You see, there is this oft-mistaken theory that there’s no cooking like home cooking and that your mothers cooking cannot be beat, not even by Gordon Ramsey.
I say oft-mistaken for it would be a grievous mistake to judge my mothers cooking alongside Gordon Ramseys cooking, or anyone elses cooking for that case for my mothers cooking was without exception, exceptional.
Exceptional in that it had no taste, no texture and often no colour and when it did have colour it was generally black having been cremated in the oven.
It was probably the ovens fault, I will grant her that one respite, for the oven was a second hand one that my father had bought second hand from a second hand domestic appliance shop in a poor part of the city and when he got it home he realised that not only was it second hand but it was useless as an oven too for it had only two settings for the gas – on full blast or off – which was probably why its previous owners had decided to get rid.
So my mother soldiered on with an oven that could only cook at 300 degree centigrade, or not cook at all, and when she read a recipe that told her to “cook for twenty minutes at 180 degrees” she had to do a quick calculation in her head as to what that would convert to at 300 degrees, and more often than not, in fact every time for years, she got it wrong.
We grew used to eating black crisp food, its quite nice really and at least you don’t run in from school wondering whats for tea and whether you’re going to like it, not when its something thats been cremated until its black and crisp again.
Or salad, we’d have lots of salad during the summer because she couldn’t burn that although she did try from time to time, but our salad had a strange after taste, so much so that I took to smothering it with tomato sauce, the after taste still shone through though, afterwards.
She baked cakes too, flat, solidly burnt cakes, her favourite phrase when taking stuff from her oven was “its just touched” which meant that to her eyes it was only the edges that were burnt, the truth was that invariably it would all be blackened, but we ate it anyway.
She’d saw the flat cakes in half and spread strawberry jam in the middle as if to make it palatable, Ned and I would lick the jam off and throw the rest of the cake out of the window onto the lawn where seagulls would land from afar, break their beaks on our mothers cakes and then be unable to take off after feasting for five minutes, we had seagulls sitting around on our front lawn for several days at a time waiting for the cake to progress through their digestive system, be shit out onto the lawn, and enable them to fly away, never to return.
Her shopping budget was spent on my father, for every evening when he came in from work he insisted on steak for tea, steak that he would grill for himself for he did not trust our mother to grill it for him. His steak every night menu left a rather obvious imbalance in the household budget and so often Ned and I would run home from school to be greeted with jam and bread for our tea – later when our father came in and sat down to his 16oz rump steak we’d sit and watch him eat it, all the while drooling slightly and with our empty stomach growling, occasionally we’d mention to him that we had only had jam and bread for our tea and he’d stare accusingly at our mother who would fluster, slap us around the back of our heads with her pinny and exclaim “I don’t know where they get their lies from”.
But I will give credit where credit is due, my mother made a fantastic apple pie, I have never tasted an apple pie like the apple pie that she made, hot steaming apple pie with a ton of proper custard on it, its still my favourite food but alas no-one makes apple pie like my mother used to make and ultimately I am always disappointed now she is gone from these shores.
The secret was the real Bramley apples that she used inside the pie, huge great big apples that she bought from a secret location somewhere in Leeds market, the stall that boasted the biggest Bramley apples in the universe, she’d buy just the two and then stagger home with them, cutting each one up into chunks that a Biafran family could have lived on for several days, placing several of these huge chunks in a large pie dish she’d smother them with a couple of pounds of sugar and then lay a pastry lid over the lot – an hour at 300 degrees and you’d have a pie that could easily have been used in a medieval castle bombardment but after breaking through the lid you’d be faced with those huge chunks of steaming sugary apple – add a pint or so of custard and I was in childhood heaven, I could eat a whole apple pie all on my own and my food weakness is still the desert course, we had a sweet tooth in our family, as you may have gathered.
