Culinary Roulette
Dinner was a dangerous game of culinary roulette that could see carrot soup served alongside chocolate mousse or stewed pears paired with stuffed eggplant.
I view a freezer as a convenient place to keep a few frozen pizzas, a couple of tubs of impulse-bought ice cream and a teetering skyscraper of ice trays, but the freezer in my childhood home in Glasgow carried much more weight. You might remove the crow bar and half dozen paint cans that wedged it shut and open up that ancient chest in the hopes of locating an overlooked ice pop and instead find anything from an entire deer to a carefully parcelled-up, 18th-century Persian rug and matching cushions, deposited into the icy depths to thwart moths.
My mum always made a bit extra when cooking and tucked leftovers into wee plastic tubs to save cooking a couple of nights a week. The fact that she didn’t label the tubs meant the menu on such nights could be a dangerous game of culinary roulette that could see carrot soup served alongside chocolate mousse or stewed pears paired with stuffed eggplant. Those were among my favourite nights to visit — a delicious suspense in not knowing until the first spoonful whether the mossy green substance waiting in your bowl started life as pureed peas or gooseberry fool.
All remaining room around the carcasses and carpets was taken up by vast quantities of vegetables grown by Miss Hamilton, an elderly artist who lived four doors away in a roomy apartment that had no space for such trivialities as a freezer. Miss Hamilton considered such an item far too unsightly for her own home, but filled half of ours for most of my childhood.
She appeared most often when we were in the middle of dinner, announcing, “I desperately need rhubarb” or “I just need to count my cauliflowers” and then stayed for half a dozen glasses of sherry and the entire evening.
Miss H was our most regular such visitor, but a slew of neighbours arrived and stayed in a similar manner. My parents’ sense of hospitality extended far beyond hosting generous quantities of frozen vegetables. They threw dinner and drinks parties frequently and, on nights in between, it seemed perfectly normal to have a reclusive Canadian photographer, a former Yugoslavian presidential contender or a world-renowned harpist pop round whilst we were tucking into our stewed pears and eggplant. Cousins, school friends and even a stuttering Russian Jesuit priest showed up on the doorstep and lived with us for months at a time.
Much like trips to the freezer, you never knew what you were going to find when you creaked open the door — or how well they were going to go with whatever company was already assembled.
