Now Who’s a Domestic Goddess?

It must be some kind of nesting instinct. Spring has sprung and I’m in full homemaker mode. This morning I made a pot of strawberry jam and angel hair pasta and now I have bubbling on my stove top a big batch of homemade tomato ketchup.

Before I retired I thought making jam and chutney and baking bread were terribly clever and complicated. Now I realise that all you need is time. I’ve discovered all kinds of fascinating ingredients that I had no idea existed, like special sugar to make your jam set,  pasta flour and pizza flour; and spices like star anise, allspice (which I always thought was a blend of  all the spices actually), and whole vanilla pods and cinnamon sticks.

I’ve been experimenting with new kinds of cakes and tried my hand at a Genoise sponge. I had heard this was quite tricky. But as I was beating the eggs and sugar I suddenly realised that my dear old Mum had taught me how to make one when I was about six. I had to use an old rotary type whisk then whereas now I have a powerful Bosch mixer but it all came back to me as things do when you are getting on a bit. I remember the kitchen in the old house in Wythenshawe before we moved to the posh part of Didsbury, the red Formica topped table and my mum, moving around the room brisk and efficient and pretty, peeling potatoes for Sunday lunch, stirring the gravy (always Bisto gravy, she didn’t like Oxo) and overseeing my efforts. Sometimes we would add cocoa to make it a chocolate cake, sometimes we left it plain, but we always filled it with lashings of whipped double-cream. She used to have a tub delivered with three pints of milk every Sunday morning and then she would carefully pour off the top of the milk into the cream to make it go further. Mum must have been a cat in a previous existence. Like just about every other family in England we always had a Sunday roast. If we were having beef she would make wonderful Yorkshire puddings, crisp and delicious; if we were having lamb she would make mint sauce by chopping fresh mint with sugar and then adding just a little vinegar. I was grown-up before I found out you could buy it in a jar. I make it that way too.

I don’t want to go all Dickensian about the past. We weren’t poor and I don’t remember ever wanting anything I couldn’t have except a pony. And on reflection Dad was quite right to say that the back garden wasn’t big enough. No one had very much in those days, even the rich lived rather frugally. But I firmly believe that children don’t really care about money or things. All they want is love and attention. My brother and I certainly had bucket loads of those. It was a very happy childhood.