Family & Education
I'm turning into my mother
Radio 4, random lemons, kitchen disasters: Susan's following in her mother's footsteps
April 10, 2019 15:58
Radio 4, random lemons, kitchen disasters: Susan's following in her mother's footsteps
April 10, 2019 15:58One morning some time ago, I was standing in the kitchen in my apron, making apple pie for Friday night dinner. I was rolling out pastry made to my mother’s recipe and in the background, Radio 4 was playing.
I don’t recall what I was listening to — probably some redoubtable old lady describing how she had trekked solo across the Arctic with a band of huskies; or a resident of Ambridge worrying about whether he’d be able to dig up the potatoes in the South Field before the rain started; or a gardening expert dispensing advice about the best way to deal with leaf spot on your begonias.
Anyway, I was feeling completely content and in my element, until a realisation struck me — I had become my mother. Everything about the scene — the pastry, the radio station, the apron — was the very essence of her.
This moment had been approaching ever since I became an adult. When I was ten or so, I clubbed together with my brothers to buy Mum a Le Creuset casserole for her birthday — her request. (I suspect my dad must have chipped in as well, if they cost anything like the amount they do now.) As I watched her unwrap it, I clearly remember my feeling of pity. Imagine, I thought, being so grown up and boring that this is what you actually want for your birthday. A metal pan.
Fast forward a decade, however, and I would have sold my soul for a bit of cast iron cookware — though I didn’t actually get to own one till I was married.
Our joint cooking equipment fixation has a darker side though, as we both attract hob-related disasters. In the past six months alone, I’ve set fire to the oven gloves, melted two or three plastic utensils, and put our metal coffee pot on the heat without any water in it. In the last example, once I realised what I’d done, I took the pot off the hob and put it down on the kitchen surface — which promptly exploded.
While I’m skilled at burning kitchen items in many contexts, Mum specialises in disasters when stewing fruit.
She scorched our worktop when it was brand new, by putting down a pan of burned apricots — but this pales into insignifance compared to the plums she attempted to cook on a family holiday when my son was eight weeks old.
She accidentally turned the light on under a different pan, which contained my breast pump, waiting to be sterilised. The pump melted so comprehensively that it more or less disappeared — you could just see a pale layer of plastic coating the bottom of the pan.
If you ever need to hire a breast pump on a Sunday in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region of France, I can give you all the advice you need. It’s especially important to remember that it’s called a tire-lait and not, as I thought, a tiroir, meaning that I walked in and out of pharmacies asking to hire a “drawer”.
Lemons are another means of measuring how much Mum and I are alike. “Every week,” she used to say, “I buy a lemon. I never know what I’m going to need it for, but I buy it just in case. And every week, I always do need it”.
My husband Anthony had often heard her say this, so every time I bought a lemon, he’d ask in anxious tones whether it was intended for a specific recipe, or whether I’d got it “just in case” — the latter being a sure sign that I was turning into my mother.
These days, I use lemons in all sorts of recipes and tend to have several in stock at a time, so they can no longer be used as a becoming-my-mother-indicator.
It should be said that my mum is competent in many areas that I am not: keeping things tidy and science and art and finding her way round and planning ahead. And however hard I try and however intensively I listen to Radio 4, I simply cannot get my pastry as light as hers.
As part of my serious research for this column, I sent Anthony a message asking in what other ways he felt I might be turning into my mother. This was his reply: “When I was a boy, I met an old man and his wife. They’d been married for 75 years and were still very much in love. I took the old man aside and asked him what the secret was of such a long and happy marriage.
“Straight away he said to me, ‘Son, one day your wife will ask you in what ways she is like her mother. As sure as I am sitting here today, you must not answer that question. And then you will have a long and happy marriage like I have.’”
No amount of pressing would get Anthony to say anything else, so I can only guess.
@susanreuben
