A yummy life

My lovely big sister has almost finished the final draft of a terrific memoir. She noticed that many of her stories had a focus on food, and so included a tried-and-true recipe with each story. It's wonderful to read these stories that bring our family meals and eating habits so vividly to life. As for Jill's adult life as a cook and hostess, it was shaped by her creativity and common sense as a young wife, producing menus with colour, taste and charm for sixpence.

This got me thinking about influences on my own cooking and eating over the years. At our age, we're walking, talking gastronomic encyclopaedias. Let me count the ways my own life has shaped the way I eat...

1. My mother: healthy, tasty, simple, cheap and fast! Celia did everything with flair and shortcuts, including cooking. With a big family and a full-time job, she raced into the kitchen and single-handedly prepared our meals at high speed. Daughters did the washing up. The cheapest cuts of meat, fresh veges and fruit from the garden, milk, cream and butter from the cow, eggs from the hens. All organic before there was need for such a word. Porridge, soup, meat and three veg, and pudding to fill up the corners.

2. So-called Continental Cooking classes in 1959-1960. Heavy rich dishes like vol au vent and Hungarian goulash. Add cream and sherry or wine to everything. Put apricots and prunes into casseroles. Exciting, satisfying Friday night food for blokes after the pub.

3. Reefton boiling, roasting and baking. The cooking of my mother-in-law, Vi, was perhaps the most exotic I ever encountered. Boiled mutton with white sauce. Cabbage boiled to mush. Mutton roasted in 3 or 4 cups of lard. Little cakes with strange names and many processes, like Louise cakes and Eccles cakes and Boston buns. I was astonished but did not emulate.

4. Switzerland, from 1961-64. This was a gastronomic awakening for both Grant and me, and we have never recovered, thank goodness! Foods like asparagus, oysters and radishes honoured individually, a course in themselves. A salad with every meal. New foods every day. Fondue, raclette, sauerkraut. Wine with meals. Discovering small quirky cafés with one special dish and a fierce chef. Food was an obsession, and yet it was simpler than the jumble of items we had been throwing on our plates all our lives. For raclette, you only need cheese, gherkin and potato—but it has to be the right cheese, the right gherkin and the right potato.

5. Feeding my own family. As a housewife and mother of four in Masterton, I applied everything I knew to feeding my family. No problem, plenty of fun. When children disliked a food, I cruelly forced them to eat one mouthful—one pea—one bite of asparagus: usually there came a day when their eyes filled with wonder, because suddenly, they got it! Oysters were yummy!

6. 1970s dinner parties: competitive cooking. Bored housewives all, we tried to outdo one other with culinary masterpieces. I produced bombe Alaska, fillet of beef Duke of Wellington, crepes suzettes, boeuf bourgignon—you name it. Ridiculous. But what else is a girl to do in Masterton?

7. Hippy brown stuff. Whole food Vegetarian cafés began popping up in the 70s. Note the capital V, granted because much of this early Vegetarian food was primarily ideological. It pretended to be meat: lentil burgers, vege sausages, tofu steaks, brewers yeast and lecithin on everything. Some delicious, some disgusting, all of it righteous, too much of it brown. In Taranaki and Golden Bay, I lived among the hippies. Vegetables remain my top-favourite, number-one primary food group. I love them as they are and I don't like to see them tortured.

8. The Japan aesthetic. For two years I lived as a privileged professor in Kyoto, the heart of elegant Japanese cuisine. For a time, I lived with a tea professor and a kaiseki chef. My aesthetic sense was polished to the point of baldness. I make sashimi and I love the Zen side of food appreciation, but I'm fussy about which Japanese place I eat at.

9. Cafés and Moore Wilson. Living in Mt Victoria means passing cafés every time I walk to town. Small, beautiful, fresh, creative snacks and meals. Fusion without fuss. Lunch in a paper bag from De Luxe. Brat in a bun at l'Affaré. Breakfast with friends at Mojo. Business meetings at Jimmy's. Well, you get the drift. Then when grandchildren come to stay it's yum cha or sushi or both.

