Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen

by Matt McAllester

  Was it the Sokolow family—perhaps his widow or children—who had sheltered my infant mother from Nazi bombs in my ex-girlfriend's garden, which I had wandered around at the age of twenty?

  Sophie spoke with her father. Yes, there had been a bomb shelter in the garden, long since removed when they lived there, but you could still see where it had been.

  My mother's traces and mine kept crossing. There were other redemptions through coincidence and connection:

  I sometimes shopped at the Waitrose John Barnes on Finchley Road.

  I often saw movies at the Odeon Swiss Cottage, where I now know my mother first began to push her way into the world.

  When I met my wife, she was living a few minutes from the Odeon on a street in Swiss Cottage named Eton Avenue. When my sister finally found a nursing home for my mother, a good and caring and pretty place for her to live in peace, it was on Eton Avenue.

  You can walk from Eton Avenue to Compayne Gardens, from my mother's last home to her first, in about ten minutes, passing almost by the Odeon and directly past the Waitrose on the way.

  Coincidence may just be the crisscrossing of time and place, worthless but for the brief raising of an eyebrow and the tingle of discovery. But for me, coincidence had come to provide a feeling of continuity and belonging and history. Until very recently, London had seemed a massive, amorphous sprawl to me, despite the fact that I had spent my first years here because there had been such a long period during which I had exiled myself—from Britain, from my family, from my past, from my mother. But now the streets and houses and shops and movie theaters of Northwest London, a place I could not have found on the map four years earlier, seemed to vibrate with a sense of belonging. I felt like a salmon finding the river of my birth after a transatlantic swim, or a migratory water buffalo following ancestral routes through African plains. The Comanches, a friend told me, believed that a person's ghost would return to the place where the person had spent most of his or her life even if they had died in a distant land. I had been born here. My mother's first home was here. Her happiest days, as a young wife and mother in the 1960s and early 1970s, had been spent here. She had returned here for her final years, her last moments of happiness, as if to die in her true home. And after years of living in foreign countries, of hiding in the lives and deaths of others, I, too, had come here, come to a place where all around me were strands of a web connecting me to my mother's happy, sane life.

  I knew none of this when she was alive.

  Sometimes I wanted to get down on my knees on the sidewalk to thank this corner of this huge city for tidying up a few things that had long seemed lost forever.

  29

  I'D PREFER THAT THE FOLLOWING WERE NOT TRUE. IT SPOILS the picture somewhat. But it was also in my newly beloved corner of London where our family began to unravel more than thirty-five years ago.

  The phone rings in my father's studio. “Don,” my mother says, and my father hears a voice he has never heard before. “The builders …” She is sobbing. There's trouble with the Irish builders who are working in their new house in Little Venice: 15 Ashworth Road. Often there are clients in my father's studio—art directors, marketing people, magazine editors—and, depending on the product, there can also be a collection of cooks, artists, models, hand models with immense patience and perfectly formed hands, and, always, my father's assistants. On this morning, in the early summer of 1971, they are preparing for a shoot, they're not in the middle of one, and so it's easy for my father to step into the sunshine and hail a black cab.

  Within half an hour he is home, at the large detached house he has just bought, a few blocks to the north of Elizabeth Close. There are two children now. Our parents feel that my sister and I need a garden; my mother needs a larger kitchen; the au pair needs a room. And so a team of builders has been in the house for nearly two months, building my mother's dream kitchen, knocking down a wall, taking out fireplaces and replacing them with fashionable gas fires, rewiring, repainting, replacing bathrooms and flooring, painting inside and out. It has been going on a long time, and in recent days it has caused some tension. But my father thinks it's just the normal stuff that happens when there are people in your house, making a mess and invading your space.

  The taxi pulls up outside the house on the broad, tree-lined street, and my father walks through the house. It's supposed to be full of painters and plumbers and plasterers. There is no one there. Just a lot of mess—hammers, paintbrushes, cans of paint. He walks through the hall to the kitchen and out the French doors into the garden. My mother is sitting on the grass at the bottom of the garden, her back to the house. She is crying, extremely upset. My father sits next to her on the lawn. He puts his arm around her and gently asks her what the matter is.

