by Ed Balls
Fortunately, I took on a brilliant office manager and campaign organiser, Carol Moran, who reminded me of one of Yvette’s organisers, the great Heather Hoaksey, both of them enormous believers in the power of food to motivate activists and keep them working at full tilt. With Carol’s help, I also found a local campaign office: a small shop in the town centre, selling exotic lingerie, whose owner was willing to let us have it on a three-month lease. I couldn’t quite work out the seasonality of their business, but we snapped up the property and got our activists working away with a diet of biscuits, iced buns, sausage rolls and tins of Quality Street, plus constantly brewing pots of coffee and tea.
A week into the election campaign, Carol called to inform me that she’d come in that morning and found crumbs and half-eaten food all over the office – all the tell-tale signs of a rat. I’m embarrassed to say my lifelong dread of rodents meant that I stayed away from the office until the problem was dealt with.
The ratcatcher put down some poison, and a couple of days later a bad smell wafted through my campaign HQ, upsetting the activists as they munched on their sausage rolls. Carol called the ratcatcher back, he located the smell and removed some wood panelling to reveal the now deceased rat, lying prostrate surrounded by uneaten Quality Streets in a comfy bed he’d made for himself of lacy bras and panties purloined from the previous owners.
I spent election day in 2005 touring round the constituency in a Mini Metro with a megaphone strapped to the roof rack, an old-fashioned way to campaign, but very good fun. At the end of the day, Yvette and I had fish and chips at home from the celebrated John’s Fish and Chips in Castleford before returning to the local sports hall where both our results were announced. Yvette was comfortably re-elected, I won my seat with a majority of over 10,000 and headed back to London to start a tumultuous ten years in the political front line. And as for my temporary campaign office, it soon re-opened again after the election – this time as a tattoo parlour.
SLOW-COOKED PULLED PORK
Serves 8
This is the recipe I have used every year for Yvette’s constituency Labour party BBQ. I cook pork shoulders outside over an indirect wood and charcoal fire in my big BBQ, but the oven works fine too, as long as you set it very low. The dry rub has a great aroma and the sharp and spicy vinegar-based North Carolina pouring sauce offsets the meat brilliantly. I reckon you should serve this in big white rolls – with coleslaw, sweet baked beans and watermelon on the side.
INGREDIENTS
1 large, rolled pork shoulder
FOR THE DRY RUB
3 tbsp paprika
1 tbsp cayenne pepper
2 tbsp ground cumin
2 tbsp chilli powder
2 tbsp brown sugar
2 tbsp salt
2 tbsp ground black pepper
FOR THE NORTH CAROLINA POURING SAUCE
300ml white wine vinegar
300ml cider vinegar
1 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp Tabasco
1 tbsp dried chilli flakes
½ tsp salt
½ tsp ground black pepper
METHOD
Preheat the oven to 170°C/325°F/gas mark 3 or light the BBQ.
Put all the BBQ dry rub ingredients in a bowl and mix well. Smear all over the pork shoulder, working it by hand into every gap and fold. Put the pork shoulder in a large roasting tin and place in the oven or BBQ.
After an hour, turn the heat down to 130°C/275°F/gas mark 1 and leave for 13 hours – discarding the fat from time to time. Don’t skimp on the time because it won’t be ready. It should be flaky and not need any carving.
Mix the pouring sauce ingredients to blend in a jug, and then relax. When the cooking time is up, put the shoulder – which should by now be burnt black and have shrunk in half – on a board and cut down the middle with a carving or bread knife. Scrape the flaky pork into a bowl – discarding the skin – and then pour on the spicy Pouring Sauce. A good slug will do the job – you can’t overdo it really.
BEEF CASSEROLE
Serves 5
In a general election campaign, everyone has their vital role to play. Strategists in the campaign HQ craft the message; prime ministers and party leaders do battle in the TV debates; Cabinet members tour the country visiting marginal seats; local candidates kiss babies and attend hustings in churches and village halls; party members and supporters deliver leaflets, telephone voters or stuff envelopes. But as far as I was concerned, my most vital role the two times I stood for re-election was to cook.
