When you think of Christmas, which food springs to mind? Perhaps turkey, mince pies or mulled wine? For me, it’s the festive fruit tart my grandmother baked every year, to be eaten on Christmas Eve. When we settled down to eat dessert on 24 December, after all the hustle and bustle of festive preparations, journeys across the country and the tensions that often come with a family Christmas, the serving of the tart was a signal to relax.
But when my grandmother died unexpectedly in 2016, we couldn’t find the recipe anywhere. We scoured her kitchen, flicking through cookbooks and notes, but there was no sign of it. Her recipe, it seemed, had died with her.
That Christmas was brutal. Our celebrations were muted. Family members would dissolve into tears whenever Little Donkey, one of her favourite carols, played. Everywhere I looked, there were holes where Grandma should have been. She should have been sitting on her usual stool as we opened our presents. She should have been perched on the kitchen stairs while dinner was prepared, her offers of help being batted away. She should have been prodding us out of the door for one of her “little ambles” to walk off the mince pies. She should have been dishing up her tart on Christmas Eve.
For most of my life, my grandmother was the fittest older person I had ever met. Her great passion in life, aside from her family, was walking. She was most herself tramping along a footpath, eating a packed lunch in a sodden field or planning a route along the South West Coast Path. Even in her 80s, she could make it up a hill faster than me. She seemed invincible.
Because of this, and as young people so often do, I thought I had more time with her. I didn’t always text her back, I didn’t call her as often as I should have and didn’t visit nearly enough. I didn’t ask her enough questions. I didn’t take enough photos of her. I didn’t preserve the sound of her voice. I didn’t ask her for her recipes.
I thought I had more time. We always think we have more time.
Five years after that first, difficult Christmas without Grandma, a small group at my church held a meal where everyone was asked to bring a traditional family dish. There was only one thing I could possibly take. I decided – recipe or not – to try to recreate the tart. I am no baker; Welsh cakes, cookies and the odd brownie are really my limit. But I thought that maybe I could find something similar to what I recalled of the tart and perhaps tweak it a little. It was time to turn to the internet.
I racked my brain: there were cranberries, I knew that. I could picture them, jewel-bright among the other fruit. Something soft. Pear, maybe? Apple? There was a crunch: pecans! I had something to work with.
I found a few options that could work, but I thought I would check with my mother in case I remembered the dish wrongly. When she said it might have been a tarte tatin, the game changed. It took just a few seconds online before I found it – the recipe. It wasn’t some invention of my grandmother’s or a family recipe passed down the generations at all. It was a 2005 recipe from Waitrose, which she must have picked up as a card in the supermarket (to my knowledge she never used the internet for recipes, the reason I hadn’t thought to try online before). There it was on the screen. Grandma’s tart.
There is no particular magic in a pudding, or a ring or a beloved piece of clothing that we hold on to long after someone has died. But things can help us to remember people who are no longer with us. My grandmother might not have been at the table with us that year, but a tiny slice of her legacy was, sitting on a plate in front of each of us with a liberal helping of cream. As we ate our tarte tatin together that Christmas, one of the huge holes where my grandmother should have been was no longer there. Yes, Little Donkey still hurt our hearts a bit, but now we were able to share our memories more with fondness than pain.
Grief doesn’t ever disappear but, with time, its sting lessens. The space around it grows to allow the light back in again. We realise that those we love are not completely gone. That Christmas, thanks to a cranberry and pecan tart, it felt as if we had a little piece of Grandma back.
