The occasion was a family summit, a summit to discuss my grandmother's fast progressing Alzheimer's. There had been a meeting in Henley, where she then lived. While the adults talked, the four cousins window-shopped in town.
After the serious business, whatever it was, had been transacted, the adults and children regrouped and headed to my uncle and aunt's house - Hereward Cottage in Chalfont-St-Giles - for lunch. My aunt Lynda was not there but had left us a large and delicious lasagna to eat.
It was some words of Alex as he served us that have stuck in my mind: "Apologies", he said, "that it's nursery food." No one, of course, accepted the apology (a chorus of "Nonsense" etc) and I don't think anyone was merely being polite. After all, what could have been more comforting and warming than a plate of lasagna after (for the adults) a rather gloomy morning of seriousness?
But something else occurs to me many years later, probably at about the age Alex was then. His comment was certainly not meant to make the children present feel more childish. Instead, Alex was, probably entirely subconsciously, reminding himself and his sisters that once upon a time they had all been used to eating "nursery food", in a nursery, in Henley, cooked by their mother, my grandmother.
Showing posts with label Henley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Henley. Show all posts
Sunday, 9 December 2012
Sunday, 28 October 2012
Wartime economy fudge
No salt in this recipe, I know, but it is the best version I have ever encountered with a flavour that hits your tastebuds like no other. I have heard others say it's more "tablet" than "fudge" but I am not convinced.
The recipe, taken from my book (with the timings inserted by me while making it), then its story:
1 lb granulated sugar
1 1/2 oz marge
1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence (I prefer extract)
5 fl oz evaporated milk
5 fl oz cold water
Mix sugar, milk and water. Heat gently stirring with wooden spoon until sugar melts (5 minutes?). Add marge (cut into small pieces). Bring to rapid boil (10 mins). Stir all time. Wipe down sides of pan (don't let residue stick). Boil until soft ball stage (10 mins). Moment comes much sooner than you'd think! Remove from heat. Add vanilla. Cool for 5 mins. Using wooden spoon, beat it, stirring frantically until changes colour and looks creamy (10 mins), pour into greased mould (lined with foil).
I recommend AGAINST chocolate versions, rum 'n' raisin versions or whatever. Gilding the lily.
Mum's commentary on the recipe in my book:
"This came from a book in Bedworth Library. During World War II my mother swapped tea and other rations for the ingreedience and made something similar."
Bedworth Library was our local library in the first house where I ever lived, in Windmill Road, Exhall. I had always assumed the recipe my mother had recorded in her book - from which this is copied - was the very same that her mother had used, recorded in copperplate handwriting on faded yellow paper. Not so, it would seem. Mum would make this and then bag it for Christmas presents. Once she had made some shortly before halloween and some trick-or-treaters came round. She presented each of them with a piece and they went away not looking altogether impressed. I like to think that they would have changed their minds on tasting.
There was another occasion when, as her contribution to my nursery school's Christmas sale, she presented me with a polystyrene cup of fudge. Someone else had been more ambitious in terms of quantity and variety and had donated several bags of, if I remember correctly, rum and raisin flavoured fudge. My mother's contribution was rather lost in the array. Whether as a gesture of annoyance or otherwise, another boy and I stole some of the fudge from its table and were caught. Our punishment was to miss the showing of the school cine film. But later Justice relented and we were allowed in to see the second showing. I remember looking guiltily at the headmistress, Mrs Hartley, as we sat down in the darkened room. But that was the end of the incident.
The closest I have ever got to finding my mother's fudge on sale commercially was in a shop, now closed, in Canterbury. It had been recommended by my rather splendid landlady, Maureen de Sausmarez. I once brought some home. Having tried a bit, my mother claimed it was not of the best but then undermined her argument, repeatedly signalling she wanted more by mimicking a bird making high-pitched shrieks. Until the bag was empty.
