Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen Read online

  But what I hanker for most of all is the ice cream, to which I hope a third batch of strawberries will be dedicated. She makes it only rarely. If she makes it, it fills only one plastic container. It is the most intense and delicious flavor I have ever experienced.

  “Make the ice cream, Mum,” I beg. “Please.”

  “But it's a lot of work. I'm tired.”

  This time she makes it.

  And now, more than twenty-five years later, I wanted to taste it again. I felt sure there would be, within her own recipe book, a handwritten description of how to concoct this most strawberryish of strawberry ice creams. Written down decades before, like the directions to the buried treasure. For the first time in months, I opened a book that still seemed almost too electric with memory and emotion to touch.

  There was nothing there of any help at all. No mention of strawberry ice cream in her hand. Or any ice cream.

  “You're not playing along with this, Mum,” I said out loud.

  There were no recipes for strawberry ice cream in French Country Cooking or even the massive French Provincial Cooking.

  I picked up The Observer magazine and flicked through it. And there, as if sent from above, was a recipe for strawberry ice cream. Okay, it wasn't from Elizabeth David or Katie Stewart or Robert Carrier. It was written by the popular British cookbook writer Nigel Slater. But in the family tree of cookbook writers and chefs, Nigel Slater is only one or two branches away from Elizabeth David. As is just about every chef working in Britain and most in the United States. Alice Waters, perhaps the most influential chef in the United States, sat down as a young woman, read French Provincial Cooking from cover to cover and, to grossly oversimplify the story of her myriad influences, thus embarked on the journey to her doctrine of seasonal, simple, Mediterranean-inspired, local-produce-filled cooking. Alice and Liz became dear friends. The legacy spreads deeply into American and British restaurants and cookbooks. The River Café, perhaps London's loveliest restaurant, thrives off Elizabeth David's obsessions with seasonality, simplicity, local produce, the Mediterranean, and just having an incredibly great time over food and wine. The restaurant's alumni include more brilliant cooks—Sam and Sam Clark of my favorite restaurant in the world, Moro; the seasonally obsessed TV chef, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall; and the Naked Chef, Jamie Oliver. They are all Elizabeth David's children, or grandchildren, really. When not directly stealing her recipes, as Fearnley-Whittingstall does with her brilliant French onion tart, they are borrowing heavily, fifty years after she first published.

  So I looked at Nigel Slater's recipe for strawberry ice cream, and its simplicity and loveliness seemed to speak of a history that stretched back to the imperious Mrs. David and from her to one of her devoted followers—my mother. The simplest and best, Slater began. It had only three ingredients. One pound of strawberries. Three and a half ounces of baker's sugar. Ten fluid ounces of heavy cream. After removing the leaves, slice the strawberries. Cover them in the sugar for an hour, macerating. Whip up the cream, thick enough to lie in folds rather than stiff enough to stand in peaks. Zap the strawberries in a blender. Fold it all together, leaving a bit of a ripple. Cover and freeze. It is worth checking and stirring the ice as it freezes, bringing the outside edges into the middle.

  I did as he said. I took out the blue plastic bowl from the freezer four hours later and left it to soften a little for twenty minutes. It was a thick swirl of pink and pinker. I took my first bite. The coldness filled my mouth, followed a moment later by a sort of warmth, the warmth of a flavor mixing with memory and love.

  The intense strawberryness made me see the plastic, store-bought ice-cream container—Wall's vanilla—my mother had kept and then filled with her strawberry ice cream. I could picture her elbow bending as she dug into the container with a strong silvery spoon, scooping out chunks into bowls in front of my sister and me. We were forbidden to help ourselves, because my mother knew that if left to our own devices, within minutes none would be left.

  Present and past blended for me. I closed my eyes in the kitchen and I imagined my mother somewhere, smiling at my childlike grin, the gift of strawberry joy successfully passed down from the dead to the living.