  “One of the builders draped his jacket over the armchair that's in the pile of furniture next to the sitting-room door,” she says through her sobs.

  “Yes,” my father says.

  “And I threw it into the garden,” she says.

  “The jacket?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  That's not the whole story, as my father finds out when, a bit later, he calls his friend who is working as the architect on the project. My mother accompanied the jacket-throwing with enough obscenities and fury to convince the squad of tough-skinned Irish builders that they'd had enough.

  My parents sit in the garden for a long time, talking it through, my mother slowly calming down. My father has always known she can be fiery and he has long loved her for it. He has grown up in a household of manners, order, and temperance. She and two sisters and one brother and her parents are louder in normal talk, often, than most people are in argument. They fight and shout and adore one another. My mother is an unbearable, unapologetic snob, and when people don't meet her expectations, whether she is talking in a store with a sluggish sales assistant or at a dinner where her fellow guests are debating architectural preservation, she is merciless. She is also the warmest of hosts, drawing people into her world with her frankness and quick wit and willingness to listen and give back. My father has spent years with her, and often they talk for hours and never once has he found a word she says to be boring. She is never dismissive of him.

  He has never seen her like this before. She is overwhelmed, angry, frustrated, unable to cope. Because of a jacket on a chair. He can't help silently sympathizing with the builders. And, for the first time, his wife's fieriness frightens him.

  He calls my aunt Kata, and my mother, sister, and I spend the last week of the house renovations at Kata's house in Surrey. The builders, assured that they won't have to face my mother anymore, come back and finish the job.

  My mother has taken her first tiny step away from the world.

  30

  MORE CONNECTIONS APPEARED IN UNEXPECTED PLACES. I met a dozen strands of my past, traces of different journeys and places and people, in a single Elizabeth David recipe. It was in my mother's fragile, overused copy of Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen, Elizabeth David's exhaustive exploration of how British colonialism brought back the joys of Indian and other Asian cooking to English cooks.

  I came across the recipe when I was planning what to make for dinner one night. My friend Richard Poureshagh was coming, bringing his new girlfriend, Donna, for the first time. Two days earlier an old family friend, Arthur Kellas, had died. Arthur and his wife, Bridget, were our direct next-door neighbors in Ardnamurchan. Which is to say they lived half a mile away along the barren headland in their own log house, with their own view of the Inner Hebrides. Their house was packed full of treasures from their lives overseas, many of them from Iran, where they had met when Bridget was the British ambassador's daughter and Arthur a young diplomat. Later they had returned for another tour of duty in Iran. I would often think of them when on reporting visits to Tehran. So Iran was on my mind as I was thinking about what to make for Richard and Donna—especially because with Richard there was a further Iranian connection.

/>   His mother was a Scot, his father Iranian. No supporters of the Islamic Revolution, they fled Iran in 1979. Richard came to my school in Edinburgh that year, armed with one sentence in English: “Where is the toilet?” When we were seventeen he had a girlfriend named Isabel. I had Clara. One evening Richard's mother, who had learned Persian cooking during her years in Tehran, cooked for the four of us, tactfully leaving the room after serving the food. What she left behind was a big dish of the most perfect Persian rice and a bowl of fesenjan—or fessanjun, or fezanjan, depending on one's transliteration. It was one of the most delicious things I had ever eaten—a stew (koresht, in Farsi) of ground walnuts, pomegranate juice, spices, and chicken. Richard and I spoke of the dish and the meal often in the years to come. I had it only one other time, at Bridget Kellas's table in Ardnamurchan.

  Homework in the kitchen in Edinburgh

  When I first started to visit Iran as a reporter, I hunted it down. I had a couple of mediocre ones in a restaurant across the street from the old American embassy. Eventually, my lovely translator Haleh's mother made me a proper fesenjan. What a combination of elements. The sweet-tart deep-red pomegranate juice mixed into the smooth nuttiness of the dark, mildly spiced sauce—a tinge of cinnamon and cardamom, perhaps some turmeric—and the whole thing folded over the meatballs Haleh's mother had made instead of chicken.

