Running away from the world
To make orange cream, take sugar lumps, an orange or two and double cream. Use only sharp-edged, highly processed cubes. Rub each cube over and over until the grains break the delicate skin, and orange oil seeps into the bright white sugar.
The saturated sugar will start to drop. When the lump seems fully and utterly bright orange, crumble it into the waiting double cream.
For whipped cream: if it’s before 1986, use a hand-crank whisk. If it’s after, use an electric. Or, in any time or space, use a balloon whisk.
Smooth the cream over a fully cooled sponge cake, pile into a pavlova case, or into waiting choux buns (after pulling out the pappy centres).
Circa 1986
My mother eschewed a life of golf club lunches, sherry, Anglicanism, Alice bands, and strings of pearls. Instead, she baked elaborate puddings in high-necked Laura Ashley blouses after taking her four state-educated children to Catholic Mass, where she and I sat on the front bench, as dad led the choir.
After church, it was Sunday lunch. The ritual of roast topside or chicken or leg of lamb, and potatoes roasting in the mixed marbled fat collected week by week in a pea-green bakelite bowl. Boiled carrots and gravy scratched from the drippings with wine and water.
Once I asked her how she learned to make brandy snaps that I’d stuff with orange scented cream, and fragile filo pastry pies, angel cakes piled high with macerated June strawberries. It seemed strange, because her mother had served us stale crisps, rancid salmon mousse, cabbage boiled to grey, to remove the dirt.
She found cooking classes, she said, because it was so boring to be at home with me, the fourth of four! And that’s why she didn’t take me to playgroup very often, because she’d already done it with the first three, couldn’t bear to do it all again.
I’m not sure how to react. I smile.
Circa 2011
Heat biting my fucking fingers through the wet corner of the tea towel and fuck fuckedy fucking fuck now the fucking pizza has ripped on the fucking baking tray. A sloppy soup of tomato, cheese, ham pooling with soggy lumps of dough this is this is this is not how the food should be this How Why can I not make it work???
Tiny square kitchen, every surface covered with bowls, dirty dishes. Flour and semolina are somehow everywhere and nowhere there is nofuckingwhere to FUCK slam it HOT on the fucking shitting filthy cooker FUCK IT.
“Maybe it’s not worth making pizza, if it’s so stressful” a draft of cool air cuts and splinters, grabs my attention. My husband, stepping into the chaos of my kitchen. They are waiting, my husband and my children, for their supper. It’s Saturday. In the morning I cleaned the flat whilst he took the children to the playground, and then he spent the afternoon shut away making music behind a soundproof door. Later he complains he doesn’t feel part of the family.
There is white wine, at least, cold and cheap, tangy on my teeth and cool as it hits my windpipe, the little punch, the wave through me, the moment of calm, the release.
“IT’S FINE”. He backs off.
He does not realise that he wants pizza, they want pizza, and the only pizza we can afford on £60 a week for food, cleaning, and toiletries, for four people, is homemade.
We can’t afford Firezza‘s half metres of smoke-cracked crust. I want the taste of warm wheat sharp tomato, creamy mozzarella. The taste of frozen pizza, for me, like chewing cardboard, like the ruminant chew of bran flakes.
When I hold the cheap supermarket flour in my hand and the stoneground organic, and I see I know the organic is three times as much but when I hold the the regular own-brand I see and feel the rising temperatures headlines on the weekend paper soil erosion Guardian side bar growing chaos. Buying organic feels like a way of making every bite a protest. Of trying to turn back the tide.
Even thinking about slipping frozen pizza into the trolley I see those tiny growing bodies those ones I chose I wanted to bring into this world I am their mother for fucks suck so no, I will not give them the e-number, bread softened, weird cheese-that-doesn’t-melt hyper processed pizza1.
So I’ll keep trying and trying because - you tell me until you and me both get better jobs, until I can find a flexible part-time gig close to him, that doesn’t mind when the kids vomit when I have to bring them to the office and that gives me months of leave so we don’t have to pay for holiday care, tell me how I can nourish my fucking tiny baby growing children, when this is what we fucking have?
Words and rage race around my head as I stare at the ripped, soggy dough. Can’t even make shitty pizza can’t make money can’t fix the broken blinds can’t pay the service charge or shut the neighbours up when they pound music at 2am, but I can nourish my children.
I can take scraps and make a life. I can fucking do this I can do this. This is my job. Mothers cook.
Circa 2023
The beech chopping block and the cooker are filthy. White flour covers the block my friend gave me, when she moved, and I cried because she was my only friend in the village. Grains of sugar are scattered over the flat black cooker top. Did I bake last night?
A rush of rainwater through a break in the gutter woke me, again.
Is the bucket on the front door awning overflowing? Why don’t I have £2,000 to fix it yet? Still? How the fuck have I left it this long? If the next job comes through will I be able to hire the builder? How many months work do I have booked?
Every terrible life choice speeds through the dark. The promotion I sabotaged in exhaustion and fear. The days spent reading craft blogs at my desk, the fear I felt of being an adult, of trying to make my way in the world. So I made a little dolls house life, and now, I am over forty and only ever a few months from chaos. No savings from a corporate job, no security of a second salary, or savings built in my twenties. In my twenties I was working only half the week, buying baby shoes, washing cloth nappies, and running away from the world.
I give up trying to ignore my litany of failures. I swill cold water around the iron stove-top kettle, the cooker magnets hum to life. A habit I learned from my ex-husband, who liked to start his day to start by being served a cup of tea from the warmth of bed.
Open the fridge door for milk, I see six-for-a-fiver protein yoghurts sitting next to leftover lasagne. Five fucking pounds for some strained yoghurt, stuffed with flavouring, E numbers, protein, stabilisers, and ingredients I cannot pronounce. The latest food fad, the one plastered all over conference halls three years ago, now in my fridge. But my child told me that, to help her revise, these are what she needs. So I stack banoffee, raspberry, white chocolate and blueberry pots for her, buy her cans of Pringles, and cans of Monster.
Waiting for the kettle to boil and calming my breath against the panic and the drips, those fucking incessant drips, I see a shallow dish, half hidden under the tea-towels. Apple peels and cores stacked in the bin, the peeler and knife in the sink, mixing bowl upside down on the drying rack.
While I was sleeping, in my bedroom that rests on my kitchen, my children closed the door and flicked on the fairy lights that helps this room feel like a kingdom.
Like I did at uni, like I learned as a small girl, they found fruit, flour, butter, and sugar. They rubbed the wheat and sugar into the fat, simmered the apples, and made themselves a crumble. That is why the kitchen feels warm - heat still hangs from the oven.
Their dirty bowls are in the sink. I hope that they sat at our kitchen table, the Ercol table set I found in the next village down, and talked in the quiet night. Sometimes, I cook pizza as my friends sit, or pile a table with mezze, occasionally a roast. Always too much, and always leftovers. You’ll never leave my table hungry.
I fill the sink, soak the bowls. They can wait. The kettle screams, I fill my mug, stir, add the milk and take myself back to bed. I pick up my diary and start to write.
A note on ‘whole foods’
Like a lot of people, I fell into a whole food narrative. That anything different was toxic and dangerous. I don’t regret cooking for my children. What I regret is bringing so much anger and frustration.
What became clear was my fear of ‘fake foods’ was driving problems for my kids. So I backed off and eased up. Met my kids half way. Which allowed them to make their own choices - sometimes cooking a veg-heavy stir-fry, sometimes Pringles.
I know there is nothing wrong with this food! This is where I was at. No judgement.
This is a gorgeous piece of writing. Too much resonates x
Ann I felt every second of this piece. Such a resonant piece of writing.