My father is confused. “What’s this got to do with sewers?” he asks, over a crackly phone. Minutes earlier, I’d told him this chat would be about “food” which, due to the variable phone reception he enjoys in the wilds of rural Derry, he’d misheard as “sewage”. I’m glad this has happened for several reasons.
Firstly, it’s a charming misunderstanding with which to begin a gently humorous column about my childhood experience of cooking.
Secondly, I feel like the idea of him confusing sewage with food is a good metaphor for our vastly different tastes in cuisine, and his opinion of many of the meals his children have cooked for him over the years.
Lastly, I can think of few better ways to give readers an idea of who my father is, than to observe that he was momentarily content — in fact, delighted — to have a frank conversation about the processing, storage and removal of human waste and is, if anything, disappointed it has mutated into one on the joys of cooking.
My father is not a cook. Barring barbecue, the command of which he presumes out of something like divine right, I don’t know that he’s ever cooked a meal for me in my life. I’m struggling to remember him making me a cup of tea. He worked for the Northern Irish Water Service for 40 years, where his job entailed designing, building and maintaining septic tanks and water treatment works, so you might say he has a greater knowledge of dinner’s final destination than its origins.
My own childhood memories of food are of me cooking for him, just about as far back as I can recall. I grew up with ten siblings on the Derry/Donegal border. When my mother died when I was five, my father was left to bring up 11 children between the age of two and 17 years old. Looking after all of us, while mourning the love of his life and working a full-time job, required more hard work and sacrifice than I can comprehend; more, even, than I can bare to imagine.
It would, therefore, be churlish for me to decry his reluctance to cook us dinner every night on top of the Herculean efforts he was already undertaking but, luckily for the remit of this piece, I am quite churlish indeed.
Like all Irish people over the age of, say, 33, my father grew up in a world where taste was very much a secondary, perhaps even tertiary, consideration. Before restaurants were brought to Ireland in around 1998, people mostly ate only those foods that could be identified from nursery rhymes. Mutton, roast beef, potatoes and, perhaps explaining the porridge thing, curds and whey.
There were two main flavours in the Ireland of my father’s youth; sweet and lard, and it was best to boil both away in water, in case a taste for either developed.
Enjoying food too much was a distraction from other, more important pursuits, like saying the rosary and pointing, delightedly, at overhead planes.
As such, my father’s tastes are not especially well-defined. He is fond of decrying the spiciness of objectively non-spicy foods and my childhood adventures in curry amounted to him instructing us to serve him a sauce that was a thin, yellow, milky substance marred, inexcusably, by raisins.
“How did ye feed yourselves with no mammy in the house?” is something we’re asked quite a lot.
We were, in fact, asked it at the time, by neighbours or teachers or random busybodies for whom the presumption was we just sat around and starved, or begged scraps from passing mum-shaped women while Daddy drank beer and watched Formula 1.
I’m happy to report we did nothing of the sort, although it would have made for a much more saleable and affecting memoir had I thought of it before now. My father, thankfully, had some help early on.
Up until the end of my primary school years, this took the form of Anne, a saintly neighbour who looked after the pre-schoolers while my father was at work, and made dinner on weekdays. By the time I was around ten or 11, however, we were judged old enough to shoulder these domestic burdens and become the help ourselves.
Shortly after my confirmation — indeed, so closely afterward I wondered if it was an intrinsic part of the sacrament — I was officially inducted into the roster of family meal providers, and tasked with feeding my family on a regular basis. All of which elides the sad fact about kids’ cooking — it’s not very good.
Once, when she was 12, my little sister Fionnuala added a little too much water to a lemon meringue tart. She just about held it together while bringing the sloppy citrus pie to the table, but broke into tears once Daddy discarded the knife he’d been given and fetched a ladle to serve it with instead.
My little brother, Conall, once deposited a dozen spuds, uncooked, into a deep fat fryer, which resulted in a foodstuff that boasted the consistency and taste of fire-damaged snooker balls. Certainly, my own time as a child cook was not particularly illustrious. The less said about my attempt at carbonara — read: food poisoning — the better, and on more than one occasion my father was compelled to push his plate away with as much discretion as he could muster, feigning a lack of appetite that would be easier to believe had he not ordered chips some moments afterwards.
A few jibes aside, my father was, and is, extremely gracious about our efforts, and the responsibility we seized when his bandwidth was at its lowest. I’d like to think his appreciation for our cuisine was due to either his kindness or our talents, but it’s just as likely attributable to the passage of time.
That, and the simple, grateful palate of a man who likes food fine enough, but would much rather we were talking about sewage.
