Sonic Flavourscape, Grey London

It is perhaps only when you begin to teach something that you have been doing on autopilot for most of your life that you start to realise just how much you have learned over the years. Like most women who have raised a family, cooking is second nature these days. Twenty years and more of making two or three meals a day for an indeterminate number of people leaves its mark. We never knew how many of the boys’ friends would be eating with us until mealtimes… and there are always ways to stretch food a bit further.

I was lucky, learning early from the three preceding generations of my family how to handle food. You don’t even realise at the time how much you are absorbing as you ‘help’ in the kitchen as a child and certainly it was not till my sons had both left home for a good while before they realised there were things they didn’t know how to do. There was a panicked call about how to cook a romantic dinner… the occasional ‘just what do I do with a cabbage’, but on the whole they were pretty well equipped to deal with just about anything basic in a kitchen. Now, of course, Nick is getting me to teach him how to cook properly as I have mentioned, so most days his house greets you with wonderful aromas and I have the pleasure of sharing knowledge with an avid student.

Inevitably, that takes me back to when the boys were small. I have fond memories of afternoons in the kitchen baking… the grubby bits of leftover pastry, grey and squished like Plasticine, that they made into jam tarts and ate with relish, even though they were as hard as iron by the time they had finished with them…and all the sneaky ways I found to get mountains of fresh vegetables into them without them ever noticing.

There are a lot of memories tied up with food when you think about it; special dinners, first dates, birthday parties and wedding breakfasts, not to mention those memories from childhood that hold a special place. So, although I seldom cook at home any more, I am now having the pleasure of cooking with my son all the dishes he can remember from childhood. Today we made curry and, as we both gave in to temptation and had second helpings for lunch, I told my son about the transport café where I had worked… and where I had learned not only how to carry ten mugs of tea at once, but also how to cook Indian food.

I was eighteen, two years married and very young. I loved the place. The lorry drivers who came in early for breakfast were regulars… they became friends. Old Bernard who worked for Long’s and looked like the archetypal garden gnome, Albert… coming up for retirement but with more energy than most teenagers, Tim the six foot six Adonis who would pick me up one handed to clean the ceiling… it was fun. They were almost all old enough to be my grandfather and to a man they flirted outrageously with me and the boss. Margaret loved them all impartially and maternally and spoiled them rotten, cooking wonderful dishes for them that you don’t normally get in a transport caf’.

She was an Irish-Indian woman and knew her way round a kitchen. One day she made a huge cauldron of proper curry and sat me down with a plateful of the stuff, with raitha, ‘wet salad’, pacoras and bhaji all fresh. This was completely new to me… that kind of exoticism hadn’t reached our quiet backwater in those days. ‘Curry’ came in packets according to my mother, and were either bland and watery or so hot you couldn’t taste a thing. This was spiced to perfection, a real masterpiece… I was hooked after the first bite.

So Margaret taught me to cook Indian food. Okay, the fresh chilli incident lingers in memory… and laughter… never eat anything unusual that lies next to your plate unidentified, raw, and seemingly innocuous…just saying… But apart from that one small disaster, Indian cooking became part of my life. Later I learned French cuisine during my years in France, North African cooking from an Algerian friend and her family… the same with Chinese and Italian… and Mexican from a delightful old painter in Paris who had known Pancho Villa, so I think that counts. Add to that the generations of knowledge my grandparents and great grandparents shared and I realise what an incredibly lucky education I had in the kitchen … and out of it too.

Because, by extension, I have to also realise how lucky I have been to really know and get close to so many people of differing cultures and generations and how much that too has taught me. We are all the products of our experience and life offers us riches in that respect. Like knowing how to do something we do so often it has become second nature, we have a tendency to take for granted the rich tapestry of experience the world offers us these days. Many of us travel, TV and film have opened the world to our eyes in a way earlier generations could not have imagined; we learn of events as they unfold, rather than as something that happened and we are all very much involved in an immediate way. Never has the world been so small… and teaching my son to cook today reminded me of that. Sometimes it doesn’t take a lot to show us what has been under our noses all along.