What I treasure | My inherited recipe books

My most treasured books lie hidden. They’re shrinking violets in my kitchen, spines frayed and indecipherable, found among modern volumes from celebrity kitchens and heavyweight classics from renowned masters. My favourite cookery books are often rediscovered by accident and, as I ease them from the shelves, they transport me to half-forgotten times and places in my past.

My Mother’s Be-Ro book, a slim booklet produced by the flour manufacturer, still falls open at the pages consulted by her, and sticky fingerprints offer clues to the ingredients of coconut macaroons and jam tarts. It conjures up memories of my scratchy bottle-green school jumper and toasting bread with my brother in front of a smoky coal fire, Blue Peter on the television.
The Farmer’s Wife book evokes my teenage years. The spicy aroma of the sticky gingerbread contained within gives way to Aqua Manda, the heady fragrance that I applied liberally on Saturday nights.

The Hamlyn All Colour Cook Book heralds early married life and, with its curried eggs and tuna bake, a new and sophisticated period along my culinary journey. As I browse the faded pages, it’s our trendy brown and orange kitchen and primrose bathroom suite (how I longed for avocado) that elbow their way through the mists of time. Fast forward ten years and the Food Aid book from which I make mushroom pâté each Christmas reminds me of the Live Aid concert that inspired its publication.

There are more, each with their own special memories, but it is a small blue book bulging with handwritten notes that means the most. These are the family recipes handed down to me over the years. One glance at the looped script and I am back in the kitchen of my childhood. It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon and my mother and aunts are chatting as they assemble bridge rolls stuffed with tinned salmon, and arrange their specialities – fruit scones, cream meringues and chocolate eclairs – on doilies. I can smell their soap and hear their gentle scolding as my cousins and I play underfoot.

I doubt I’ll be able to resist the new, glossy cookery tomes that will appear this Christmas but, as they join the rest of my collection, I know that my memories will be hiding in their midst.

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What I treasure | My walking boots

It’s strange to think that my most treasured possession is a pair of boots that are so actively ignored when I don’t need them. Usually, accidental steps in hidden bogs that cause stagnant water to seep inside is the reason for their being left in the boot of the car. Always with a pledge of a deep clean and oil, but so often exchanged for a brisk bash in the car park to get rid of the biggest clods of mud before the next walk.

These boots are older than I am. Worn in for 15 years by my mum and then passed down to me, the tricky size five-and-a-halfs have been moulded to fit from a constant cycle of damp fields, sea salt and mossy woodland paths. The laces have grown plump and awkward, sometimes stubbornly immovable through rusting eyelets and the promise of drying them out after long walks.

When I was seven or eight, I plodded alongside Mum, who wore them then, on the farm we stayed at every year; a little girl who held onto her mother’s little finger. I’d pull the grass seeds from their husks and scatter them like chicken seed. When I was ten, these boots would run away from the waves and dry with a sea salt line when we didn’t escape the swash in time. When camping, they held my tiny feet as I fetched water but couldn’t be bothered to pull on my own shoes, instead shuffling across the heath to a tap, sloshing the kettle all the way back until half of what was collected remained.

They took us through summers spent in Herefordshire: soles worn from two decades of pushing down on spades and forks to lift onions – and from standing for a photo in front of the same spot of a pine forest, year after year; a family tradition that saw my brother and I grow tall with the saplings. They were mine after new waterproofing deemed Mum’s leather boots second best. Yes, they always let the water in; yes, they barely support my ankles, but they bear the marks of a love of the outdoors that bloomed in the hills of the Brecon Beacons and along the shores of North Norfolk. They’ve taken me up mountains and down valleys when
I couldn’t afford boots of my own.

The ritual of wearing thick hiking socks and sliding into Mum’s walking boots is a kindred moment. I always send her a picture of wherever me and the boots have been; a digital scrapbook that continues the photo albums stored on the family bookshelf. They are the anticipation and adventure that pulls me away from concrete and carpet. Well used. Well loved. Irreplaceable.

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What I treasure | My kayak

My kayak is a bright, cerulean blue, and sturdy, with smooth, solid curves. When I see photos of me in it, I look different, somehow – alone, strong, adventurous. This person, paddle slicing through glassy water, is free. She can take off on a whim, cope with whatever is thrown at her, and is always on the cusp of discovering something new – a hidden cove, a shoal of darting mackerel, a secret house only glimpsed from the sea. This person knows exactly where she is going, isn’t lost in the day to day.

My husband bought it for me after a hospital stay. Me, clock-watching as his 30-minute operation became four hours, words muttered about haemorrhaging, cauterising, complications. When he finally emerged, he still wasn’t well. I remember the nurse’s flushed face, the young doctor’s shaking hand as it dawned things weren’t quite going to plan. I’d never faced death like that, right in the eye. What scared me was how lonely it was – my husband was the one I turned to in a crisis, but this time the crisis was him. My stomach dipped as I thought about our two young daughters. What would I tell them?

But he made it through, and after, there was a freedom about him – something loose,
untethered. We did the things we’d only talked about before, dreams we’d squirrelled away inside our heads – took the risky job, adopted the kitten my daughter wanted (not just one but two), bought the kayak I’d been coveting.

