I have just called my mother to ask her what we used to eat at Christmas.

"Did you ever make turkey?" I ask.

"I have never touched a turkey in my life," she says, her revulsion ringing over the line.

"OK," I say. "What did we eat, then?"

"Oh, all sorts of things."

"Like?"

"I used to make leg of lamb," she says.

The thought of my mother, tiny and beautiful, touching any piece of large meat is weird. She wears latex gloves, which she gets in gigantic boxes from a medical supply company, to chop onions. Those princess hands on great, lardy, goose-pimpled hunks of meat? I don't know. I simply can't imagine it.

Plus, I don't remember leg of lamb. I don't even like leg of lamb.

"Did I used to eat the lamb?" I demand.

"No. Of course not."

"Right, well. Good. What did I eat, then?"

"I used to make you all the things you loved. The two of you used to be really keen on that gnocchi for a while, remember? I used to put a layer of cheese in the middle. I made that for you, and once it was out of the oven I cut it into different shapes. Stars."

Gnocchi alla Romana, customised with a layer of melting parmesan, whittled into novelty holiday shapes. This rings a far-off bell. But I couldn't be sure of it. The strange thing is, ask me about any other food moment in my life and I can give you military detail.

Sixth birthday, tea: rectangular Quatre Quarts cake, iced with a pink base under a green butterfly. Wedding day, breakfast: toffee yoghurt eaten from the pot, a banana, Rescue Remedy, and a most special LA energy drink, made by my sister, from lemons and some sort of controversial powdered root. My mother offered me pistachio and chocolate macaroons, and almond croissants, but I was in no state.

I can give you hundreds of after-school suppers, and every cherished specific of my grandmother's cooking. I can give you scrambled egg with tinned crab, eaten at the kitchen table, and cheddar cheese and lettuce sandwiches on brown bread eaten in the garden on the grass. My mother pulling a tray of fat piroski, stuffed with bacon and thyme, out of the oven. My eldest sister, India, lining up bowls of multicoloured batter with which to make psychedelic pancakes on a Saturday morning; entertainment for her little sisters.

Because food to us was love. And we loved each other. But Christmas lunch? Any one Christmas lunch from my childhood? From 12 years in our steadfast red-brick, north London castle? I can't give you. I've disremembered.

"We did eat lunch, didn't we," I ask my mother, "on Christmas Day?"

"Yes," she says. "We had lunch on Christmas, and I also used to do supper on Christmas Eve."

"Did we stay up for that?"

"Of course."

"What did we eat?"

"I used to make different things for us" – she means the grown-ups – "but Amaryllis" – that's my other big sister – "used to insist I make macaroni with tomato sauce and bacon."

"And peas!" I interject. "And peas!"

I want to throw open my windows and shout it out for all December: "AND PEAS!"

Macaroni with tomato sauce and bacon and peas. I can see the stainless-steel pots on our stove, steam chugging up into the extractor. I can see the oven whirring with orange light. I can see the night outside the kitchen window and our table, our thick, wooden table, and the benches either side.

"The secret ingredient," India says to us much smaller two as we listen sagely, "in tomato sauce with bacon and peas is mayonnaise. One teaspoon of mayonnaise. THAT," she says, "is what makes it extra good."

"Will you remember to add it in?" we ask her anxiously.

Suddenly I can see it all. I see my mother in one of her silk high-necked dresses. I see her in her kitchen of our old house. Before divorce. Before estate agents. Before we all went in our different directions.

As December passed and Christmas approached, my mother used to make mince pies. Which are full of raisins, and therefore disgusting – fact. So for me she used to reserve the last four hollows of the pie pan. And into them she'd spoon, instead of mincemeat, a kind of frangipane, pears mixed with sweet almonds. She would place a pastry star on top, to mark mine out, or an A. An A: for Me.

And that was our Christmas tradition; the tradition that my mother made all our favourite things. Without fuss, seeming effortless. Pear pies for me, tomato sauce with bacon and peas for my sister. Baked gnocchi. Leg of lamb. Gratin dauphinois that smelled of bay. Onion tart with a shrewd layer of mustard underneath the slippery-slidey, glitzy onions. Two dishes of O'Hagan's sausages. Rum and almond butter.

One year Daddy walked in to the dining room with his arm on fire. At the end of his arm was a Christmas pudding, and in a line from the pudding to his elbow was a solid run of blue flame. It was fantastic.

With the wry 007 manner he often has, he patted the fire out with his other, unburning hand, and put the pudding down on the sideboard. In that moment it seemed that the whole world was dark, and we were alight, the only ones.

• Slaughterhouse Heart by Afsaneh Knight (Black Swan, £7.99) is available in paperback