Kitchenella: The secrets of women: heroic, simple, nurturing cookery - for everyone. Rose Prince
not, or those whose lives I have studied, like les mères, the working mother cooks of France who understood completely how to fit good food into a busy day.
Never be afraid, when someone serves you something good, to ask them how they did it. This is the verbal tradition: the passing on of information and secrets, so easily lost when the talking stops. It is the single most vital tool in retaining traditions of cookery and needs to be there with each jotted recipe, every cookery book, any time there is a pan on the cooker.
My mother
Being full is something I knew before anything else. As a small child, I remember our round tea table and its wicker chairs, the piles of sandwiches and toasted, buttered currant buns. I was my mother’s fourth child – she would eventually have six. Tall and blonde, my mother had her hair done weekly in the hairdressers at the end of the street: backcombed on top and curling down to her shoulders. I noticed her long nails were pale pink as she made our supper after school. She claimed not to have been able to cook a thing when she married, aged only 18, but she became a very good cook.
Her mother had lived in France since 1950, and with every visit the French commonsense way of eating must have bled into my mother’s attitude. She made creamy soups, melting gratins and beat her mustard-yellow mayonnaise by hand. She always peeled tomatoes by plunging them in hot water, then dressed them in real vinaigrette made with genuine Dijon mustard which sank deep into their flesh – and she made heavenly dauphinoise potatoes. She never cheated, but like a French housewife she saw nothing wrong in buying in a terrine or a tart when she did not want to cook. As children we probably smelled more garlicky than our school mates.
My mother was not one of those to make fairy cakes with. We never had hilarious squirting sessions with piping bags and hundreds-and-thousands. She did not ‘play at cooking’, but taught us to cook – and she could be a terrifying perfectionist. It was she who drove me to make sweet pastry so thin it was possible to shine a light through it. She was the person who came up behind me when I was peeling potatoes at the sink for the roast, and said, ‘I never cut them up that way, myself,’ with chilling authority. When we were teenagers, visiting friends would gasp at the achievements of my mother and her brigade of cooking daughters. I loved to cook but already, before I was grown up, I knew it was hard work. I think my home tuition went a little far and was overly obsessive – though useful for my career. For me, cooking has always been an exhausting passion, though I have now learned how to enjoy it and not be worn down by it.
At primary school age we had our fair share of fish fingers, baked beans and Heinz tomato soup, but more and more, as we got older, we ate ‘grown-up’ food at weekends. On one occasion my mother came back from shopping carrying a tray of soft raw bread dough, covered lightly with greaseproof paper. ‘What is that?’ I asked. ‘I am going to make a pizza,’ she answered, unwrapping a pack of Danish ‘mozzarella’. It was the early 1970s. She was a long way ahead of her time.
Running out
As a family we were unusually preoccupied with food and there was at one point a definite fear of ‘running out’. Not due to poverty; financially we were privileged, though my mother knew how to be frugal, often cooking oxtail and tongue, and giving us an early introduction to dumplings, lentils and beans. At the time I hated the meals with pulses. Lentils especially, which tasted floury – I longed for potatoes. I adore lentils now.
My parents had divorced when I was three. We lived with my mother but spent half of our school holidays with my father. My mother remarried when I was six and we moved from London to north Buckinghamshire, about two hours’ drive from my father’s house.
My stepfather, Teddy, was a commodity broker who commuted daily to London by train, flamboyant ‘kipper’ tie around his neck. In the mid-1970s, just prior to the power cuts and three-day week, he predicted a food shortage. For several weeks we spent each Saturday at the cash and carry, picking up dry food supplies that would be taken down to the cellar of our house for storage. He bought whole butchered lambs from Wales and filled a chest freezer with them. I remember my mother making meat pies and stewing apple for crumbles and filling a second freezer. We installed a generator and bought a lot of candles, sacks of sugar and flour, Marmite, ketchup, even jars of sweets.
There was no food emergency after all. We ate from that cellar for years, even moving house later on with some of the ketchup and Marmite. But we had experienced something unusual and it has stayed with me. Witnessing my mother caught up in survival mode for those few months, however ultimately unnecessary, left its mark. What I saw (and my siblings are bound to accuse me of melodrama) would for a short period have been similar to that of a child observing their mother during food rationing in World War II, or even a degree of the desperation felt by the women just ahead of the French Revolution who could not feed their children. My stepfather had provided the means for obtaining food; my mother had set about cooking her way out of trouble.
Stuffed
After that we were always full – if anything, I was rather overfed. ‘Being stuffed,’ answered one of my sisters when I asked her for her earliest memory. And I became interested in cooking, imitating my mother, learning from her, helping her and eventually leaving home a reasonably competent cook. Being in a large family meant I learned to make heaps of food from very little. Filling food on a budget – and always, as my husband remarked with horror when we met – far, far too much of it.
None of this mattered for years. I did eventually learn to temper the size of my helpings and to waste less, though I admit to a deep-seated fear of an empty fridge or store cupboard. I hate the idea of running out. It seems vaguely paranoid, but now I am in a new phase of this. Here it is again: the sense that the food supply is once again threatened, this time not only because of politics but also global warming. The added dissatisfaction with the food industry has narrowed my choices with food and as a consequence our food bills are rising. Once again there is the need to use cooking, combined with good economics, to deal with a crisis. The battle has begun.
Money
Two strong arguments are always put forward by women who do not cook: time poverty and money – poverty itself, in fact. They feel these are powerful reasons why cooking has more or less stopped in their home and every meal is eaten out or is bought ready made. But time is a commodity that cooking does not eat up unless you want it to.
Most of the recipes in this chapter take between 20 and 40 minutes to prepare, an acceptable period of time for a hungry person to wait and not much longer than reheating a ready meal. It is true that skill helps save time – obviously the quicker you can crush and peel a garlic clove or chop an onion, the sooner the food will be on plates. Cooking regularly hones those skills – and the process becomes faster all round.
The actual will to cook is quite another thing, but that is a slow process of persuasion that has much to do with building a series of good memories: experiences where things have gone well and left nice thoughts in the part of the brain that keeps a record of smell and flavour.
But money. That’s a good one. Discussing the cost of food is like talking about religion. Someone is going to become upset. People who have money are traditionally not permitted to tell people who have little how to spend it. So that rules out most of our TV chefs – both they and the broadcasters become rather indecisive. They either broach the subject with supreme clumsiness and drive the bad eaters underground, or they are just plain unconvincing. It is hard to get inside the skin of those for whom budgeting is a daily concern, unless it is an experience you genuinely face. Anxiety about money also overwhelms creativity, experiment and adventure. This is the reason why so many on low incomes rely on trusted, branded ready-made foods that may not be as nourishing as other low-cost meals but which every mum knows she can serve and every plate will be emptied. The thought that anything bought on limited means will be rejected is nothing short of disastrous. This is why it is so necessary, when giving up convenience food and embarking on becoming a home cook, to know the secret of how to do it well each time.
SOUPS
Knowing how to make just a few soups is the secret of survival. Most take only 20 minutes to make, the ingredients are cheap and, after a bowl of soup, you feel full to the ears. We don’t want much more than