There’s a spring in my step this week, and it’s all courtesy of the nostalgic tastes and smells of my childhood.
I’m telling you, if you’re in search of a way to feel young again, ditch the expensive lotions and potions and turn instead to the kitchen.
Like hearing an intro to a song that once formed the soundtrack to your youth, the olfactory magic of food will take you back in time.
I came home this week to the smell of melting chocolate and the sound of mini, crinkled paper cases being rubbed between my mum’s fingers as she tried to separate them, feverishly while still stirring.
Dozens of treats for a charity bake sale were being created in my kitchen and my senses were buzzing.
First up was the staple of every 80s dinner party or a pre-wedding ‘show of presents,’ – the coffee and walnut ball.
It’s the reason I’m still an avid consumer of coffee Revels.
This little spherical morsel comprised a Nescafe-infused butter cream and crushed nut centre, which was formed and chilled, before being rolled in chocolate and topped with a decadent half-walnut.
As I closed my eyes and inhaled it in one go, I was six again.
I was standing in my aunty Joan’s ‘good living room’ on Christmas day, wearing velvet on velvet, eating a very grown up treat.
I can still see my gran now, giving me the nod of approval to go ahead and try one.
Family memories bound up between pages of family recipe book
By the time the week was out my mother had been up to the loft in search of THE recipe book.
A bound mix of typed lists and handwritten notes, it is like a treasure map to sweet, bloated happiness that can only be achieved via cake.
After flicking through the gelatin-laced savoury and sweet mousses (good luck being vegan 40 years ago), we went past the uniquely Scottish macaroon bars.
Only the Scots could take mashed potato and turn it into a confection.
Next page, tablet.
For those who have maybe never experienced this delicacy, it’s basically various forms of sugar melted and set. With butter.
And it’s marvellous.
When I first learned to drive I got an anxious call from my Papa who was in a phone box in Motherwell.
Asda had an offer on condensed milk and he had panic bought enough to make an igloo out of tablet and needed me to come and get him.
When he died I inherited his tablet pot and the tray he poured the molten mixture into.
It was still scored in meticulous lines from where he had used his joiner’s set square to make precision perfect blocks, before wrapping it in greaseproof paper.
My wedding favours were his hand-made tablet.
And there is nothing quite like the sweet, sickly, moreish smell as it suddenly comes together and begins sticking to the side of the pan.
A flask full of stovies and a first taste of lasagne
My mum was actually scrambling to find the instructions for ‘cherry nut delight’ in the family recipe book.
My granny’s coffee morning speciality, it involved pastry, glace cherries, butter cream, coconut and yet more walnuts.
Elsewhere, there were dog-eared pages for shortbread, and custard creams; our family’s take on stovies using square Lorne sausage… and every page brought back a memory.
I used to take my Fraggle Rock flask to school full of stovies in the winter.
And you haven’t lived until the burnt edges from a tray of petticoat tails have graced your lips.
I laughed at spaghetti prefixed with the word ‘Italian’.
But then, I can tell you the very day and hour I first tasted pasta that wasn’t Marshalls macaroni.
I was 10 and about to finally eat the apocryphal lasagne of which my dad had once spoken.
He had grown up next to the Onesti family who ran chip shops and whose delicious, fragrant, home-made food wafted through his tenement.
I’ve experienced glorious food since, some of which even came with a Michelin star.
But there has been nothing to rival those sheets of lasagne, or its caramelised cheesy topping.
Family recipe book sent me searching for other treasures
So nostalgic has my culinary week been that I ended it by sourcing a well-fired roll from my local baker.
My English husband had never heard of such a thing.
And he remains unconvinced that a blackened piece of bread can be either tasty or good for you.
But in my mind I was a seven-year-old cycling down a Cumbrae road, during the Glasgow fair fortnight.
I was about to pick up the rolls and a ‘quarter of tongue’ to take back to my gran for a picnic.
And I can tell you that this week’s charred and crusted bap, and its fluffy interior, did more for me than the very expensive face cream I’ve just purchased.
It helped replace a dozen worries with the raised eyebrows and deep-sigh satisfaction you can only get when something tastes like a moment in time.
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