I was born and grew up in Sheffield, the city of steel and, more importantly, the city of Bassetts Liquorice Allsorts and Henderson’s Relish (which is almost exactly like Worcestershire sauce, except if you say so, you will likely be run out of town). Mine was one of those families, relatively common in my childhood but less so nowadays, which encompassed, at moments rather starkly, more than one social class. My grandparents had all left school at 13 (my paternal grandfather was even younger), but their children – my parents – had both gone to university, the first in their families to do such a thing, thanks to the education provided by their grammar schools (or so they would say).
My father was a lecturer in the department of botany at the university; specifically, he was a mycologist. My mother, who had been one of his students, was a biology teacher. Sheffield, though, was only their adopted city. My father, the son of a Birmingham gem-setter, was from West Bromwich originally. My mother, the daughter of a travelling grocer, was from Sunderland. I’m telling you all this because all of it influenced the way we ate then, and the way I eat now, and because in my family we may also find the story of Britain’s appetite – and of how it changed in the years after the war; how we got to where we are now.
All families are weird or unusual to a degree, even if their various members aren’t always aware of it. But mine was, I think, this way to an exceptional extent – and I certainly did notice it at the time (even more so now). This isn’t the place for my angst-ridden teen memoirs (that’s another book), but I will say that we were uncommonly interested in food at a time – the 1970s and early 80s – when many, if not most, British people were not. In the main, this was simply because we liked eating. Our family omnivorousness and greed was always the source of some pride to us; in adulthood, if I cook for someone and they don’t ask for seconds, I feel disappointed, as if something has gone very wrong. But food was also a proxy language, our best and preferred means of communicating, especially if the chips were down (or up). We were northern and complicated, and not much given to the emotional incontinence so beloved of the 21st century. Food was our way of expressing love.
But if food was a language, we spoke multiple dialects. My grandparents’ gastronomic vernacular was born of their class and the towns of which they were natives; my parents’ came of these same things with additional vocabulary courtesy, in a roundabout way, of British cookery writer Elizabeth David and foreign travel. In my mother’s case, it also came from the Cordon Bleu Cookery School magazines she’d collected and now kept in special ring binders. My brother and I were the beneficiaries of the combined lexicons of both.
We could have neck of lamb stew with our granny Cooke at lunchtime – a widow, she had moved to Sheffield before we were born to be near my father – and lasagne or a curry at home in the evening. I’ve been talking here about language in a metaphorical sense. But cross-cultural eating was reflected in the actual words we used, too. We were in a kind of halfway house, linguistically speaking. We called the meal in the middle of the day lunch, not dinner. But we called our evening meal tea and it was eaten early, by six at the very latest. When I’m tired and forget myself, I still call it tea, even now – and secretly, that’s how I’ll always think of it.
But however much they enjoyed pasta and poppadoms – their marriage began in the back end of the swinging 60s and ended in the early 70s – my parents also liked nothing more than to wax lyrical about the foods of their childhood. If they had rejected certain culinary habits in their newfound middle-class sophistication – they believed, for instance, that their parents overcooked meat, preferring it bloodier themselves – there were other things for which they still ached and couldn’t give up.
This was especially true of my father. After Sunday lunch, he always used to keep the juices and the fat as dripping, storing it in the fridge in a little white ramekin – a throwback to his childhood. To watch him eat dripping on toast was to witness the kind of elaborate ritual that tourists pay good money to see on holiday in Japan. The moment when he broke the pale, almost glossy, top of the fat – the jelly loitered beneath, dark and bloody, and you needed to get a balance of both for the perfect spread – with the point of his special knife (he had special knives for everything) was exquisite: a delicate, darting, near-surgical movement that was conducted in a silence that was almost religious. When he sprinkled salt and pepper on his toast, it might as well have been incense. If he had genuflected as the result made its way to his atheist mouth, I would hardly have been surprised.
I loved my grandmothers. Both of them cooked for us and one of them, my granny Goodson, was touched with a kind of genius in the kitchen. She made her own flaky pastry – imagine it! Everyone buys it now – and it was lighter than air and yet so wonderfully buttery. It was thanks to this that her steak and kidney pie was unimprovable – a thing of beauty and utmost deliciousness.
