It’s a curious fact that, however long you live, no meal will be as delectable as the food your parents prepared for you in childhood. For that cuisine is seasoned with family myth, nostalgia and comfort, prepared at an age when pure contentment was possible. My mother was an awful cook but – for me – the taste of happiness will always be devilled lambs’ kidneys with a side-helping of bread fried in dripping, closely followed by apple dumpling and cream (the dumpling made with beef suet and white sugar). Nowadays, it would be rare to find houses where jugs full of hardened beige dripping are the norm, let alone children who’d consume the stuff.
But by the time you reach mid-life, you pine for the tastes of nurseries past in the same way that you yearn for your 18-year-old skin and a second chance to read Persuasion for the first time. So I was touched to learn of the acclaimed Roca brothers’ (Spanish chefs: Joan, Josep and Jordi) quest to track down foodstuffs eaten by their mother, 86-year-old Montserrat Fontané, during her Catalonian childhood.
They set out to recreate the flavours, even buying her old family farm in the process. The only problem was that some of the ingredients didn’t exist anymore. Old crop varieties, such as the Olot black turnip once typical in la Garrotxa’s mountain region, had vanished with the advent of modern farming techniques. The brothers had to visit the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to retain the slightest hope of making madre happy.
I now gaze at my two sons and wonder if I should set them similar Herculean tasks. I have a hankering for my late mother’s famous “jelly-fluff”, a concoction made from Chivers jelly cubes whipped into a froth with a can of Carnation evaporated milk, then left in the fridge for two hours (how mum scorned people who served Angel Delight).
Or maybe they should retrieve some “scrag end” of lamb, boil the meat off the bone, then mix the mess with tinned ham and some lard, to be squeezed into a Pyrex bowl with a weight on top to compress it. Bingo: meat loaf; eat with everything for a week and turn the remains into rissoles. My boys have never known the fried delights of a mystery-meat rissole, nor of Bird’s custard powder, salad-cream egg sandwiches, or an icebox cake (favourite of the 1950s’ hostess) made with lemon-soaked sponge fingers.
The strange thing is that you can even feel your heart tugged towards foods you dislike because their familiarity is overwhelming, like a scolding grandmother. Take boiled Brussels sprouts, with their sewer stench; every Christmas I make myself eat four soggy mini-cabbages because my mother made that rule decades ago and insisted I’d “grow to like them”. Aged 53, they’re still vile but I haven’t earned pudding until they are down my gullet.
In a similar vein, a colleague told me he’d caught his grandmother sipping a kids’ Fruit Shoot through a straw and she’d told him it recalled the fortified fruit drinks of her infancy. The second he said this I was sitting in the back of a Ford Escort circa 1975, slurping on a bottle of un-freshly-pressed Britvic orange-juice with a straw stuck in it. Safe and happy – with rotting teeth.
If we oldies are to be indulged in our dotage we’ll need a Global Processed Food Bank, crammed with Spam, Arctic Roll and Walkers Monster Munch – Kettle Chips are indisputably better, but they won’t make you feel like Peter Pan.
