Home Cooking

There was a time when all cooking — apart from fish ‘n chips wrapped in the local newspaper — was home cooking. Nowadays, the term is touted as a guarantee of culinary excellence amid the swamp of fast food, ready meals and takeaways which constitutes the base currency of many people’s diet.

My earliest memories of home cooking involves grandmas. It is not so much the taste of the food I recall but the smells. The grandma on my mother’s side, when she hugged me into her ample, aproned bosom, smelled of bread. Her kitchen was a haze of floury sweetness out of which she conjured an endless supply of cakes, pies and little bread rolls. She let me scrape the mixing bowl when she’d done and lick the big wooden spoon.

My other grandma was a modest cook whose kitchen always smelled of boiled potatoes. She kept her meat and dairy products in a basement pantry. I would go down and fetch items for her — I can still see the wide marble slab and feel its coolness. Meals were always potatoes, a couple of veg. and ‘a bit of meat’. It was always ‘a bit’….’a bit o’ beef’, ‘a bit o’ pork.’ Once, when I was sent off to stay with distant relatives in Scotland, I was presented with ‘a bit of tongue’. Which unfortunate beast had once owned the tongue I had no idea but I found it totally inedible, much to my embarrassment and my great-aunt’s disappointment. Since then I have never been a great eater of red meat. I found it took ages to chew and tasted like damp cardboard.

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‘Fast food’ was not a familiar concept when I was growing up. Now the sliced yellow capsicum M of McDonald’s or the beefy lettering of Burger King illuminates shopping malls and service stations across the land. A section of my regular Sunday morning walk requires me to clamber over a fence into the premises of a McDonald’s by the A1 roundabout. I then have to weave my way through queues of cars, many of them containing whole families, as they shunt forward to be handed the sweaty cheeseburgers in polystyrene cartons they have pre-ordered through a speaker system on their way in. A Sunday morning treat!

Sadly, perhaps, when I remember my mother at the time I was a growing lad she is permanently stationed in the kitchen, washing, ironing or cooking. A commonly used utensil was a heavy iron skillet she needed both hands to wield. A favourite dish, frequently demanded by my father, was scallops — not the seafood, but slices of potato fried in batter. Like her mother she was always baking and turned out rock buns in industrial quantities. She also made the most delicious steamed apple pudding. She would tie a piece of muslin over the top of the bowl containing this suet delight before lowering it into a pan of boiling water. I have never encountered such a pudding since.

When I think of the quantities of food I consumed in my teens I can’t fathom how I didn’t become terminally obese. My mother provided us with a cooked breakfast every day — eggy bread was a popular one — then we had a meal in the evening when my father came in. And this is not to mention the school dinners. I am aware that these are often the butt of cruel satire but the dinners provided by the Grammar School I went to when I was eleven were wonderful. I can still taste the specially juicy roast potatoes they cooked and see in my mind’s eye the sultana sponge puddings in thick custard which followed.

Yet there was no panic about unchecked childhood obesity then. I can remember only one fat boy. Apart from being tubby he also, as I witnessed in the changing rooms one day, had hair on his back. Looking at photographs of kids from the fifties and sixties you rarely see an overweight one. In fact most of them seem to be a bit on the skinny side. It is not as if we were starved of sweet things — as I have intimated there were always plenty of buns and puddings to go round. We remained thin, I think, partly because the food we ate was fresh and didn’t contain hidden quantities of fat and sugar and partly because every daylight hour was spent hurtling around outdoors, riding our bikes, chasing and fighting each other, playing football.

