by Ed Balls
Dad’s friend had told us that America’s most famous burger chain had started opening branches in London, with double-sized hamburgers in boxes and cokes so big you could hardly carry them, so we headed to the Leicester Square branch. The queues were enormous, there were no seats to be had, and my parents would only let us have small fries and an ordinary cheeseburger. But I did see, up close, a Big Mac in its own box. McDonald’s was in Britain. The future had arrived. I’ve had McDonald’s so many times since, usually on a long car journey with the night drawing in and the kids hungry and grumpy and demanding Happy Meals from the back of the car. But I just have to taste those salty, crispy chips and the distinctively sweet, sliced gherkin muddling with the ketchup on the burger, and I’m right back in the magic of that day in Leicester Square.
I don’t think our family was unusual in not eating out. Today there are restaurants and takeaways down every high street, but – other than fish and chips and greasy-spoon cafes – restaurants were much less common back then, certainly outside the big cities. And while a chain of Berni Inns was spreading across the country, serving £1 steaks with chips and fancy liqueur coffees, ordinary pubs rarely served any food and most didn’t let children in at all.
So aside from school lunches, my early food memories all revolve around eating at home or at the houses of relatives. My dad’s mum Nellie was the only grandparent of mine still alive when I was born and she lived in the same small, terraced house in central Norwich where my dad had grown up. My grandpa died when my dad was just ten years old, so Nellie had to manage on her own, getting my dad through his school days and proudly seeing him and his older brother John win places at Oxford and Cambridge. We spent many happy days in the 1970s being looked after by Grandma, playing with an old clockwork train that belonged to my dad as a child and reading his old Rupert annuals from the 1940s. And Grandma would always cook us shepherd’s pie, made with minced beef, not lamb (so technically a cottage pie, although we never called it that), which, to this day, is the true taste of my childhood.
I don’t know how she managed to make it so tasty, because the recipe was very simple. The beef mince was browned with onions and carrots and then cooked in water, with plenty of salt and pepper and perhaps half a stock cube, but no garlic – as Mum always said, ‘We aren’t French.’ The potato top was always perfectly crisp and corrugated, yet still creamy. I’ve never had better to this day.
My mum grew up just a couple of streets away from my dad, but she had a very different kind of upbringing. Her dad owned the butcher’s shop on the Unthank Road, and she and her six brothers and sisters lived cramped above the shop, then in a bigger house round the corner. Every day the shop was shut at lunchtime and the whole family – all nine of them – sat down for a meal. Years later, when her older brothers and sisters were working in office jobs in the city centre, they still came home to eat lunch together.
It was only ever meat from the butcher’s shop at lunchtime, but my fourteen-year-old mum would be sent to fetch fish and chips for my grandfather every night of the week without fail when he got home from the pub. She never objected because it gave her a chance to bump into my dad for a chat and a bit of courting on the way back, and if that meant my grandfather’s fish and chips were often cold by the time she got them home, he apparently never complained.
In our family home, first in Norwich and then Nottingham, where we moved when I was eight, we also ate together every day. Not in the middle of the day, but at six o’clock, once everyone was home from work and school. We always had meat: the leftovers from Sunday’s roast with pickles on Monday; then, during the week, sausage, egg and chips; shepherd’s pie; a minced meat pie; maybe pork chops; and on Saturday evening, usually chips with rump steak or my dad’s favourite, a ‘mixed grill’ – steak, sausage, bacon and a fried egg – followed by Angel Delight – chocolate, strawberry or butterscotch – for a special weekend treat.
Sunday was the most important day in our family, and even after the roast lunch, followed by a big portion of apple pie or blackberry and apple crumble, the ritual eating wasn’t complete. I spent most Sunday afternoons playing football on the local ‘rec’ with the boy next door and my little brother, but we had to be back home by five o’clock for the family serial on TV and Sunday tea.
Just a few hours after we’d had lunch, my mum would wheel her small teak trolley into the living room, with sandwiches, cheese on toast or Welsh rarebit. Always a homemade sponge or fruit cake. Maybe rock buns or jam tarts. But most important, the centrepiece of the trolley: tinned fruit with evaporated milk. Normally peaches, sometimes pears, and on special occasions, pineapple chunks or mixed fruit cocktail. All doused in thin, sweet, tinned milk, and regarded by all of us as the biggest treat.
This may sound odd – there was plenty of fresh fruit in the shops in those days, and I took an apple, pear or banana to school every day. But for my parents – both born in 1938 and brought up during the rationing of the Second World War and its aftermath, when fresh fruit was just not available – tinned fruit remained the height of luxury.
Many years later, when we all went on a big family cruise around the Mediterranean, I can remember the stress my parents felt when, having eaten breakfast, lunch and dinner, the ship’s tannoy announced that the Midnight Buffet was now available. None of us was hungry. But it was there, it was free, and as far as my mum and dad were concerned, that meant it needed to be eaten. Those wartime habits died hard.
This may all sound very traditional and old-fashioned, as you might expect from a family that had lived in East Anglia for generations, but my mum’s cooking also had an exotic twist. When my parents got married in 1961, my dad’s scientific work had first taken them to Switzerland, before two years in the mid-1960s teaching in Berkeley, California and Portland, Oregon.
