Iced mushroom soup

This is another "lost" recipe: just the title appears in my mother's recipe book. I have a vague recollection of her making it. I would imagine onions, mushrooms and cream would be the primary ingredients. Black speckles on beige in a white tureen with the ice cubes clinking.

Impressions of another

It is not often that I receive a written review of something I've cooked; the closest is usually in the form of a bread-and-butter letter. But a few years ago, family friends had supper and stayed over with me; and one of them was an Australian priest who wrote a diary for his parish magazine. The egocentric in me was delighted. I quote:

"The meal was good. With the drinks were little pieces of toast spread with a pungent, dark coloured, but tasty paste, there followed a cold orange soup and then a good salad with an eclectic collection of interesting food from a platter, including pickled herring in cream, prosciutto, ham, and more, all excellent. Ice cream and strawberries for dessert."

The "pungent, dark coloured, but tasty paste" might have been tapenade, I suppose. The cold orange soup was certainly Gazpacho (not, I must confess, homemade). I find it surprising that I would have served ice cream with strawberries.

Blyton breakfast

"Porridge and cream," said the woman. "And our own cured bacon and our own eggs. Our own honey and the bread I bake myself. Will that do? And coffee with cream?"

"I could hug you." said Julian, beaming at her.

***

A wonderful smell came creeping into the little dining-room, followed by the inn-woman carrying a large tray. On it was a steaming tureen of porridge, a bowl of golden syrup, a jug of very thick cream, and a dish of bacon and eggs, all piled high on crisp brown toast. Little mushrooms were on the same dish.

"It's like magic!" said Anne, staring. "Just the very things I longed for!"

***

"Toast, marmalade and butter to come, and the coffee and hot milk," said the woman, busily setting everything out. "And if you want any more bacon and eggs, just ring the bell."

"Too good to be true!" said Dick, looking at the table.

Granny’s strawberry ice cream

When Granny grew strawberries in the back garden, she kept them, as they grew, in jam jars. I never wondered why but discovered, many years later, that it was to protect them from snails. Unfortunately, the snails were undaunted by the jars and simply crawled in to feast.

Despite the snails, she managed every year to harvest some fruit. Strawberries and cream were served in white and pink china bowls that had belonged, I think, to her mother. I have inherited them.

Then there was homemade strawberry icecream, made either from her own strawberries or ones we had picked at Snitterfield. It consisted very simply of the fruit mashed up with milk and single cream, poured into a Perspex bowl and put into the freezer.

Taken out, it always needed a little while to defrost slightly; thus there was a thin layer of pink-purple slush before the hard slab underneath, which needed to be chopped out of the bowl with a knife.

More of a sorbet than an ice cream; so cold it hurt your teeth as they sank icily through. Occasionally we were allowed to pour cream on to it, which hardened and could be peeled off the ice cream to be eaten in its own right.

A slightly less austere version of this recipe would use double cream and stuff the milk.

Milk

It was a short story that haunted me when I was younger. By Joan Aiken, I think, its main character, a child, became obsessed about the moon: first she dreamed of it as a luxuriant, shining white garden but, in later dreams, it appeared to her as an empty, dusty desert. Falling ill, the girl went to hospital, where a man in a white coat showed her under a microscope her earlier visions of the moon. He then told her that what she was examining was a drop of milk: "Milk's full of moons", he said.

I had a curious experience of my own in hospital several years before I first read that story. I was there for the investigation of fits. During my stay, I was taken to a small room where the man and woman there offered me a choice between a moon and a star, to go at the end of my hospital bed. I chose a moon, which seemed to surprise the woman, who told me she thought that a star would be much better. But I stuck to my original request, buttons were pressed and the cardboard moon was produced from a machine. It was a silver crescent moon and before handing it to me, the woman used scissors to snip off the pointy ends, on the grounds that they were "sharp". When I repeated this story to my parents a number of years later, they told me that I had been full of medication and that it must have been a dream: a drug-induced dream indeed.

Another fairy tale is the tale of Lady Greensleeves - but the music is better known than the tale. It concerned two children who go on a quest to find their enchanted uncles. They are tempted on the way by a wicked equivalent of the child catcher who warns them of frogs in the water and offers them instead a goblet of milk "in which the rich cream floated". When they refuse, preferring on the advice of Lady Greensleeves, to drink water from the stream, their enemy angrily tips away the milk only to return later with an even more lavishly Blair goblet of wine.