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When I lived in Wakefield I used to go for a ten mile ramble through the attractive countryside around Cawthorne and Denby Dale. Half way round I would call in at a pub called the Junction, a practical name since it was built at the merging of five roads. Here I would have a cheese sandwich and a pint of bitter before going on my way. The last time I went I noticed that the name had been changed to the Denby Duckling. Alarm bells rang faintly. I went in. ‘Could I have a cheese sandwich and a pint of Theakston’s, please’ I asked. The sharp featured woman behind the bar replied , ‘We don’t do sandwiches. This is a fine dining establishment.’ ‘Oh,’ I said and looked round at the sleekly contoured tables aglitter with shiny cutlery and wineglasses. Nobody appeared to be dining, finely or otherwise, that particular day. I drank up and left.

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What is ‘fine dining’ anyway? How does it differ from simply eating ? The answer might be found, I suppose, in one of those ubiquitous cookery shows which crowd the schedules, ‘Bake It’, ‘Mastercook’ or whatever. Some nervous contestant comes in bearing a large plate containing a tiny square of meat the size of an oxo cube with a sprig of some green herb pinned on top, the whole surrounded by a spiral of brightly coloured juice. The ‘judge’ forks a morsel into his ample cheeks, chews it around for a few seconds, rolls his eyes round in a rather unnerving way, then pronounces as from Olympus his verdict. At which the cook either beams with delight and hyperventilates or collapses in tears to be patted and hugged by his similarly emotional fellow hopefuls.
I yell at the TV, ‘It’s only food, for heavens sake!!’ And who are these self-styled arbiters of ‘taste’? Needless to say, I will never appear in such a programme, but if I did and some meaty-jowled gastronome turned his nose up at my stuffed courgette I’d take great delight in advising him where to stick it.

There used to be a snack-bar on Wakefield Market where I could get a pint mug of tea and a sausage sandwich with fried onions and a dollop of ketchup. Mmmm! The market is unfortunately now defunct, its place taken by another faceless shopping mall. As a brief digression, however, here is a little poem about the market as I remember it.

He calls early at the tea-bar,
the thin man with grey whiskers,
takes his plastic beaker
and sits alone on a white chair.

The lady with petunia face
bustles among her bedding-plants
as customers queue with punnets
of marigolds, pansies and lobelia.
Her gaunt son packs them,
glowering like a snap-dragon,
while she hands out advice like change.

A palisade of carpet- rolls,
deep red, royal-blue with golden foliage,
rises above the stall like battlements.
The man in the tweed cap stands sentry,
shouldering his metre-rule.

And Margaret, seller of shoes and books,
labels her goods with flair:
‘odd left’, ‘odd right’, and ‘matching pairs’,
‘soppy tales’, ‘naughty mags’, and ‘highbrow stuff’.

‘Got ant Kafka, Margaret?’
‘No love, but I’ve some nice left boots.’

*

When D.H.Lawrence found his creative juices drying up he used to make marmalade. There is something calming, therapeutic, about cooking at home. I am no baker, but sometimes i try to replicate my mother’s date and walnut loaf without it getting too soggy or too dry. My kitchen implement of choice is my wok. It serves as a frying-pan, saucepan, casserole dish, steamer all in one. Just about all my meals are made in it. Recently, I have taken to making Scotch Broth; it is a good way of using up remains of vegetables with some lentils and pearl barley thrown in. Traditionally you are supposed to add some kale but I usually forget to buy it.

Rather unusually, I’m going to end with a recipe. I love mushrooms, so, with apologies to the fine-diners among you, here is how I make ‘faux mushroom risotto’, ‘faux’ because it doesn’t require arborio rice, just plain long-grain rice. This recipe is for one, therefore multiply the ingredients as many times as you like.

Pour yourself a glass of white wine.
Put rice on to boil. Boil it in vegetable stock.
Chop up a rasher or two of smoky bacon, mushrooms, a bit of onion, garlic and a few slices of leek.
Stir-fry the above in your wok, in sesame oil, season well and add some herbs, dill or parsley.
Slosh in some wine and let it simmer for a bit..
When the rice is done, almost drain it and chuck it in with the rest and stir it around.
Sprinkle on some parmesan if you want.

Happy eating. Oh, and finish off the wine.

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