Cupboard Love: A Food Romance, page 1
Cupboard Love
Laura Lockington
,
© Laura Lockington 2014.
Laura Lockington has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 2001, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2008 by The Book Guild Limited.
This edition published in 2018 by Lume Books.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Grandmothers: Putting the Fun in Funeral
Chapter 2: A Perilous Picnic with the Aunts
Chapter 3: The Uncles or Any Spoon Will Do…
Chapter 4: Sunday Bloody Sunday
Chapter 5: Appley and Strawy
Chapter 6: Thunder Tea
Chapter 7: Abroad:
Chapter 8: Dinner Lady's Surprise
Chapter 9: Sickie Blanket
Chapter 10: Everybody Must Get Stoned
Chapter 11: Remember, We're English
Chapter 12: A Horse Walks Into a Bar and Asks for a Whisky…
Chapter 13: In Love and In Italy
Chapter 14: Emmets
Chapter 15: Dinner Parties from Hell...
Chapter 16: Eating With Hands
Chapter 17: Scars
Chapter 18: Salt Air
Chapter 19: The Final Cheese Straw
Introduction
I don't care what anyone says. Losing your virginity does not make you an adult. Nor does getting your first credit card. Or buying your first house. Or making a will. Cooking your first Christmas lunch: that's about as grown up as it gets.
My life has been marked by the meals I've had. My first day at school is all but forgotten, but I remember the lovingly cooked perfect soft boiled egg with toasted soldiers. I couldn't with any certainty describe my first wedding dress or the shoes I wore on that ill-fated honeymoon, but I could tell you what I had for dinner. I've already planned my funeral menu (lucky guests will offset their grief with cold lobster, Jean-Yves's mayonnaise and the walnut bread from that little baker round the corner).
It's time to admit; I have an unhealthy interest in food. Not just my food. But your food. His food, her food, their food. In restaurants I peer at other people's plates. In supermarkets I forensically examine other people's trolleys. It's not that I want what they have, I just want to know what they're having. I am a food stalker.
If you're as bored or curious (some might say nosey) as I am don't bother browsing the bookshelves or raiding the medicine cabinet — try reading the fridge. Knowing what someone reads for amusement or takes for indigestion is nowhere as revealing as knowing what they have for breakfast. Out of date yoghurt? A student that hasn't learnt how to shop (or cook). A tupperware box of homemade granola? A diet conscious fool. Champagne, Loch Fyne kippers and home made marmalade? Marry them.
Food is as revealing as money sex or religion. More so. And it's revealed more often — with every meal or snack. How often do we hear that someone can't eat fish? Or that they crave chocolate, have a hatred of sprouts and or are forbidden coffee? We hear all about all their dietary preferences but never their true bank balance. As for sex, well, we only hear what they want us to hear.
Our relationship with food determines our relationships with others. Some people swear you can predict the performance of a potential lover simply by watching him dance. I'd rather watch him eat a pomegranate. Is he picking the ruby seeds out one by one or tearing it apart with his hands? Is he prissy about getting the crimson juice on his shirt or is he happily wiping his mouth with the back of his hand? Does the bitter yellow pith bother him or is he attacking it with gusto? I think we all know which is right.
I once broke up with a partner between courses. We'd been together for five years. After the lamb I left the room to get the summer fruit pudding. He left me while I was in the kitchen. And there was clotted cream, too.
What did your mother make for you when you were ill? When my first husband had the flu he begged me to make him a quite revolting lunch involving coley — that very grey fish old ladies buy for their cats — and tinned tomato soup. Perhaps equally revolting to you is my belief in the healing properties of mashed banana.
Our reaction to food is not rational. What we choose to eat depends on our past and personal experiences. The food we choose tells us very clearly who we choose to be and to be with. More than religion, football teams or daily newspapers. More than anything.