Those years had a huge influence on them. Politically, they saw racial injustice and student unrest at first hand, with the civil rights movement at its pinnacle, and the early protests against the Vietnam War beginning to grow. Musically, my earliest memories are of my mum singing along to the political anthems popularised by Pete Seeger – ‘We Shall Overcome’, ‘Little Boxes’, and ‘Which Side Are You On?’, as well as Peter, Paul and Mary and The Seekers.
The other consequence of their time in America was how it changed my mum’s cooking. Our daily and Sunday dinners remained traditionally English, but if she was hosting guests, Mum had a whole different repertoire, learned from how friends from different backgrounds on the West Coast campuses would cater for large groups.
My earliest memories of my parents entertaining at home are when my dad’s graduate students were invited round. It was my job to tour the room with a bowl of peanuts before I was sent to bed. I would listen from the stairs and hear the students marvelling at my mum’s exotic American-influenced cooking. She invariably made lasagne in a sloppy, rich Italian American style. And that would be followed by apple and blackberry cobbler (like crumble but with a US-style scone on the top), or plum kuchen, a German American dessert with a rich, creamy top. If I brought school friends home, they’d be taken aback by my mum producing great bowls of bolognaise sauce with long strands of ‘proper’ spaghetti. For kids only used to eating ‘spaghetti’ out of a tin – as small hoops or letters – this was very different and much more difficult and messy to eat, but hugely popular all the same.
As relatively forward-thinking as my parents’ culinary habits were, however, we still had to wait for the 1980s to arrive before we finally made it to a restaurant. My mum decided she needed a change and a new place had opened near our village, The Charde in Tollerton. We children didn’t find out what was happening until, on the way home from church, all dressed up in our Sunday best, my dad suddenly turned off the main road into the Charde car park. We were told to be on our best behaviour and, aged thirteen, I was expected to set the standard for my younger brother and sister.
The main courses were a selection of roast meats – it was a Sunday aft
er all – with big tureens of vegetables. I can remember very little about the food – it certainly wasn’t a scratch on my mum’s homemade roast – except for the vivid moment when we were asked to choose a starter. We could have tomato soup, prawn cocktail, or a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. Mum and Dad didn’t like prawns, and we were so used to eating Mum’s tomato soup that it didn’t feel like anything special, so all of us went for the orange juice, each glass served on its own individual plate with a doily and a napkin. My family, eating out at a proper restaurant. It felt like the most luxurious thing ever.
GRANDMA’S SHEPHERD’S PIE
Serves 5
The shepherd’s pie that my grandma and mum cooked every week was always made with beef mince – there was no lamb in shepherd’s pie in our family. But nor did we call it cottage pie – ‘what’s that?’, we’d laugh. It remains one of my most favourite dishes to cook today, although I do spice it up a little compared to their very simple recipe: garlic softly fried with the onions, leftover gravy from the Sunday roast – beef or chicken, it doesn’t matter – and if there’s no spare gravy I’ll use some liquid chicken stock plus a couple of tablespoons of Lea Perrin’s Worcestershire Sauce to give the shepherd’s pie a bit of extra tang. It’s important to rough up the mashed potatoes to get a good, crispy top. As always, it’s the gravy that makes the difference, both in quality and quantity – no one wants a dry shepherd’s pie - so always make sure you have enough. For a vegetarian version, use Quorn mince and vegetable stock.
INGREDIENTS
1 tbsp olive oil
3 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
1 onion, peeled and finely chopped
1 carrot, peeled and diced
450g minced beef
500ml stock – liquid chicken or beef, or leftover gravy, or use a stock cube dissolved in water
2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce (or soy sauce)
Salt and pepper
5 medium-sized potatoes, peeled and halved
1 tbsp butter
2 tbsp whole or semi-skimmed milk
METHOD
Heat the oil in a heavy pan and add the garlic, onion and carrots. Cook slowly until soft (about 5 minutes). Add the meat and, when browned, pour on the stock. Bring to the boil, add the Worcestershire sauce and salt and pepper and simmer for 25 minutes. (At this point my mum sometimes used to add half a sachet of ‘chilli-con-carne’ mix to make a slightly spicy version – I use two heaped teaspoons of the Cajun Spice Mix.)
Bring the potatoes to the boil and cook until a knife runs right through them easily. Drain and return to the saucepan. Add the butter and milk, then mash till smooth.
Turn the oven on to 180°C/350°F/gas mark 4.
Transfer the meat to an ovenproof dish, reserving most of the liquid in the saucepan to use as a gravy (you might need to strain it through a sieve).
Slap the potatoes on top, use a knife to smooth over and a fork to get a good texture. Cook in the oven for 30 minutes and serve with the gravy.
LAMB WITH HERBS
Serves 4
My mum always wanted a hostess trolley. When we were young, her biggest gripe on Sunday was that she couldn’t keep the plates warm, and she needed a trolley like Auntie Marlene’s. This fabulous contraption – which looked like a wired-up set of drawers and emitted a low hum when plugged in – would be switched on an hour before lunch by Marlene, creating a nice warm surface for the plates in the lower warming tray and heating the vegetable tureens on the top, all ready to keep everything hot once the meat was carved and the gravy boat was full.