  She had more to bestow. I stood on a chair and lifted down her old aluminum jam dish, or preserving pan: slightly misshapen, alarmingly big, built solely for the purpose of boiling fruit. This was the pan that used to sit on my mother's stove, bubbling and steaming, vapors of impossible sweetness snaking their way out of it and filling the house.

  “Do not get too close,” she'd warn me. I'd be standing on a wooden stool five feet away, peering into the dark, simmering goop inside, slightly afraid and entirely desperate to stick my finger into it. She'd pick up the wooden spoon with the extra-long handle that rested next to the stove on the counter and dip it into the pan. Then she'd blow on the runny jam until it had cooled and thickened enough for her to steer it into my open mouth.

  Elizabeth David wrote an entire—and very long—book about bread, but from what I could tell she wasn't overly interested in jam. There was, again, nothing in my mother's own recipe book. So I looked on my shelves and found another book of hers, one I had never looked at: The Penguin Book of Jams, Pickles and Chutneys, by David and Rose Mabey, some of its pages stuck together in a corner with big splotches of darkness. Strawberry jam got two whole pages to itself. Katie Stewart offered a slight alternative, with a shorter recipe. I began to read, expecting the revelation of an alchemy. But making jam turned out to be about as difficult as boiling the kettle. Which makes you wonder why on earth anyone buys jam from a shop.

  I dumped strawberries, sugar, and the juice of two lemons into the huge pan and turned on the heat. Not very long after that I had enough strawberry jam, albeit ridiculously runny—“Ah, so that's what a ‘setting point’ is,” I said when my sister asked how long I had boiled the jam—to keep Pernilla and me alive during the winter. I went quickly back to the market and bought raspberries and filled some more jars with a darker jam. I lined them up on the kitchen table, all labeled and tucked safely into the jars with transparent plastic covers and elastic bands.

  20

  My sister and I are running along the beach at Gullane in East Lothian, outside of Edinburgh, happy-tired and floppy after a Sunday lunch of roast pork with applesauce and a stop off on the way back in Musselburgh, at the best ice cream shop in the entire wide world—Luca's. Here Jane has once again broken her own world record for the slowest consumption of an ice cream, the tip of her tongue dabbing tormentingly at the pink-and-white swirl. Mine was long gone by the time she was halfway through her pointillist approach to eating.

  Now we sit in the white enamel bath in our flat on Oxford Terrace and squirt water at each other through empty shampoo bottles.

  “Time to wash your hair,” my mother says. She is sitting on the closed toilet, smoking a cigarette.

  “Can you get Daddy, please?” I ask. We all know the drill. I will not let my mother wash my hair, because only my father knows how to do it without getting soapy water in my eyes. And he must use the same handleless, transparent, slightly gray-colored plastic cup each time. This is one of the logic-free demands a child will make that his parents realize is, in the end, better to surrender to.

  Jane washes her own hair and gets out of the bath. My father comes in and gently pours warm water over my scalp with one hand, using his other as a dam across my tilted forehead. Just in case. He massages in the shampoo and rinses my hair after he has placed his hand-dam back on my forehead.

  “Can we have a funny supper, Mummy?” I hear Jane ask in the kitchen. Sunday could be about to get even better. A funny supper on a Sunday is pretty common but by no means guaranteed. And it brings with it the added guaranteed benefit of taking place in front of the television. I stop splashing to listen.

  “Okay,” my mother says.

