Grandma Handwrote A Cookbook And Showed Me How To Slaughter A Chicken
I would’ve gladly skipped the latter, but her passion for good food rubbed off on me…
I remember Mum getting ready for cooking on Saturday mornings like it was yesterday.
It looked like this.
She’d sit on a chair in the kitchen. Sheets of newspaper spread in front of her on the floor. And a sack of vegetables next to it.
Her method was simple.
Peel the veggies and dispose of the compost by wrapping it up in yesterday’s news. Simple enough, but it never worked out like that. Mum often immersed herself in local news events and forgot about the potato in her hands.
As a result, our lunch got perpetually delayed.
“Mum, are you peeling or reading?” I’d ask her one day, chuckling to myself, aware that my words couldn’t compete with the ones she was reading.
“Peeling” — she said half a minute later, without looking up, her eyes (and the peeler) resting on the job adverts.
All we could hope for was boring news in the paper so the chicken would be ready by the time lunchtime hunger set in.
I never really gave much thought to our family’s eating traditions until the other day when I bumped into my grandma’s cookbook on the kitchen shelf.
Yes, it is a cookbook. Even if it’s handwritten, in an A4 ruled notebook and its pages yellowed over the years.
I inherited it, as Grandma promised I would. “This will be yours once I’m gone,” she’d say, “as well as the china in the cabinet.”
I’m not sure where the china ended up, or the cabinet, for that matter. But I did claim her notebook from my family years after her passing.
It was a principle.
On her next trip to England, my mum put the weathered thing in her luggage and flew it over from Hungary.
Grandma was a force to be reckoned with when it came to cooking. Quite literally so. She had no fear of cutting the chicken’s throat herself when someone offered her livestock.
“Look, you hold its neck like this,” — she explained to ten-year-old me and went on to demonstrate how to slaughter a bird like she was teaching me how to knit a cardigan.
That was Grandma in the good old eighties, blissfully unaware of the trauma she caused by killing an innocent soul in front of me.
I would’ve preferred knitting.
On a positive note, the soup tasted like Heaven, which I thought was a fair outcome considering what the chicken and I endured to arrive at this moment.
At least, its death served a good cause.
Grandma loved hosting family events, and we loved attending. It was her way to keep everyone together and our chance to gorge ourselves on delicious food.
Delicious food it was, soup full of meat and vegetables followed by yet more chicken. Deep fried, served with rice and peas, or potatoes tossed in pan-fried onion.
You must think that’s abundant, and it was. A few hours after our first round, we even had a second serving.
“Have some more,” she’d urge everyone like we didn’t eat enough to feed an entire village. She’d even stroke my back while gently ushering me towards the dining table.
“Don’t you worry Sweetheart, just eat. You need it.” was her signature sentence. So, I did. I kept putting food in my mouth for the entire day, she worked so hard, after all.
It didn’t bother us that the sudden calorie intake was about to clog our arteries. There was always enough room for the cakes grandma baked the day before, which she always complained about with gusto.
“I don’t know where it went wrong,” she’d say, lips slightly drooping. “It must be the butter.”
When it wasn’t the butter, it was the eggs. When it wasn’t the eggs it was the sugar or even her pesky old oven with its temperamental heat regulator.
She seemed to find a thousand signs of imperfection that did not exist. Her cakes were perfect — creamy, moist, and soft to the touch.
She was a brilliant chef, a fine butcher, and a sophisticated baker. Yet, she loved pretending to be coy about her skills, just in case of a culinary catastrophe.
That never happened.
One day, I found her sitting at the dining table, the notebook — then bright yellow — and the Women’s Magazine in front of her.
“This way, they won’t get lost,” she said, referring to the recipe in the magazine that she was writing in her notebook.
I sat beside her and took the cup of tea she’d already made for me and watched in awe as she formed her ornate cursive letters seamlessly flowing onto the page.
Those moments were like gold dust. Even as a youngster, I was truly present. Just the scratching sound of the ball pen and the warmth of the mug in my hands.
Although my child brain couldn’t fathom her fascination with food at the time. Or why she wouldn’t cut out the dish instructions and glue the clippings in her notebook.
Wouldn’t it be easier? — I thought.
But I didn’t know -couldn’t know- at the time what I know today. I was only young. Cooking was her passion. Her hobby. An endeavour that not only gave her fulfilment but helped her keep the family united.
Food was Grandma’s world. And the vast collection of her recipes was a testament to that.
The charming calligraphy (and yes, the occasional clippings) gradually filled the A4 pages and over the years her “recording” of recipes turned into a unique, “handmade” cookbook.
She didn’t realize then that her devotion to cooking affected even generations to come. Inadvertently. Like an IV slowly dripping in our veins.
Her daughter (my mum), who witnessed Grandma’s culinary skills in her childhood, carried the same tradition forward.
We had plenty of cooked food, even though Mum delayed lunch by reading the news.
But history — as often happens — has repeated itself. My sister and I do the same today, spending hours preparing the next meal.
We were taught, that food is what you cook, not what you buy from a street vendor or the Chinese takeaway around the corner. Although sometimes it’s the easiest thing to do.
We teach the same approach to our children. Relentlessly.
Even though, they prefer battered fish from the chippy. For now.
But the message is being cemented, and one day (hopefully) it will be fully received. They can not be immune to the IV dripping in their veins.
Or to our perpetual nagging of ditching junk.
The one thing that Grandma couldn’t teach us, is how to slaughter the chicken ourselves. And that will never change.
