Home is where the baking is. Photo / Babiche Martens
At first, gravy was like toothpaste. Fully formed, no questions asked.
Then I discovered it was something Mum made. The last step in a roast dinner, the steamy-tricky bit that made her face flush and her apron necessary. Lift the meat, sprinkle the flour, stir and scrape until the pan is brown and sludgy. Strain in the boiling water from the peas and carrots. Stir and scrape. Stir faster. Faster!
Of course I helped. Absolutely I was there as she carved the meat and shared the crisp and fatty end-slice, the cook's prerogative that never makes it to the table. But until I left home, I'd never made a roast from scratch.
Students learn how to casserole sausages and brown mince. Roast dinners come later when you've got a grown-up flat with a dining table, a pay cheque and your mum on speed dial.
"Should I put tinfoil on the meat? What temperature? How do you make gravy?"
I guess I must have called her once too often. The ink has faded and the spine has cracked but the words on the hardback notebook she gave me 26 years ago say, "Kim's I need to phone Mum recipe book." In her neat pen, she's copied a few family favourites. In my scrawling shorthand, I've added many, many more.
We wear our years on our faces and our bellies. We can also count time via a record collection or a box of photographs that prove perms and Deirdre Barlow glasses are always a bad idea. If you cut open a tree, the rings in its trunk will give away its age and place in history. The same might be said of a body. In any given Covid-19 lockdown, for example, I am two parts melted cheese and one part anxiety.
Last week, I lost hours to Instagram posts from restaurants that had pivoted to takeout. Would the pizza that tasted so good eaten at a table next to the kitchen pass be the same after 20 minutes on the back seat of a Toyota Avensis? Was a $13.80 delivery fee for two cardamom morning buns and a long black peak middle-class madness?
I remembered the first time, when we were all in this together and Auckland was not an island within an island. Back then, we cooked. The bookshelf in my hallway contains about 100 recipe books. There's another in the sunroom, packed with food histories and academic treatise, with titles like "Food Workers as Individual Agents of Culinary Globalisation". Claude Levi-Strauss gives us much to think about in The Culinary Triangle but, in a pandemic, my holy trinity is Alison Holst, the Edmonds Cookery Book and Mum.
You are what you eat and also what you thought you might eat - the aspirational recipes torn from a magazine, the email print-out with instructions for Fiona-from-the-choir's coffee slice that is the sole reason your pantry contains chicory essence. The first time you had larb is there in the spidery writing of a friend who went to Thailand on a student exchange decades before your hometown ever got a Thai restaurant. They're all there, stuffed in that notebook with the faded writing on the spine. I am sad, in this second lockdown. I am trying to cook but my heart is not calmed by lasagne. Instead, I read. The collection in my homemade recipe book looks random but every one is its own short story. A connection to people I can't see right now. More comfort than a bag of chips.
That's the plan, anyway. I turn the page and the first recipe is ... "Chicken Stuffing, serves four. (W.W)". The real clue is in parentheses. This is a Weight Watchers approved recipe. This is from the first time I shed 33kg and thought being thin would make me happy. Recently, I read an anonymous comment online that said, "Kim Knight should step away from the fork - she can barely fit in the chair." It related, specifically, to my role as Canvas restaurant critic and, more generally, to the commentator's sad and not very interesting life. I've added it to a collection that includes a postcard I once received from someone who had carefully cut my photo from a magazine and glued on drapey, shapeless clothes they thought would work better with my body. I thought it was funny but when I took it home, my boyfriend asked if I had called the police.
I'm kind of annoyed that the first recipe in my homemade book reflects a self-sanctioned scrutiny of my body but you can't rewrite history. Push past the instruction for the world's saddest corn fritter (it calls for a non-stick pan and the word "fry" takes quote marks) to the recipe for Bailey's Irish Cream. It contains a lot of real cream, an entire tin of condensed milk and (the order of these words is crucial) "one good cup of whiskey".
There are pages filled with things I faithfully copied but don't remember cooking. Barm Brac was surely invented for a pandemic (dried fruit, flour, warm black tea and just one egg). Pork and apricot tagine, because if you didn't eat meat with 12 dried apricot halves did you even do the 1990s?
Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai once wrote that, "Cookbooks, which usually belong to the humble literature of complex civilisations, tell unusual cultural tales. They combine the sturdy pragmatic virtues of all manuals with the vicarious pleasures of the literature of the senses." I flick through the book my mum gave me and I am 15 and 22 and 36 and standing in the kitchens that made me.
Beth's Easy Chocolate Cake is so big the recipe tells me to "line a roasting dish". I lived with Uncle Graham and Aunty Beth for my School Certificate year. They were building their dream house but, in the interim, had a cottage so old it did not have a flush toilet. Resilient, practical people. Every Sunday night, Beth would make 18 asparagus rolls and freeze them in packs of three for my school lunch. But what I remember most from that time was setting fire to my bedroom curtain when I left it draped, atmospherically, over a bare lamp bulb. Aunty Beth marched into my room with a wet tea towel and a pair of scissors. She smothered the flames, chopped the curtain in half, dropped the scorched bit out the window and then went back into the lounge to watch some more television. She would have been amazing in a pandemic. I still make her chocolate cake.
I write that sentence and then, a day later, I think: Really? Because I've remembered another Beth, with three kids and a dairy farm up the road. The Barrytown years, when Friday nights were darts at the pub and the wives wore white jeans and the husbands played rugby and there were so many of us tumbling around in each other's small-town lives that regular-sized cakes just couldn't cut it.
"Carol" dumplings are for the way an old boyfriend used to say "caramel" dumplings just to charm my mother into making them. I don't know who Angela is, but Angela's icecream is what I made for my parents when they spent three years living on an island in the middle of Cook Strait. Just them, on an ark full of tuatara, with groceries delivered monthly, tossed to shore in rodent-proofed plastic drums. Once, when my dad opened a much-anticipated box of beer to discover a sealed but empty can, his letter to the brewery was so poignant they sent him a dozen and a free shirt. Yeah, nah. You can't drink a f***ing shirt, mate.
There are Grandma's hot cross buns, Grandma's pav and Grandma's coconut ice but also, increasingly, recipes that call for Shaoxing wine or sesame oil or miso. My world got bigger between September 1994, when my mother gave me this book and now. The tuna in a ventresca tuna salad is fresh, not tinned. I remember that dinner party and the handmade birthday card from my friend's dad on the mantelpiece. "So thoughtful," I said. "He's in jail," she said. It was one of those moments when you know this is a friendship that will go the distance. Last May, she was supposed to travel halfway across the world for my wedding. I miss her so much.
"Should I make a cake?" I remember asking my deskmate, Emma. "I never make cakes."
He was coming to dinner, the stranger I had seen across the room at a party. We had eye fillet steak, baked potatoes, broccoli and a blue cheese and mushroom sauce. He took leftover lemon syrup cake to work. A decade later he asked me to marry him. It is a cliche - but not a lie - to report that there are sugar smudges on that page.
What makes us save one recipe and not another? Who was that woman who cared how many calories in a corn fritter? Did I seriously think that one day I would serve stuffed vine leaves with lemon sauce? I never wake up wanting pork belly but as soon as I read those words I am insatiable. Am I being seduced by photographs? I was surprised, recently, to read that Nigella Lawson's first book had hardly any pictures, that we simply devoured her stories. In 2018, when the anniversary edition of How to Eat hit the shops, it was reimagined as a fat, delicious novel. I frequently read it in bed, regretting the lack of Stilton in my life.
My homemade recipe book has more loose pages than actual pages. Every home cook knows what I mean. That shoebox or folder or kitchen drawer with the supermarket handout for avocado cheesecake, a dozen photocopied variations on duck terrine, a faux pho that takes only an hour. The last thing I actually wrote down for posterity was a habanero sauce made with the bounty of an Auckland summer. I wore gloves and my eyes watered for the entire weekend. Bottled brightness. An investment in the future.
‘Mum had lived and died with this secret,’ says writer Mary Garden.