Cordon Bleu Cookery Books
On the shelves on the upstairs landing, where we keep old books we rarely look at but aren’t able to throw away, sits a row of hardback cookery books. Their blue and white spines and bold typeface must subconsciously catch my eye each time I climb the stairs: Meat Cookery, Fish 1, Fish 2, Baking 1, Baking 2, Memorable Meals… Most of them we have never opened, and many have never been used at all.
Just one, Preserving, has its heavy boards a bit scuffed at the corners. Taken off the shelf, it falls open at the double spread of chutney recipes: Red Tomato, Green Tomato, Apple and Raisin... These pages are marked up in blue biro to remind us of half-quantities, along with a scribbled note reminding that ‘dealing with the tomatoes a lot of water’ (sic). The pages are splattered with brown cooking stains that match the illustration of chutney being spooned out of a preserving pan. Other pages – those with receipts for marmalade and fruit bottling – are similarly distressed, but rather less so. All the rest are untouched, almost pristine.
These books came as an expensive subscription series from the Cordon Bleu Cookery School, published in 1971. My mother set up a standing order at the very beginning of her slide into dementia. They represented mother’s ambition to entertain well, to put on a good show – her hardback copy of Entertaining with Good Housekeeping, dated from the 1930s and falling apart from use, we passed onto my niece Sarah. She and her sister Anna, the two elder grandchildren, remember their Granny dearly. But the Cordon Bleu series was a step too far and, more, a step too late, a step out of reality which meant the younger grandchildren missed out.
I remember Dad telling me he had cancelled the subscription because she wasn’t even opening the packages. He sounded cross, but maybe he was just upset. It was out of character for him to go behind her back like that. He was at his wits end but couldn’t talk about it with anyone. I had just returned from four years in America, and was the first in the family to notice, or maybe willing to notice, what was happening to her: “Mum’s going like Nannah” I said to my sister Ann, for we had watched our own grandmother sink deeply into dementia. But Ann refused to, or maybe couldn’t, hear me. It was only a year or so later that Mum became unmanageable. Ann and I met with Dad in the nearest thing we ever had to a family council, at which Dad, choking, said, “She’s not the girl I married”, and we agreed she needed specialist care in a nursing home. Thankfully, she died not long after.
But Dad brought this partial set of books to his new home after Mother died; and Elizabeth and I hang on to them, even though they defy our customary ruthlessness in getting rid of things that are neither useful nor beautiful. Every time we make chutney or marmalade, when I bottle damsons, we take the Preserving book from it place alongside its companions. The contrast between the splattered and pristine pages brings forth memories both sweet and bitter – how her ebullient ambition and love of life turned almost manic in her final years.
