Latest features My father, the chef

Date Published:

12/06/2009

Does your dad burn the tea and biscuits? Or is he a dab hand in the kitchen? 4Food sent Hannah Forbes Black to investigate her dad’s foodie roots for Father's Day

When I think of the kind of homespun, down-to-earth cooking that people so often describe as 'like my mum makes', I don’t think of my mum. I think of my dad, whose enthusiastic, chaotic cooking made the kitchen the happiest room in the house. He'd throw on an apron and clatter around the kitchen, flinging things into pots and muttering joyfully about spices, and when he was done he'd bring dishes to the table with the flourish of a magician unveiling the last stage of a trick.

It's not in the blood

Weird, because my dad's parents weren't interested in food, he tells me when we get together so I can steal recipes off him for this article. "My mum can't cook at all," he tells me. I already know this. But there's more, says my dad: "I often tell people I'd never seen a green pepper till I got to university - my friend fooled me into taking a big bite out of a green chilli because I didn't know the difference; I'd never seen any of these things." Was he embarrassed? "No, but my mouth felt very hot."

Granny's egg curry

My grandmother's menu of typical British stodge was enlivened by recipes she'd fished out of an old cookbook from the time she lived in what was then Rangoon. "Egg curry," remembers my dad, grimly. "That was definitely from the expat salon cookbook." She was raised by her aunt and uncle, who were leftwing radicals and thought that teaching girls how to be good little housewives was imperialist nonsense. If you discount the terrible cooking, this had impressive results - my grandma was instilled with sufficient chutzpah to marry a black man in the deeply racist Britain of the early 1950s, something I imagine she might not have done if she'd been the kind of girl who spent her youth making casseroles.

My grandfather, who I never met, was apparently unperturbed by the unvarying diet provided by his wife, my dad remembers. "Because my dad was from Jamaica, people often ask did you eat Jamaican food? But we just ate what was in front of us. He was probably getting fed by his variety of Jamaican mistresses that he was busy seeing on the side. He didn't seem to be that bothered about what he was eating. He was probably getting fed from multiple sources." "Like a cat." I joke. No wonder my grandmother didn't feel like cooking elaborate dishes.

No cash? Bake cakes

When my grandfather left the family, there was abruptly no money for shop-bought cakes and biscuits any more - so my dad learned to bake. "We were suddenly poor and whinging and saying 'We haven't got any biscuits.' And my mum would say; 'Well why don't you do it yourself then?' So that's how I started, under her supervision in the kitchen. It was basic stuff, Victoria sponge – flour, margarine, sugar, whip it up, stick it in the oven, Bob's your uncle." My dad has always emphasised what an easy and miraculous thing a cake is and he always used to let me scrape the leftover raw mix from the bowl.

One of the recipes below, a really simple sherry trifle, involves sponge cake. This was the special occasion dish of my childhood, prepared in a big glass bowl for birthday parties - through the glass you could see all the different layers of wonderfulness. Trifles had a frisson of dangerous living about them, because of the alcohol - my mum would watch us like a hawk in case we had too many helpings and ended up as lifelong alcoholics. My dad, in this as in so many things, felt that if it didn't kill us it was probably fine.

Sod the 'best before' date

He's never cared much about 'best before' dates either, which is definitely his mum's influence showing. "Food is food. Unless it's definitely poisonous, eat it for God's sake," he says, quite heatedly. "My mum's like that - she'd make an extra Christmas pudding that we'd have at Easter." I am completely mystified by this. Who wants to eat Christmas pudding at Easter? "That was just the way she was," shrugs my dad. "If you did things, you did a batch of them."

There was some controversy around acceptable eating dates when it came to my dad's West African groundnut stew. My thrifty father would make a vast inhuman quantity of it and serve it for days on end, until my stepmother declared that enough was enough - and he was left doggedly finishing it off himself. We ate a lot of African food around this time because my dad got really into pan-Africanism. From my slightly hazy teenage point of view, this seemed to mean lengthy discussions about the slave trade and lots of intense, talkative men coming and going in the house. In addition, at mealtimes we would sometimes say 'thank you' to the dead animal we were about to eat, and my dad would go outside and pour a bowl of water on the ground as a 'libation to the ancestors'. "Lots of cultures say thank you to the animal," says my dad now. "It's probably a lot more meaningful if you've gone out and hunted it as well but, all the same, why not? It's a way of reminding yourself you're eating an animal, not just a blob."

The strong food bond

This is the kind of thing that makes me feel the tug of shared DNA because actually, although I tease him about it, this is something we have in common - a sense that food is an expression of ancient tastes and longings. Belonging is complicated, families can feel impossible, but food can instantly connect you to your past.

My favourite food memory of my dad is from one of the rare moments it was just the two of us, among all the bustle of a complicated post-divorce family. I was perhaps 12 or 13. He said he'd cook anything I wanted and, feeling like an Egyptian princess with a personal chef, I demanded fish curry. He went to the kitchen and reappeared with exactly what I wanted. "It's actually adapted from a Madhur Jaffrey recipe," admits my dad now. But back then, it seemed to me like my dad had a special brand of magic, spiriting meals up out of nowhere and always knowing exactly what I was hungry for.

Try Hannah's dad's trifle, West African groundnut stew and fish curry.

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