After a bit of a break I am coming towards the end of my memories of my Mum, with this post focussing on food and drink. In latter days most of the photos I have of my Mum are associated with weddings, and this one is clearly of my Mum and Dad heading out to some unspecified wedding in 1979. It seemed appropriate given that two of the anecdotes towards the end of this piece are associated with happenings at wedding receptions.
The grocer’s shop where my Mum worked for most of my school days was , as I said previously, at the crossroads formed by the Holywood Road, Station Road and Circular Road (famous for two former residents, C.S. Lewis, who lived for a time at “Little Lea" and the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland James Craig who lived across the road). There were a small cluster of shops there, a butcher, bakery, the grocers in which my Mum worked, a pharmacy (which later became a video library) and a newsagent's, known as “Walter's" after the proprietor, although its official name was “The Boulevard" which was also the slightly romanticized name for the whole group of shops.
“Walter’s/The Boulevard” was the place where on the way home from church my Mum picked up the only newspapers we took in the week, the unusual combination of the social conservative Sunday Post (which I loved because of “Oor Wullie" and “The Broons") and the salacious “News of the World,” which my Mum never let us anywhere near. Then on a Friday it was our first port of call when my younger brother and I got our pocket money from my Dad's Thursday night paypacket, to get our comics and sweets for the week. Part of the deal was that my Mum paid for one comic/magazine for each of us, which she placed on order, including, over the years, “Wizzard and Chips,” “Look-In," “2000AD,” and “Shoot", but if we wanted anything extra, such as whatever Marvel comics that they had in that week, it came out of our pocket money, as did the sweets. The comics were read over and over in the course of the next week, and not just by Sam and I... Shoot in particular was read by both my older brothers and later my nephew, when the whole family gathered for lunch on a Saturday (more of that below). Meanwhile the sweets, 2 10p mix-ups (sweetie mice, blackjacks, fruit salad, McCowans Highland toffees and egg and milk chews among others) and a quarter of whatever sweets from the jars on the shelves we chose (rhubarb or clove rock, kola kubes and pineapple chunks were particular favourites) devoured by my brother and I while watching “The New Avengers” or “Space 1999” or whatever else was on TV on Friday night. This was usually sitting on my parents bed, watching their tiny black and white portable TV... A special treat was also watching Multi-Coloured Swap-Shop from their bed the next morning, sometimes joined by my older brother William if “Hong Kong Phooey” was on.
While we were watching TV on a Friday night and Saturday morning my Mum was usually down in the kitchen preparing the soup for Saturday’s lunch, which was a meeting time for all the family: including all my brothers, my sisters in law, my niece and nephew, and my Aunt Lily. The soup was always a vegetable/barley broth based on a beef stock which my mum created by boiling a beef shin bone on a Friday night, before adding the fresh soup veg, and dried lentils, split peats and barley the next morning, and there was enough for at least 12 on a Saturday and at least another 4 bowls on a Sunday (when it tasted even better). It was served up with boiled potatoes and plain bread, with a glass of milk, and we sat down in shifts to devour it. It was usually followed by a pot of tea and an a mountain of freshly baked home made scones, sometimes a mixture of plain, fruit or treacle... These were renowned in the family as being fabulous when absolutely fresh from the oven, but the next day they set so hard that there wasn’t a bird in creation with a tough enough beak to feed on them if you left them out for them... But there were rarely any left by the time the Saturday lunchtime vultures had descended...
I loved my Mum's soup and no other vegetable soup has ever come close in my estimation (sorry Sally). But it was the cause of my first serious trip to hospital. The family had gathered for lunch and my older brother William had arrived on his brand new motorbike. My oldest and younger brothers, together with my Dad and niece and nephew went out to see it, but I was finishing whatever comic I had been reading. Having done so I put it down and ran out the door to see this new purchase, straight into my Mum who was carrying a large bowl of piping hot soup to the table. The soup went straight down my neck and over my chest. My Dad, who was just coming back in had the presence of mind to pick me up and throw me bodily under the tap in the old Belfast jawbone sink in the kitchen. I was then bundled into the back of my brother Robert's car and we headed straight up to the Ulster Hospital where I was treated with various unguents and wrapped in cling film. Thankfully my Dad's quick thinking had prevented any serious or long term damage... but my main concern was whether I would get my soup when I got home.