A sad story on which to end. My grandmother - referred to in my mother's commentary above - had Alzheimer's Disease and in its early stages, she gave my brother and I a few coins with which to buy "Henley fudge" which, she told us, could be found in the shop at the bottom of her road. It may have existed decades before but the only fudge my brother and I could find was Cadbury's ("a finger of fudge is just enough...") and that is what we ended up buying, supplementing the money we'd been given with our own.
The recipe, taken from my book (with the timings inserted by me while making it), then its story:
1 lb granulated sugar
1 1/2 oz marge
1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence (I prefer extract)
5 fl oz evaporated milk
5 fl oz cold water
Mix sugar, milk and water. Heat gently stirring with wooden spoon until sugar melts (5 minutes?). Add marge (cut into small pieces). Bring to rapid boil (10 mins). Stir all time. Wipe down sides of pan (don't let residue stick). Boil until soft ball stage (10 mins). Moment comes much sooner than you'd think! Remove from heat. Add vanilla. Cool for 5 mins. Using wooden spoon, beat it, stirring frantically until changes colour and looks creamy (10 mins), pour into greased mould (lined with foil).
I recommend AGAINST chocolate versions, rum 'n' raisin versions or whatever. Gilding the lily.
Mum's commentary on the recipe in my book:
"This came from a book in Bedworth Library. During World War II my mother swapped tea and other rations for the ingreedience and made something similar."
Bedworth Library was our local library in the first house where I ever lived, in Windmill Road, Exhall. I had always assumed the recipe my mother had recorded in her book - from which this is copied - was the very same that her mother had used, recorded in copperplate handwriting on faded yellow paper. Not so, it would seem. Mum would make this and then bag it for Christmas presents. Once she had made some shortly before halloween and some trick-or-treaters came round. She presented each of them with a piece and they went away not looking altogether impressed. I like to think that they would have changed their minds on tasting.
There was another occasion when, as her contribution to my nursery school's Christmas sale, she presented me with a polystyrene cup of fudge. Someone else had been more ambitious in terms of quantity and variety and had donated several bags of, if I remember correctly, rum and raisin flavoured fudge. My mother's contribution was rather lost in the array. Whether as a gesture of annoyance or otherwise, another boy and I stole some of the fudge from its table and were caught. Our punishment was to miss the showing of the school cine film. But later Justice relented and we were allowed in to see the second showing. I remember looking guiltily at the headmistress, Mrs Hartley, as we sat down in the darkened room. But that was the end of the incident.
The closest I have ever got to finding my mother's fudge on sale commercially was in a shop, now closed, in Canterbury. It had been recommended by my rather splendid landlady, Maureen de Sausmarez. I once brought some home. Having tried a bit, my mother claimed it was not of the best but then undermined her argument, repeatedly signalling she wanted more by mimicking a bird making high-pitched shrieks. Until the bag was empty.
A sad story on which to end. My grandmother - referred to in my mother's commentary above - had Alzheimer's Disease and in its early stages, she gave my brother and I a few coins with which to buy "Henley fudge" which, she told us, could be found in the shop at the bottom of her road. It may have existed decades before but the only fudge my brother and I could find was Cadbury's ("a finger of fudge is just enough...") and that is what we ended up buying, supplementing the money we'd been given with our own.
Sunday, 21 October 2012
Introduction to Salty Food
Let me do some explaining. So far, two potato recipes, each taken from a family recipe book. Potatoes are not going to be the theme although I will almost certainly return to them. Nor is everything going to have salt in it, despite the title.
The purpose of all this is to try to pull together a collection of family recipes, photographs, and memories of family celebrations. It is, among other things, an amalgamation of three unfinished books. First, my own recipe book. Then there is my mother's, a book known as the “Foster Family Cook Book” for as long as I can remember. And finally, my mother's "Christmas Book" which, as well as Christmases past, includes accounts of other celebrations. There are other scraps from diaries, letters, photographs and other bits and pieces that would otherwise get lost or buried. As Philip Pullman wrote in "Lyra's Oxford" (2003): "The world is full of things like that: old postcards, theatre programmes, leaflets about bomb-proofing your cellar, greetings cards, photograph albums, holiday brochures, instruction booklets for machine tools, maps, catalogues, railway timetables, menu cards from long-gone cruise liners - all kinds of things that once served a real and usefu purpose, but have now become cut adrift from the things and the people they relate to."
