by Ed Balls
I was a keen Cub Scout from the age of eight and we soon learned to cook sausages over open fires and what we called Dunkers – flour, water and salt mixed into a dough, wrapped round a stick, cooked over a campfire and eaten, hot, chewy and salty and slathered with butter.
My personal cooking journey properly began when I started experimenting in the kitchen for myself as an eleven-year-old in the school holidays, when my mum got her first job since I was born, working part-time as an NHS clerical worker at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham. She had a collection of Reader’s Digest recipe cards which she’d brought back from America, a huge edition of Mrs Beeton’s famous Victorian cookbook and, of course, Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course. To begin with, I tried out recipes that didn’t require many ingredients, so my efforts wouldn’t be discovered. Mrs Beeton’s ‘One Egg Invalid Omelette’ was my first success. Nowadays, the idea of a bunch of recipes designed specifically for people suffering illness at home feels odd, but in the nineteenth century it was regarded literally as a lifesaver.
I started helping out more formally by putting the potatoes on to boil or getting the vegetables ready for when my mum got home. My big cooking breakthrough came when our Scout troop organised a six-week cooking course leading to the Cook’s badge. I learned to make pastry, fruit cake and a casserole with beef and brown ale; and we practised making ‘Camp Pancakes’ – white sliced bread smeared with jam, folded over, dipped in pancake batter and then fried on both sides in a buttery pan.
With my Cook’s badge under my belt, I started to take more of a lead at our annual Scout camp, where, rain or shine, we spent ten days away in North Yorkshire cooking only on open wood fires using the ingredients our patrol was handed each day from the Camp Store. I learned to smuggle in firelighters for when the wood was damp, but also some stock cubes and marmite to give our stews and soups a lift.
At home, I moved on from peeling the potatoes to cooking some of the family’s weekday meals. My mum taught me her recipes for sponge cake, blackberry and apple crumble and, most important of all, bolognaise sauce. Not only could I now make spaghetti bolognaise ready for when everyone got home from work or school, I had also learned the base sauce for my mum’s lasagne. Steadily she passed on to me the recipes from her childhood and those she had learned in America and adapted for us. And I’ve been using them and adding to them ever since.
My mum was undoubtedly glad to have one of her children willing to learn at her side in the kitchen, because the interest certainly wasn’t going to come from my younger sister or brother. Joanna is two years younger than me and never seemed to like food, or certainly not what we ate at home. On Sundays after lunch, when my brother and I went out to play football, she would often be left sat at the table for another half an hour after we’d all left, not allowed to get down until she’d finished, her roast chicken going round and round in her mouth like a slowly spinning tumble dryer.
She hated any vegetables other than peas, and categorically refused to eat them. So much so that when my mum took her to the local GP with a dry rash on her fingers and arms, the doctor declared that she had Vitamin C deficiency, otherwise known as scurvy: the disease that sailors, denied fresh fruit and vegetables when out on the oceans, had suffered and died from for hundreds of years.
My younger brother’s relationship with food was at the opposite end of the spectrum, and even more challenging for my parents, thanks to one of those incidents of childhood that can shape a life. Andrew was out shopping with my mum when the butcher opened his giant fridge to expose a whole half side of beef hanging up inside. My brother promptly fainted and had to be carried from the shop. Unable to shake off the image of the cow’s partial carcass, he declared himself a vegetarian, and vowed never to eat meat again.
This might not seem so unusual nowadays, but for an eleven-year-old boy in 1985, it was rare, if you’ll excuse the pun. ‘Meat is Murder’ by The Smiths might have been in the album charts, but the image of vegetarianism was still Neil from The Young Ones, not something many young boys aspired to. Nevertheless, Andrew stuck to his guns, both then and ever since. He did try a few times to break the habit in his twenties – I cooked him sirloin steak, roast chicken and lasagne at his request to see if he could be tempted. He never managed to eat any of it, though, and soon gave up trying.
His sudden lurch to vegetarianism didn’t come easy for my parents, especially my mum, the butcher’s daughter, who couldn’t understand all the fuss. And in the early weeks after the fainting incident, she made few concessions. She served Yorkshire puddings, gravy and vegetables for his Sunday lunch as usual – but with a handful of peanuts substituted for the beef.
Having helped raise and feed three kids myself, I pity my poor mum. A daughter who didn’t eat vegetables and a son who didn’t eat meat. I was the only one who ate everything she put in front of me, and wanted to learn how to cook it too, so no wonder she was a keen teacher.
Once I left for university and my sister was out after work in the evenings, my mum gave up trying with my brother and chose the easy way. She gave him a weekly allowance and left him to buy vegetarian ingredients or ready meals at Sainsburys on his way home from school. As a Cub and Scout himself, he was already well trained.
I was aghast on every level. Like many oldest children, I’d had to put up with parents who were strict about everything: what I ate, when I went to bed, what clothes I wore, and keeping me to the ‘rules of the house’, whether that meant sitting down for meals on time or not running up the phone bill chatting to friends. All that was out of the window by the time my little brother reached secondary school, and on top of that, he was doing all his own shopping and cooking – even if it was just putting vegetarian pasta bakes in the oven.
