‘These are the food memories that make me’
THIS WEEK’S COLUMNIST Novelist Jo Thomas
‘They were the best mussels I had ever eaten’
A Findus Crispy Pancake, a golden turkey, melon drenched in port – it’s funny how food memories can transport us to a time and place. For good or for bad, one bite can take us back to a particular moment, bringing with it everything we felt at that time.
Findus pancakes were part of my childhood. With both parents at work, this was food we could forage from the freezer on our own. Christmas dinners were always special, though, with a big turkey. Even when my dad was in the later stages of motor neurone disease, I remember the joy of being together around the Christmas table. Apart from the year my mother got fancy and drenched a perfectly good, much-anticipated melon in port, making it inedible. Oh, the frustration! The stolen joy of that simple, sweet melon.
On holidays, it’s always the meals you remember. The sweet, peppery mussels we ate at a roadside truck in Brittany.
The owner wore blue socks under his brown sandals, his mother sat with a bowl on her lap, in slippers, scrubbing the mussels. We sat under a cheap tarpaulin with a pitcher of rosé. They were the best mussels I have ever eaten.
I remember so well the last birthday I shared with my dad, then in the advanced stages of his disease. In the south of France we dined and drank in a beach restaurant – him with a few sips of soupe de poissons and a good red wine, fed by my mother as a thunderstorm raged around us. The sides of the restaurant awning slapped in the wind and rain; it was fabulous.
Later, it was fish fingers that were the big turning point in my life – the reason I decided to finish fertility treatment. Eating a fish finger took me back to my childhood, to bath times and gathering around the television on a Saturday evening. It was then that I realised I didn’t need to give birth, I just wanted to be a mum. I started down the path of adoption to create the family we are today.
Food is like a photo album in my mind. I remember the night
I came up with the idea for my first published book, The Oyster Catcher, as clearly as if I was there now. I was sitting looking out over Galway Bay, after some rain. The moon shone across the water and I sat in front of a large plate of oysters. I was hungry for more – and for the stories the oysters held, the history of the place, the community and culture. And so another turning point in my life was imprinted in my mind by food. Like a new chapter, a new journey had begun.