In my experience a cup of good tea can be as revealing as a glass of wine or a beer, especially if there is cake or sugar-free bun loaf as well, which I make.
In our house we use loose tea we buy in bulk: Assam and Earl Grey, which we blend 50 - 50. We also use Haddon Hall china cups and saucers. We keep our mugs for coffee and cocoa. You could call tea drinking a ritual of sorts with us.
It goes back to the day we met nearly fifty years ago and the conference we were at offered paper cups, mugs or cups and saucers. We both chose the latter and I was drinking Earl Grey even then. I didn't give up milk in tea until the 1980s, when Susan’s friend Eric arrived on the scene, who liked his tea weak and black. I tried it and have been hooked ever since. Still Earl Grey or our home blend.
Eric has gone. He died of cancer ten years back, but I remember him with every cup of tea I drink. I never say, but I remember others too when I eat certain foods.
Susan’s dad Reg comes to me when Susan and I have poached eggs on toast for lunch, as we do most Saturdays. I can see Susan’s mum Annie remonstrating with him in a Nottingham tea shop when he followed me in ordering poached eggs on toast. ‘Reg, you know you don’t like poached eggs’ Annie said. All I remember after is that it turned into a heated row and I got up and left them to it. A couple of hours later Susan came and found me in the park outside our home, where I had found shelter in the pavilion.
I also remember Reg when I have the occasional pork pie. Him standing in front of the open fridge door savouring the thought of pork pie and a piece of Stilton cheese and a few savoury crackers. A man I still miss after 38 years.
So, here I am, with my cup of tea and shortbread, thinking of food and those I love and are dead. With my mother it is macaroni cheese with cauliflower. I leave out the boiled eggs, but it is my favourite meal, though I rarely eat it these days because of its high fat content and my having a gallstone problem. Before that it was my weight, but these days I am not overweight. Then there are her cheese and marmalade sandwiches, which I make most weeks.
Pop, my maternal grandfather, who died in 1976, just before his 80th birthday introduced me to the love of my life when it comes to food - runner beans - and the sheer pleasure they bring from planting in a pot to watching them grow and the wall of green they create on one side of our home, to picking them, cooking them, putting them on a plate with butter and cheese on top and, if I have cooked the beans to perfection (as I usually do), hearing them squeak as my teeth bite into them.
Pop, at my age, was as good as living on his own. There was a couple lodging upstairs and keeping an eye on him. He died a couple of weeks before his 80th birthday in 1976 in the arms of my beloved Auntie Nannie in Harlow of a heart problem not diagnosed until hours before he died.
My heart problem, which was corrected with open heart surgery in 2017, could have been hereditary - which is why I wonder if Pop may have lived longer had a doctor spotted the problem sooner?
Pop loved a plate of beans with butter and cheese on top, plus beetroot. My daughter is not keen on runner beans but she is addicted to beetroot like me.
There are a few other food associations in my head right now linked to a couple of dead friends and family members, but I have finished my cup of tea and the garden needs attention, so another day maybe…
Do you have food you eat which reminds you of friends and family who are dead?
Family meals and seasonal meals like Christmas, Easter and my birthday bring food memories too and those not sitting at the table with us.
I hasten to add my memories bring a smile to my face and make me feel happy and this fact may well explain why I enjoy eating macaroni cheese; runner beans, beetroot and poached eggs so much.
Robert Howard 🐰
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