It wasn’t only discipline, family meals and mandatory meat-eating that collapsed after I left home. For some reason, when I went off to university, my parents decided it was time for the family to have a dog – something they had resisted for the previous eighteen years while I was at home. But rather than dwell on the choice of my replacement, I volunteered to train the eight-week-old puppy when I came home for the Easter holidays.
And what a joy it was. Tess, a beautiful Golden Retriever named after Thomas Hardy’s ill-fated heroine, immediately slotted into the family hierarchy: devoted to my mum and dad, who fed her; playful with me, who trained her; obedient to my sister, who intimidated her; and openly contemptuous towards my brother, whom she’d clearly decided was beneath her in the pecking order, responding to his every entreaty to sit, stay or come with a baleful look that said: ‘Who do you think you are, then, sonny?’
Tess lived a good and long life and my parents have had Golden Retrievers ever since. But Tess changed our family life in very unexpected ways. For one thing, suddenly my mum and dad were getting much more exercise than they ever did – Tess would jump up, bark and get her lead every time the Coronation Street or EastEnders theme tunes came on, demanding to be taken out. But her arrival also made my very traditional family much more demonstrative emotionally than ever before she arrived. Don’t get me wrong, I come from a loving family, but we just weren’t the kind to show it. Having a very huggable, kissable dog working her way round the family seemed to break down some of those barriers.
That came hardest of all for my dad, who was always the complete opposite of ‘touchy-feely’. It was only when I joined Strictly, in my late forties, where hugging (like fake tan) is almost a religion, that I got into the habit of hugging my dad. I think he has eventually come round to it. But I can still remember the fear in his eyes the first time I moved towards him with open arms.
My dad’s gradual conversion to hugging – a bit like my brother’s sudden conversion to vegetarianism – is proof that none of us are set in stone in terms of who we are, and so much of our behaviour isn’t really intrinsic to our personalities, so much as playing the role we think we’re expected to play, at the time and in the society we happen to live in. I often th
ink about this when people are surprised that I do the majority of the cooking in our house now. It’s much more normal now for dads to do their fair share around the house, but in my dad’s day, cooking, like hugging, was very much the mum’s job.
Back in 1967, the day before my due date, my dad boarded the special train at Norwich Station to see the Third Division Canaries take on the mighty Manchester United in the fifth round of the FA Cup. Norwich won and I arrived a week late. But my dad still wasn’t at the maternity unit when I was born, nor was he there for the arrival of my sister and brother. And that was far from unusual. Yvette’s father wasn’t there for the birth of his two oldest children, and while he was there for the third, it was despite his best efforts not to be. In those days, it was routine to be at the football on a Saturday and hear a new dad be told the news of his son or daughter’s birth over the tannoy system, always accompanied by a big laugh and cheer from the crowd.
When I compared notes with Yvette about our dads, hers obviously did more cooking than mine, but mainly on special occasions. They both grew vegetables and dabbled in homemade wine, and both did odd jobs around the house – actually, Yvette’s dad built a whole kitchen extension, although it took him over ten years; my dad only managed a lean-to greenhouse, but he did get it done over two weekends. There was no expectation that they would do any of the day-to-day chores involved in running a home, though: the constant round of cooking, cleaning and washing. Paternity leave was an unknown concept.
My life as a dad has been hugely different. I was there for the birth of all our children and I’d already done more cooking at the end of the first week of our first daughter’s life than my dad ever did when any of us were at home. Since then, I’ve shopped and cooked for our family throughout our children’s lives, partly because I enjoyed it, and partly because Yvette clearly didn’t. But I’m certainly not unusual. As our society has changed, as many more women have gone out to work and shift patterns have become more complex, these days many more dads and grandads will pick up the kids from school, take them home and make their tea.
There are aspects of my parenting where I have consciously departed from the way I was brought up. Being more demonstrative, for a start. And trying to be more understanding and accepting of our children and their desire to do things differently. And yet, as I’ve got older, I see so many similarities and echoes of my parents in how we live our lives. Looking at old family photos of my dad with his two older brothers – broad, stocky and smiling – I see me and my brother today and how we’ll grow old too.
Often when I stand in the street and gawp at a passer-by wearing ridiculous hipster clothes, or riding a three-wheeler bike, Yvette will say, ‘Stop staring, you’re just like your mother.’ As Yvette and I mellow with age, and go soft on our youngest daughter, I can only smile at the annoyance of our two older kids, who complain that they got the strict end of the stick, just as I did about Andrew getting it easy all those years ago. And when we now sit down for Sunday lunch and I watch nervously as the first person pours gravy from the boat – ‘not too much, it’s got to go round’ – I could be at home, aged seven, hearing my dad say the same.
Our parents shape who we are to such a great extent and, as I get older, I see that more and more. So, for our children now moving into adulthood, people of their own, with different interests, careers and perhaps in time different approaches to parenting, too, I celebrate those differences, but I also know deep down – or at least hope – that they won’t truly break away, and, like me and my parents, they’ll be glad that they didn’t.
