Yet beyond all that, there were certain trigger points which brought a response, certain altars before which she was programmed to dip her knee, the most prominent of these being the Mester’s tea. Whether it was called tea or dinner was determined by its nature. It was the meal he sat down to, on arrival home, after a day’s work. It was sustenance for the provider, it was the master’s due, and it didn’t necessarily follow that the rest of the family would eat the same, or so well. It wasn’t remarkable to hear, in a shop, ‘and 2 oz of boiled ham, for the Mester’s tea’ It was as well to specify the recipient, because someone buying cooked meat of a weekday was just showing off, irresponsible, profligate, but someone buying a treat for the master of the house was diligent, a dutiful housewife.
One of Charlie’s favourite teatime offerings was a pair of kippers, much enjoyed. The fishmonger would wrap the kippers, first in a sheet of white paper, then in a sheet of newspaper.
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| A Nice Pair of Kippers |
On arrival home, the bundle would be placed, wrapped so, in the coolest place in the oven of the Yorkshire range, which is the top shelf, furthest away from the fire. There they would stay for the 5 or 6 hours until Charlie’s arrival home. I used to love it when Jane opened the bundle, the scorched paper falling away in flakes, like dried flower petals, until the glistening, silver-bronze fish were tipped onto the warm plate, the smoky aroma filling the house.
Two other dishes from the oven I recall, both apparently, responses to tradition, welling up from Jane’s tribal memory. I can think of no other explanation for them. The first was Hash, or ‘Ash, as it is pronounced in Yorkshire, the aspirate ‘H’ being scarcer than crab feathers. Was it a coincidence that we had ‘ash on Ash Wednesday? The dish comprised cubed shin beef, spuds, peeled and cut into uniform ‘half egg’ sized pieces, carrots and parsnips in similar chunks, I don’t remember onions, all in water with a little gravy salt, very little, and the covered dish going into the oven, where it seemed to take until the middle of the night to cook, but there was no thickening added.
It probably only seemed like the middle of the night, being perhaps only an hour beyond my normal bedtime. I remember us all sitting around, waiting to eat this miserable concoction, because for some vague, hidden reason, we were all required to partake. Perhaps that was part of the tribal memory, as well.
The other oven dish, rice pudding, was another midnight matinee, and again, there was this obscure atmosphere of compulsion. In this case, I have no idea from which traditional peg it was hung, but even as a small child, I was aware of Jane seeming to act under influences outside of herself. She seemed to be responding to voices only she could hear. As far as her spectators were concerned, there was a self-conciousness about her, as though she was thinking ‘Look, I don’t want to do this; you don’t want me to do it, but we’re all stuck with it, so that’s it’.
Whatever superior or mystical forces might have been abroad, they didn’t extend into the oven. What went into the oven was rice in milk, and what came out was rice in milk. There was probably sugar in it; there was certainly grated nutmeg on top of it.
The rice came out a good deal softer than it went in. It was cooked, even, and the milk was ever so marginally more robust than before, but ‘rice in milk’ was still a more truthful description than ‘rice pudding’. I still don’t know how you thicken rice pudding, but it is an ignorance I’ve inherited from Jane.
One other traditional dish comes to mind. It was cooked on St. Crispian’s Day, and understandably, it was called ‘Crippins’. Jane would prepare a quantity of ordinary bread dough, but using baking powder instead of yeast, for the raising agent. After allowing it to rise once, she ‘knocked’ it down again, then rolled it out into a slab, about an inch and a half thick, which she cut up into rough triangles. These, she would cook, by rolling them around in a frying pan, in a little very hot lard until they had risen again, and were showing an even dispersal of pleasant brown scorch marks. Then they were removed, rolled in sugar, and eaten in the fingers, still very hot.
Yes, the St. Crispian-Crippins bit is obvious; I can see the element of tradition. I just can’t see the attraction, the cause for compulsion to eat chunks of hot bread greasy with pig fat, and gritty with sugar.
What really puzzles me is that these dishes were extras- extra to our diet, our meals rota, and extra to Jane’s already adequate workload. Yet she was their sole instigator.