But to return to the topic of milk. There is something drug-like about it. The way it can send babies into a stupor, followed by sleep. Perhaps it is the opaqueness. There is an episode of the Avengers in which the baddies introduce a mind-altering drug into milk bottles delivered by a fake milkman to various senior people in government. At a pivotal moment, Patrick Macnee's sidekick, the one whose name everyone forgets (NOT Diana Rigg and NOT Honor Blackman) is trapped in a glass churn of swirling cream desperately waiting to be rescued. When Steed finally saves her, she is caught like a fly in amber, in the middle of a gigantic block of butter.

I suppose, then, that milk is our first ever experience of food. Curiously flavourless while full of flavour: think of the difference between top of the milk and the rest of the bottle. Of the spoilsports who cheerfully tip the bottle on its end twice before opening it... Once there was gold top and silver top. One of my grandmothers, who I seem to recall buying sterilised milk, had the habit of not removing the silver top but instead piercing it and pouring the milk through the resulting hole.

Milk is something to be rejected instantly if its flavour goes wrong: I am thinking of milk that has gone only slightly sour. Like those triangular cartons or miniature one third of a pint milk bottles we had at school, both provided with a straw to poke through, left in their grey crates next to a warm radiator.

You can now buy in supermarkets bottles of creamy yellow Jersey milk. And in France, packets of Candia Frais with globules of cream amid the slightly sweet-tasting milk, which landed on and improved the arid texture of the shredded wheat. In St Tropez over breakfast outside our caravan, beneath the pine trees, we once noticed a solitary ant dragging a strand of the cereal that my brother had dropped from his bowl.

I also recall as a child reading one of the "Katie" books which refers to the evocative sound of "clinking ice in the milk-pitcher"; although cold milk is the way forward, I would be concerned about the ice diluting the milk.

Old enough to know better, I once attempted to make hot chocolate in Scotland by putting milk on to boil in an electric kettle. A funny smell resulted and the kettle was destroyed. That experiment over, one question continues to fascinate me. How would milk taste if it were put through a soda stream?

Snitterfield

The very name "Snitterfield" conjures up what it was and is: a quintessentially English place, in the heart of England - Warwickshire - and a place where childhood memories were forged without my even realising it.

Granny would take us, probably once each Summer. It was a pick-your-own fruit farm. Two white plastic punnets placed in the green cardboard metal handled basket, on the ground that if you only used a basket, there was a risk of the fruit tipping out. 

Then out to the fields. Raspberry hedges almost always. We tried strawberries once. But mostly it was raspberries. Long rows of hedges where we would separate and then try and work out, through sound, where the others were. The sun, always, beating down. Other families wandering past. Keeping a rather superior eye on my younger brother to ensure that he wasn't blithely gathering underripe raspberries.

Full punnets. The hut where the fruit was weighed and paid for. The baskets now stained purple. The repetitious joke in the queue: "They should weigh you when you go in and when you come out".

Back at home, fresh raspberries and cream, occasionally with meringues that made you cough. Some of the raspberries into the freezer to have when there was snow on the ground. We spent one afternoon over a saucepan making raspberry jam so thick you could hardly spread it.

Once, we were disloyal to Snitterfield. My mother and aunt Christine accompanied us and, on the way in the car, Granny spotted a new pick-your-own-fruit farm and a decision was made to try it out. We ventured into the fields but a few samplings later, my mother concluded that the raspberries were not worth eating. Granny was not entirely convinced but Christine agreed: "I'd rather eat a bowl of bread and butter". She also suggested an alternative use for one of their punnets and our minds were quickly made up. Before her threat could be put into action, we left and headed to Snitterfield.

Tinned spag

The snow on the ground today brings back memories of Aunt Joy who lived at the bottom of a series of zig-zagging tree-lined lanes in Surrey. Little Coldharbour, the house was called. Dark woods behind, brown fields in front. Whenever there was snow at Little Coldharbour, our mother told us, the road became impassable. Half a century before, Aunt Joy had fallen ill with double pneumonia, following a blizzard. Her mother, Ellen, my great grandmother, had had to walk along the tops of the holly hedges to summon medical help. Although we rarely, if ever, had to contend with snow ourselves, visits to see her were not without a sense of adventure. My mother was not particularly talented at driving or finding the way anywhere, and so there was always an unbreathed tension: would we ever get there? "Signs for Penge", muttered my mother. That name grew to have the resonance of the golden gate to Samarkand.

