by Ed Balls
When cool, the individual mousses are great with something tart and sweet on the side. I usually make a raspberry coulis by slow-simmering the raspberries in a pan with a tablespoon of water and a tablespoon of caster sugar until it thickens. Leave it to cool before serving with a raspberry and a dollop of double cream on top.
INGREDIENTS
400ml whole milk
250ml double cream
100g dark chocolate
100g milk chocolate
50g caster sugar
4 egg yolks
1 tsp vanilla
Double cream, whipped and on the side
150g raspberries
METHOD
Put the milk and cream into a saucepan and bring to the boil. Add the chocolate and stir until it all melts – it will be easier if you chop or grate it. Set aside to cool a little.
Turn the oven on to 170°C/325°F/gas mark 3.
In a bowl, whisk the sugar, egg yolks and vanilla. Then add the chocolate mixture and whisk together.
Pour the mixture into six ramekins. Put the ramekins into an ovenproof dish and pour boiling water around them to halfway up the sides.
Carefully transfer to the oven and cook for 40 minutes. The mousse should be set, but wobbly. Remove from the oven and leave to cool. You can then cover and keep them in the fridge until needed.
MUSHROOM RISOTTO
Serves 4
Mushroom risotto is the first and last dish that Yvette ever cooked for me. It was a favourite of hers to cook when she was pregnant with our first child. Done properly, it’s a rather fancy and time-consuming way to make cooked rice – which probably explains why, having retired from cooking when the baby arrived, she’s only rarely made it ever since.
My mum used to make something she called ‘risotto’ when I was a child. It was a way of using up leftovers and I never liked it much, just rice, boiled and then fried up in oil or butter with chopped onion and bits of bacon or leftover chicken and peas. Yvette’s mum cooked a similar dish every Monday, but she just called it ‘fried rice’.
It was only after Yvette and I visited my parents in Italy in my twenties that we experienced the real thing for the first time – a proper Italian risotto. One of their favourite restaurants served a mind-blowingly good Parmesan risotto where, in the final stage of the cooking – the mantecatura – the chef would set a huge, 2ft diameter, hollowed-out Parmesan cheese on a next-door table, dump a hot and cooked risotto from a pan into the cheese, add huge amounts of butter and then stir vigorously as the Parmesan melted in with the butter and rice until rich, thick and silky.
The quality of the stock is vital in a good risotto – chicken or vegetable works best. And as I learned with my parents from that north Italian chef, the more butter and cheese you add at the end, the better it will taste. I love to make a simple and delicious Parmesan risotto. To make a mushroom risotto, it’s best to use both fresh mushrooms and dried porcini mushrooms, adding the water they have been soaked in to the stock. I also like to substitute asparagus for the mushrooms, chopping up the tender tips to mix in with the cheese and adding the woody stems to the stock to give it an extra asparagus flavour.
INGREDIENTS
1 onion, peeled and finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
1 litre stock – chicken or vegetable – add the extra mushroom water/asparagus stems if using
1 tbsp olive oil
600g Arborio rice
1 glass white wine
150g butter, cold
150g Parmesan cheese, grated
Salt and pepper
FOR THE MUSHROOM RISOTTO
150g mushrooms, chopped
30g dried porcini mushrooms
FOR THE ASPARAGUS RISOTTO
1 bunch fresh asparagus
METHOD
Heat the stock to a simmer.
Heat the oil and fry the onions for a couple of minutes. Add the rice and then the wine and enjoy the hiss. Stir the rice in the wine until it is nearly dry, about 3–4 minutes. Then stir continuously as you add the hot stock, a spoon at a time. This process should take about 18 minutes, by which time the rice should be cooked. Test to make sure.
Remove the cooked risotto from the heat and vigorously beat in the butter and cheese for 2–3 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste.
If making mushroom risotto, put the dried mushrooms in 250ml of hot water for an hour and add the water to your stock. Then add the chopped mushrooms and soaked mushrooms after the onions before you add the rice and the wine, saving some mushrooms for a garnish at the end.
If making asparagus risotto, cut off the woody stems and add them to your stock as it comes to the boil. Blanch the tiny tips of the asparagus in hot water for 5 minutes, drain and set aside; chop the rest of the asparagus thinly and add after the onions and before the rice and the wine. Use the blanched tips as a garnish.
6 FEEDING THE KIDS
Apparently, I changed all the nappies for each of our three kids throughout the first month of their lives. Yvette called it the ‘Ruth Kelly Rule’, after the former Member of Parliament for Bolton, who told a pregnant Yvette in the voting lobby that new mums had quite enough on their plate already and changing all the nappies was the least a new dad could do. I say ‘apparently’ because when Yvette told me this story, years later, it was news to me. My memory of those early weeks is a total blur and I have no recollection of any such rule being announced. I just did as I was told on a daily basis.
Yvette says she always gave up enforcing the Ruth Kelly Rule after the first month, on the grounds that I slept so deeply that waking me up to do a change in the middle of the night took as much time and effort as getting up to do it herself. I have no memory of any of that either. Obviously. But with Yvette drained by lack of sleep and breastfeeding, all the cooking and food shopping fell to me from the moment our eldest daughter was born, and that lasted a good sight longer than the one-month nappy-changing rule.
