A FOOD MEMOIR: LOVE AND SPONGE CAKES

When the novelist James Scudamore was sent away to boarding school, his grandfather’s generosity sustained him—literally and figuratively ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Winter 2008

By the time I knew him, my grandfather had retired, and developed a Churchillian build and Falstaffian appetites. I never knew the farmer he was before—the trim character in photos who smoked a pipe, worked a long, hard day and had a mouthful of teeth he could call his own. The man I knew had been released relatively early from the tyranny of full-time farming—first the M1, then the M6 streaked across his land, and he and my grandmother sold up and shipped out when they could. In retirement, his natural generosity and abundance became defining characteristics. They turned him into a dedicated, full-time provider, and saved me more than once from the austerity of a school that tended towards the Spartan.

Nowhere was he more benevolent than in the area of food and drink. On the first Wednesday of each month he’d get up at 5am to drive to the wholesale fruit-and-vegetable market in Leicester, armed with orders from relatives and friends, and stock up on bags of onions or potatoes, whole cheeses, trays of yogurts, meat, bread. He would buy so much that the stallholders, most of whom knew him by name, assumed he ran a medium-sized grocer’s. Visitors to his house would leave weighed down with unexpected sacks of shallots or free cases of clementines.

Certain food rituals conjure him still. He is there when I thumb the centre of a Camembert to determine its ripeness, when I pull out a cork or sharpen a carving knife. It was an influence that began operating on me from an early age: not yet two years old, I stayed with my mother’s parents for a few days while she and my father were otherwise engaged with the birth of my younger sister. By the time I was collected, I had acquired a taste for Bovril on toast which rages to this day.

My grandfather despised meanness in all its forms, but particularly at the table, perhaps because of the post-war frugality that had featured in his working life: woe betide the restaurant that served him an over-priced, underweight portion or a mushy, microwaved vegetable. Food was serious—a subject for consideration and debate. The merits of different cooking methods or cuts of meat would be discussed over lingering sessions of bread and cheese that were often the main event of lunch. When the meal finally ended, just before he lay down for his postprandial kip, his main concern would be what we were having for dinner.

In 1985 my father’s company seconded us to Brazil. After several years at school in São Paulo, I was sent to a boarding school in England, selected because it was down the road from my grandparents’. Their home became my weekend refuge. The school took an old-fashioned view of home comforts and fine dining: when the pipes burst during my first winter, we cleaned our teeth in melted snow for a week; at the back of the building was an acre of rhubarb, which found its way to the table in many off-putting forms.

Most outrageous of all, pupils weren’t allowed to keep any food of their own—because of the rats, we were told. My grandparents did not look kindly on this decree, and I was routinely deposited back on a Sunday night bearing contraband bags of fruit and nuts and chocolate, to be secretly stowed at the bottom of a locker in case of emergency.

The one exception to the rule was that a family member could bring you a cake on your birthday, to be shared out equally among the pupils. Since there were almost a hundred of us, the average cake didn’t go very far, and our teachers had honed the ability to divide any offering, however modest, into miniscule one-bite squares so that nobody went without. When my birthday came around, my grandparents were determined to make sure that everyone had a proper slice. Staying up late into the night, they baked nine double sponges, which they loaded with jam and cream, set together and iced as one vast confection on a board specially cut for the purpose. It took up the entire boot-space of their Citroën estate, and I was a hero when it arrived the following day. The teacher in charge that evening cut the same, mean, one-inch squares as usual, so that most of the cake was left over, to be dispensed in equally parsimonious, increasingly desiccated portions for the rest of term—a crime which my grandfather never forgot.

His provision was all-encompassing. He and my grandmother would tour France together, visiting favourite vineyards and stocking up on cases of red wine and Champagne, which they would bring home in a trailer for distribution among family and friends. He made his own sausagemeat, feeding many different formulations and combinations of ingredients through an old hand-cranked mincer in the kitchen, and freezing it in batches for future use. The variables seemed endless, and provoked seemingly endless discussions. How much soaked bread should one start with before adding the meat, seasoning and herbs? Should bacon be involved? If so, smoked or unsmoked? Parsley? Sage? Garlic? Some years, batches were made to different recipes, in order that taste-tests could be held and consensus finally reached—which it never was. Invariably, however, the result was delicious, whether roasted in the oven in unctuous lumps or stuffed inside the Christmas bird. But it wasn’t just a seasonal foodstuff: it was a constant, a staple. It could be rustled up at any time for an unexpected guest, whether served cold with a glass of wine in the evening, or freshly cooked at lunchtime with potatoes and gravy.

As I got older, my grandfather got frailer, but even at a distance he never stopped providing. In my first term at university a whole Stilton arrived, along with an instruction: eat it with a spoon and pour in a slug of port to soak through when you get halfway down. Two years later, after I had complained that I always got colds in the winter, a crate of oranges were delivered, along with an electric squeezer.

In 2004 he developed farmer’s lung, which impeded his breathing and put great strain on his heart. He carried on visiting Leicester market regardless, cruising the stalls in his electric invalid carriage, pulling his veg and his oxygen cylinder behind him on a trailer that he’d made himself. In May 2004 he was given between three and six months to live. Some 14 months later, on July 22nd 2005, his heart finally gave out in a restaurant. His last words were, “I think I’ll have the fish.”

Picture credit: illustration by Katie Edwards

(James Scudamore won the 2007 Somerset Maugham Award for his first novel, "The Amnesia Clinic". His second, "Heliopolis", is out in January, [Harvill Secker])