Real Food

There is a painting on my kitchen wall by Eileen Hogan. She painted it as a present for my mother’s 80th birthday. It is of the book ‘French Country Cooking’ by Elizabeth David, the beautiful iconic 50s Penguin edition. It is so evocative. That book sat on the shelf in our family kitchen when I was growing up. My mother inspired a lot of people with her enthusiasm for cooking and Eileen Hogan, not having known her for very long, picked up on this enough to do the painting for her. My mother, Patricia, was a culinary adventurer. She had done a lot of travelling when she was younger to Argentina, Uruguay and Ibiza in the 1940s, when travelling was truly an adventure and maybe this had inspired her. We grew up in our Basingstoke council house enjoying the fruits of her kitchen labours for breakfast, lunch and dinner. She introduced us to natural yoghurt courtesy of her Yogomagic machine in the 1970s, saying that we had to start to eat this thing called ‘yoghurt’ because it was made using fermented milk and the Tibetan monks ate it every day and they lived for a long time. This was before the sweet concoction we know as yoghurt, was mass produced by the supermarkets and laced with sugar and modified starch, and labelled ‘low fat’ to entice us into thinking that we were eating healthy, rather than a sugary dessert, which yoghurt was never supposed to be.

I can still picture my mother standing next to the kitchen table, kneading bread dough, the big blue bucket into which she would put the dough to rise, sitting by the side on the floor,  the shaping of the loaves, that gently rocked the table as I did my homework. The loaves, once baked, would then be sliced and frozen so that we always had real bread to eat every day. She knew then the evils of factory made bread, Mother’s Pride, as it was cleverly called by the marketing men. My mind is full of memories of food produced by her hands and I can still recall scenes from her kitchen; when the jam exploded from the pressure cooker, painting the ceiling of our kitchen a vibrant deep purple. I remember looking over her shoulder, asking what she was making one day when I saw her stirring stock through some rice and discovered the delights of my first risotto. I remember her crying by the stove when she realised she had coated the fresh doughnuts she had made in fine salt instead of sugar. Life wasn’t easy with my father, money was short but she was devoted to us and our diet.

She bought me my first cookbooks by great cooks, like Arabella Boxer, Jane Grigson and Anne Willan. When she died she left me in good hands.

She knew as many cooks before her knew, the power of good food, the importance of real food. She passed that on to me and I have passed it to my children. As I reach a new stage of my life and contemplate becoming a grandmother I know that if there is an afterlife she will be looking on with pride as she sees the fruits of her labour live on in the bones, organs and souls of her children, grandchildren and soon to be great grandchild.