Freudian sauce.
Does a connection through a recipe mean more than savouring a taste?
One: Clean sauce
Jay’s mom cooked four meals. Fried sausages or roast meat (silverside, chicken, loin of pork) with steamed potatoes, carrots, and peas, sometimes broccoli. In the summer, she’d microwave corn on the cob.
Almost every night, she counted potatoes into the steamer, peeling toxins away1 into a paper towel. But every night there was a clean nightie, threadbare from boilwashing the germs away, the fabric barely covered her thin thighs that rose from her platform sandals.
Karen kept count: two potatoes for her, four for her husband, six for DaBoy2, four for Zara, three for Emilia, three for Carla, two for me. “No more for you than that Annabelle, that’s why you’re fat, like all that bread you can’t stop eating”. Her long fingers always moving, poking a soft spot, squeezing a spot, hanging on to her mostly grown children, keeping them close3.
The three other meals Karen cooked were steak and chip-shop chips; adding home toppings to supermarket pizza; and tomato sauce with spaghetti.
It was her lazy supper, so simple it didn’t count as cooking. When I’d cook it too hot or fast, Jay stood next to me, reminding me it wasn’t supposed to even pop, Annabelle for fucks sake, his mom made sure it was gentle, like frying tomatoes in butter, you have to be so careful to not burn it, can’t you just fucking learn? I talked about the spag bol I made, the soups, the stews. But, this sauce was special. This was different, and his mom knew the way.
When I got it wrong, his laugh would roll as he said it was okay, I was fucking useless anyway.
After supper, I would scald the leaky stainless steel tea-pot, add two bags, swirl SWIRL the water in, Annabelle. Pull on her Marigolds and run the hot tap until I could feel my skin puffing against the powder and plastic. Pour liquid soda crystals over the bleached cotton cloth, wipe down the counters and the cooker from the corner to the lip, now stack the dishwasher with the dishes I’d already run under the hot tap, and watch the plastic of the sink bleach white again as I hung the gloves over the tap.
“Annabelle, come one! Whaddaya doing? Come on! Did you load the dishwasher? Where’s the tea? What’s taking so long? God is your brain rotting at that university? And don’t go upstairs to read!”
In the front room it’s Corrie and EastEnders. I bring the tea, they shout abuse at the TV and laugh at the leftwing liberal in the corner.
I say nothing. I don’t say enough.
My phone buzzes. A text from Cate. We miss you, she says. The halls night out is going to be amazing, wish you were here! Hope you’re having fun!
I tuck my phone into my pocket and fix my eyes on the TV.
Two: Therapy sauce
How is it, I say to my therapist, how is it that one of the staple meals I feed my children, and the meal that they now make for themselves, in their own ways - how is it that something this bully cooked, can be so much a part of my life?
What the fuck is wrong with me that one of my most comforting meals and a staple of my children’s food memories - how is it these came from this human?
This woman treated me like home help - and I let her. I let this happen. What the fuck is wrong with me?
You know this, she says. There’s nothing wrong with a meal that is cheap, comforting, and simple. You’re a single mum. Your days are long.
Give yourself a break. You know that Karen didn’t invent this recipe.
Maybe, she suggests.
May it’s just tomato sauce.
I sigh. Behind me, taking up most of the sofa, Rob Dog sighs loud enough for my therapist to hear over Zoom.
Why can’t I let it go?
Three: Non-Freudian sauce
It appears I will be sleeping underneath a five-foot Freud.
My daughter’s friends wanted her to join their Spring Break in Vienna. However, we’ve only met once, on last year’s Spring Break, when they came to London, and to Kent.
I have to explain to my daughter, my ex, and the Americans that three days hanging out is not enough for me to trust strangers with my daughter and her passport, thousands of miles and many countries away from home. So I am here, an expensive and unwanted chaperone, free to explore a city I do not know.
London calling
Outside St Botolph without Aldgate, the Easter sun was weak. My daughter and her friend lived the post-lockdown ritual of meeting the shape of a person you’ve come to love online. Learning their texture, adding the smell of their body to the neat stories and sentences you’ve both texted, typed, and read.
Now you’re feeling the curves of their back under your hands as you hug the first time, the brush of their hair on your cheek. Where they look when they’re waiting at traffic lights - if they wait at traffic lights. How they stab their straw at the tight cellophane of a fresh bubble tea.
The day after Brick Lane, we took the Americans to a National Trust house. Tucked into a valley of bluebells, wisteria, and rhododendrons, the wooden wall panels are, I notice, the same scrollwork as the headboards from my Grannie’s house.