What we eat is as telling as what we wear. Food has fashions. Just as telling as the woman who wears a mini skirt and outlines her eyes in kohl decades after it has been au courant, is the man who insists on having his steak burnt beyond recognition à la 1960s. I realise now that my early childhood was guided by Edwardian mores. This was partly because my grandmother, born in 1861, ruled the roost. And partly because my parents, to whom I appeared as a surprise late in life, were the tail end of her generation. They had both lived and worked through World War II. Even now, in a time of relative excess, they had reverted to her style of eating. The food and lifestyle revolution caused by Elizabeth David and Terence Conran did not hit our household till quite late.
Our food habits and feelings are so deeply ingrained that, even if we stopped and questioned them, we simply wouldn't get an answer. You either like whelks or you don't. I once saw a close friend of mine prepare a leg of lamb for roasting. She laboriously cut off the knuckle bone and slipped it beside the joint. I asked her why she did that. Because my mother did, was her reply. She phoned her mother to ask her why she had. She said that her mother always had. Grandma was duly called and cackled with laughter. 'You fools! I did it because my roasting tray was too small for the joint!' Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
So I have decided to delve back and try to discover how and why I eat as I do. It may be as foolish as chips without salt or gin without tonic. But I have to know. What is it that makes me cook for the people I love? Is it something that we all do? Is food fuel for living or loving? Live to eat or eat to live? Do I need to unchain myself from the stove? Kitchen or bedroom? Can you have both (without a house fire or large laundry bills)?
Love and food. It's all in there somewhere.
Chapter 1: Grandmothers: Putting the Fun in Funeral
Ham Cooked in Cider
Even if your butcher assures you that it doesn't need soaking, it probably does. Place in cold water and leave overnight or for at least five hours.
2kg 'green' gammon
1 large bottle cloudy cider
stick of celery
1 carrot
1 onion
8 peppercorns
2 bayleaves
(For the glaze — dark sugar, English mustard
powder, cloves)
Place the ham in the largest pan you have, pour over the cider, and pop the onion, carrot, celery, bayleaves and peppercorns in. If the cider doesn't cover the meat, top it up with water. Bring to the boil and then simmer for two and a half hours. Allow to cool or you will burn your fingers horribly. Take the rind off, and score the fat in criss crosses with a sharp knife. Rub with a handful of mustard powder and sugar. Stud with cloves and then place in hot oven till the outside is as brown as you would wish — about twenty minutes to half an hour.
Delicious. I promise you will never buy pre-packed ham ever again.
The two grandmothers were formidable in their separate ways.
Grace Helen had been a beauty and a card sharp. A cruel series of strokes kept her bedridden in my childhood home in Kent: a regal figure swathed in black silk shawls and heavy amber necklaces, a silver topped ebony cane kept by the bedside which was tapped imperiously when anything was wanted. Her once chestnut hair, now white, she is a refuge from anything that needs to be avoided. Whole days are spent in the comfort of her heavily blanketed bed playing snap or shops, wrapping up small china objects from her highly polished wooden cabinet in newspaper and then bartering with one another over the price. The silky strips of ribbon that hemmed the purple wool of her bedclothes are rubbed away to a silvery sheen by my fingers. She belongs to the days of corsets, tortoiseshell hairpins and lace handkerchiefs drenched in eau de cologne. Low slung elegant cars had driven her down the corniche to ‘Monte’. She has a sharp tongue and a kind heart.
When an optician made a house call to check her failing sight she was convinced he'd left the room and whispered in a piercing hiss to my mother: ‘Joan, thank goodness that dreadful man has left, he smells. I'm sure he wets himself!' He hasn't left. My mother covers her confusion in a torrent of words.
A plate of fruit with a silver and mother of pearl fruit knife is always on her bedside table. Just the names of the apples were enough to make you think she was reciting a litany. Pearmain, Beauty of Bath, Bloody Butcher (causing hysterical giggles from me, because it was so rude), Crimson King (the words reversed years later to become the name of a rock band that I played very loudly in my bedroom whilst dousing myself in patchouli oil), Foxwhelp, Captain Kidd, Cornish Honeypin, Court Royal, Doll's Eye, Gloria Mundi, James Grieve and many others that can probably only be found now at Kew Gardens. If at all.
