I spent last Thursday evening with my parents and as the result of a series of random conversations ended up being given a tiny recipe book that is such a part of my childhood.
My Mother and I share a bit of a passion for
Emma Bridgewater crockery. It started with the odd mug, I bought her the one with the black and white cat (Dad got the ginger kitten); then the flower ones started coming out ... last year we discovered the pieces you can buy as seconds so the odd pie dish has started to arrive, Dad got me the
butter dish I'd been coveting and at Christmas we all got mugs with our names on.
Anyway - I'd noticed in the background of The Hairy Bikers - Mum Knows Best, that at the end of each session when there's a big feast with all the cooks and family sat eating off proper plates rather than the paper bits and pieces the visitors have been using, all the crockery seemed to be Emma B's! I was sadly excited and told Mother - who had never seen the show.
So Thursday just gone we sat watching it together. Watching TV the way we always watch TV, with other conversations going on, people coming and going, me knowing she's not really watching it, me drinking too much wine. This time there were some Swiss recipes, Dad had a year at school in Switzerland (he's one of the generation sent away to boarding school at 7 ... horrendous to consider now) I think when in his early teens so melted cheese over strange pickled items triggered the odd memory for him, which lead me to start retelling some of the stories that had really affected me on this series. I'd not thought about it before, but one of the main themes of the series has really got to me, the recipes passed down through generations, and cooking as a link to the past, or as a balm while coping with agony - it was the woman who cooked her Mother's curry in the weeks after her Mother had died, filling the house with the familiar spicy smells, that had really got to me - and I don't even like curry!
Scones must have appeared in the programme as inevitably they came up as one of our childhood memories - and I passed comment that no one on the Great British Bake Off had made scones even close to Mum's amazing ones. She recalled that even at school her scones had been perfect, even if she was marked down in her exam by a miserable visiting teacher who had taken against her.
The rambling, layered conversation included the reminiscing about those teatimes, often put on to show off to school friends, nothing like as frequent as we would have liked - they consisted of fresh scotch pancakes (drop scones) served in batches straight from pan to plate (if the numbers were uneven we'd take turns in who got the extra) where they were covered in butter and fresh homemade lemon curd (no one makes lemon curd like my Mother, properly lemony, sharp yet sweet enough to eat out of the jar with a spoon) then once the batter was used up we'd move to the proper scones - made with fruit in them (sultanas that is) for preference, split open, heavily buttered, whipped cream, fresh homemade strawberry jam (Jam and Marmalade are the things that will always taste best made by my Mother - and that's not a childish attachment to the past or my Mother, anyone who's tasted the best of Mother's jam is ruined for life!). I remember experimenting with the order in which you'd have the jam and cream, and you'd always load up each half separately, no point in trying to sandwich the two parts together, what a wasted opportunity for jam and cream!
One of the most amazing of her jams was the Blackcurrant, partly because the time from bush to jam was about two hours (pick your own, not even from the garden, we'd just race back as soon as we had enough and start the process of boiling up the black fruit, that distinctive smell of cat pee telling us that it really was fresh) and partly because the recipe was just perfect. Which lead to another of our endless "where on earth is the book with the recipe in?" we all know what it looks like, tiny, green, hard backed, lost for ages somewhere in the house.
"Jams, Jellies And Preserves" - I did what anyone would do these days and start with Amazon. Actually I think we went straight to
Alibris as it's long out of print. No luck. Mother came up with the name of the author, but Father remembered it as subtly different, and it turned out he was right! Once we had the name of the author we found something that looked like it might be right, but it also looked like what is basically a photocopy of the original - I'm sure that's not the actual technical method, but it doesn't appeal and it's quite expensive. Then Mother noticed an entry listing "unknown binding 1953" - that's the one! £6! Perfect! We'd been sitting playing with our iTouch's to find the book so she was able to just click and buy! The excitement!
Despite having just ordered the book Mother decided to go out into the kitchen for that "if I look often enough surely it will just appear", I decided to climb up to the top of the shelves in the living room, which is where I'd always instinctively looked for it. And blow me down! There it was! As had been predicted, as soon as we'd bought another copy, the original turned up! I was actually so excited that I was making a noise like a fog horn (terrified the cat and might have been fueled by wine ... ) while I carried the tiny volume into the kitchen to demonstrate that we had finally found it.
And Mother then gave it to me! I wanted her to wait until the new copy arrived just so we could be 100% certain that we'd got it right, but she said that if it's not right all I have to do is type out the blackcurrant jam details for her.
I'm hoping she'll type out the lemon curd and her marmalade recipes. I'm not sure that we have a lot of food memories to pass up and down the family line, but afternoon tea is definitely one of them!
Oh and I got to point out the bits of Emma B crockery the Hairy Bikers were using - you could see a few of the flower mugs.
And the name of the author? Ethelind Fearon
