In between meals

How I fell in love with food and learnt to cook

I’m standing in the kitchen stubbornly refusing to eat either cereal or toast. My sister is happily tucking into her bowl of rice krispies, toast and peanut butter on the side. The very sight of it makes me feel sick. For me there is little worse than soggy cereal, the miserable flakes sticking to the side of the bowl or swimming in the grey, sugary milk, it makes my stomach turn. The only thing I want to eat for breakfast is pancakes, but like most mothers, mine does not have time to make me pancakes every day for breakfast. “If you want pancakes,” Mum says. “You’re going to have to learn to make them yourself.”

So I learnt, swirling the butter in the old cast iron pan, whisking together the flour, eggs and milk, trying to wait patiently for the first side to be cooked before I tried to flip it. The batter was often lumpy, the flips didn’t always work, but over time my pancakes got better, I’d eat them rolled up with raspberry jam, two or three every morning before school. I was perhaps seven years old then, and I’ve been making them ever since; they’re still my favourite breakfast.

I don’t really remember a time when I didn’t cook, and food and cooking fill my childhood memories. Me stood on a stool in my grandma’s kitchen helping her to make buns, watching the mixture turn in the old Kenwood mixer, dusting the sultanas in flour to stop them sinking to the bottom of each little cake. We’d pick plums from the garden and turn them into jam, chop mint for mint sauce and spend quiet hours podding broad beans. I peeled potatoes and sliced chips, stirred pots of bubbling beans and learned to cook sausages, turning them regularly so they browned all over in the sizzling dripping taken from the bowl grandma kept in the fridge.

We’d eat around the old square farmhouse table, which spent most of its life pushed against the wall, but was pulled out on Saturdays to accommodate countless cousins and uncles. There were never enough seats, so us children were often squashed two to a chair. The boys would make chip butties and the ketchup would drip down their chins. I loved it. I loved walking up the yard and shouting “dinner”, hearing the tools clatter to the ground and the sound of boots tramping into the house, the chatter as they all washed their hands and then that quiet moment when everyone was full, sitting there stretching back in their chairs, trying to convince themselves to go back out to work in the cold. Helping to cook that meal made me feel like I’d done something to make someone’s day a little bit better. Grandma and I would stand side-by-side at the sink once everyone was gone, one of us washing, the other drying, making the most of the quiet afternoon.