And that’s how, without either of us realising it at the time – well, certainly without me realising it – Yvette fast-forwarded her mum’s culinary retirement by twenty years. From the day our first child was born, she stopped cooking. And to this day she’s never started again. Barely even a pot noodle.
It helped that I was so glad to fill the void, just for the want of something interesting to do. It’s heresy to admit it, I know, but I found the first weeks of fatherhood pretty boring. I made cups of tea, answered greetings cards, accepted bunches of flowers at the door and changed nappies of course. But there wasn’t a whole lot more I could contribute. The one asset I brought to proceedings – cooking aside – was my ability to jiggle. When our tiny little daughter was feeling colicky, I’d lay her down on her front, scoop her up with my right hand and start to massage her stomach while her head and arms rested on my left arm. With a bit of extra bounce and sway, I could jiggle for hours. All that hip action would come in useful seventeen years later when I started my training for Strictly Come Dancing – not so much when I returned to the Treasury after a fortnight’s paternity leave.
While I’m embarrassed to say that fatherhood didn’t disrupt my working life much at all, it was an entirely different story for Yvette. It’s hard enough being a Member of Parliament and having a young baby, but back then there were no maternity arrangements for new mums – not even proxy votes, where someone could vote on their behalf rather than obliging their attendance in person. In the constituency, there were still residents in need of urgent help, and a busy office dealing with day-to-day problems. There were still schools to visit, council meetings to attend, and speeches to make. And none of that could be done by anyone else – the idea of ‘maternity cover’ for MPs was, until very recently, unheard of.
If things were difficult the first time round, the birth of our second child created a situation that had never happened before in British politics. Yvette was by then in her post at the Department of Health, and therefore the first government mi
nister to take maternity leave. Her first challenge was to work out what her entitlement to leave should be. Yvette spoke to her boss, Health Secretary Alan Milburn, who said he didn’t know and told her to speak to the department’s top civil servant. He said he didn’t know either and passed her on to the Cabinet Secretary, the chief mandarin for all of Whitehall. He explained that there were no rules, and no past precedent to follow, and that, strictly speaking – since Yvette was a Minister of the Crown – this was a decision for the Queen, not the civil service. No one thought it was a sensible idea for Yvette to consult Her Majesty directly, however, let alone ask Tony Blair to raise the matter for her.
The Cabinet Secretary instead suggested that Yvette do what she thought was reasonable, a splendidly old-fashioned way of ducking the issue. Knowing that she was setting the precedent for future ministers, Yvette decided she should take six months’ paid maternity leave like civil servants did. The problem seemed solved, but of course it wasn’t that simple. As a government minister, letters and papers continually pass through your office and every day you make decisions for which, months and even years later, you will be held accountable to Parliament. There were no formal arrangements for maternity cover and no precedent for how Yvette should keep in touch so she could easily return afterwards. The Department of Health and other ministers were hugely supportive, but it was an experiment in muddling through.
When Yvette had our third child, this lack of formal arrangements became a real problem. Where the Health Department had been helpful, the Department for Communities and Local Government was much less so, making it hard to sort out a plan and more difficult to return. Thankfully there has been progress since and – almost exactly twenty years on from our son’s birth – when Suella Braverman was due to become the first Cabinet minister to take maternity leave, the government changed the law to enable her to do so. But there are still no formal procedures for paternity leave for ministers or proper maternity cover for MPs.
When my dad was a young father there was no right to paternity leave and no expectation that he would take any time off. The fortnight I took after our kids were born was only just becoming a formal right in that era. For me or my dad, the idea that some young fathers nowadays can take what amounts to six months’ leave would have seemed incredible, let alone the fact that many will be the primary carer or share the burden equally with their partner. When I was a young dad, what I was doing felt like the cutting edge. Looking back, however, I undoubtedly could and should have done much more. But at the time, being in charge of all the cooking and shopping felt like plenty, especially having to make sure the fridges and cupboards were stocked in two places at the right times, so that there was something for the kids to eat when we arrived back in Castleford on a Thursday or Friday and then again when arriving in London after the weekend.
Once I got used to it, the online shopping revolution was a lifesaver – and I learned quickly from my mistakes. You only need to have 6 kilograms of bananas turn up at your door once on a Monday morning to teach you to check that you’re purchasing by quantity and not weight. Ditto getting the delivery address right. More than once I’ve stood on our front step on my mobile phone while an irate delivery driver complained that I wasn’t answering the doorbell, only to discover that I was in Castleford and he in London.