Whether it was because Marlene had one, or that it was considered the pinnacle of 1970s domestic sophistication, or because she was actually obsessed with the plates getting cold, my mum really wanted a hostess trolley for our house. My parents did have a Teasmade in their bedroom, which woke them up every morning at 7 a.m. with a loud buzzing noise and a flashing light as the boiling water poured out into a waiting teapot for their morning cuppa in bed. And, like many other families, we had a large chest freezer in the garage, which remained largely empty once my parents discovered that buying half a pig was a false economy, as my mum didn’t know how to cook most of it and my dad didn’t want her to learn.
It was for the hostess trolley, however, that my mum truly pined. Which made it all the more bizarre that, when she eventually got one, long after I’d left home, it was barely used. It took so long to move the plates and dishes in and get them out again, my mum found it easier just to put them all straight on the table, like she’d always done before. Still, it was there for special occasions and to impress visiting relatives, like Auntie Marlene and Uncle Terry. And I’m aware that my mum’s odd foibles have rubbed off on me. I don’t like it when the family are slow coming down for Sunday dinner – ‘It’ll get cold!’ I shout up the stairs. And I also like to keep the gravy bubbling in the meat tin until the very last minute.
All of which explains why, when it comes to entertaining, I’m always on the lookout for dishes that taste better as they cool. That’s where this lovely Ottolenghi-inspired lamb recipe comes into its own. The hard work to make the marinade is all done the day before. I tend to sear the lamb cutlets and then cook them in the oven an hour or two in advance – as they rest, they get tastier and tastier.
I use individual lamb cutlets on the bone for this recipe, but you could use lamb steaks and reduce the oven cooking time by a third. The green marinade is sweet, spicy and herby and makes a great pouring sauce. I usually heat it up and pour it over at the last minute. That’s what my mum would have done, I’m sure. Though, of course, if she were cooking this dish for Marlene and Terry, she would have kept the lamb cutlets warm in her hostess trolley. Because at long last she finally could.
INGREDIENTS
8 lamb cutlets, on the bone
FOR THE MARINADE
3 garlic cloves, peeled and roughly chopped
2cm piece of ginger, roughly chopped
A good handful of parsley, roughly chopped
Coriander, same again
Mint, same again
3 red chillies, roughly chopped
2 tbsp red wine vinegar
3 tbsp honey or maple syrup
3 tbsp soy sauce
Juice of 1 lemon
1 tsp salt
100ml groundnut oil
50ml water
METHOD
Place all the marinade ingredients in a food processor for 30 seconds. If you don’t have one, then just chop everything up finely. Put the lamb cutlets in a deep bowl, pour over the marinade, cover with cling film and leave for at least 3 hours, but preferably overnight.
Turn the oven on to 190°C/375°F/gas mark 5. Heat a griddle pan until hot and sear the lamb cutlets, a few at a time, for 2 minutes on each side, shaking off any excess marinade back into the bowl before you sear. Put the seared lamb on a baking tray and cook for 8 minutes for pink, 10 minutes for medium, or 12 minutes for well done. Layer the cooked lamb on a serving dish and let it rest for at least 10 minutes, though an hour or two is fine. Meanwhile, heat the excess marinade in a saucepan and pour over the lamb before serving.
2 LEARNING TO COOK
I can’t remember much about the school trips I went on as a child, but I have vivid memories of my packed lunches. Goodness knows what I learned visiting Newark museum, church and castle. But I can see and smell my ham sandwich, ready salted crisps, Club biscuit and apple, all fitted snugly in a converted margarine tub and lovingly cradled on the coach journey. As for the fateful school trip to Birdworld when I was five, I’m still scarred by the shock of opening my lunchbox to find a large lump of cling-film-wrapped Cheddar cheese with no bread. Bewildered, I self-consciously gnawed on the hunk’s corners while my friends munched more conventional bread rolls filled with ham or jam. The mystery was solved when I got home and showed my mum the nibbled cheese. She promptly squealed and opened the fridge to find my carefully-wrapped sandwich still safely stored in the cool box.
I also spent a summer when I was twelve working every morning with a Co-op milkman who smoked forty cigarettes in the three hours we spent driving round the village making our deliveries. The same lady left him shortbread too, which he often seemed to spend a mysteriously long time collecting, while I ate a yoghurt off the cart and waited patiently. And when I spent the run-up to the festive season working at the Nottingham central sorting office, I’d never tasted a better cooked breakfast than the one they served in the staff canteen, or been so desperate for it as I was on those chilly mornings after a couple of hours sorting hundreds of Christmas cards and gift parcels.
My favourite books when I was a child all seemed to revolve around eating, too. The best adventures at the top of Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree happened when the magic land involved food. Her Famous Five were always eating lashings of everything. Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was, of course, a natural choice. But in my most treasured stories of all – Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons adventures in the Lake District and the Suffolk flatlands – the children didn’t just eat; they cooked over a campfire. And I was desperate to do the same.