Daisy Goodwin
The real story behind my mother’s country kitchen
This Christmas we will be having spiced beef, a magnificent dish that was first cooked for me by my mother, Jocasta Innes, when she was writing The Country Kitchen in the
Seventies.
In these times, when Michelin star chefs go foraging, and hot smoking has become the new barbecuing, it’s astonishing to realise that this book – which is a cornucopia of cutting edge information on everything from how to make a mutton ham to smoking a turkey or whipping up a damson cheese – is 40 years old.
It has just been republished in a sumptuous new edition by Argonaut books, and rereading it has been a clove-studded trip into my childhood.
They say that the children of lovers are orphans, but the children of cookery writers are a domestic focus group who are elected to taste everything, no matter how unappealing, and give a forensic analysis of their impressions.
“Do you think it would taste better,” my mother would say as we chewed her home-made Argentine chorizo sausages, “with more paprika? Or would you add a dash of cumin?”
As the making of sausages was not a quick process, by the time the finished articles appeared my siblings and I were ravenous and just grateful to be fed. My mother’s passion for authenticity in all things meant that there was no beans on toast option; we all ate whatever she had been working on that day.
My mother was not living in the country when she wrote
The Country Kitchen, but in a chilly terraced house in Swanage. But from the windows of 36 Priest’s Road she could see the Purbeck
Hills, and that was where she picked the gorse and elder flowers, the blackberries and sloes that formed the basis of her experiments in winemaking. The first hangover I can remember came from the intemperate consumption of her parsnip wine. It was so smooth and sweet that it didn’t taste like alcohol at all. But the after-effects were memorable.
I remember the writing of The
Country Kitchen as being fraught with hazard; although my mother was unruffled by germs in daily life, she took the threat of botulism very seriously and her kitchen was permanently canopied in steam as she sterilised her preserving jars with evangelical fervour.
There was the trip to the chemist to buy saltpetre (also known as gunpowder), which was a crucial ingredient in the dish spiced beef. The recipe came from Dorothy Hartley’s
Great Food In England, but the saltpetre of the Seventies was clearly not as strong as its Victorian equivalent; when we lifted the lid of the crock in which the meat was maturing, we found it was crawling with maggots. Luckily, she discovered that ascorbic acid, or vitamin C, did the same job, and that is what I will be using this Christmas.
My mother’s country kitchen was more Thomas Hardy than Laura Ashley. Her own mother had at one point kept a pig farm, so she knew the squealing reality behind the brawn and the head cheese.
But she was more of a forager than a smallholder. She never kept chickens, but I remember her spending hours agonising over the mushrooms she had picked, comparing them to the illustrations in the book of fungi. Only the puffballs seemed completely safe.
But though my mother was not self-sufficient food wise, she did understand the reality of subsistence living. Her first book had been The Pauper’s Cookbook.
My two younger sisters regularly went to school wearing authentically embroidered Dorset yeoman’s smocks – how my mother found the time and the patience to embroider like a Victorian peasant, as well as churn her own butter, I have no idea.
One particularly cash-strapped Christmas, she made us all quilted waistcoats out of her old clothes, every stitch tiny and delicate. My teenage self didn’t appreciate the effort, but now I think of those stitches and weep.
The book is much more than an exercise in nostalgia. My mother, ahead of her time as always, understood that the cure to the malaise of modern life was to make things. Today, book shops are full of hipster tales of self-discovery through wood turning or cheese making, but Mum had long ago discovered that the secret to happiness was getting your hands dirty.
This is not a book cobbled together by home economists to go with some sexy photographs. The Country Kitchen is the product of trial, error and a kind of practical scholarship that informed everything my mother did.
She tried everything from cheese to cider making, brining to pickling, not out of some Luddite belief in the authenticity of the rural past, but to find out if things tasted better and, crucially, could be made more economically than buying them in the shop. Wine may be cheaper now (or maybe not, postbrexit) but there is nothing more intoxicating than drinking something you have brewed yourself. The recipes in the book are time consuming, as my mother didn’t believe in shortcuts, but there is definitely a favourable ratio of effort expended to satisfaction achieved. Mum would have scoffed at the idea of cooking as “meditative practice”, but I know that at times of stress, her kitchen was her place of refuge.
At the time she was writing the book, her marriage to my stepfather was breaking down and she was under constant financial pressure, but nothing would interrupt the quest to make the perfect soft cheese or to build a foolproof cold-smoker. Of course, there were moments when, as a teenager, I resented the focus that she gave to sausage stuffing or sloe gin; my mother always seemed to be in the middle of something messy, and much more interested in brining than the vicissitudes of my 15-year-old heart.
My time with her was precious because when she had left my father when I was five, he had won the custody battle, so I wanted her, not the home brew. But while I hope I have been a more attentive mother to my two daughters, I don’t think I will hand on to them a more valuable lesson than finding joy through making things.
My mother died five years ago. After the funeral, I gathered up all the things that reminded me of her, the letters in her beautiful italic handwriting, a watercolour she did of me as a little girl, a ruffled skirt that she made to dance the flamenco in.
It didn’t seem enough for such a vivid and passionate life, but then I realised how lucky I was to have all the books that she had spent my childhood writing, hunched over a typewriter, cigarette in one hand, glass of wine in another, and I only have to open one to to savour her inimitable presence. Every time I make one of her recipes, I can hear her saying: “But how does it taste?”