So, it is Mothering Sunday and, if you are a mother, I hope that you're reading this in bed while listening to the unmistakable sound of a male of the species downstairs, preparing your porridge. Do try to ignore the crashing, the swearing and the slight smell of burning. Alternatively, perhaps you're about to be taken out for a huge lunch, preferably somewhere old-fashioned, with a pudding trolley. On this trolley should be: one sherry trifle, one plate of brandy snaps, one lemon meringue pie, one swiss roll, one orange mousse (with decorative clementine segments), one large bowl of chocolate profiteroles and one hefty jug of Jersey cream. Remember that a good pouring of cream improves pretty much any pudding, including trifle. If your waiter does not say the words: "Would you like cream with that?" after every serving, he is in the wrong job.
In honour of Mothering Sunday, the editor has asked me to write about the passing of recipes between generations: someone told him about my recipe for cheese biscuits, which I got from my stepmother. Now, it's true that this is an exceptionally good recipe, and it's pleasing that, among my friends, these salty circles of parmesan are so loved. But I cannot honestly say that I make a habit of using family recipes. Yes, there are Granny Cooke's meat balls (to be served with a roast rather than tomato sauce), and my mother's recipe for Australian Christmas pudding (ice cream with boozy dried fruit in it). Also, my father's Libyan lamb. The truth is, however, that the family recipes I love most in the world have not been used, at least not by me, since my maternal grandmother, Elsie Goodson, died 20 years ago. They could be; my mother kept them all. But I'm not sure they would be the same if not made by her, in her kitchen, in her oven, with her strong hands.
My granny was an exceptional woman: beautiful, kind, funny. She was also the best cook. After my parents' divorce, the only thing my father admitted to missing was his mother-in-law, and her stupendous flaky pastry: so light, you could lift it off the steak below merely by blowing on it. I think she was a good cook because it was her greatest pleasure in life to hear people asking for seconds. This had a lot to do with my grandpa, to whom she was devoted; like me, he was greedy. But it was also, I think now, a source of wonder and happiness to her that, in adulthood, she could afford to shop, to indulge in small luxuries. She and her six brothers and sisters had a shipyard shop steward for a father. When the men were out on strike, things were tight: on one occasion, he chopped up the family's bow-backed dining chairs for firewood.
Anyway, whatever the reason, everything that came out of her kitchen was delicious. She made exquisite pies, had a way with fish (lemon sole, mostly, bought fresh from the dock) and, when you were in need of comfort food, she would slow-bake thick layers of ham, cheese and onion in the Aga until they were fit to melt. It was at tea time, though, that she came into her own. She served a proper high tea: cold meat and salad (soft English lettuce, so unfairly disparaged now), followed by a full selection of her baking. My God, her baking! When she came to stay, she travelled with two suitcases. The first contained her clothes; the second, half a dozen biscuit tins.
I got many things from my granny, an inability to leave the house without make-up on being one (indoors, she wore flat shoes and an overall; outdoors, she wore heels and lipstick at all times), a secret longing to have my hair set being another (she maintained a perfect helmet of blue-grey curls). But perhaps her most lasting legacy is my feeling – and it goes against all my most deeply held feminist principles – that a woman who can bake is closer to contentment, to happiness even, than many. I'm a terrible baker, which must be why I'm so weighed down by existential angst. Not, of course, that this has anything to do with why I've never made her chocolate biscuits, the secret ingredient of which was cornflakes that she had first set about with a rolling pin. That's to do with precious taste memories, with wanting to keep them alive and intact, untainted by burnt edges and my too-heavy hands.
