by Maria C Collins

Created on: July 30, 2008   Last Updated: August 09, 2009

When I am in my kitchen cooking, I am often lost in the memories that different recipes bring forth. I do not remember learning to cook. I just absorbed the knowledge by osmosis, standing, watching and listening and helping.

When I make jams and chutneys from the fruit from our garden, I think of Nanny, my father's mother, she was a champion preserver and made jams and chutneys every year. I remember a long ago day, when she and my mother made blackcurrant jelly and the fruit was strained through a big piece of muslin tied between the legs of an upturned kitchen chair. I remember the beautiful purple colour of the fruit as it stained the muslin. Nanny must have felt the same satisfaction that I feel, when I see all the neatly labelled jars lined up in the cupboard in the autumn against the winter to come.

When I look through my cookery books and see a recipe for Lancashire Hotpot, I think of Nanna, my Mum's mum, so many recipes call for kidneys and all sorts of things in them. I can hear Nanna's voice saying, "the only things that go into a real Lancashire hotpot are lamb, carrots onions and stock and potatoes on the top!" She was a true Lancashire lass and looked upon these other recipes as heresies and sabotage, perpetuated, probably, by Yorkshire women. I can remember her teaching me to make potato cakes, they were delicious and we loved them as much as her own children had. They had thought of them as a great treat, never realizing then, that Nanna made them when she was short of money.

Many of the things that I cook now, I cook from my head without any recipe, they are the dishes I learned by watching my mother, who is a brilliant cook. She cooked things like spaghetti bolognaise and curry in the fifties and sixties, when meat and two "veg" were the norm in England. She has always been an adventurous cook and I take after her in that regard. When I was a child, my friends always loved to come to tea at our house because meals were tasty, different and interesting. In the unknowing innocence of childhood, I wanted burgers and chips (French fries) out of packets like my friends had for tea, if we had burgers they were home-made and called "Vienna steaks", and chips were made properly from potatoes.

My cookery books have pencil additions to the recipes and pieces of handwritten papers poked between the pages. Some of the papers and additions are in my handwriting and some in the writing of the three remarkable and talented cooks who taught me so much and gave their enthusiasm to me. These special books are like photograph albums or scrapbooks, a doorway back into a different time and place.

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