10. Travels in Asia. Life takes me here and there. China, Tokelau, Tonga, Samoa, Malaysia, Cambodia, Bangladesh and India, for example. Each time it's a reminder that the ethnic meals produced in New Zealand are a pale reflection of their original selves, brushed bland for our foreign palate. The world is full of amazing flavours.

11. Live-aloner stair-thinker cooking. Living with a family or even just one other person, I found it easy to produce meals for 2 or 4 or 10. But I've lived alone for more than 20 years now, and my habits are very different.

Nowadays, cooking for one person is what's easy and soothing and fun. Virtually every day I cook something wonderful for both lunch and dinner. Yesterday's lunch was a salad of silver beet (lightly steamed), baked beetroot, persimmon, walnut and feta cheese. Other days last week I ate Thai red curry fish soup, pork and pea soup from my freezer, salmon omelette with a green salad, toasted sandwich—whatever, I love it all.

Normally I run downstairs from my office, and on the stairs I think about what I'll cook. Today, for once, I'm thinking ahead: rösti with a salad of broccoli and pear, maybe. It depends what's in the fridge. And there's always enough for one person.

But you can't prepare a menu for guests while running down the stairs. You have to think ahead. Make decisions. Even go shopping. The cooking is still easy, but thinking about what to cook can be strangely disconcerting. I am better at making lightning decisions than methodical ones. What's more, I invent many dishes on the spot and never make them again. Recipes do not feature. So I'm illogically nervous that the dish of the day might be just too eccentric for anyone but me.

The sum total? I'm happy with my food. Almost every meal I say out loud, 'Yummy! Mmm! That was delicious!' What I eat is constructed from a brilliant foundation in childhood, the constraints of raising a family on a budget, the wonderful foods available to us here in this privileged enclave of New Zealand, and the stimulation of many outside influences.

And every step of my culinary development has been tightly associated with particular people. That's the beauty of it.

Lucky lucky me. I have a yummy life.

That's my food story. What's yours?

Writing for fun again: what am I to do? Can't help it!

So, my 70th year is almost over—doh! (That happens, Rachel.) It's been awesome and the next year will be awesome too.

An influx of maturity and wisdom never arrived, sorry to report.

But just in the nick of time I can imagine my next writing project. Thank goodness: there's nothing more fun than writing for fun.

Ever since finishing Scarlet Heels: 26 stories about sex, I've been almost 100% businesswoman—apart from a blissful stint as writer in residence at Lavigny. I've even stopped transcribing poems that dribbled out of my granddaughter's mouth because I felt I was invading her privacy.

Lately I have been inspired by Maud Casey, a wonderful young New York novelist who was with me at Lavigny. I've just read The Shape of Things To Come. She has that proportion thing right: the prose is exceedingly easy to read and understand and yet quite often there's a sentence that's so brazenly original and wise or mysterious or metaphorical, it's like a salutary slap in the face. I don't want to be boring or bored, but I don't want to be impenetrable or pretentious either. Maud is my model at present.

That, and reading a patchy book of memoirs by distinguished old NZers, yesterday gave me a vision of my next writing project. Very thrilling to see the way it could be, even if it never happens. I think I'm going to write random poems randomly related to life as an officially older person. Not unlike this blog, but as poems.

Odd and funny and real would be the goal. And not boring! I'm sick of oldies who relate earnestly how life was when they were young, how it's changed and what they think of that. I don't care.

I don't usually announce what I'm going to write: that's just asking for trouble. But I'm old enough to be pretty sure this one will happen. Not quickly, because I'm busy. But in a steady dribble, as is appropriate for an old lady laughing.

Writing for fun again—what am I to do? I can't help it.

Anna and Grace: maturing in style

The September Issue was great value, as movies go.
A. Fashionating scene: life inside Vogue magazine.
B. Hokey pokey icecream.
C. Two inspiring women, Anna Wintour at 59 and Grace Coddington at 68.

I could describe in some detail every outfit that Anna Wintour wore in the film. Half my brain was thinking, I could wear that, I couldn't wear that -- and mentally revamping my own wardrobe.

