It’s a conversation I have had so many times that I’ve become slick at rattling off an answer. Never quite the same, but a variation on a theme. It always starts the same way. It happens to me often because of the frequency at which I change jobs and have to work and make small talk with new people I’ve never been introduced to.
“How’d you get into baking?”
Like I can’t help but break down a recipe or a dish into its component parts and see how it was assembled, I can’t help but break down this story. And how I tell it.
Audrey Bowie
My maternal grandmother is not from Shetland, and nor are her recipes. She was a teacher in her earlier days, but I knew her only in the later years of her retirement. For a good chunk of my childhood, she was everything.
We lived in our little old house on the side of a hill near the end of a single track road. Gran lived a minute or two’s walk away, our closest neighbour. She lived in a Norwegian ‘kit house’, designed for one with a spare single room. It had, and indeed has, three windows in the living room that overlook the sea and Shetland’s tallest hill and the wilds behind. There’s another window in the kitchen, just above the countertop. The other window over the sink looks at our house.
During my primary school years, I’d get the school bus to drop me off at Gran’s house instead of our own. I’d stay there until there was a phone call to come home for tea. I had several juvenile motivations. First, and foremost, chocolate. And Jaffa Cakes. I was not a skinny child. I knew the secret places she kept the spares, and she knew that I knew, but we never said anything. She always kept them stocked.
And then there was tea. I would maintain that making tea at Gran’s house is where I developed my sense of service and the unwavering requirement for praise that has rather defined my life since. It has certainly guided my professional choices. I became obsessed with making the right tea for the right person. Sugar, milk level, brew time. Trying to second-guess and improve people’s choices – Gran always demanded half-and-half milk and tea, no sugar. I never obliged, and I think she was always happy. The most I ever went was one third:two thirds and even that felt wrong.
With my tea and my entire packet of Jaffa Cakes, my bar of Dairy Milk covertly consumed, I’d settle in on the other sofa from Gran next to the cat. Sometimes we’d play Scrabble and Dominoes. And sometimes we’d bake.
This baking has striking similarities to my training as a surgeon. My gran was a truly great baker, and only recently have I realised how good she was. She treated baking as a fun thing for me to do, but also as an apprenticeship. I have memories of only being allowed to watch and lick the bowl. As soon as I was big enough, I was allowed to hold the electric mixer, but I was never allowed to make the decision about when to stop mixing. I remember still, vividly, the first time that Gran allowed me to fold in the flour when making a Victoria sponge. I had to stand on the top step of the stool so I couldn’t have been more than six or seven. She made me stop and start again every time I tried until I did it right, like the surgeon who would cut out every knot I tied until she was happy.
Little by little, Gran would drip-feed me skills that would serve me the rest of my life. And although I was able to go away and make the recipes that she made, whenever we baked together they were better. She might let me do every step, but she was always in complete control. She might let me add the water to the pastry, but she’d tell me when to stop.
Stork Margarine Cookery Service: The Art of Home Cooking
In Gran’s later years, her health deteriorated. I came to see how she was beginning to doit (‘become confused’) as the years went on. She was more reliant on her carers, frequently lost at Scrabble and there were ever more bars of chocolate in the top shelf of the fridge door. She was increasingly frail, relying more heavily on her stick and then her zimmer frame.
She underwent a gradual decline that saw her unable to care for herself, so she came to live with us. She moved in and took the only bedroom on the ground floor of the house, next to the bathroom.
She did not bake. I often wonder if she could have, if given the chance. I like to imagine so.
Gran died when I was at school. I remember borrowing a black tie for the funeral and my piano teacher playing Debussy on the electric keyboard in the church. I remember the pallbearers’ faces and the slam of the blunt wooden coffin onto the pedestal. And for the first time I remember being unable to control my emotions and that that was OK. After the funeral, we gathered back at our house for bannocks and lentil soup. The comfort and warmth of simple food; the presence of many smartly dressed people who didn’t know what to say. It was odd. The dogs wandered, confused. I don’t remember anything else.
We divided up or donated Gran’s remaining possessions. I vied for no money, but only some battered and rusted baking tins and one possession above all else: one book, a Stork-branded recipe book, beaten up. Scribbled on. Filled with folded pieces of paper covered in that diligent handwriting, not yet tainted with the wobble of age.
I kept this book, The Art of Home Cooking, in the family home, and I never looked at it. It was important to have, but its content didn’t matter. What mattered was that we had it. I left it there, sitting beside all the hardback cookbooks I or my sister had bought since. I don’t think I ever even folded out one of the pieces of paper.
But now I have it. It’s mine. In the process of writing this book, I have opened it up and looked at it for the first time. I have read every brown page and I wept and I laughed at the little quirks. I’m presenting a few select pages here, and I’d be honoured if you would bake something from them, written by her hand. I know she’d be proud.