Among other things, I am trying to capture some of my mother’s main principles when cooking and eating. She often referred to “good, honest food”: a term first used, I think, by Elizabeth David. Certainly Elizabeth David says the following in an article called 'Eating out in Provincial France 1965 - 1977': "The food was good honest food, honestly cooked". That lengthily-titled article is reprinted in "An Omelette and a Glass of Wine", possibly the greatest ever anthology of writing about food.
"Peasant food" was another favourite descriptor of my mother's: always a compliment. At more than one family supper, we would have something slightly unusual on our plates and would be told it was a staple in China or wherever. On such occasions, my father was known to say, rather plaintively, "But we're not in China".
Many years ago, at my mother's dictation, I started to make some notes on a pad of paper for a cookery book that one day she was going to write. The paper I was using, which must have been lying around at the time, advertised a Glucometer: something for diabetics to measure blood sugar? The book never materialised but the notes, mainly consisting of a list of recipes, remain.
Under the heading "Intro", the notes read as follows:
"Parents grew up in post-war Britain. Rationing. People starved of flavours and colours. Soho. Peppers in triumph. Crisp food."
The "Peppers in triumph" reference is particularly resonant. It relates to my grandfather, Roberto, who came over to England in the 1930s from Milan and married my grandmother, Eve. He would apparently visit Soho (he was a Professor of Italian at University College, London) and return home to Henley bearing peppers: Waitrose in Henley had yet to be built. The peppers would be fried in olive oil and eaten - by him alone, I am told.
The purpose of all this is to try to pull together a collection of family recipes, photographs, and memories of family celebrations. It is, among other things, an amalgamation of three unfinished books. First, my own recipe book. Then there is my mother's, a book known as the “Foster Family Cook Book” for as long as I can remember. And finally, my mother's "Christmas Book" which, as well as Christmases past, includes accounts of other celebrations. There are other scraps from diaries, letters, photographs and other bits and pieces that would otherwise get lost or buried. As Philip Pullman wrote in "Lyra's Oxford" (2003): "The world is full of things like that: old postcards, theatre programmes, leaflets about bomb-proofing your cellar, greetings cards, photograph albums, holiday brochures, instruction booklets for machine tools, maps, catalogues, railway timetables, menu cards from long-gone cruise liners - all kinds of things that once served a real and usefu purpose, but have now become cut adrift from the things and the people they relate to."
Among other things, I am trying to capture some of my mother’s main principles when cooking and eating. She often referred to “good, honest food”: a term first used, I think, by Elizabeth David. Certainly Elizabeth David says the following in an article called 'Eating out in Provincial France 1965 - 1977': "The food was good honest food, honestly cooked". That lengthily-titled article is reprinted in "An Omelette and a Glass of Wine", possibly the greatest ever anthology of writing about food.
"Peasant food" was another favourite descriptor of my mother's: always a compliment. At more than one family supper, we would have something slightly unusual on our plates and would be told it was a staple in China or wherever. On such occasions, my father was known to say, rather plaintively, "But we're not in China".
Many years ago, at my mother's dictation, I started to make some notes on a pad of paper for a cookery book that one day she was going to write. The paper I was using, which must have been lying around at the time, advertised a Glucometer: something for diabetics to measure blood sugar? The book never materialised but the notes, mainly consisting of a list of recipes, remain.
Under the heading "Intro", the notes read as follows:
"Parents grew up in post-war Britain. Rationing. People starved of flavours and colours. Soho. Peppers in triumph. Crisp food."
The "Peppers in triumph" reference is particularly resonant. It relates to my grandfather, Roberto, who came over to England in the 1930s from Milan and married my grandmother, Eve. He would apparently visit Soho (he was a Professor of Italian at University College, London) and return home to Henley bearing peppers: Waitrose in Henley had yet to be built. The peppers would be fried in olive oil and eaten - by him alone, I am told.
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