"My mother was the most horrible cook, unbelievably bad at it. Her umbrella crime was the lack of self-knowledge far from being bad, she thought she was brilliant but underneath that, a set of discrete misapprehensions, any one of which would have been enough to make you not want to eat at her house. She'd never take a recipe literally; each ingredient could be swapped with something else of a similar colour, or a similar size, or not similar at all."
"She loved to throw in a rogue element. As I write this, I'm flicking through her magazine cuttings, and she's made a note above an aubergine and potato casserole that says: Good, but needs something else. Lime? She thought everything, sweet and savoury, could be lifted by a dried apricot. She was extremely experimental but eschewed basic principles, such as parboiling, or meat being roasted for a specific amount of time, relative to its weight, rather than for ever."
The narrator's mother was an experimental, poorly skilled cook who routinely substituted ingredients, mixed sweet with savoury, and believed dried apricots improved everything. She ignored basic principles like parboiling and precise roasting times and prized cardamom. After she died, the narrator unexpectedly inherited a prolific apple tree that produced far more fruit than the narrator's household would eat. The narrator resisted for a time but then felt compelled to use the apples, making enormous crumbles, leaving flapjacks for neighbours, and incorporating apples into pork and oat dishes to finish the glut.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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