by Ed Balls
We set off for our climb to the summit at midnight, fuelled by cereal, porridge, bacon and eggs, but after five hours of steady plodding in the dark, and with the sun starting to rise, it was me who was starting to struggle. Whether it was the thin air or the fatigue, I was having real difficulty focusing my mind on what I was trying to do, and all I wanted to do was sit down. Our lovely doctor gave me a steroid, a cup of tea and some biscuits and said that if this didn’t perk me up and give me that final boost, I’d have to turn back. In that moment of crisis, it wasn’t the biscuits that did the trick, or even the encouragement of my fellow climbers – it was the dreadful fear of embarrassing my kids. And that wasn’t just in my mind; my son had told me very clearly before I left: ‘Look, Dad, be safe, and whatever you do, if Little Mix make it to the summit, make sure you do too.’ It was a high bar to set, given that I was over fifty and overweight while Jade and Leigh-Anne were as strong and fit as Olympic-ready professional athletes. But that was his challenge to me and it drove me on.
After six days climbing, just three hours from the summit, and with Jade and Leigh-Anne still going strong, I simply couldn’t give up – not when I was this close. So I dug deep and made it to the top, with Dan and Alexander both holding me up for the last few strides to the summit.
I made friends for life on that mountain, and I was delighted to welcome them all round for a Sunday roast, followed by the kind of rich treacle tart that would have done wonders for our energy levels in that final stretch. And whatever embarrassments I may have put them through in recent years, I know the kids weren’t complaining too much when half of Little Mix were hanging out in their back garden. ‘Can you not?’ indeed.
TREACLE TART
Serves 8
A month after we conquered the summit of Kilimanjaro for Comic Relief, I cooked Sunday roast beef and Yorkshire puddings for my climbing mates. For afters, I made one of my favourite desserts using a Peter Gordon recipe that I’ve used time and again and adapted over the years. Dan Walker is a particular fan. It takes a bit of time, and while you could speed things up a little with a shop-bought sweet pastry case, the ‘sable’ sweet pastry is easy to make. I usually make it by hand, but you could easily blitz it in a mixer.
INGREDIENTS
FOR THE SWEET PASTRY:
150g unsalted butter, cold and cubed
250g plain flour
Grated zest of half a lemon
100g icing sugar
1 small egg, beaten
1 tbsp milk, whole or semi-skimmed
1 egg yolk, beaten (to seal the pastry case)
FOR THE FILLING
4 eggs
1 lemon, juice and grated zest
550ml golden syrup
450ml double cream
3 croissants, crumbed in a blender
1 apple, peeled, cored and finely chopped
METHOD
Quickly and lightly rub the butter into the flour – only take 30 seconds and don’t worry if the mix is still a bit lumpy. Add the lemon zest, icing sugar and the egg and lightly mix into a ball by hand. If it’s too dry, add some milk. When it’s shaped into a ball, wrap it in cling film and put it in the fridge for half an hour.
Turn the oven on to 180°C/350°F/gas mark 4. Butter a round 30cm tin – preferably with a removable bottom. This sweet, sticky pastry is very hard to roll – I find it’s much easier just to put it in the tin and shape it into the base and sides. Cut a piece of greaseproof paper to more than cover the pastry case and then pour baking beans or dried beans over the paper to hold down the pastry while it cooks. Put in the oven and bake for 15 minutes. Take out, remove the beans and paper, brush with some beaten egg yolk and cook for another 10 minutes.
Turn down the oven to 170°C/325°F/gas mark 3.
In a large bowl, hand-whisk the eggs and lemon, add the syrup and cream, then whisk until fully blended and emulsified. Add the croissant crumbs and grated apple, mix well and pour into the pastry case.
Bake for 40 minutes and then check. The top should be set but still wobbly. You will probably need another 10 minutes. Take out and leave to cool.
SLOW-COOKED LAMB SHOULDER
Serves 6
I learned to make slow-cooked lamb shoulder in a cooking class on an Italian holiday. The caretaker’s wife from the house we were renting arrived with a huge shoulder of lamb and proceeded to layer an astonishing quantity of salt all over it. She threw in a few cloves of garlic and a sprig of rosemary, poured over some cold water, and cooked the shoulder long and slow. It tasted so good.