Once properly equipped, I embarked on what have proven to be two wonderfully satisfying decades of cooking for the family, although again not without initial difficulties. As the children were weaned off their milk-based diet, and after the fun and messy months of mashed banana and heated jars of baby food, I set about trying to get them to eat my homecooked foods. That became a frustrating struggle. Shop-bought chicken nuggets and fish fingers went down a storm, but as soon as I tried to make homemade chicken goujons or fish bites, they just sat on the plate, uneaten. They loved sausages, but when I made onion gravy to go with them, they didn’t want to know. I bought cookbooks specially designed to be child-friendly, but, in those early years, nothing remotely ambitious seemed to work. Even when Yvette became adept at hiding my milk-poached cod in rice and peas to get it past our eldest daughter, our young son, a picky eater from the outset like his grandad, just raised his game, meticulously hiding the uneaten fish underneath the uneaten rice and peas.
Thank goodness, then, for birthday cakes, the one department in those days where my products were guaranteed to please the kids and keep my confidence up. While Nigel Slater was our top cookbook chef back in our pre-children days, Nigella came into her own after the kids were born. Not the flirty Nigella filmed hosting her midweek London dinner parties, but Domestic Goddess Nigella, expert in fairy cakes and buttercream icing. This was my most surprising dad-discovery: I wanted to be a domestic goddess too.
Our oldest daughter’s first birthday cake was, I’m sure, a simple sponge; since then, the birthday cakes have grown in number and ambition, and once the kids were old enough, they were each allowed to choose their own design. I’ve made princess cakes, football cakes, a hamburger cake, an iPad cake, a Moshi Monster cake, a Converse trainer cake, a bouncy castle cake, a rugby league pitch cake, a Coca-Cola can cake, a Doctor Who TARDIS cake, an Instagram cake. Some were comical disasters, but the majority succeeded.
My favourite – and theirs – is the pirate ship cake, which they’ve requested I make a few times over the years. Most important of all are the decorations: what our kids always seemed to love most of all was the simple joy of seeing the sweets they could buy in packs in the shops popping up in a different context on their birthday cakes. Liquorice Allsorts may not be everyone’s favourites, but they provide a wide range of options, from lifebelts and port holes to ships’ chimneys, although, of course, only a chocolate mini roll will do for the main funnel. Curly Wurlys make brilliant fencing or netting (to stop the pirates falling overboard) and wagon wheels and chocolate fingers are enormously versatile building materials. Yvette suggested recently that I try to make sails out of chocolate: I discovered that by melting some dark or white chocolate, carefully smoothing it out thinly on a piece of baking paper, gently corrugating the paper, clipping it in place with paper-clips and then leaving it to set in the fridge for twenty minutes, I could make a set of convincing sails, fit to power a ship round the Caribbean.
Over the years, especially after I’d inadvertently gathered something of a following on Twitter, I’d tend to share each new birthday cake creation on social media. Sometimes people would ask me why I didn’t include pictures of the kids blowing out the candles or enjoying their first slice. I explained that, for all the struggles Yvette and I had with parenthood, and juggling the demands of politics and family life, one really important decision we took at the beginning of our political careers was to keep our kids out of the spotlight. We decided that with each child, after a new baby photo in the local paper, there would be no pictures, no appearances, and we wouldn’t name them in public. It’s never been an easy rule to stick to because not only are people understandably interested, but it goes against most natural parental instincts to show your kids off or refer to them by their names. But it’s not a decision that we’ve ever regretted for a second.
The biggest difficulty came when there was a direct link between our roles as a parent and our ministerial responsibilities. How could we ask other people to make sometimes difficult choices for their families if we weren’t willing to talk about making the same choices in our own lives? That came back to me during the Covid lockdown when the government had to decide what to do about schools. I remembered a simulation exercise that Yvette and I took part in around the Cabinet table when the government was trying to control the outbreak of bird flu in 2007. As the secretary of state for schools, I was told it was vital to keep the schools open, because if every nurse and doctor with kids had to look after them at home, the NHS wouldn’t be able to cope with the staffing shortages. That was all well and good, said Yvette, but if children were at risk of getting seriously ill with bird flu spreading fas
t in local schools, it didn’t matter what the government said, parents were going to keep their children safe at home, and that included our three kids, so we needed to plan for that reality, not some alternative world where parents would risk putting their children in danger. Yvette was absolutely right: the basic starting point for her comments was knowing what she would do as a parent, and not expecting – on any level – other parents to do different.
The same was true when the MMR crisis broke out, when Yvette was the public health minister. A pseudo scientist called Andrew Wakefield frightened many people by claiming there was a link between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. His claims were unfounded but, by scaring many parents who then chose not to let their children have the vaccine, many children subsequently died from a killer disease – measles – which we thought had been eradicated. Yvette and I talked and decided that she should tell people that our children had received the vaccine. As the minister responsible, she couldn’t stand with the chief medical officer and tell parents it was safe for their children to have the MMR jab if we weren’t willing to say that’s what we’d done ourselves.
It was the right thing to do, but also very controversial because – at the same time – Tony Blair, as prime minister, was unwilling to answer the same question about whether his young son had received the jab. The prime minister’s office was cross that Yvette was willing to, and I don’t think they forgave her for that decision. But, as we’ve seen from the same debates over the Covid-19 vaccine, it’s vital for the country’s public health to counter these scare stories and conspiracy theories, and it’s impossible to do that if you can’t say whether you’ve followed the same advice you’re giving to others.