A Note on My Grandmother
This website has been years in the planning, albeit in a rather unconscious and haphazard way. It's been years of talking about food, thinking about food, making food, taking pictures of food. Even planning holidays around food.
I come from a foodcentric family. My grandmother was a chef, and something in the milk must have enriched the taste buds of all her children and grandchildren. She was also a farmer's daughter. Her interests lay not only in mirror glazes and soufflés (although a dab hand at both) but in simple, perfect ingredients. Right up until the end of her life, even once her own appetite had dwindled and she must have been - as my mother claimed - eating her signature red lipstick for survival, she derived such genuine pleasure from seeing us eat or from hearing about what we had been cooking.
I remember when we would arrive in Yorkshire, after many hours of squabbling in a packed car. It was always late, late at night and I could barely see my feet as they made their way across flat flagstones and in at the front door. First was the little square room, cold from the outside, furnished only with coats and a strange little brown bird that always sat on the highest shelf. Then the second door opened. Green chair, a fire and, when you turned, a table spread with the crispest of white cloths. We would sit and we would eat; dark stews with pillow-like dumplings, pink-brown meat with crackling that snapped in your mouth, and always an exciting cheese, a glass of perfumed whiskey. I remember so many of my grandmother's meals, but those midnight feasts are the most prominent.
This blog will, I hope, turn out to be something like our family's approach to food; a mixture of tastes and stories, memories forged by eating and an emphasis on the pleasure of it all.
I am confident my grandmother will come up again.