After being elected for the historic and safe Labour constituency of Normanton in West Yorkshire in the 2005 election, the Boundary Commission broke up my constituency, and I became the candidate for the adjoining and marginal Morley and Outwood seat instead. The Morley party owned an old Methodist chapel with an office, a big meeting room and a kitchen, all a far cry from the exotic lingerie shop in Normanton, but a golden chance for me to bring my cooking and campaigning together.
We regularly organised campaign Saturdays, more often as the election came closer. Activists would come from across Yorkshire and beyond to deliver letters in the morning while I cooked in the kitchen. At lunchtime we’d all sit down together – ninety at a time – to eat lasagne, spaghetti bolognaise, chicken fajitas and, most popular of all, this excellent beef casserole, the perfect fuel for political activity. We were one big family, like my Mum and her siblings all those years ago, sitting down to rest and eat at lunchtime before we all went back to work.
This recipe is rich, comforting and easy to make. It’s better if you can marinade the beef for twenty-four hours, but thirty minutes is better than nothing. And it’s much easier if you can tie the herbs in a piece of muslin cloth to save you picking them all out individually.
INGREDIENTS
800g beef chuck or skirt, cut into cubes
2 tbsp olive oil
3 rashers of bacon, diced
½ tsp salt
½ tsp ground black pepper
1 tbsp plain flour
1 tbsp soft butter
FOR THE MARINADE
1 onion, peeled and roughly chopped
3 garlic cloves, peeled and roughly chopped
1 carrot, chopped
¾ bottle of red wine
1 sprig of thyme
1 sprig of rosemary
1 bay leaf
1 cinnamon stick
METHOD
Put the marinade ingredients into a large bowl with the beef, cover and leave for 24 hours. Then carefully separate out the beef, vegetables, herbs and liquid.
Put a tablespoon of olive oil into a heavy pan and, when hot, fry a third of the beef for 5 minutes to seal it. Remove with a slotted spoon and repeat, adding oil as needed.
Add the bacon into the same pan with the remaining hot oil, and fry for 3 minutes. Then add all the marinade vegetables, turn down the heat a little and cook for 5 minutes. Add back the beef, herbs and marinade liquid, bring back to the boil, add salt and pepper and then simmer – on the top of stove or in the oven at 180°C/350°F/gas mark 4 – for 2.5 hours, adding extra wine or water as needed. When the casserole is done, remove the lid and discard the herbs. Combine the flour and butter to form a paste, add to the casserole and cook for 5 minutes more. Check the seasoning and serve.
5 BECOMING A PARENT
The first twenty-five years of my professional career were largely spent behind a desk, either working on my computer or going through papers. That was even more true of the long periods over that time that I spent working in the evenings and weekends at home. Over the years, my main desk drawer has become a treasure trove stuffed full of mementoes from my adult life and work, and if I ever set fire to the kitchen during one of my more ambitious experiments with Japanese teppanyaki, I’ll almost certainly try to empty that drawer into a suitcase before running for the door. If I only have time to grab one thing, however, it will definitely be the blurry image of our first baby at her twelve-week scan.
The y
ear after we were married, Yvette called me in Washington DC, where I was with a UK Treasury delegation, to say she’d had a positive pregnancy test and we were on. I knew the right thing to do was to keep the news quiet at that early stage, but it was too exciting and I immediately announced the news to the whole Treasury team and – thanks to my lack of volume control – the rest of the Japanese restaurant we were in.
Like many new parents-to-be, we started off by buying lots of books and studying the pictures. For me, though, it wasn’t until that first scan that it all started to seem real, and suddenly very serious. There she was on the screen, a tiny blob with a pulsing heart and no other distinguishing features I could see. But she was alive, and I felt something inside me switch on at that moment which was never there before but has never turned off since.