There’s something primal about paddling. It feels ancient, the rhythm of it. I’m part of the water, literally feeling it, its movements, as it resists the paddle stroke by stroke. So low on the water, without the grumble or whine of a motor – the birds mistake me for one of them. They arc through the sky, or sit perched on a nearby rock, feathers slick with water. Cormorants dive headfirst into the waves right in front of me, reappear a minute later, black heads gleaming.

I chart the changing seasons from the water, and I’ve learnt that the sea has its own topography. I now know where the rocks are, crusty with barnacles, just jutting out of the water, and where the beds of sea grass hide, the swathes of seaweed – gelatinous green ropes and brown fern-like growths that loop around the paddle.

I can’t wait to show my daughters this world, but I’ll still kayak alone – remembering why we bought it, to become the person I am inside my head.

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What I treasure | My hand-written recipe book

Among my collection of recipe books is a special one with a plain, blue cover. It’s filled as much with unforgettable moments as it is with edible delights. Whenever I flick through its pages, I find myself back in 1986. I’m 17 and living with a family in Belgrade in what is now Serbia. At that time, it was the capital of the ‘non-aligned socialist republic’ of Yugoslavia: neither Western nor fully behind the ‘Iron Curtain’.

My strongest memory is of sitting at the table in the hallway that doubled as a dining room in my host family’s flat, noting down recipes in my notebook. Most were ones my host mother, Marija, taught me to cook. We had little shared language and cookery was an activity we could do together without words. Weighing, chopping, stirring, and rolling could all be done by watching or gesturing to each other.

I wrote down some of the recipes in English, others in Serbo-Croatian, occasionally a mix of the two. Many only detail rough quantities: three cups of flour, two cups of sugar, one of oil and large amounts of eggs (10 or 12 is not unusual). There are smudges and stains showing where ingredients strayed onto the page.

Marija’s cooking was different from what I knew from home, restricted by shortages imposed by a communist state. Food was strictly seasonal and local. Special dishes stood out because they were a rare treat.

On birthdays and important holidays, Marija would spend hours making cakes or savoury bakes from scratch. Filo-pastry filled with spicy ground meat or salty cheese; a strawberry cake with whipped cream that will forever be the best I’ve tasted; and plum dumplings so juicy that they burst in my mouth at first bite.

I still make these dishes, and just looking at the list of ingredients sends me back to a specific moment in time. The little chocolate, cream-filled išleri biscuits Marija made for my 18th birthday. The cinnamon-scented apple cake she baked to celebrate her son’s return from military service. The simple delight of a pile of pancakes filled with rosehip jam on a cold winter’s night.

I treasure my recipe book for many reasons – for the memories it contains and the fact that, woven into every page, are recipes for a good life as well as fabulous food.

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What I treasure | My Spode Mug

My mug has kept me company for almost a decade, gifted towards the end of a friendship that would inevitably decant, leaving only the gritty sediment swirling in the bottom, hard to digest. It’s a memento of the surreal; a whirlwind romance, a move across oceans, an incapacitating illness and a slow recovery as everything else fell apart. It’s a reminder of simple kindnesses, of which there were many, in a place without the familiar, a talisman from another life.
It’s been half empty and half full. It’s caught tears and echoed laughter. I’ve cradled it delicately and been tempted to hurl it at various things, even a few people. . . It’s seen me stripped bare; contorted by rejection and rage, wallowing in self pity. It’s been by my side as I’ve learned and evolved... matured.

It’s a mug I’d never have picked; the crockery is too thin, the pattern too old. It’s too refined for my raw edges; too British for my Antipodean routes. Inexplicably, I like it. But I treasure it because she gave it to me, one Christmas. Alexander McCall Smith taught me later that Spode could fuel an argument and feed a story, as I sat alone in an Edinburgh flat with my steaming mug in hand. You Brits sure do put a lot of heat into tea. Time has carved out many lines on us both; the handle now too cracked to house any hot liquids. And still it remains, home to a family of toothbrushes. It’s neglected and toothpaste splodged but never unloved.

As I write this, the mug shatters, as if guided by a force bigger than the tiny hands which clambered up and tried to ‘borrow’ it from the shelf. “It don’t matter, Mummy,” my toddler comforts me. And while my heart aches as I collect up all the pieces, I know he’s right. It is just a mug. I treasure it not for the pattern or the pottery.

I treasure it as a waymarker to memories. And they will come to me without this prop. All these things it held still exist, true memories are imbibed. The broken pieces bring a freedom to choose new possibilities, to make my own happiness. Maybe I’ll finally take that mosaic course I’ve wanted to do for years. Or maybe, just maybe, I’ll get in touch with the lady with the cracking smile and infectious laugh that once upon a time gifted me my beloved Spode mug.

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What I treasure: My grandmother’s bracelet

‘Like many treasured pieces of jewellery, this bracelet – originally a gift to my nan from my granddad – means something for being passed down through the family. It’s got the added charm of being out of the ordinary – created from 26 Dutch 10 cents pieces, each about the size of a five pence. Each coin bears the face of Wilhelmina, Queen of the Netherlands, who was exiled following the German invasion in 1940, and dates from between 1936 up to 1944, the year it was given to my nan.’

Frances Ambler chose to write about her grandmother’s bracelet for our new feature, What I Treasure. Turn to page 89 of February’s The Simple Things to read the story behind this precious heirloom.

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