Breadwinner

She was the breadwinner, and the baker, in the house.

She didn’t cook during the week, but her Sunday roasts sprawled. They spread across the table as the years went by. Feeding four, she still had to make dozens of Yorkshire puddings, sometimes crisp and sometimes flatter and chewier. During my protracted vegetarian phase, cheese and potato pie was a staple. A revert to omnivorism saw the meat requirement increase substantially. Gravy, thick with fat and redolent with flavour from browning and vegetable water. Roast potatoes, smeared with dripping. Greens, overdone, wilted. Carrots and peas, mashed swede. Cauliflower or leeks in cheese. Sometimes an experiment would appear, “just a little something”, she’d lay out for our approval. On rare occasions it was such a success it became a staple demanded for significant meals.

When she was away at work we would work through the pile of cakes or biscuits she had made at the weekend. The best was a chimerical confection of pie and cake, served in small, almond-laced, slices.

Christmas was her special day. In the build up to December the freezer and cupboards would gradually fill with easy to cook snacks, calories piling on calories, a mountain of sugar and saturated fat, interspersed with the trendy delicacies of the eighties.

There were memorable disasters.

A game pie turned up one year. All her care and love was manifest in the glazed pastry crust, decorated with shortcrust leaves, the rim crimped neatly. She carved large slices for us, eager for feedback. The filling was dry and unseasoned, bland as a mouthful of newspaper. If newspaper were served in an evening buffet still frozen. We made polite noises, cut around the frozen chunks, and smeared hot mustard across the rest.

The polite noises were our mistake. The following year the game pie reappeared. My dad had, at least, encouraged her to ensure it was defrosted before she served it. More fool him, as he bit into a slice and cracked a tooth on a pellet she had missed during preparation. I took the thinnest slice possible and subtly googled the risk of lead poisoning from birdshot. The leftovers were sent to neighbours with short arms and deep pockets.

In October of the following year, when asked about Christmas plans, my brother insisted his only plan was to not eat any game pie.

That year she was distracted by the happy noise of her recently introduced potential daughters-in-law to the advent festivities. Wine glass in hand, she forayed from the kitchen, no longer the only woman in the house. No-one took her place at the stove, which meant vegetables went quickly from boiling merrily to burning thoroughly. Orange tinted cinders. She still served them.

After she retired she took to cooking more, with the rest of us out of the house working. After a month we entered into a conspiracy to improve her outcomes, slinking into the kitchen and adding flavour to unsupervised dishes. Salt, pepper, dried herbs and pre-prepared sauces were our weapons. The omerta was broken by hilarity, when she declared one evening that her stew had been steadily improving, and that what she had served was her best yet. Our collective cackle rather gave the game away. Unfortunately, it also led to a reversion to unseasoned food for a month.

And then she had a scare. More than a scare. A minor discomfort that she didn’t want to bother anyone with turned into a dash to hospital, a month in whitewashed rooms and corridors, pushed around in a gown beneath thin blue sheets, with little to no food she could stomach or keep down. By the time she got home she had a nice new line in scars and bruises, like a supermarket turkey that had been incorrectly trussed and left at the back of the freezer for too long.

The chemo was worse. Each pass through grated something vital from her. It started with her love for sweet treats and rich savouries. Chocolate was ash in her mouth. Then went her appetite. Then, as she steeped in the poisons, her nerves began to char. Her fingers and toes went numb. With that went some of her zest, her energy.

Before, a day stuck in the house would have created a flour dusted explosion of activity, cakes, tarts, pies. But with her feet and hands betraying her, this wasn't on the menu any more.

Our relationship changed abruptly, like the tray of chips tumbling from the oven, or the cup of tea kicked over by unfeeling feet. We hovered near her, watching her trembling hands. She'd always been a menace with knives. Paring knives, bread knives, cheese knives, she'd cut herself on all of them, over the years. Now each meal was seasoned with new fears. We were the parents, now, biting our lips as she relearned skills she had taught us. The urge to step in, to encourage her to sit down, bubbled up but was never allowed to spill over.

As her illness consumed her, family meals became more frequent. Any excuse to surround her with warmth and love, to fetch her a cuppa or rustle up a preferred treat.

Dad even learned to cook broth, spooned carefully into her, one tepid sip at a time.

We served crab vol-au-vents at her wake.