Later, when I was the Cabinet minister responsible for children and families, the experts told me how vital it is that dads feel part of the pregnancy and get involved in the discussions – it’s known that fathers can have a big influence over whether new mums breastfeed, so it’s good they hear for themselves how important that is. I remembered how awkward I ended up feeling when I went along to Yvette’s antenatal appointments, sitting in the corner and not being spoken to. I told the experts in my department that we needed to change that culture at the front line to get dads more involved.
Yvette, at least, was clear about one of my key roles when it came to the pregnancy: making sure that her food cravings were properly satisfied. I remembered from childhood that my mum had a craving for Cadbury’s fruit and nut chocolate when pregnant. Oddly, Yvette craved taramasalata, which she – mistakenly as it turned out later – thought she wasn’t allowed to eat while pregnant. She was also a big chocolate mousse fan, however, and, with raw eggs a definite no-go, I set out to find a mousse recipe in which the yolks were cooked. These days, that would take thirty seconds on the internet. But back in 1999, Google was just getting started, Twitter was still seven years away, and the BBC’s website was very limited. After much manual searching in bookshops and magazines, I finally found a really good-looking option – less a mousse, more a dark, rich chocolate custard which baked in the oven until it was set. Fully compliant with all pregnancy guidelines, it was utterly delicious.
My other vital role was being in charge of hospital planning. Yvette booked in to have the baby in Pontefract Hospital. At any time, I needed to have the car available, the quickest route planned, and the hospital bag packed, all so we could ensure we’d be there in good time for Yvette to have the epidural she wanted. We did have one false alarm a few weeks before the baby was due, and my planning kicked in like it was an SAS raid. But there was nothing happening that night; the doctors were worried about mild pre-eclampsia and said they’d have to induce if we got to the due date, but let Yvette go home after a couple of days.
We spent the final days at home in Castleford, twiddling our thumbs, hoping nature would take its course, but resigned to the fact that the midwives might need to give things a final push. Yvette’s parents came to stay, my younger brother arrived as well to offer moral support, and my own mum kept phoning for updates, poised to travel when things got under way. And we were all put to work. Bored of pacing up and down the garden, Yvette announced that, having finished painting a ‘Miffy’ mural on the new baby’s bedroom wall, she wanted to paint our small sitting room. We drove down to B&Q to buy brushes, paint and turps. After about three brush strokes, however, Yvette thought better of it, handed the brushes over to her mum and my brother and returned to pacing up and down the garden.
For two full days, my mother-in-law prepared and painted walls while Andrew did the ceiling – he was the only one tall enough to reach. Stress levels mounted by the hour. On the morning of the second day, June turned to him and declared: ‘It’s already after 10 a.m., surely that’s not too early to open a bottle of wine?’ Yvette’s dad, meanwhile, was despatched by his daughter to the garden centre and spent a happy forty-eight hours on his return planting apple trees at the bottom of our garden.
Not to be outdone, I decided I should cook something hot and spicy which might get things moving and spent a day and a half making a lamb dhansak, using a very involved Cyrus Todiwala recipe from his Café Spice Namaste cookbook. All to no avail. The lamb dhansak was eaten. Yvette was on the cranberry juice. The rest of us had another glass of wine.
The due date loomed. If nothing had happened by the next morning, we were going to have to go into the maternity ward anyway. That evening, Yvette was having some Braxton Hicks contractions. They were light and she didn’t think they were anything significant, so we timed them but not very rigorously. Then, at about 11 p.m., as we were preparing to go to sleep ready for induction day, Yvette turned and said, ‘I need you to time this contraction.’ ‘Fine,’ I said wearily, ‘just give me a moment.’ Suddenly, in a piercing tone, she yelled at me: ‘Just time my fucking contractions RIGHT NOW.’ The immediacy, volume, pitch and post-watershed content of Yvette’s vehement response told me this was no false alarm.