The brass handles and resting plates of a tall boy take me to her angular, shady sitting room. A sterling silver teapot sitting behind glass transports me to my childhood breakfast table, my feet kicking my chair as I chew pappy bran flakes, and the smokey fug of lapsang souchong rises from teacups as dad reads the paper and spreads home made marmalade on wholemeal toast.
Wood panel after tea pot, moulding after tile, I can’t help but tell narrate these strange similarities and memories.
I wonder if I’m showing off. I probably am.
Vienna sausage
Arriving at our small sandstone hotel in the middle of Vienna, tapestries hang on black lobby walls and gilt armchairs flank glass-topped coffee tables. Behind a partition, in perfect English, a young man asks me for my card. I don’t have a credit card with me. Instead, I give the names of the Americans. I don’t know when they’re arriving, I say, but, “they are taking care of our room”. It trips off my tongue, I look him in the eye and hold the pause. He agrees. I feel luxurious. I feel powerful.
We weave through stone walls to a wire-cutter lift. Our top floor room has floor to ceiling windows, two double beds, a desk, a kitchenette, and a small dining table.
I unpack. Stack books on the desk, tuck my pyjamas under my pillow, and make a cup of tea, before I remember we have no milk. My daughter’s headphones are clamped to her ears. To sleep off the trains and the flight she curls into the smaller bed, waiting waiting for her friend to arrive, to get away from me. She drops into sleep.
Itching with airport adrenaline, I see the hardbacks I treated myself to. But yesterday I lost my freelance gig. What had seemed a fine treat in the London Review of Books shop last Saturday, now feels a ludicrous extravagance, a childish waste of money.
Money and numbers float in my brain and tethering them feels impossible. The Americans must be millionaires - I know this, because I Zillowed their penthouse. It is worth 1,750% of my home. They paid for this hotel, I paid for our flights, t
he trains, for it all. I know it is worth it. I also need every penny.
They are the self-made American dream. I tell stories about ghosts.
Tomorrow is Easter Day, and I do not know how we do this. What is fair? Who pays? Who owes?
But today. Supper. I need to know what we might do, and I need to not wait.
When we left the metro, I saw a Spar. I take the keys, stretch my legs down the stairs, and remember to turn my head left for cars, bikes, and trams.
The shop shines with bunnies and lambs, chocolate Mozarts and marzipan Freuds. I buy us crisps and sweets, crispy chilli peanuts and drinks, the newer to our palettes the better.
Just in case everything is shut tomorrow, or the teenagers just want something plain, or I cannot cope with the rush of a new city and its different flavours and textures, I pick up butter, cheese, pasta, and two tins of tomatoes.
Tomato butter sauce*
Feeds four
Two tins of peeled plum tomatoes (not chopped)
50 grams butter (ish)
Pinch of salt
Teaspoon of sugar
Pasta, cheese.
Take two tins of peeled plum tomatoes, and empty them into a saucepan (if you have a heavy-bottomed pan, use it. If not, no big deal). Add the butter, sugar, and salt.
Turn the heat to medium-high (on a scale of 1-10, I’d say 6).
Take a potato masher. As the tomatoes come to simmer, crush them into a pulp, and give a good stir. Turn the heat down, to around 30% of full heat, and simmer for about half an hour.
If you have hungry people to feed ASAP, boil the shit out of it whilst your pasta cooks - just keep stirring it, else it’ll burn, and turn jammy.
Stir the sauce through cooked pasta. Serve with god’s own amount of cheese.
It’ll keep well in the fridge. Store in a glass jar for a longer shelf life than plastic.
*I’m not doing the recipe-blogger thing (all respect to the money-earning bloggers out there).
I want you to read the story, more than I care about you cooking the sauce. But I figure you might want to know why I’m still cooking this sauce after twenty years. Have fun, go cook!
Look gang. The MAHA purists and the ‘big food’ conspiracy gang will have you all shook up about non-organic. For what it’s worth, after working with one of the major organic delivery firms, I believe in organic farming as a way to nurture soil health and protect our planet. To eat more in line with the seasons. After years working in food and around food politics, I’ve come to the non-peer-researched view that the bestest way to eat always reverts to the most boring mean: eat a good amount of veg, including leafy grains. And fruit, and then other things. Unless you want to be vegan or veggie, or you have allergies, just try to not let food purity take over - it’s a short jump to blood and soil politics.
Yes, that’s what they called Jay. “DaBoy”, the only one. I was doomed.
There was grief in the family, that isn’t mine to write about. All names have been changed.
I love this. Beautifully framed x