SPAGHETTI BOLOGNAISE
Serves 5
Spaghetti bolognaise has been a staple throughout our kids’ childhood, just as it was through mine, and it still owes its origins to the recipe my mum taught me back in Nottingham. For our children, I would often cook a bolognaise sauce at the weekend and leave it in the fridge for the week ahead. Then my mother-in-law, Grandma June, would turn up with another one ready-made for Monday night. I reckon they sometimes had it three times a week, and our youngest daughter would have eaten it every day if she could. On holidays, she often did.
Dried oregano and lots of tomato purée are the key ingredients in this rich and tomatoey sauce, plus good stock. And this recipe is also very versatile: it is the meat base for lasagne and, with a few strategic additions and subtractions, it becomes a good and spicy chilli (I’ve added those changes here too). You can always use Quorn mince and vegetable stock to make it vegetarian.
INGREDIENTS
2 tbsp olive oil
3 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
1 large onion, peeled and finely chopped
1 ½ medium carrots, diced
450g minced beef
400g tin of peeled plum tomatoes
500ml chicken stock
400ml water (to fill the tomato can)
½ tube tomato purée
1 tbsp dried oregano
½ tsp salt
½ tsp black pepper
300g spaghetti
Cheddar cheese (or Parmesan), grated
METHOD
Heat the olive oil in a wok or heavy pan and, when sizzling, add the garlic, onion and carrot and cook for 5 minutes until soft and starting to brown. Add the beef and stir until it has all browned and any lumps have been broken down. Roughly chop up the tomatoes before adding them to the meat, followed by the stock and water. Squeeze in the tomato purée and add oregano, salt and pepper. Bring to the boil and then simmer for 30 minutes until nicely thickened.
Put the spaghetti into a large saucepan, add boiling water and cook according to instructions. When it’s done (it should stick if thrown at a wall, or just bite it), drain and rinse with cold water, ladle the spaghetti into individual bowls and serve with bolognaise sauce and sprinkled with cheese.
CHILLI CON CARNE VARIATION
To make a really good chilli con carne, these are the small changes you need to make to the bolognaise recipe above:
ADDITIONS
1 stick of celery, diced
400ml tin of kidney beans, drained
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp chilli powder
½ tsp ground cinnamon
1 bay leaf
METHOD VARIATION
Add the celery in when you cook the onions, garlic and carrots.
Reduce the amount of tomato purée to 3 tablespoons, and at the same time add the remaining additional ingredients.
Simmer for at least an hour and a half, adding some more water if needed.
APPLE & BLACKBERRY CRUMBLE
Serves 6
I’ve never been a big custard fan. I was too scarred by the stodgy gloop we got served for school dinners. I love custard cold in a trifle and I like the way it cools on an apple crumble and becomes sticky and chewy. But poured, lumpy and hot, over a chocolate sponge or jam roly poly? No thanks. Given the choice, I would always much rather have double cream – and of course my mum and dad would choose evaporated milk every time. Yvette, on the other hand, always wants custard, and I’m often in trouble for forgetting to make it, although frankly, while she says she likes my homemade custard, she’d be just as happy with Bird’s Instant.
Whether you prefer custard or cream, there is no better dessert to pour it all over than a crumble or cobbler. I love crumble, with a spoonful of double cream added after you’ve rubbed together the flour, butter and sugar to give the topping an extra richness. I think a cobbler is even better, though, with the same fruit base as a crumble but with a lighter, scone-like topping. It’s one of the recipes that my mum brought back from America.
My mum reckoned blackberry and apple is the ideal fruit combination, but there are lots of variations. You can easily miss out the blackberries or vary the spices to exclude cinnamon or substitute nutmeg. If you change the fruit, you will need to vary the preparation a little, however. If using rhubarb or plums, cut into 2cm pieces, sprin
kle with sugar and bake in the oven at 170°C/325°F/gas mark 3 for 20 minutes. If using gooseberries, cook in a saucepan but without the butter and spices and twice the sugar – caster sugar might be better than brown. Both crumble and cobbler absorb cream or custard, so I’ve included my custard recipe just in case (which is much better than Bird’s if you ask me).
INGREDIENTS
4 large Bramley apples, peeled, cored and quartered
2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp dark brown sugar
½ tsp cinnamon
150g blackberries
FOR THE CRUMBLE TOPPING
250g plain flour
125g unsalted butter
50g dark brown sugar
50g caster sugar
1 tsp mixed spice
1 large dollop of double cream
FOR THE COBBLER TOPPING
140g butter
280g plain flour
140g caster sugar
1 egg
100ml whole milk
½ tsp cinnamon
½ tsp baking powder
2 tbsp demerara sugar
FOR THE CUSTARD
400ml whole milk
3 egg yolks
2 tbsp caster sugar
1 tbsp cornflour
1 tsp vanilla essence
METHOD
Put the apples in a saucepan with the butter, sugar and cinnamon and cook on a moderate heat for 15 minutes. The apples should be softening but not collapsing. Transfer to an ovenproof dish and sprinkle the blackberries over them.