  It was a dish of mothers. Still, no harm in trying to emulate them.

  So this night I decided to cook it for Richard and Donna—as a surprise for him, a small, silent allusion, which I knew he would pick up, to dining with sweethearts now and twenty years before.

  I searched for a recipe. Haleh had, years earlier, given me a book of Persian recipes. I looked there and found a fesenjan recipe—but it had eggplant. That threw me. I had never had eggplant in fesenjan. So I looked online and found some alternatives that seemed more like it. I began to plan my shopping trip.

  Later that day I stood in the kitchen and picked Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen off one of the bookshelves above the radiator where I had put most of my mother's cookbooks. I wanted to see what Elizabeth David had to say about different ways of preparing rice in Asia. As I flicked through the pages, my eye caught something. I couldn't believe it—a recipe for “Fezanjan,” on page 204. It suggested duck rather than chicken or meatballs, but otherwise it was pretty much the same—the walnuts, spices, and pomegranate juice, the key three ingredients, were there. And at the foot of the recipe, a note: Source: Mrs. Arthur Kellas, British Embassy, Teheran. A well-known Persian delicacy. And then a further source, below that: The Tenth Muse, Sir Harry Luke, 1954. Which, I quickly found out, was subtitled A Gourmet's Compendium, and seemed to be the collected culinary curios of a mid-century British aristocrat. Bridget must have met him or heard his call for recipes and sent him her fesanjan. And Elizabeth David had lifted it in its entirety from Sir Harry, as she often did with writers she respected.

  (Later, Bridget told me the full story, which involved yet another passing-on of the recipe: “Harry Luke was visiting Tehran when we were there in our second innings. He came to supper with us and we dished up fesanjan, prepared by our wonderful old cook, Ahmad, who used to time his cooking by how long he would take when chanting verses from the Koran. Anyway, Sir Harry must have enjoyed the dish, because he later asked me for the recipe. I wrote down what Ahmad told me and submitted it, and so it went into print! Even though I had never actually made the dish myself. What a fraud I feel!”)

  I smiled at the circularity, then cooked with a sense of serendipity. When I was a teenager and for a few years managed to convince myself that there was a God, I warmed to Coleridge's pantheism, the sense of God being in nature, being everywhere, literally and physically as well as spiritually: one Life within us and abroad, Which meets all motion and becomes its soul.… I would look at the sky and the sea and the land in Scotland and feel that things would hold together, that beyond the disintegration of what had meant everything in the first ten years of my life—my family—was something bigger and stronger and, unlike my family, unbreakable. I had not felt that about God for many years. But the hunger for connections had stayed. To me, food was appearing in everything, holding things together, linking me to my mother, overlapping with my past and my future; in this case, a single recipe was forging connections between my dear friend, a meal we had shared as teenagers, mothers in Iran and Scotland, and a dead cookbook writer I had never met but loved as if she were an aunt—a crotchety, demanding, lovable relative who bound us all together in my kitchen.

  Richard came and, may his own mother forgive him, said that my fesanjan—Bridget's, Elizabeth David's—was as good as his mum's.

  31

  SURELY SOMEWHERE IN MY MOTHERS PAPERS I WOULD come across something kind and creative, some sign of her intelligence and gifts before things went wrong in her head. I was finding it tough going, all the raving poetry and polymath scribblings.

  And then they began to appear.

  I found more letters among the files relating to her teaching—one from the headmistress (a nun) at a Catholic school in London, dated November 1965. It was a letter of recommendation for my mother, who had clearly just completed her teaching practice at the school: She has a very pleasant manner with children and was popular with them while here, wrote Sister Placidus, in looping blue ink. Mrs. McAllester has personally much to give others and imparts the knowledge of her subjects, French and English, in an attractive way.

  Next out of the suitcase was a letter from the Hamlyn Group, a publisher, dated October 20, 1967. Fifteen days after my sister, Jane, was born. My mother's first child. Of course there is no hurry for the translation—as long as it is coming—and please don't worry about it, wrote Christine Gray, of the Natural History Books department. What sort of baby is it? After your mentioning so much about it I am dying of curiosity.