My Mum was a woman of a limited culinary repertoire... it was soup on a Saturday lunchtime (except during late spring and early summer when there was no decent soup veg, and we had champ with ham or corned beef instead). Then for Sunday lunch after church, it was silverside of beef with mashed and roast potatoes, peas, carrots, parsnips and gravy (or occasionally roast pork or lamb). If my Dad had been down at Megain for Church he would occasionally have brought back some ice-cream for dessert from Desano’s on the way home, usually vanilla or my Mum’s favourite Raspberry Ripple. During the week it was usually a combination of potatoes in one form or another with a variety of meat and veg... A family favourite, which has been handed on down through two further generations, was “pork and onions”, a combination of pork chop or more often loin steaks, or sausages at a pinch, cooked with mounds of buttery mash (or when I was late in from rugby or drama rehearsals, mash that was reheated in the pan with the pork and onions).
It was a limited cuisine, although plentiful, fuelling my Father for his hard manual work. There was no rice (except tinned rice pudding) or pasta (unless it was spaghetti hoops or alphabetti spaghetti on toast) but there were no ready meals in those days (the closest was fish fingers and oven chips from the freezer, with baked beans) and never had carry-outs except for fish and pastie suppers on a Saturday evening from the Larkfield Chippie (or the Brandra or Silver Leaf on the rare times it was closed). My personal favourite, then and now, was a pastie supper, a delicacy unknown outside of Belfast in those days, with the constituent ingredients a closely guarded secret of each chip shop owner... Occasionally when she was down the Newtownards Road my Mum would buy 10 pasties from Jinnies’ Chip Shop at the Arches. If my brother and I were with her a treat would be getting lunch in Jinnies’ complete with bread and butter and “chip shop tea” – a particular style and strength of tea unique to such establishments. The Bethany further down the Newtownards Road was probably more popular and survives to the present day, but we preferred the “shabby chic” of Jinnies’, though such a term was unknown back then, and the real attraction were the pasties.
On other shopping trips into the centre of Belfast my Mum’s favoured eating places were the Robinson & Cleaver at the top of the iconic marble stairs, where a ham sandwich was used as a “carrot” to entice me out of bed when younger, and more unusually “The Morning Star” in Pottinger’s Entry. It wasn’t the trendy gastropub it is now, and the menu options were usually vegetable soup or pie and chips. I say it was an unusual choice in that my Mum had an antipathy to bars and alcohol in general that was probably a function of her Dad’s drinking, but for some unknown reason if we were in the city centre over lunch that was usually where we ended up.
Her antipathy to alcohol didn’t manifest itself in total abstinence. When I was younger, on special occasions she would have had a “wee Pimms”, a Baby Cham or, on New Year’s Eve, a “Snowball” (Advocaat and lemonade). She detested drunkenness, and made my Dad’s life miserable on the rare occasion when he came home from his work’s Christmas dinner a bit tipsy. He too wasn’t a drinker. The only alcohol we had in the house was the occasional can of Newcastle Brown, a bottle of rum or Bacardi, which lasted forever and probably had little alcohol in it at the end, and, at Christmas a bottle or two of Black Town or Blue Nun liebfraumilsch, which was seen as the height of sophistication. The only time anyone can remember my Mum drinking too much was at a cousin's wedding reception when my eldest brother noticed that she had taken a few of the free drinks that the waiters had been circulating with.
"Do you know what you're drinking Mum?" he asked her.
"It's just orange juice... but they're very nice." she replied with her speech slightly slurred.
"That's not an orange juice, it's a Harvey Wallbanger! There's vodka and another liqueur in that. How many have you had?"
"3 or 4," she said, before the sweat broke on her and she headed to the restroom...
When I left home to move to Edinburgh for university, the only advice/warning my mother gave me was to stay off the whisky, threatening to cut me off if she ever caught me drinking it... again, probably a function of her Dad’s love of it. Thankfully she didn’t follow through on that threat when, as I was standing talking to her at my wedding reception in Alloway, two of my friends from the theatre approached me, one after the other, the first with a “wee Laphroaig” and the other a double Grouse...
Her preparation for me leaving home did not extend to teaching me to cook for myself, or indeed any domestic skills. Hers was a generation where women did that sort of thing, not men, and so none of her 4 sons learned to cook or clean, not a mistake we made with our own boys. But being a student meant that I had to learn such things for myself, and one the only occasion she came to visit Sally and me in our flat in Edinburgh after we were married, I made a boeuf stroganoff for her arrival. The fact that I served it with rice made her slightly suspicious, but she said she enjoyed it, before asking Sally how she had cooked it...
“I didn’t” said Sally “David did...”
“No seriously, how did you cook it?”
I’m not entirely sure she ever really believed I could cook for myself... At least she believed I had the wit to have chosen a wife who could cook.
Shalom
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