Her endless supply of fruit is delivered, along with all other staples to the house. What a joy that was. I know Tesco online does it now but somehow it's just not the same. The men bringing all that bounty became a part of my life. Spotty Chops, the rather horrible nickname of the boy who delivers the bread, would also solemnly hand over a lock of his hair once a month in an envelope — my grandmother is curing his warts and it requires hair and silver from him (the silver was a sixpence which was then buried in the garden at a full moon). I don't know if his cure worked. I hope it did or he could well have been snipped bald as well as being afflicted with a wart. Cheese, eggs, watercress, fish, onions, milk, shrimp... they are all delivered on allotted days.
Even now, when the watercress I buy comes from a supermarket and clearly states on the front 'washed and ready to eat', I wash and wash and wash it. Like Lady Macbeth, I can't stop washing. The fear of god was put in me by my grandmother of the dangers of fluke worms. One tiny egg was all it took and this monstrous thing would swell and grow and turn your skin blue and you would bloat and burst like balloon and never, ever go to a ballet class ever, ever again.
Such gore was pretty standard fare in our house, gruesome illness being a favoured topic of tea time conversation. I once saw a black and white educational film about leprosy and was convinced that I'd contracted it. In the film a man in a white coat, working under strenuous conditions in Africa, examines his wrists under a light and is horrified to discover he's got white spots. It's the first sign. I was trusted to wash alone by now in the bathroom and for weeks gaily ran the hot tap making splashing sounds. One fateful day, I too had the dreaded white spots. I ran breathlessly to my grandmother, determined to be brave, you understand, but also to let her know gently that I was not long for this world. She assured me drops of hot water on the skin of a very dirty little girl had quite the same appearance. Soap was called for. I limped off to the bathroom feeling obscurely cheated.
Grace Helen could be intimidating. Matilda Mary Anne was just plain scary.
She was my paternal grandmother and ran The Robin Hood pub in the East End of London with guts and gusto. She needed them. The East End in the 1960s was a dangerous place, not the trendy urban hub it is now. Her husband, my grandfather, was a gold miner. He worked six months of the year in what was then called the 'white man's graveyard'. The day he left for Africa again, her fancy man, Pineapple Jack, moved into the pub. He only left the day my grandfather came home six months later. This continued for decades, right up until my grandfather died, much to the general disapproval of Grace Helen. Then Pineapple Jack moved in for good. (‘A most unsatisfactory arrangement,' said she with a sniff.)
Matilda Mary Anne was vivid in the extreme — loud colours and dripping jewellery added to the general unsatisfactory flavour of her. She reminded me of a parrot, same gaudy colouring and a beaky, slightly predatory look to her face. She once bought me a frilly nylon (v. modern, or so I thought) party dress of mauve and purple net, a small biscuit iced gem of a dress that scratched my legs. Grace Helen and my mother were mortified by it. I loved it. My normal party attire ran along the lines of silk and cotton so this peacock like garb was a new sensation to me. I flounced to show it off in front of everyone and heard Grace Helen say to my mother, 'Dear God, she looks like a bar maid!' while fanning her face with her hands. I later got into trouble by asking Matilda Mary Anne what low tastes meant.
Very occasionally my parents visit the Robin Hood. I am paraded behind the bar for the regulars to swoon over then whisked upstairs by my mother. Memories of men in coats nursing pint jars of stout and a piano being battered to death with Matilda Mary Anne seemingly the only woman there are all I have of it. That and the smell: stale beer, smoke and something else, maybe danger. Even now it seems very attractive.
What is definitely not attractive is jellied eels. I think they were my first gastronomic horror. I positively hated them. I can still see them glistening in a thick white china bowl with hot vinegar splashed over them. I hated them so much that I spat them clear across the room to land in a quivering globule against the canary yellow skirting board of my grandmother's upstairs parlour. My mother laughed, probably relieved that I didn't have low tastes after all.
