Mothers Cakes and Confectionery

[Serial_Apologist]

Back to cakes.

And how!!!!

[french frank]

Brilliant post, ardcarp!!

And how!

My mother could … cook. We had a French lad staying with us one year who said, rather caustically, that when his mother was preparing a meal she started two or three hours before it was to be served, whereas my mother took about half an hour, to boil up some potatoes and other vegetables, shove chops under the grill and serve on plates with a jar of mint or redcurrant jelly. She no longer cooked the butterfly and rock cakes as she had done twenty years before.

[vinteuil]

... my mother (now long deceased) was an appalling cook. .

... I wonder if this, in turn, made you a good cook / a serious foodie??

I was lucky in that my ma was a serious and interested cook, of the Elizabeth David persuasion. But she attributed this to the fact that her ma had been totally uninterested in food : the cook produced the same (insipid) meals relentlessly week by week with nary a change, and my grandma never noticed. A trip to France in her late teens changed everything for my ma...


.

[jean]

My mother was a good plain cook, I suppose - she did nothing adventurous, but everything well. She made proper gravy from the juices in the pan, when my friends' mothers threw those away and used Bisto instead. She cooked vegetables (of which we always had plenty, as my parents had an allotment) very quickly and in so little water she regularly burnt the pans.

We didn't have very interesting puddings, because there was still rationing and no cream to be had. But of course there were melting moments.

[cloughie]

My mother was a good plain cook, I suppose - she did nothing adventurous, but everything well. She made proper gravy from the juices in the pan, when my friends' mothers threw those away and used Bisto instead. She cooked vegetables (of which we always had plenty, as my parents had an allotment) very quickly and in so little water she regularly burnt the pans.

We didn't have very interesting puddings, because there was still rationing and no cream to be had. But of course there were melting moments.

No baking day on a Friday then?

[Richard Tarleton]

I was lucky in that my ma was a serious and interested cook, of the Elizabeth David persuasion. But she attributed this to the fact that her ma had been totally uninterested in food : the cook produced the same (insipid) meals relentlessly week by week with nary a change, and my grandma never noticed. A trip to France in her late teens changed everything for my ma...
.

Mine claimed not to be able to boil an egg when she married - her mother would not let her near the cooker/range - but she learnt fast, especially post rationing [as jean has just reminded me] and acquired a copy of Constance Spry when it was published in 1956 after which she never looked back (and gave numerous copies away as wedding presents). My favourites on the cake front were her flapjacks, meringues and a dark chocolate cake. Her invariable mainstays when entertaining were "Chicken Marengo" (which bore little or no relation to what Dunant served after the eponymous battle) and an apricot fool dessert. C Spry was incorrigibly English, as I recall, a clove of garlic if you were lucky, but a lot better than nothing.

[Serial_Apologist]

I seem to remember that the concept of exotic home cooking started coming in somewhere abound the mid-1950s - before which time, one had to go out to experience the delights of India, and then China, Mexico and so on. Today the old jelly deals/stroke/pie'n'mash establishments have become the exotic rarities, banished presumably to seaside stalls and places with names such as Romford and Basildon.

[ardcarp]

... I wonder if this, in turn, made you a good cook / a serious foodie??

Definitely the latter. How did you guess, Vints? Mrs A. is the supremo of cuisine here (though, he adds quickly, that is not the sole reason for our fifty-year partnership!). I was quite surprised that on a recent blokish sailing trip, I turned out to be the only one who could produce anything decent...in a Force 6 is necessary. I also discovered that the ship's cook wields a certain 'soft power' over the rest of the crew......

I seem to remember that the concept of exotic home cooking started coming in somewhere abound the mid-1950s

Oh yes indeed. I can remember my older sister showing me how to make spaghetti Bolognese....unbelievably exotic. As for a Vesta curry washed down with a bottle of Mateus Rose, well, it takes you back.

[greenilex]

We have a brand-new pie shop near us...

[jean]

I bet it doesn't do jellied eels as well, though.

[teamsaint]

We have a brand-new pie shop near us...

Plesteds pies used to be our sustenance of choice during saturday morning overtime at Calor gas.

Yum.

( wonder if they are still as good ?)

[EdgeleyRob]

Back to cakes. I hope it will not sound callous or hard-hearted to say that my mother (now long deceased) was an appalling cook. And the appallingness of her cookery was evident, above all, in her cakes. Or should I say her cake, because she only made one per year, The Christmas Cake. Forget Stir-Up Sunday. Hers was made on Christmas Eve, usually around midnight. Mother was a smoker. Not a leisure smoker. A smoker-while-u-work. And the annual cake was definitely 'work' in her eyes, an arduous but obligatory labour. So the fag on her lips grew a long teetering cylinder of ash as she punished the mixture in the bowl. I'm quite certain fag-ash was a key ingredient. On the subject of ingredients, mother boasted that she had never used a recipe in her life. [Ditto for Christmas Pudding, which was made at the same time.] So without use of scales or measures she threw everything in with considerable abandon. Cooking was equally haphazard. The fruit always seemed to migrate the the bottom. The interior had a soggy and faintly raw flavour whilst the top was rock-hard and somewhat concave. Christmas morning was the scene of marzipan, icing-sugar and those little silver ball-bearings, which threatened to break your teeth even if the icing didn't get you first. I won't go on to describe the turkey and the roast spuds (shoved in together along with two packets of lard). Nor the sprouts which went on soon after. The meal didn't appear until at least 3pm. No-one dared complain.

I have to say that my mother was, in most other respects, a remarkable woman; a champion of women's rights ahead of her time, and one-time Mayor of her Town.

She lived into her mid-nineties despite the fags and the lard.

Ah yes fag ash on and in cake,I remember it well.
As a child I thought it was like salt or pepper.

[oddoneout]

Ah yes fag ash on and in cake,I remember it well.
As a child I thought it was like salt or pepper.

My maternal granny used to smoke in the kitchen, but only for the preliminary stages of food preparation - veg peeling and such like - so any fallout was I think removed. She was a rather dumpy woman and favoured the wearing of one of those sleeveless wrap around dress type aprons, and a scarf tied round her head and knotted at the front 1940's style. By the time the John Player plus dangling ash was added she looked like a cartoon cleaning lady - more than a little at odds with someone who was most definitely comfortably middle class in origin and who'd been a headteacher in the early decades of the 20th century. I don't remember if she made cakes etc - I know that her 'woman who does' made scones, rock cakes and fairy cakes(which I was allowed/expected to decorate or convert into butterfly cakes)when we children came to stay, and the coffee and walnut cake for the couple of occasions I was visiting on my birthday was made by a neighbour.

[french frank]

My aunt used to make a seedy cake, a sort of sponge-type cake with caraway seeds. I think the adults preferred it more than the children.

[ardcarp]

I think the adults preferred it more than the children.

Interesting sentence there ff ! Hope Jean isn't looking.