Aunt Joy was usually stretched on the day bed in her sun room as we arrived at last at Little Coldharbour. Grapevines hung from the ceiling but I never saw any grapes. There was a set of eight bells on the wall with a stick, inviting any passer-by to play a scale. Beyond the sun room was a windowless room stuffed with books, sofas and blankets. It was inside that darkened sitting room that Aunt Joy's sweet cupboard was located. Inside, row upon row of jars, as though it were a miniature sweet shop. Sherbet lemons. Dolly Mixture. Mint Imperials. Pear drops. My brother and I were allowed free licence to delve among the jars and choose, which we would do, repeatedly, during visits. Even our mother was indulgent on such occasions, despite her general antipathy towards "sugary sweets" and, worse still in her eyes, "cheap sweets": "You'll rot your teeth."

Aunt Joy was also fond of allowing us to guzzle fizzy drinks. "Kids' booze, I call it", she would announce, brandishing a bottle of lemonade. "I always think it's unfair for you to have nothing while the adults are all boozing away." Another Aunt Joy treat was one of her famous Ice Cream Sodas. Drunk using a straw: cream soda in the glass followed by a scoop of vanilla ice cream. When our mother was out of the room, Aunt Joy would encourage my brother to blow bubbles in his glass.

Those, then, were the between meal snacks. What about the main meals? Aunt Joy had a number of favourite sayings, now sounding slightly ominous. They included: "I've always been a good cook" and "I've always liked experimenting with food." The experiments were conducted in her rather grubby and damp kitchen. At its rear was a larder to make your heart sink. Row upon row of tins. Tinned beansprouts, tinned meatballs, tinned cream, tinned condensed milk. It was exactly the same larder which had entranced her little nieces - my mother and her younger sister - when they had gone to stay in Bletchingley in the early fifties. At supper time, Aunt Joy would say: "Like some spag? Or baked beans?" According to my aunt CeCe: "We always had tinned spag as we weren't allowed it at home. We adored it."

As adults, though, those nieces' tastes developed into deep distrust of anything emanating from Aunt Joy's kitchen. For instance, her "Chinese" cooking, consisting of rare chicken drenched in Cook-In Sauce, soggy sticky boiled rice and those tinned beansprouts cooked until they were flabby wisps ("I've always liked foreign grub"). Or grey sausages which she’d boiled instead of frying them. But we, the great nephews and great nieces, loved it. My cousin Tom used to say indignantly "But I LOVE Aunt Joy's cooking", whenever anyone suggested the contrary.

The last time I recall visiting Aunt Joy was to pick her up to take her to her niece's wedding reception in the neighbouring county. The same niece who remembered loving the tinned spag. My mother's mini had something wrong with it on the day and the added weight of Aunt Joy caused the car to splutter in indignation. At the foot of one hill, my mother had to get us out of the car to walk to the top. The reception over – no tinned spag in sight - we dropped Aunt Joy at Little Coldharbour for the last time. In her absence, the little car sped away without difficulty.

Mashed potato

It is odd how something so simple can on occasions be so utterly revolting. Take Smash: dried mashed potato in a packet. The most successful advertising I've ever experienced, judging by the distance between the advert and reality. The description of the carefully selected, beautifully peeled and prepared potato... What on earth was my mother thinking of when she bought it? Perhaps I inveigled her. The finished result was utterly lacking in flavour, texture or integrity.

Another thought that occurs to me, this time in relation to school mashed potato. How was it that it was so nasty yet in different ways depending on the day it was served? And how could the powers that be have decreed that it ever be served with salad (Monday lunches)?

Here is how to make mashed potato that sings. Peel, chop into small pieces and boil your potatoes. Meanwhile, cut a small onion as finely as you can. When the potatoes are cooked, drain them, then throw in the onion, a large lump of unsalted butter, a glug of double cream, some salt crystals and freshly ground black pepper and mash away furiously. I use a potato ricer.

As you'll have gathered, this is not one of those recipes where precision in terms of quantities is required. What is necessary is thorough mashing and heat.

A final observation. "Mustard mash" is something you often now find in the kind of pub that serves lamb shank. It is my theory that potatoes and mustard do not go together. However, I have no difficulty with a dab of mustard on the side to go with the sausages that so often accompany mash: though it was only in the "Dandy" that they were ever stuck into the mash, as a feast for Tom Tum or Greedy Pigg.