You can prepare this dish and then leave it to cook all day. The lamb does a lot of the work for you, sitting on the vegetables, with its juices flowing down through them to make the gravy. I’ve used carrots and potato with the garlic and onion, but you could easily add celeriac or other root vegetables. Make sure you pour some of the fat off at the end while you rest the meat, then carve the lamb in the tin and serve it with something fresh and green.
INGREDIENTS
1 large lamb shoulder
4 garlic bulbs, roughly chopped
2 large sprigs of rosemary, roughly chopped
2 tbsp olive oil
A few knobs of butter
2 large onions, peeled and sliced
3 carrots, sliced
4 potatoes, sliced
Salt and pepper
500ml chicken stock
METHOD
Preheat the oven to 170°C/325°F/gas mark 3.
Rub the shoulder with salt, pierce all over with a sharp knife to form small holes and place a piece of garlic and a sprig of rosemary in each one.
Put a tablespoon of olive oil and a few knobs of butter in the bottom of an ovenproof dish. Lay a layer of sliced onions on the bottom, sprinkle some carrots on top and then overlay a layer of sliced potatoes, seasoning with salt and pepper. Repeat and then place the lamb shoulder on top and season with pepper.
Pour the chicken stock all around the lamb. Cover with tin foil before placing in the oven. Turn down the heat to 150°C/300°F/gas mark 2 and cook for at least 3 ½ hours. You can go for a lower heat and leave it much longer, but do check it doesn’t go dry.
You can serve this from the dish or transfer to a serving plate – but don’t forget to pour off some of the fat. The lamb should just fall apart with very little carving needed.
11 FOOTBALL FOOD
A football pie is the king of pies. Eaten at half-time, standing out in the cold, scraped straight out of the foil with a plastic spoon or devoured with big direct bites into the soft pastry and its wondrous hot filling – heaven. My football pie of choice is steak and kidney, but I’d always choose a Cornish pasty over chicken and mushroom, and I’d take both over the vegetarian option. I know the idea of ‘meat and potato’ may put some people off with its ambiguity, but I’ve always found them very tasty – even if you’re not quite sure what you’re eating.
I know my football pies. So when, on Sport Relief Bake Off, our ‘blind challenge’ was to make a football pie, I inwardly cheered. The filling was mince, my pastry rolled out nicely and when it came out of the oven, the pie looked lovely, brown and gleaming with a little pastry football on top. Then came the judging and – like a dodgy handball awarded by VAR – Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood ruled against me on the grounds that my pie had a ‘soggy bottom’. My face held a fixed grin but inside I roared my outraged dissent.
Of course it had a soggy bottom. It’s a football pie. How on earth are you supposed to eat it otherwise? You can’t scrape hard pastry out of a foil casing with a plastic spoon, let alone your fingers. A good football pie is supposed to be crisp on top, and squidgy at the bottom. But there was no point in arguing with the refs. That was the end of the matter. Well, almost the end. The burning sense of injustice I felt that day has further fuelled my pie-eating habit. Every football match I go to, I queue up for a pie to check if it has a soft bottom, as every good football pie should. And they all do. Obviously.
Back then, the only c
lub failing my soggy test was my own team, Norwich City. The great TV chef and football lover Delia Smith has owned the club now for well over twenty years, and, not surprisingly, our catering is second to none, thanks to Delia’s rigorous standards. Indeed, for a time, her own catering company was supplying the snack bar behind the Upper Barclay where we had our season tickets. The range of pies was wide and exotic – from beef in red wine gravy to ham and stilton – and the pastry was immaculate: crispy top and bottom. They were lovely pies, if rather unlike traditional football pies with soggy bottoms. But time moves on. Delia continues to keep a very close eye on the catering, but the club has since signed a new sponsorship deal with Pukka Pies, a favourite of football fans up and down the land. Normal service has resumed in the Upper Barclay.
