Written by Joel Glover
She was the breadwinner, and the baker, in the house.
She didn’t cook during the week, but her Sunday roasts sprawled. They spread across the
table as the years went by. Feeding four, she still had to make dozens of Yorkshire puddings,
sometimes crisp and sometimes flatter and chewier. During my protracted vegetarian phase,
cheese and potato pie was a staple. Reversion to omnivorism saw the meat requirement increase
substantially. Gravy, thick with fat and redolent with flavour from browning and vegetable water.
Roast potatoes, smeared with dripping. Greens, overdone, wilted. Carrots and peas, mashed
swede. Cauliflower or leeks in cheese. Sometimes an experiment would appear, “just a little
something,” she’d lay out for our approval. On rare occasions it was such a success it became a
staple demanded for significant meals.
When she was away at work we would work through the pile of cakes or biscuits she had
made at the weekend. The best was a chimerical confection of pie and cake, served in small,
almond-laced, slices.
Christmas was her special day. In the build up to December the freezer and cupboards would
gradually fill with easy to cook snacks, calories piling on calories, a mountain of sugar and
saturated fat, interspersed with the trendy delicacies of the eighties.
There were memorable disasters.
A game pie turned up one year. All her care and love was manifest in the glazed pastry crust,
decorated with shortcrust leaves, the rim crimped neatly. She carved large slices for us, eager for
feedback. The filling was dry and unseasoned, bland as a mouthful of newspaper. If newspapers
were served in an evening buffet still frozen. We made polite noises, cut around the frozen
chunks, and smeared hot mustard across the rest.
The polite noises were our mistake. The following year the game pie reappeared. My dad had,
at least, encouraged her to ensure it was defrosted before she served it. More fool him, as he bit
into a slice and cracked a tooth on a pellet she had missed during preparation. I took the thinnest
slice possible and subtly googled the risk of lead poisoning from birdshot. The leftovers were
sent to neighbours with short arms and deep pockets.
In October of the following year, when asked about Christmas plans, my brother insisted his
only plan was to not eat any game pie.
That year she was distracted by the happy noise of her recently introduced potential
daughters-in-law to the advent festivities. Wine glass in hand, she forayed from the kitchen, no
longer the only woman in the house. No one took her place at the stove, which meant vegetables
went quickly from boiling merrily to burning thoroughly. Orange tinted cinders. She still served
them.
After she retired, she took to cooking more, with the rest of us out of the house working.
After a month, we entered into a conspiracy to improve her outcomes, slinking into the kitchen
and adding flavour to unsupervised dishes. Salt, pepper, dried herbs and pre-prepared sauces
were our weapons. The omerta was broken by hilarity, when she declared one evening that her
stew had been steadily improving, and that what she had served was her best yet. Our collective
cackle rather gave the game away. Unfortunately, it also led to a reversion to unseasoned food
for a month.
And then she had a scare. More than a scare. A minor discomfort that she didn’t want to
bother anyone with turned into a dash to hospital, a month in whitewashed rooms and corridors,
pushed around in a gown beneath thin blue sheets, with little to no food she could stomach or
keep down. By the time she got home, she had a nice new line in scars and bruises, like a
supermarket turkey that had been incorrectly trussed and left at the back of the freezer for too
long.
The chemo was worse. Each pass through grated something vital from her. It started with her
love for sweet treats and rich savouries. Chocolate was ash in her mouth. Her appetite declined
too. Then, as she steeped in the poisons, her nerves began to char. Her fingers and toes went
numb. With that went some of her zest, her energy.
Before, a day stuck in the house would have created a flour dusted explosion of activity,
cakes, tarts, pies. But with her feet and hands betraying her, this menu was abruptly reduced.
Our relationship changed with the speed of a tray of chips tumbling from the oven, or the tea
spilling from the cup kicked over by unfeeling feet. We hovered near her, watching her trembling
hands. She’d always been a menace with knives. Paring knives, bread knives, cheese knives, she’d
cut herself on all of them, over the years. Now each meal was seasoned with new fears. We were
the parents, now, biting our lips as she relearned skills she had taught us. The urge to step in, to
encourage her to sit down, bubbled up but was never allowed to spill over.
Her illness was pushed back by science akin to witchcraft, potions beyond our understanding
fighting a battle to delay, not defeat.
And so we watch over her, as she watched over us, and while we wait we show her our love
in the food we serve.
.
Former waiter in a Love Boat themed restaurant, reformed mandarin, and extroverted accountant, Joel Glover is a cuddly teddy bear, really.
He lives in the woods of Hertfordshire with two boys and one wife. In a house, not a nest. He knows how that sounds. His grimdark novels “The Path of Pain and Ruin” and “Paths to Empires’ Ends” are available on Amazon, as is his fantasy novel “The Thirteenth Prince” and a collaborative project “Literary Footnotes”. His short fiction has appeared in Nature: Futures, foofaraw press, and Peasant Magazine.