I bet thousands of older women have upgraded their look after seeing just how good a working woman of 59 can look. We don't necessarily have quite the same budget, but thanks to Trinny and Susannah we can analyse the components of the look. (Colour. Shape. Fitted cardigans. Knee length patterned skirts. Necklace, etc.) And adapt.

As for Grace Coddington, she deliberately chooses a self-effacing style. I think she wore the same comfortable dress, or perhaps a maroon variation? throughout the film. But I couldn't swear to that because, as she intended, I really didn't look at her clothes.

Neither wore jeans, a fleece, or beige.

Save my brain - learn Hamlet

As part of the great Save My Brain Campaign I decided to do some rote learning. But what to learn?

Taking the laziest option, I chose Hamlet's first soliloquy: O that this too, too solid flesh would melt...Laziest? Because that's what my grandmother used to recite to maintain her formidable brainpower.

So I did. It took me a verrrrry long time, a week. (Young actors can get a whole script down in that time.) And now I need to keep repeating it, to nail it into my long-term memory. If I have such a thing, at my age.

The process is pretty interesting. You have to get it absolutely right, complete with all the syllable-fillers such as "Fie on't! Ah, fie!" and "God! Oh God!" and "Heaven and earth!" And it's those bits where I hesitate sometimes, Alas! woe is me!

Interestingly, the speech seems to get shorter and shorter. As I get more confident (sometimes racing through like R2D2), I'm inclined to stop and think (always fatal). I think, "Surely I can't have reached that bit already? I must have missed a line."

Morning and night I say this mournful, desperate speech in my mind. I imagine my mind has already begun working more lightly and quickly. That's absurd, surely. And incongruous, because the speech itself is the ultimate in neurotic despair.

That's why I'm moving away from Hamlet. A friend suggested the psalms. Great idea. But of course, I'll be picky. None of those doom and gloom and apolocalyptic psalms for me.

Marketing to old people: aesthetics

Thinking further about why stuff that is marketed to old people is usually so ugly...

My parents' generation had little choice. In New Zealand, imports were restricted and variety non-existent. Everyone had the same things, pretty much. Shopping for household goods, the choice was between ugly and less ugly.

No, that's too mean. I'm very fond of memories from the home of my parents-in-law: bevelled edge mirrors, pink china shepherdesses, multi-coloured crocheted afghans, speckled green cups and saucers, net curtains, pink candlewick bedspreads and altogether a plain, plain interior.

My grandmother Mim had charming, exquisite tea sets in Royal Albert bone china, and a dresser of Mason ware for everyday use. Raising six girls on a few hundred pounds per year, my mother served tea from a silver teapot. The women of our low-income family made their few house-ware purchases with pride and focus. They longed for beautiful things — but choice was minimal and money tight.

Then in the 50s and 60s, things changed. My big sister Jill also had to be acutely careful with money, but with an astute eye for beauty she was able to buy elegant things, simple and streamlined. The home of Jill and Graham, two penniless students with four children, gleamed with Poole Pottery twintone china (as in the photo) and Danish styled furniture.

Now what puzzles me here is that today, in 2009, marketers still use a fake Edwardian style in the goods they market to older people. We get a catalogue in our letter boxes called "Innovations". (Whoever thought up that name had a sense of humour.) It features fascinating, and often bizarre, and usually unnecessary, items for older people.

Often the wood is carved or the iron twisted into curlicues. Linen is embroidered in cross stitch.

That's all very well, but the people who are hitting 70 nowadays have lived a lifetime in homes with some variety and charm. So they're marketing to old, old people. Or maybe dead people. Wake up, marketers! We do not want that yukky stuff.

The cruel aesthetics of old people's stuff

As you get old, you need old people's stuff. Great design never seems to be a priority. In fact, much old people's stuff looks repulsive.

Take shower mats. Old people slip in the shower, right? Solution: a rubber mat that grips the slippery wet base, and that responds to the grip of your dear old toes.