My family has been supporting Norwich City for longer than I can remember. Even though my dad lost his own father very young, that legacy of support was firmly passed on to him when my grandfather would head over from his Saturday shift at the local gas company for his second job working the turnstiles at Carrow Road and let my dad and his brothers jump over for free. Dad made sure I got introduced to City nice and early too, buying me my first yellow and green kit when I was five and, the next year, taking me to my first match, against the mighty Leeds United in the FA Cup. I’ve followed Norwich all over the country since, sometimes in the top division, sometimes in the second, and one year in the third. And I’ve eaten my share of football food wherever I’ve been, joining queues long and short, for pies good and bad.
Charlton Athletic do a good pie, as do Sheffield Wednesday. But the fanciest food I’ve had in recent years at the away end was at the sparkling new Tottenham Hotspur stadium. It was a memorable evening, and not just because Norwich knocked Spurs out of the Cup. There were over 8,000 of us behind the goal and the state-of-the-art bars at the away end ran out of beer before half-time. Delia didn’t have to encourage us to sing that night.
Our kids are all now Norwich fans, as are my brother’s son and daughter too. But it took some effort, and we both found that bribery with food worked best – a Coke in the car, doughnuts on arrival and a hot dog at half-time. The turning point came at Hartlepool FC in August 2009. We were guests of the club, with local MP Ian Wright, and the kindly Hartlepool chairman noticed that my son, a notoriously fussy eater, wasn’t liking the ‘carvery’ food on offer. ‘Hang on a sec,’ he declared, and slipped out to a stall behind the main stand, returning with a huge hot dog, as long as my son’s arm. And we won.
Over the years, on Boxing Day or the weekend before Christmas, we’ve had great days out at the football. Sometimes the fans in the family would go to the game before returning home for lasagne and strawberry pavlova – my dad’s usual post-match menu request. Other times our whole family gathered at Carrow Road to have a big family lunch in one of the club suites beforehand. My mum and Yvette didn’t stay for the actual game, but they were very approving of the catering. I could only join the steward at the gate in rolling my eyes when he asked them for their tickets and they explained they were only there for the lunch, not for the match.
My football food experience ticked up a major notch when, after the 2015 election, Delia asked me to become a director of the club and chairman of the board. I said yes without a thought – my driving ambition as a child was to play for Norwich City and, while I don’t think my five-year-old self knew what a chairman was, I’m sure he’d have been very surprised and pleased to find out that’s what he would become. The home games became an even better day out. Sitting in the directors’ dining room, it was my job to host the chairman and chief executive of the visiting clubs, and talk football, business and a fair bit of politics.
The visitors were always hugely appreciative of the catering – Norwich City may not have won many league titles or cups, but after twenty years of ownership, Delia and her husband Michael rightly pride themselves not just that this is a community club with strong values and a great family atmosphere, but that it has the best catering anywhere in British football. The annual award for best directors’ room food has been won by Delia’s team more than once.
My son and younger daughter came to lots of games during the three years I was chairman, smartly dressed and always impeccably behaved. Which is more than could be said for my very own ‘Embarrassing Dad’. My dad is a contrarian and loves to provoke an argument. All my life he has been keen to share his, often critical, views about Norwich City while sitting at home with my uncles and cousins. They always berated the owners, board, chairman, manager and players, and that didn’t change despite my elevation. Indeed, so much of the abuse given out by my dad and our extended family ended up being directed towards me, that I was regularly forced to explain that I neither picked the team, dictated the corner routines, or personally took the penalties. However, all that was fine when it was done within the bounds of our house. When you’re the chairman of the club, however, sitting in the director’s room, and your dad decides to lean over the table and say, very loudly, to the chairman of the visiting club, ‘Our manager’s useless, he’s always too late with substitutes, I just can’t get our Chairman to listen’, what can I say? And my kids thought they had it bad with me…
If home games were normally a good day out, depending on the result and my dad’s comments, away games were always much harder. There’s a camaraderie in travelling to different grounds when you’re part of a few thousand fans at the away end, but when there are just a handful of you stuck in the main stand next to the home directors, the atmosphere could be hostile, even in the boardroom itself. Some Premier League clubs were friendly and relaxed, but others were snooty and unwelcoming, with some owners and directors even sitting in a wholly different room. There were clubs who took pride in their catering – Burton Albion in the Championship was particularly good – but others clearly couldn’t care less. One Premier League club had a directors’ room which resembled a sleazy nightclub with dimmed lights, loud music and trays of off-tasting sushi. Others were very disapproving of our kids wearing their Norwich City shirts, and some even insisted on them passing the same full formal dress code at the entrance as the adult guests. My seven-year-old nephew’s trick was to wear his shirt and (elasticated) tie over his yellow and green kit and then pop to the bathroom to swap them round once we were in. Even at our bitter rivals Ipswich, the home directors thought that was brilliant commitment to the cause. At deeply traditional Arsenal, however, they were not at all impressed.
