Mixing

The thought of mixing can make the heart sink or lift depending on the skills of the mixer. Pineapple and cottage cheese; potato salad and hard boiled egg; clotted cream and fudge; the thought of all of these, you might think surprisingly, at best cause indifference and, at worst, repel me. But other mixes interest me enormously. Baking meat into pastry. Scraping the residue of a tomato salad - chopped onion, tomato pips, olive oil and the tomatoey juices - into a saucepan of just drained pasta or into gazpacho.

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.

Potato Salad

I suspect that this is a topic to which I will return.

The following recipe is taken from the family recipe book, most of which was written by my mother but this particular entry is in my handwriting, and I calculate that I would have been aged about nine at the time.

"Peel 5 large potatoes, chop them up into quarters (or smaller if desired). Boil them for about 20 minutes. MAYONNAISE: Cup of olive oil, two eggs, salt, pepper in dish. Beat eggs while slowly putting olive oil in. Stir vigorously. When very thick, shake salt and pepper over then mix with potatoes."

Some sentimental commentary: in the original, I can't spell potatoes (like Vice-President Quayle), nor mayonnaise. I have forgotten to separate the eggs. The word "slowly" is double-underlined and I wonder how many times I had experienced curdling at the time I wrote that down.

The first time I remember eating potato salad of any description was in St Giles's Hospital in South London (now closed), at the age of about eight when I had a foot operation. I did not like hospital food, with the exception of the fish and chips which, I was told, was the best thing on the menu. Served on Friday. My operation was on a Friday so nil by mouth, and I was discharged on the following Thursday.

In the absence of the fish and chips or anything else I wanted to eat, my mother would bring in dishes of food from home: potato salad and curry were both things I asked for. The potato salad would arrive in a blue and white china rectangular dish. On one visit, it was left at home and I complained bitterly.

About twelve years later, when I was under the same surgeon but in a different hospital (King's College, in Camberwell), it was dishes of potato salad again, and something else which we had discovered in the intervening years, called Aloo Chat. For the next entry.

Much more to say about the many different versions of potato salad I know (ranging from the sublime to the truly disgusting). And mayonnaise is a separate topic in itself.