Both of my grannies grew up poor. My Sunderland granny’s father was the shop steward at the shipyard and during strikes they chopped up dining chairs for firewood; there was a reason why she was so intensely proud that she and my grandpa owned their own home. As for Granny Cooke, she was hard up all of her life. She had been widowed so early. She couldn’t work because she was blind. But these women could cook, and quite apart from the fact that I liked to eat what they made, I think it must have been a lifesaver for both of them.
By the time I was 14 Granny Goodson was also widowed. When she visited us in Sheffield, she always came with two suitcases: one for her clothes and the other for all the cakes and biscuits she’d baked for us. But my greatest joy was to visit her, alone – the better that I might be the sole beneficiary of her Rayburn and all the things she made in it. Like a puppy, this oven could not be left untended, which meant that it was my uncle Jack, her brother, who came to meet me at Newcastle and “bring me through” (this was how they put it) to Sunderland on the small train. Which was perfect, of course. By the time we rang Granny’s bell, tea was already on the table. This was a proper high tea and always the same. It began with cold ham with salad (butter lettuce and tomatoes only) and salad cream on the side, and was followed by as much cake, shortbread etc as you could possibly eat (there were no limits).
Occasionally, my auntie Vera – my late grandpa’s sister and a spinster with peculiar hats and grand ideas about herself – would “come through” from her little house in Villette Road to join us, bearing a fresh cream victoria sponge in a beribboned white box from the Swiss baker, Müller. Secretly, I liked these cakes – the more, the merrier – but I knew how my granny felt about them. They were nothing on hers. Why did Vera even bother? Hadn’t she grasped, after all these years, that a cake had not yet been baked that was better than her sister-in-law’s?
Staying with my granny was like being at a spa, except every treatment comprised a meal or (if we were between meals) some other tempting foodstuff. She had a morbid fear that someone might be hungry and would do anything to assuage it, mostly by making sure it had no chance to get going in the first place. Her questions were delightfully wheedling. “Would you just like a little biscuit?” “Could you manage a sandwich?” “Are you sure you’ve had enough?” She was impossible to refuse. It was as if I were emaciated and my life depended on the ice-cream – she made it with evaporated milk – that would shortly pass my lips. I found the whole experience heavenly, and was always insisting I needed to go there because it was somewhere I could revise uninterrupted (this was only partially true).
Occasionally, we would go out, at which point Granny would transform herself. During the daytime, she wore a buttoned nylon overall over her clothes and shoes she called her flatties. But she would rather have died than leave the house without lipstick and powder, heels and, when I was younger, a Princess Margaret-style hat. Our destination was either town, where we would visit the department store, Binns, or my uncle Jack and auntie Elsie’s, where more food would follow. Elsie was almost as good a cook as Granny. I don’t know why this sticks in my mind, but she owned an egg slicer, which I found fancy and amazing.
Granny Cooke wasn’t such a whiz in the kitchen. But still, my brother and I often used to go to her house for lunch together, walking through the cemetery on to which it backed. She lived in a typical Sheffield arrangement, her house one of four terraces built around a little yard. No one used their front door in these streets. To get to the back door, you had to pass through what we called the entry – a kind of tunnel (a wind tunnel, when the weather was right) that took you to a shared yard and the outside loos; though some people now had one indoors, too. The kitchen had been built on to at the back. The door was usually unlocked, but if it wasn’t, we would tap on the living room window to let her know we had arrived.
The meal was always the same, though when I think of it now, I feel a bit ashamed that we insisted each on having our favourite, though I know she didn’t regard it as any trouble to make two things rather than one. My brother would have the aforementioned neck of lamb stew with mashed potato to soak up the broth (it wasn’t quite gravy). I would have lamb chop with chips. Neither of us, so far as I can remember, wanted vegetables and this wish was respected. For pudding, we would have Birds Eye raspberry mousse, which came in a little plastic pot and is rather hard to describe. It wasn’t quite a mousse, somehow, but the synthetic vanilla whip and bright pink raspberry ripples were divine. This was the only place on earth I ever got to eat them.
Once, my brother being unavailable, I took my best friend, K, to Granny’s for lunch. We were sitting by the fire, waiting to be fed, when smoke began to billow from beneath the kitchen door. We rushed in. The chip pan was ablaze, but Granny couldn’t see it. Apparently, the smell of burning hadn’t put her off her stride. I cannot remember what happened next – somehow we must have put the fire out – but what I do know is that Granny carried on making lunch, regardless, and that this time, both her guests had lamb chop and chips (and enjoyed it, too).
Kitchen Person by Rachel Cooke (Orion, £20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