Win or lose, it was never fun being an away director after a game. It’s frowned upon to start celebrating a win, so you must hide your smiles and suppress your fist pumps. And if you lose, it’s much worse – you must keep smiling while all the home directors and their friends are in jubilant mood. Those days you just want to leave – and the sooner the better. Throughout the leagues, the directors’ room also remains a very male-dominated environment. I remember back in the late 1990s going to a match at Villa Park as a guest of Brenda Price, who had taken over my friend and colleague Geoffrey Robinson’s majority stake in Coventry City when he’d become a Treasury minister. When we arrived, we discovered that the Villa owner, Doug Ellis, had banned women from his lounge, even if they were a director of the visiting football club. Brenda was told she should stay outside and we of course stayed outside with her. Delia has many similar stories of the ridiculous and odious prejudice she has endured over the years.
It wasn’t just football running to catch up back then. When Yvette became the Labour candidate for Pontefract and Castleford in 1997, we were guests of the Club directors for Castleford Tigers’ rugby league match against Warrington Wolves. When they asked her onto the pitch before the game, Yvette thought it was to say a few words to the crowd; instead, they asked her to perform the ceremonial kick-off, not an invitation to relish when wearing high-heeled boots. After the match, we were invited to the directors’ lounge for a cup of tea, but when we arrived, the club secretary was waiting for us at the door, looking rather
red-faced. He explained that the Castleford directors had two rules: no women in the lounge after a game and no spouses. The directors, he explained, had spoken at half-time and agreed they could break one rule, but it was asking too much to break both. So I stood outside and waited for twenty minutes while Yvette said her thank yous to the assembled men inside.
Our society has changed so much since then (and Cas Tigers changed decades ago), but what’s fascinating about football is that it’s been the place down the years where you can simultaneously see barriers very visibly being challenged, yet also the fierce effort that opponents of change make to keep them up. When West Bromwich Albion came to Norfolk in the late 1970s, with pioneering black footballers Cyril Regis, Laurie Cunningham and Brendan Batson in their team, I can remember the open racism they faced from some of my fellow Norwich supporters. But in 1979, their visit coincided with the league debut of one of our own first black players, Justin Fashanu, a great striker who scored the goal of the season against Liverpool the following year and rapidly became every Norwich schoolboy’s favourite player. But even while breaking down a lot of the racial prejudice ranged against him, Justin had to hide his sexuality until near the end of his career, and the abuse and rejection he suffered after finally coming out as gay contributed to the desperation he felt when he took his own life at the young age of thirty-seven.
Times do change and the unfamiliar can become accepted, normal, celebrated. When my Uncle Tom, my mum’s brother, decided to come out in the late 1980s, he told me, his eighteen-year-old nephew, but could not tell my parents because he feared they wouldn’t understand. Over time, however, his partner Glenn became a valued part of the extended family and were both together at the party to celebrate my parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary in 2001. Tom died of cancer three years later, before the new civil partnerships legislation had passed into law. Today, if he were still alive, I know my whole family would be sitting with him and Glenn at Christmas, looking at the photo albums of the civil partnership or marriage ceremony they would have held and remembering a special day.