Trouble is, shower mats, like so much old people's stuff, are usually ugly or boring or so boring they are ugly. More than ugly: vile, hideous, disgusting. Colours are modelled on slimy old pink nighties or the dreaded beige raincoat. Lumps in the rubber are like serious acne or boils. The texture sets your teeth on edge.

So OK, I did slip in the shower recently, the first time ever. Wham! Maybe it was a oncer. Maybe it was because I was simultaneously stepping into the shower and mentally listing the jobs of the next 90 minutes. (1. Shower & dress etc. 2. Finish packing. 3. Run to computer shop for replacement netbook cable. 4. Call taxi. 5. Catch plane to Tonga.)

Regardless, if you live alone, best not muck around with risk.

On my return I bought a handsome shower mat from Moore Wilson. It combines the beauties of a chess board, space age jelly, and a crystal prism twinkling in the sun. In the structure I see two extremes in harmony: post-modern industrial steel and the Tofukuji moss garden in Kyoto. Aesthetically I'm satisfied.

And for the next week I owned another beautiful image as an impressive bruise flickered through various permutations of blue, black, yellow and green. Nature's painting on my bum.

Ready for a wedding...when?

So, when's a good age to get married, then? Assuming we're agreed that the brain is immature until the mid 20s, any time before 25 is too young, right?

Not exactly. You might pick the wrong person in your teens, but before long, for all sorts of reasons, they become the right person -- at least for the first 20 years. I'm speaking for myself here.

That's me on the left in The Double Wedding painting above. Painted by my sister Lesley Evans, it (sort of) shows me and another sister, Deirdre, on the day of our double wedding. (Don't ask.) I was 19. Madly in love with my tall, dark and handsome fiance, and never doubting for a moment that we were a perfect couple.

Well, we weren't. We're so different that one of my sons is gobsmacked that we even chose to be friends, let alone got married. He's right: it's bizarre.

But Grant was tall dark and handsome and has always been a thoroughly kind, good and honest man. We shared many adventures and four amazing children. To say the marriage was a mistake would be outrageous, terrible -- because it had to happen, in order for our children to be our children.

So you could say I was far too young (though I sincerely believed I was frightfully grownup at the time) and I made a weird decision with my immature brain. And you'd be right. Yet in hindsight, I made a brilliant choice, despite the marriage ending inevitably in divorce.

When I look at younger people now, I'm glad I was blindly in love with the wrong man. I'm glad I married well before any possibility of making a mature choice. I'm glad I was a child bride. I'm glad I didn't try to find my true identity before bonding in passion. As it turned out, developing my true identity is taking an awful long time, so I'd probably still be a "spinster".

Instead, I am delighted that we married young. That way, we could divorce young, with decades to explore life independently. Thank goodness they didn't have MRI brain scans in our day.

Three score years and ten

Meet Celia Taylor in her youth: my gorgeous mother. (Notice: I didn't say in her prime. That came later. As it does for us all.)

In this blurry photo she's probably 19 or 20, and it's around 1934. Glamorous even after climbing a mountain -- and obviously fit. Rebellious. She had a dark, sulky beauty when young, and men of all ages relished her company until she died. And she had six daughters of whom she was proud.

Celia was always adamant that three score years and ten was quite sufficient as a life span. She quoted the Bible in support.

"If I'm going gaga and I'm nothing but a burden," she told us occasionally, "Take me to a beautiful mountain, take me to a glacier, take me to the edge of a crevasse, then turn your back." Yeah, right. But she meant it! She was sufficiently realistic (or ethical) not to make us promise, which is just as well.

Fiercely independent, and passionate about the pleasures and powers of her life, Celia's worst fear was of being a burden. She positively wanted to die at 70, latest.

And so she did, on New Year's Day in her seventieth year. Some people can do that, I believe. Of course she had to work up to this death, by smoking (considered daring and glamorous when she was young) and getting a degenerative disease. You can't make a stroke happen out of the blue.

Well, that was strange even in those days. Today's 70 is yesterday's ... 50? Yet her mother and grandmother lived into their 80s, all guns roaring until quite near the end, I believe.

Regardless of logic, 70 was her deadline. Maybe I started this blog because next year I'll be 70 and I never felt less like dying.