On more than one occasion I’ve blogged about the role of memory in accounts of food and eating in literature. From the narrator’s memories of delicious childhood teas at his best friend’s house in Michael Frayn’s Spies, to Flora Thompson’s memories of the food practices of her native Oxfordshire in the early 20th century in her autobiography Lark Rise to Candleford, food plays a significant role in writers’ and characters’ memories of the past.
But in Emma Healey’s 2014 Costa prize-winning novel Elizabeth is Missing there is as much an emphasis on memory loss as on memory itself, and the role that food plays in that.
At the centre of the novel is 82-year-old Maud Horsham. Maud’s memory is deteriorating, and her increasingly erratic behaviour is causing those close to her great concern. However, Maud is more concerned about her friend Elizabeth, whose recent disappearance is stirring up – and becoming confused with – memories of the disappearance of her beloved elder sister, Sukey, nearly 70 years earlier. Healey’s novel combines a moving depiction of ageing with the gripping elements of a thriller as the reader swiftly turns the pages in order to find out what has happened to both Elizabeth and Sukey.
For Maud’s daughter Kate, and her carer Carla, some of Maud’s most worrying behaviours are exhibited around food: she shops compulsively, eats at the ‘wrong’ time, eats too much and cannot be trusted to turn off the oven or grill after she has made something.
Forced into a life of constraints, with signs posted up around her house telling her what she can and cannot do, Maud understandably rebels. And many of these little rebellions centre around food.
She argues with Carla about her stockpiling of tins:
‘”All those tins of peaches!” Carla shouts from the kitchen… “You must stop buying food,” she calls again. …”You have enough for an army.”
Enough food. You can never have enough…
“It’s not like I have many treats left,” I say, pushing myself higher in my seat to make my voice carry to the kitchen.’
When Carla leaves at 09.40 after her morning visit, Maud goes straight to the fridge: ‘I pull a plate from the fridge…The plate has a note attached: Lunch for Maud to eat after 12 p.m. I take the cling film off. It’s a cheese and tomato sandwich. When I’ve finished eating I wander back to the sitting room.’
Another note tells Maud ‘not to go out’, but that doesn’t stop her: ‘I don’t see why. It can’t hurt to nip down to the shops.’ But when Maud gets to the shop, she can’t remember what she has come for – even though she wrote a shopping list before leaving home – and she resorts to her familiar peach slices:
‘What was it I came for? The loaded shelves frown down at me as I circle them….My basket is empty, but I think I’ve been here for a while; ..I reach for something: it’s heavier than I was expecting and my arm is pulled down suddenly with the weight. It’s a tin of peach slices. That’ll do.’
A reason for Maud’s obsessive buying of peach slices is provided by the sections of the story where Sukey’s disappearance is related. Set in 1946, a year after the end of the Second World War, rationing is still in force. In one passage the young Maud goes shopping with the family’s ration books. She fails to get the haddock she wants at the fishmongers (there being only cod left), and then has to stand in a queue for the greengrocer’s (the idea of queuing to go into a shop would, until recently, have seemed very strange to us!), hoping desperately there will still be enough bananas by the time she gets to the counter. The childhood experience of food shortages could account for Maud’s stockpiling in her later years.
In another episode Maud goes to the grocer’s to buy ‘a tin of peaches and Ma’s ration of cooking fat’. The choice of peaches may explain Maud’s obsession with tinned peaches, rather than other tinned food. But I also discovered that tinned fruit was actually a rarity in wartime. The ration coupons needed for one tin of fruit amounted to all one person’s tinned food for one month, so it would have been a luxury foodstuff for special occasions. And peaches were particularly rare, with pears and fruit salad being more readily available. Whilst Maud may have a failing memory and not know consciously what she is doing, her purchase of so many canned peaches demonstrates a desire for a lifestyle that she was deprived of in her formative years.
There is no reference to the elderly Maud actually eating the tinned peaches she buys – which is presumably why her carer gets so infuriated with her. I’ve used my tin of peaches – plus some blueberries which I had in the freezer – to make a cobbler. A cobbler is a dish in which a sweet or savoury filling is covered with a scone-like topping and baked in the oven. Cobblers were promoted by the Ministry of Food during the Second World War as they can be made with much less fat than pastry – so this seems a particularly appropriate dish for this book.
MAUD’S PEACH AND BLUEBERRY COBBLER
Ingredients (serves 4):
2 x 410g tin peaches, drained
2 handfuls of frozen blueberries
225g self-raising flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
Pinch salt
40g butter (room temperature)
30g caster sugar
1 large egg, beaten and made up to 150ml with milk
Small amount of milk and granulated sugar for coating the scone topping.
Method:
Preheat the oven to 200C / fan 180C / gas mark 6.
Place the peaches in a medium-sized ovenproof dish and sprinkle over the blueberries.
Sieve the flour, baking powder and salt into a large mixing bowl. Rub in the butter using your fingertips until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.
Stir through the sugar.
Pour the liquid into the dry ingredients and use a knife to mix together. Use your hands to knead into a soft but not sticky dough, adding a little more flour if needed.
Turn the dough onto a floured surface. Roll out to a thickness of at least 2.5 cm, and either stamp out rounds using a pastry cutter or cut into triangles using a sharp knife. Place the scones on top of the fruit. Use a pastry brush to brush with milk and sprinkle with granulated sugar.
Place into the preheated oven and bake for 25-30 minutes until the scone topping is golden brown.
Eat hot, with cream or ice-cream if you like.
