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| Hot chocolate - horrible! |
Food has a powerful ability to bring back memories,
and when conversation flags, people often turn to reminiscences about foods
from their childhoods. Butterscotch flavoured instant whip seems to have been a
widespread favourite – but what memories are attached to it? I remember my
beautiful aunty Audrey, in a black sweater with her fabulous auburn hair in a
beehive. She had an excitingly modern electric whisk, and would lift me up while
I used it to make instant whip – always butterscotch or chocolate mint. It also
brings back the sadness and guilt I felt when I grabbed for her long amber
necklace and broke it, sending the pretty beads bouncing over the floor.
Even the most mundane foods have memories attached. As
a challenge, I thought of biscuits, and remembered my mum's homemade fudgies
(secret ingredient - Camp Coffee), and an American volcanologist who ate them
by the score. And I remembered my very earliest days at infant school, when we used
to bring snacks in little greaseproof paper bags. Sweetly, we all wanted to
share the things we brought, but it wasn’t easy - one digestive biscuit between
six or eight little kids doesn’t go. Our solution was to put everything that
everybody had brought into one bag and crush it all into a delicious sweet and
salty mix of biscuit and crisp crumbs. It was easy to share and fun to eat. I
can taste it now.
Think of a person from your past - maybe a
grandparent. What food springs to mind? For my husband, the memories were
instantaneous – his grandmas were bread sauce and Battenburg. For me, Didcot
nana is forever associated with the deliciously naughty sugar sandwiches she
used to make for me - thin white bread, thickly spread with salty butter and
sandwiched with a generous sprinkling of crunchy white granulated sugar. I knew
she loved me. My earliest forays into the world of cookery took place when she
invited me into her kitchen to 'make a mix'. I'd be helped onto a high stool or
allowed to sit on the kitchen worktop from where I could reach to rummage in
her cupboards. I'd find gravy browning, custard powder, cornflour, cocoa,
perhaps a tiny bottle of peppermint essence or food colouring, and with great
seriousness I would spoon these ingredients into her mixing bowl, add water and
stir with a great big wooden spoon. Then I'd take it into the room where
granddad was sitting beside the fire, and he would pretend to eat it. I loved
it.
Drayton nana is associated with Sunday dinner, and two-way Family Favourites on the radio, with crackly voices wishing each other well from far flung army and navy outposts. Later, Club biscuits (plain, orange or mint - never the horrible ones with the currants) and the wrestling or Golden Shot on the television. My brother and I would dare each other to take her extra strong mints - she teased us with them, offering them when she knew we would have to spit them out.
If you remember eating with a person, chances are
you’ll remember the food. Memories of old boyfriends include watching Chas
demolish a pile of whitebait (so heartless!), Mark skimming the evil-smelling
scum off a pot of mince in his mother’s chilly kitchen, and Dez’s soppy grin as
he tucked in to one of his trademark doorstop watercress sandwiches. The
woman who broke up my parents’ marriage responded to my vegetarianism by
boiling up some carrots, and demonstrated her sense of culinary adventure by
throwing in a bay leaf. Bay leaves make me gag.
