Memories, mk2

I'm at the circular table, sitting in the two tone cream and burning orange kitchen, my chair jammed up against the corner. The smallest space. Being the youngest I could most easily wriggle into it. My fathers 3/4 pint mug filled. A plate of toast. Pots of Fruitfield marmalade with slivers of zest. Everyday orange juice. A lifetime of sqeez. It's faintly powdery taste remains with me. In the seventies, they never manage to make it taste entirely reconstituted.

It's the sense of abundance from my mothers kitchen that remains with me. Cone shaped plates of food, heaped high. That generous sense of ampleness, with more to come. And always enough for another person. Friends would sometimes be staggered, especially in my college days, by the physical size of the meals we had.

Pork chops with apple sauce. A kidney still attached on my fathers plate, slightly shiny and chocolate redbrown. Heaps of potatoes. Processed peas. Yorkshire relish. I still can't eat potatoes, boiled or mashed, without a generous dollop of yr.

Flash fried steaks, caramelised onions, pepper and salt. Pan drippings poured over boiled potatoes. Mushrooms done in the same pan.

Beef stew, food for days, finished off as a Saturday lunchtime soup. Sweet, the soup tinged orange. Bisto mixed with cornflour as stock. Sweet meet boiled gently for an hour and a half, falling apart on the spoon. The smell and taste and colour and warmth of the memory wells up through all my senses. I can taste the white pepper sweetness of it on my tongue. I can feel it heating me on a November afternoon. I can see the short nod my mother always offers after she has served everyone up. When she has checked each plate, each pot and pan, and everything in the kitchen is exactly as it should be. Plates heaped high, bowls filled. Ample food available. Thick brown bread cut and buttered. That short nod that signalled she was about to eat. That said "that's my family fed".

The metallic crack of the biscuit tin, and the slightly sickly slightly stale smell of custard creams. fig rolls, and rich tea.

Bicuits and cold milk before bed. Gently persuading my mother to up the pre bedtime rich tea ration, and regularly succeeding. My mother never can refuse to give food, of any description. To eat is to live, to feed is to love.

Sunday roasts which seemed to be the size of my childhood head. Boiled ribs, pink, and steaming and salty and delicious. Gammon steaks, grilled. With pineapple. Signalling the introduction of one more foodstuff into my diet. Two if you include the vague approximation of fruit as a foodstuff. Lamb chops, or rack, slathered with vinegary mint sauce fresh from a colmans jar.

The seemingly endlessly large jumble of washing up that followed, preceeded by the endlessly large jumbe of arguments about whose turn it is. Sunday tea. Cold cuts. Cheddar cheese with yr. Brown bread, butter, and dunnes pate. Thick slabs of everything. Jam tarts, or homemade appletart.

This is the stuff of my early life. These are the memories which still inform my own food. The feelings that I hunt down each time I sit somone down at my table. I have my own ritual of completion, much like my mothers, the same urgent sense of hospitality, no, more than that. That same sense of urgent care and pleasureable responsibility. That same sense of generosity and ampleness of spirit found in the hands of both my father and mother....

What are the tastes that have made your memories? Wagon wheels in your lunch box. Dairylea? Pleasantly plastic easi-singles in sand-filled beachside sandwiches? Fizzle sticks. Dib dabs....

Tell me. I'd like to know.