  It was the first I knew that my mother had translated books for a living. An earlier letter from a different editor makes it clear that she was translating from the French volumes of an encyclopedia entitled Colour Library of World Wildlife.

  Ken Denham and I are very satisfied with the translation work you have done for us so far, the editor wrote, and I understand that you will be able to do some more for us. She was to be paid four guineas per thousand words.

  And then I found a pink foolscap folder. In my mother's handwriting, in the top left-hand corner, was written in pencil: Cordon Bleu. Ann McAllester. 15 Ashworth Road, W9. 01 286 0689.

  I opened up the folder, which had been held together with a gob of Blutac, now almost as hard as clay. Inside were dozens of pieces of paper, with typewriter text that had been annotated by hand. Recipes. All of them classic French food. Some held together with now-rusty staples. “Gâteau au Chocolat Chantilly” “Carré d'Agneau Perinette.” Do not make stuffing too wet & soft, my mother had scribbled in pencil at the top. Do not overcook garnish, she had written at the end of the recipe. I wondered if she was taking notes in class or commenting on her own mistakes at home, warning herself of these missteps for future meals.

  Near the top of the pile was a piece of paper with her name written in the top left-hand corner. And typed out: Wednesday Morning and Afternoon—Advanced. May 3rd, 1972. Summer Term, 1972. Below that title, a list of a dozen menus. A repertoire of classic French cuisine. My mother had, it seemed, decided that Elizabeth David and her other mentors—Robert Carrier, Katie Stewart—were not quite enough. She had to learn at the most famous of all cooking schools, Le Cordon Bleu.

  I called the school. They dug out from their archives a card with her name on it, showing that she'd taken twelve advanced classes that spring and summer. Another small trace of my mother, left in a file box in a cooking school in Marylebone for thirty-five years. It was a year after she had blown up at the Irish builders, a year after my father first saw something different in his wife.

  Some of the recipes she learned at Le Cordon Bleu were, I have to say, not the kind of food
I really wanted to master: pineapple jelly salad (underlined, worryingly, in an approving way); deviled egg mousse; chicken with fruit salad (I'm not making this up). But most of them looked amazing, old-fashioned, intimidating. And irresistible. The only question was: Which would I choose to master?

  32

  NOW THAT I'VE THOUGHT ABOUT IT SOME MORE, I SEE IT was not the man who walked off the platform in the Boston subway who gave me my first scent of unexpected death and its sickly sweet, destructive, fascinating power. It came much earlier, from my mother.

  My mother wants to further her career as a schoolteacher and has been accepted for a course at Moray House teaching college in Edinburgh. But there's a problem with the staff at the college, she confides in my father.

  “They're spying on me,” she tells my father when they are alone. “They have sent people up to Ardnamurchan even.”

  “I don't think so, Ann,” he says. “I doubt they'd do that.”

  “I'm telling you, Don, they have spies watching me. All the time.”

  There is nothing my father can do to persuade her that the staff at the teaching college she is yet to attend are not spying on her. As the days go by, her conviction hardens.

  On April 25, 1981, my father's brother, Jim, calls from Birkenhead, near Liverpool, where my father grew up. My father is in the kitchen constructing bench seats out of wood when the phone rings.

  “Don, Dad has died,” Jim says.

  In the week that precedes the funeral, my father realizes that my mother is in no state to come with him to Birkenhead. I am eleven and my sister is thirteen. Mum will stay in Edinburgh with us.

  He drives very quickly south, down the M6 motorway, buries his father, stays three nights, and early on the Sunday morning after the funeral, gets into the yellow Vauxhall station wagon and drives north, heading home. It is May 3, 1981. He's passing near a town named Abington when he feels an overwhelming need to pull the car over. Immediately. He sits in the car with his hands on the beige steering wheel, other cars racing past him along the tarmac of the A702 north. “Something is very wrong,” he says to himself. “Something has happened.”