Coming home from the pub, wrapped in a blanket in the back of the car, I listen drowsily to my parents talk. I adored being in that car, a Jaguar, I think. It had walnut flaps fitted in the back of the front seats that could be pulled down to create tables and was upholstered in pale blue leather. It even smelled safe. The voices from the front are muffled but clear enough to understand.
`Darling, she doesn't look well, you know.'
My father didn't reply. He often didn't reply, especially when he was driving or doing the cryptic crossword in the Times. This was a red rag to my mother who once set light to his paper to provoke a response. I reassured myself that she obviously couldn't ignite anything now because he was at the wheel. I heard her slide a cigarette out of its packet and the quick sulphurous strike of a match. Piccadilly Plain. That's what she smoked and she always lit the end of the cigarette that had the small writing on it. The other week I had asked why she did this. Giving me a slow smile she explained it made it harder for the police to trace her. Deeply thrilling.
`She's perfectly all right.'
I didn't quite understand the tone in his voice. It wasn't something I'd heard before. Not angry, but somehow hard. A sharp, flinty tone. I wondered if it had anything to do with what I'd found out from Grace Helen. There was no love lost between the two grandmothers and I had thrilled to the secret that she had told me, though it had seemed very puzzling to me at the time. My father was born in the pub. Matilda Mary Anne had gone upstairs after locking the doors and delivered him alone. She was so furious to discover that he was a boy, she simply decided to call him Susan and dress him as a girl. I had seen pictures of my father with long curly blonde hair, ringletted and tied with a ribbon and wearing a long white lacy dress. This hadn't struck me as odd, because it all seemed so long ago, and I assumed that all small children were dressed alike. I'd seen the faded sepia prints. They were just pictures. I simply couldn't connect the faded images to my family. No one knew. No one but her ever changed a nappy or bathed him. Then the unthinkable happened. When he was seven the school authorities carried him kicking and screaming from behind the bar and dumped him at a school. He came home with a shaved head, hobnail boots and knee length shorts. My grandmother thought of the worst name that she could and he was promptly christened Archibald William Thomas. She suspected the landlady of The Grapes had had a hand in it and from then on war was declared. By all accounts my father turned into a ragamuffin overnight and was often escorted home by the local policeman.
`Well, the place is too much for her.' My mother sounds exasperated.
My father snorts derisively. 'You're not suggesting that she—’
`No, no of course not. I just worry, that's all.'
That's true, I sleepily thought. My mother could worry for England. Dangers were lurking in every corner, even innocent looking women at Charing Cross station were actually in thrall to white slavers who would stab a small blonde girl with a hypodermic and bundle her into a laundry basket to wake up in some harem in the desert, the plaything of a pasha. I used to dream occasionally of silken tents in the desert and picture myself an Arab princess being presented with barbaric looking headdresses. Sadly no such thing ever happened, however pleadingly I stared at startled lone lady shoppers.
The car swooped round a corner and I slid along the back seat clutching at the tartan rug covering me.
`Bloody fool,' I heard my father mutter at another car, `And look, he's wearing a hat! What have I always said? Never trust a man who drives in a hat.'
This was a given diktat, along with many others that made no sense whatsoever. All front doors must be painted scarlet. Never cut your nails with scissors, always clippers. Pimms can only be drunk in the afternoon. Cucumbers must always be peeled. And if a man asks you to dance, even if he is a halitosis ridden hunchback with maniacal tendencies, you must always accept. Even as a child I clearly remember wondering if all these things were really true and what would happen if you ever painted your door blue. The front door of my first home was painted crimson — as have all the others. As should all front doors.
My mother opens a window slightly and I can smell London is fading away. We will soon be home. If I fake sleep I'd be carried up to bed but then I would miss out on a goodnight kiss from Grace Helen and a bon-bon. These were kept in a lignum vitae box, on a night stand and were slipped to me as if they were love letters. Covered with white icing sugar, they were a mixture of nuts, hard toffee and cinnamon. Perhaps not awfully pleasant really, but familiar and ritualistic.