  This is very good news. And soon I can smell the cold roasted potatoes, which we call crispity potatoes, being sauté
ed in the kitchen. There will also be cold roast pork and applesauce, but beyond that I don't know what's coming. It's part of the excitement. The plate just arrives. Although it is possible, within the unwritten rules of the funny supper, to lobby gently for constituent parts. A piece of celery. Potato chips with ketchup to dip into. Pickled onions. A chunk of cheddar. Sausages. Tomatoes with mayonnaise on the side. Peanuts. Chocolate fingers, whose chocolate you can suck or lick off, leaving the boring biscuit exposed. Carrot sticks. Slices of salami. Coleslaw. Crackers. Slices of cucumber. Ham. Grilled cheese on toast with Lea & Perrins nearby. An apple. Warmed-up vegetables from lunch. Chocolate-covered digestive biscuits. Sometimes, when there are no roast potatoes left from lunch, my mother pulls out her french-fry pan, already full of pre-used vegetable oil, and starts peeling and slicing up potatoes into fries. Somewhere in the mass of fries will sometimes be a surprise M, a J, a D, and another M. Matt, Jane, Dad, Mum. That means Dad has been in the kitchen to do a little potato sculpting. (One fall we have an American philosophy student lodging with us, a warm, cheery Dartmouth kid named Dirk who teaches me how to spin my soccer ball on one finger as, he explains, basketball players do. If Dirk is at home when the french fries are on the menu, my father carves out another D. Dirk loves fries almost as much as I do, and one night he takes me out to the chip shop with his drawling, hairy college buddies, all on their semester abroad, and we sit on a public bench eating chips and drinking Coke, which he has bought. On the evening before Dirk returns home to West Virginia and leaves a hole in the family, my father presents him with a gift he has been making, secretly, in his workshop downstairs: a gold-sprayed french fry made of perfectly carved wood, pierced by a real fork, with a glass drip about to ploop down from the fry. It is on a small plinth.)

  I sit on the floor in my pajamas, cross-legged under the square coffee table with the white Formica top. My sister sits beside me in her nightgown. The Sony television is on. Mum comes in carrying two plates. I sit up as tall as I can to see what's on them.

  Teatime in Edinburgh

  21

  IN VITRO FERTILIZATION OFTEN REQUIRES A WOMAN TO TAKE lots of hormones and drugs whose names are hard to keep track of if you're not personally taking them but whose effects seem to be, more or less, universal. Most of them are delivered through needles, several times a day; some of the needles are very large indeed. At times, this combination can make the woman in question a little moody. One day during our second attempt to make a baby in a Petri dish, I showed my wife a couple of Internet videos that I had found amusing and hoped would make her laugh: thousands of Filipino prisoners in orange jumpsuits perfectly re-creating the videos to Michael Jackson's “Thriller” and Queen's “Radio Ga Ga.” Pernilla watched, and when Freddie Mercury sang, “Some one still loves you,” in “Radio Ga Ga,” tears began to trickle down her cheeks. They were not tears of laughter.

  “It's so sad,” she said.

  “What? It's hilarious,” I said.

  “But they're all locked up,” she said. “There's no one to look after them.”

  “You're so sweet,” I said.

  Which was the wrong thing to say.

  “Why, because I'm all hormonal and find it sad that there are all these prisoners and I cry when they sing, ‘Someone still loves you,’ and I think that perhaps they're there in prison in the Philippines and no one loves them, no one even fucking knows they're there?”

  For all her mood swings as her body went through the extreme pushings and pullings of vast amounts of drugs and hormones for the second time in only a few months, Pernilla remained the person in the world who made me happiest. The doctors said that she had probably been pregnant briefly the first time—hence the confused reading—and so we had quickly gone for another cycle of IVF. I fed her obsessively.

  If the embryologist had his math right, August 9 was the day that one or both of the two embryos implanted inside Pernilla would embed itself in the lining of her uterus. She would, at that point, be pregnant.

  That day I woke up absolutely certain that we were about to become expectant parents. As I ran in Queen's Park that morning I pictured myself introducing my daughter or son to some of life's treats, as my mother had done for me.

  It is a Saturday morning and I am sitting cross-legged in our playroom, staring at the Sony Trinitron television. There is a black-and-white movie on starring a young man with black hair. He hits someone in a bar and ends up in prison. I sense that his fate is unfair and I feel terrible for him. But then things get better in prison. He makes friends and, before long, they're singing and dancing to the most amazing music I have ever heard.

  I run upstairs to the kitchen when the movie ends.

  “Mum, do you have any records by Elvis Presley?”

  “No, darling,” she says. “I don't think so. But look through the records.”

