My wife has gone away on a week’s vacation with a girlfriend which gives me the opportunity to make meals that her indoors is not too fond of. A couple which springs to mind include liver and onions (she who must be obeyed hates offal) and my mum’s recipe for corn beef hash. My wife believes canned corn beef to be awful because it reminds her of dog food.
I only learned to cook about twenty years ago when I was going through a divorce. I couldn’t boil an egg to save my life, but at the same time I couldn’t afford to eat out continuously; particularly when I was entertaining my two children every other weekend. Ironically my sister-in-law steered me onto the road of cooking redemption when she gave me a cook book by Delia Smith entitled “One is Fun.” As the title implies it contained a list of recipes for one person which was ideal for me at the time. Delia’s critics accuse her of being too pedantic and patronizing to the reader, but for a cooking novice like myself she was a godsend; the simpler the better.
My mum and my ex-wife spent hours in the kitchen (not together I hasten to add) preparing meals and quite naturally I assumed that cooking must be incredibly complicated and way out of my league. In the case of my mum, she was the first to admit that she hated cooking, but it was a necessity to feed a family of four. Armed with a chip pan which practically every working class household in Britain possessed she could rustle up a good fry up with the best of them.
One of my favorite meals prepared by my mum was egg and chips. Sometimes during the summer holidays she would take my brother and I for a day’s excursion to Caswell Bay. We caught the No 40 double decker bus that terminated at the beach, and to a nine year old, the journey felt like a venture to the other side of the moon. Upon arrival my mum hired a deck chair, pulled out her knitting and set up camp while my brother and I played in the surf and sand. She made us a variety of snacks for lunch and we usually stayed until dusk or when the incoming high tide reclaimed the sand and pushed mere mortals off the beach as a hint to head for home.
Following the return bus journey, sunburned and sand blasted, we arrived home bedraggled, weary and usually starving. My mum would customarily rustle up fried egg and chips and when you’re tired and hungry the food tasted like nectar from the gods. There is nothing better than dipping golden home made fries, laced with salt and malt vinegar, into the canary yellow egg yolk, and finish off with a chip buttie (the spell checker doesn’t like this word-slang for sandwich) washed down with a cup of hot sweet tea.
My mum was the empress of comfort food and on a grander scale she made the best laver bread and cockles; served with thick Welsh bacon hanging over the side of the plate, grilled tomatoes and usually fried bread. Hash browns would make a wonderful substitute for fried bread, but who needs perfection? Laver bread is the poor man’s caviar and a cockle is a small but very tasty shellfish which very many years was farmed off the marshes around the village of Penclawdd on the Gower Peninsula.
Several years later, I made an amazing discovery attending my mum’s funeral. My auntie Beat told me that my granddad was making curries in the 1920s and 30s. He worked as a boatman in Swansea Docks which attracted ships from the Orient, New World and darkest Africa. Sailors disembarking at the quayside would give him recipes and exotic spices which he used to great effect. I believe he would have been amused and delighted by the plethora of Indian restaurants that emerged in Swansea by the end of the 20th Century. There must be over sixty Indian restaurants dotted around the City Centre of Swansea. Consequently, it was not surprising that my friend and I enrolled for evening classes in Indian Cookery and we learned to cook a mean vindaloo and madras curry with an onion bhaji thrown in for good measure.
Unfortunately, my mum did not share her dad and son’s love of curries. On the contrary, she was convinced that the local cat and dog population was severely reduced with the introduction of Indian restaurants. She was adamant they were health hazards and begged me not patronize them. However, she was mortified when her favorite restaurant, “The Burlington Tavern,” a local restaurant icon for many years, was closed by the Health Department citing 96 violations of the Health and Safety Local Government Act.
Over the last few years I have learned to cook many different cuisines-Italian, French, Thai, Mexican and of course Indian. I enrolled in Italian cookery classes where I discovered how to separate an egg and determined there is little difference between freshly made and store bought pasta. I love a good steak but equally I can’t resist baked beans on toast laced with a fried egg easy over.
