My mother was the most horrible cook, unbelievably bad at it. Her umbrella crime was the lack of self-knowledge – far from being bad, she thought she was brilliant – but underneath that, a set of discrete misapprehensions, any one of which would have been enough to make you not want to eat at her house. She’d never take a recipe literally; each ingredient could be swapped with something else of a similar colour, or a similar size, or not similar at all. She loved to throw in a rogue element. As I write this, I’m flicking through her magazine cuttings, and she’s made a note above an aubergine and potato casserole that says: “Good, but needs something else. Lime?”
She thought everything, sweet and savoury, could be lifted by a dried apricot. She was extremely experimental but eschewed basic principles, such as parboiling, or meat being roasted for a specific amount of time, relative to its weight, rather than “for ever”. She loved cardamom.
