever saw her commit to paper. I watched my grandmother carefully write it, as if she was doing calligraphy. loved and used recipes, handwritten or ripped from soup cans, are evidence of attention and care.

Now that our lives are digital( a quick Google delivers more recipes for chicken soup than you could cook in a lifetime ), what happens to the handwritten recipe, or the one surreptitiously torn from a magazine in the dentist’s waiting room? When I asked this question on Twitter, more than 700 people got in touch, many saying that their handwritten collection – whether kept in notebooks, files or tins – was the possession they would save in a fire.

Frances( Franky)sh an ah an, a copywriter living in Bristol, doesn’t just have recipes from her mother and grandmother but menus too, written in the back of her mum’s notebook, of all the dinner parties she gave. ‘There are recipes I still use but the book is a record of a time as well. my mum’s dinner parties seemed unspeakably exotic. I remember lying on the landing wrapped in my duvet listening to them. many of these represent the period before my parents divorced so a re a record of a special time ,’ Franky explains. ‘I can also see how my mum’s cooking changed as my parents became better off – t he vegetable stews gave way to chicken. But the notebook itself is as important as what the words communicate. It was always in the kitchen. A time and a person are in these pages.’ Fra nky’s mother, Pippa, now in her early 60s, is bemused that her old recipe book is so treasured. held together with s el lot ape, it was going to be thrown out after she transferred the recipes to a new notebook, but Franky

If a recipe is written in the hand of a loved one it’s more precious