In a small side street in Geraldine, Canterbury, a second-hand store proudly displays a small, tatty, stapled cookbook. When I spied Lessons from my Mother’s Kitchen, featuring various locals discussing recipes they learned as kids, it made me think about my own mum’s kitchen.
It was a place of simmering aromas, sizzling pans and the sound of chopping. My mother is a good cook and enjoys family dinners – so cooking is a natural extension of caring for her family.
My mother’s greatest culinary weapon is her secret box of tricks in the pantry. It’s hidden behind packets of pasta and is used without stirring my father’s attention. My father has very particular tastes in food – he believes things should taste of what they are and not be enhanced with spices, herbs or powerful sauces.
So Mother has become sleuth-like in her use of condiments – at the moment her ammunition of choice (and it does vary) is kecap manis (sweet and thick soy sauce), other soy sauces, Worcestershire sauce, ground coriander, a little jar of brown sugar, ground nutmeg and a huge jar of Dijon mustard.
The kecap manis may be added to a meatloaf for depth of flavour and a little sweetness. Any soy sauce drizzled over simmering shredded cabbage, cold cooked rice and leftover meat in a pot creates a whole new dish.
Ground coriander added to a sauté of mushrooms is delicious, and who doesn’t love Worcestershire sauce as a flavour addition? Most of us have had a bottle longer than many key relationships. Just a pinch of brown sugar totally lifts simmering tomatoes, ground nutmeg is wonderful added to a white sauce, and the Dijon mustard is used for salad dressings and to smear over topside of beef.
My mother has transformed gravy-making into an art form. Her trick is to take out most of the drippings, but leave the entire meat residue in the pan with some fat.
She doesn’t add wine to the gravy – instead just uses flour and all the vegetable water. Her roasts are always incredibly good, and she gets upset at the sight of very organised cooks who prepare vegetables way in advance (leaving them in salted water), which my mother feels kills all the goodness. Her main tip is to “taste, taste!”
I truly believe my mother’s continued energy for cooking at 83 is due to her passion for daily raw smoked red onion sandwiches. You see, close contact with others post the sandwich is negligible (for obvious reasons), so she is unlikely to pick up germs.
A more inviting aroma for top Christchurch chef Andrew Brown is the memory of fruit cake baking in a West Coast coal range on a Sunday afternoon.
“My mother was a great baker,” he recalls. “Her general feeding of four hungry kids was more routine – but her baking had magic.”
One day Andrew’s mum started putting orange rind into beef stew and Andrew was so impressed it made him curious about culinary combinations and motivated him to become a chef.
Similar inspiration came for Auckland’s Christine Thackwell. For her first cooking lesson her mother put all the ingredients for a cake on a bench and explained to six-year-old Christine what did what, with no recipe.
“My mother wanted us to have confidence and learn in the kitchen at the same time,” Christine recalls. Growing up in Christchurch in the 1960s, these lessons involved produce from the garden and simple food. “We had no idea what an avocado or fresh pineapple was, but Mum always managed to make meals delicious and inspirational,” says Christine.
Those lessons sowed the seeds of a lifelong love of cooking. Mega-energetic Christine has spent the past two decades setting up and operating cafés, and now runs The Casual Foodie in Auckland, a busy food-to-go and deli outlet.
“My mum,” she says, “is now 88 – and has decided it is perhaps time she stops salmon fishing… Although she will be disappointed to lose that fresh fish supply.”
What do people say? The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Photographs by: Getty Images