  It's like I'm famished. I run through to the living room and rifle through the LPs, but all I can find is classical, jazz, a couple of Simon & Garfunkels, Judy Collins, Joan Armatrading, Harry Nilsson, the Kingston Trio, Mozart, Beethoven, and other records by other people I don't care about. I want Elvis, and I cannot believe that my mother and father have none of his records. Specifically, the record.

  “But isn't ‘Jailhouse Rock’ the best song ever made?” I ask, slightly desperate now, searching for confirmation to what I see as a self-evident truth. “It must have sold millions of copies. How come you don't have one?”

  “I was never really that keen on Elvis,” she says, and I look at her in amazement. “But why don't you buy it with your birthday money?”

  This is perhaps the smartest thing my mother has ever suggested, I decide. Granny and Grandpa McAllester send me a crisp new pound every year in an envelope. I keep it safely in a brass box with a key until I find just the right thing to spend it on. Candy, in other words. I have never bought or owned a record before.

  We drive through the Robert Adam– designed New Town of Edinburgh, one of the most beautiful sections of any city in the world, but I don't see it. I don't see anything. I only hear a noise—the sound of Elvis in my head. We park as close as possible to John Menzies, a big stationer that also sells books and records. We rush up to the floor where the records are. I'm planning on asking them to play it for me, just to make sure it's the same as the song I heard in the movie.

  “Have you got your pound?” my mother says. “Let's go to the forty-fives.”

  Under P we find no Elvis singles. This is a mistake, surely. How could they not have numerous copies of the best song ever made?

  “Let's go and ask,” my mother says. She squeezes my hand.

  We approach the desk.

  “Do you have ‘Jailhouse Rock’ by Elvis Presley?” I ask the young woman behind the counter.

  “Hang on,” she says, turning round to look through the racks of singles. She turns back. “No, sorry, but it might be on an album.”

  We look under P and find a selection of Christmas songs sung by Elvis, although he doesn't look much like the sleek young man I saw in the movie. He looks big, and his hair is bigger.

  “Let's see if they can order it,” my mother says.

  “Can I order ‘Jailhouse Rock,’ please?” I ask the young woman behind the counter.

  She takes out a big book and flicks through it.

  “Sorry, they don't make singles of ‘Jailhouse Rock’ anymore,” she says.

  My mother drives home and I sit in front of the record player for an hour. I am desolate and, more to the point, newly aware that the world is not what I expected it to be.

  “Matty, come in here,” my mother calls out.

  I go into the kitchen and she is melting what she calls “cooking chocolate”—in other words, it's good when it's in a chocolate crispy but kind of horrible when eaten in chunks—in a bowl that sits in a pan of hot water. A box of cornflakes sits next to the cooker. She has already positioned a tall wooden stool next to the cooker. I leap onto it and stare at the chunks of chocolate
as they disappear into the goo that's beginning to collect at the bottom of the bowl. The kitchen is filled with wafts of warm cocoa. She takes her spatula, and her wrist turns clockwise as the melted chocolate pours into the mixing bowl where she has put the cornflakes. Then she places the bowl that held the chocolate on the kitchen counter next to me.

  “Go on, then,” she says, smiling. And my index finger slides its way around the sides of the bowl and into my mouth, and rock ‘n’ roll records can wait.

  22

  WHEN I GOT HOME FROM MY RUN ON AUGUST 9, I FOUND an e-mail from my father, who had just spent several days in Ardnamurchan with my sister. Jane has some info for you, he wrote.

  My sister called when she reached London. “What's the info?” I said.

  She had told our father about her trips to the church on Farm Street, how she lit candles for our mother in the small chapel to Our Lady of Lourdes and how she felt close to our mother there for some reason.

  “Yes,” I said, having heard this before. I was still not terribly interested in churches, especially ones that I had never been to.

  “Well,” my sister went on, “Dad said to me: ‘You know, Matt was christened in that church.’”

  And I felt another connection made—small and meaningless perhaps, rooted in a religion I did not share, but the past felt like a slightly less intimidating thing to me.