TRUE kindness is done quietly, my grandmother believed. She died long before I was born, but my mother told me how she stumbled across her own mother’s goodness, when times were hard.
A neighbour said that when she went through a very tough time, she’d find a box with groceries in it at the back door in the alleyway, every week. And when someone died, the white linens and the candles were sent over in the evening, under cover of darkness.
My mother showed her love in practical ways. She cooked and she baked and she sewed. I’d sit on the floor beside the foot pedal of her fancy electric sewing machine and listen as she made it sing.
Coming home from school, there was soup on the stove and dinner in the oven. She’d serve mince, onion, carrots and gravy with a ring of mashed potatoes around the edge.
“What’s for dinner?” we’d ask.
“Birds’ nests,” she’d tell us... and it was always good.
Once I over indulged in the rhubarb – that was a day of reckoning. And now, I come across the old recipe books and wonder at what we have won, as women, and at a little of what we have lost.
There seems no time in busy lives to make Mrs Craig’s shortbread or Peggy’s rum truffles. But somehow in lives already crammed – shuttling between work and home and children – we want to make time. We want the smell of gingerbread to waft from the kitchen; a tin of fresh shortbread for visitors.
Is it this that makes the Bake Off so popular? Do we all want to make that perfect cake? Or do we all just want to watch others fall on their faces as disaster in the shape of sloppy icing and soggy bottoms hit.
Our neighbour was a baking guru. She was an elderly widow, bird-like in every sense. She wore a sheepskin hat and sheepskin bootees. She believed in acts of kindness – and she came to look on my mother as the daughter she never had.
Bowls of home-made ham bone broth, real lemonade and melt-in-your-mouth shortbread were passed across the hedge.
In the winter of her life, it was my mother who called in the evenings to see that all was good. It was my mother who found her lying in the hallway close to the telephone where death caught her.
But the book my mother inherited from her neighbour and dear friend is full of old war-time recipes dutifully noted in beautiful copperplate script. They include 101 things to do with a rabbit when you catch him. Back in those war days, Mr McGregor was the least of a rabbit’s problems.
There are recipes to eke out wartime rations – 101 ways to make a lick of sugar or a lump of butter go a long, long way.
And it’s easy for us to dismiss those years when a quarter of an orange was a true luxury and when the Clementine at the bottom of your Christmas stocking was a treat, not a nuisance to be tossed in the corner.
But on autumn and winter mornings, when the television schedules are full of cooking programmes and I’m craving comfort food, then I remember my sisters and I standing, hands washed, on a Sunday morning, at the old blue formica table and cooking up a storm.
Apple pies and apple crumbles, upside-down pineapple cake with cherries. No brakes were put on our creativity and we were free to use the kitchen as we liked.
Now autumn finds my stomach rumbling and my eyes wandering to my mother’s stash of old recipe books. They are like big ledger books – green and brown and hard backed – with ruled pages and perfect copperplate writing. Splodges of raw mixture, egg stains and spots of crusted sugar make the contents all the more endearing.
I scribble my own notes in the margins.
“DISASTER!” or “Never again” or “Yum” or “BUCKETS MORE LIMONCELLO!”
It feels like carrying on a tradition; providing as our mothers did before us.
Baking in winter brings waves of comfort. It is love measured out in an old tin flour scoop.
Shah biscuits, flakemeal shortbread, truffles and millionaire’s squares... whisper the names like a prayer.
It is a love handed from generation to generation, it is a comfort for the days when the light fades.