After all that waiting, things began moving at breakneck speed. By the time we’d grabbed the hospital bag and driven the two miles over to Pontefract General Infirmary, the baby was already arriving and there was definitely no time for the epidural that Yvette had been counting on for the past nine months. She was not happy. The swearing continued and became more animated. ‘I’ll deliver the baby,’ the midwife yelled to me across the bed. ‘You just try and keep Mum in the room.’
I hunkered down at the top of the bed, like a Castleford Tigers prop forward trying to steady the scrum, and the impressively calm midwife focused on the task at hand. In what felt (to me) like no time, our beautiful baby girl was born, checked, weighed and in her mother’s arms. Exhausted, I slumped in an armchair and fell into one of those dark sleeps where hours pass in what seems like a minute. I woke up to find our new daughter sprawled asleep across my chest and Yvette sitting up in bed, looking out at the rising 7 a.m. sun and eating toast with tea. ‘How are you?’ I mumbled, dazed and shell-shocked. ‘Fine,’ she replied. ‘But I could do with a bacon sandwich.’
If the waiting was interminable for our first child, it was no better for the second and third. By the time Yvette was pregnant again, she was a newly appointed minister in the Department of Health, the first-ever government minister to be pregnant in office, and with maternity services among the subjects in her brief. The baby was expected in August and, a month before, we were due to attend a family wedding in Norfolk. We had booked into an old hotel called Seamarge in a village called Overstrand, just south of Sheringham, where I spent my childhood holidays. It was the hotel Churchill would frequent to oversee preparations for a potential German invasion through Holland and over the North Sea to East Anglia.
But was it sensible to go to Norfolk, just a few weeks before the baby was due, if it meant being far away from the hospital where Yvette was due to give birth? Yvette asked that question casually during one of her regular meetings with the Department of Health’s chief midwife. She wasn’t quite expecting the formality of the response. Two days after the meeting, a paper arrived in Yvette’s ministerial office. The chief midwife said she’d pondered the matter over the weekend and, yes, the trip was fine. But she’d enclosed a map of England sketching out the best car routes from Norfolk back to West Yorkshire so that we’d never be too far from a maternity unit should we suddenly need one during the drive!
Appreciated as it was, the chief midwife’s map was not required. We arrived back to Castleford from Norfolk in early August and then waited a further three weeks. I cooked a wide range of spicy curries. Mexican chilli too. I must have planted at least ten fruit trees. Yvette painted a Winnie the Pooh mural on the wall of baby bedroom number two. My mother-in-law arrived but still nothing was happening. Sick of spending so much time at home, we decided to go into Leeds for an early evening drink. I ordered very spicy Bloody Marys for all of us – a single for me and Yvette, a double for
June. And it did the trick. Six hours later I was shaken awake, the dawn light already creeping above the curtains. On this occasion, and again when our third child was born, we had the same early morning scramble, always with Yvette yelling and swearing at me to time her contractions as I desperately searched for the hospital bag.
As physically and emotionally exhausted as I was by the birth of our children, I knew it was nothing compared to what Yvette had to deal with. That first time round, we’d been arguing for ages over what to call our new baby, and we were especially divided on potential girl’s names. But for all my advocacy of dads being involved in the birth of their kids, once I saw what Yvette had to do, I backed down immediately when it came to the new baby’s name. ‘It’s your call,’ I told Yvette. ‘You choose.’ I paused for a moment’s second thought. ‘As long as it’s not Ophelia…’
CHOCOLATE MOUSSE
Serves 6
This is a dark chocolate mousse that you bake in the oven, perfect for pregnant mums who can’t eat uncooked egg yolks. It’s made by melting the chocolate into milk and double cream and then whisking in beaten sugar, egg yolks and vanilla to make a thick, steaming, molten chocolate sauce which you then pour into ramekins and cook for 40 minutes in the oven until wobbly and just set. I use a mix of dark and milk chocolate, but you can go all dark chocolate for greater intensity. Either way, they will be rich and chocolatey.