Mothers and food

With today being Mother’s Day (traditionally known as Mothering Sunday) in the UK, my thoughts went to mothers in literature and the extent to which they are portrayed as food providers and cooks for their children.

Of course in the 21st century we are accustomed to the idea that women do not have to be the main caregiver in a heterosexual household, and many fathers do their fair – or even the lion’s – share of the cooking. But that has traditionally not been the case; furthermore, a 2022 survey into British social attitudes found that whilst 80% of the respondents thought that in mixed households both sexes should do the cooking, in reality more than 60% of women shoulder the responsibility for it.

So, even nowadays, many people’s first experiences of cooking will be that it is a task done by women, usually their mothers.

But what does English literature have to say about this?

When I look back over the posts I have written about food in literature, I realise that I have covered very few episodes of mothers cooking in literature.

As discussed in my first posts on Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature, food does not make much of an appearance in the earliest texts which tend to be preoccupied with events taking place outside of the domestic sphere, and with characters who, owing to their social status, would be unlikely to ever enter a kitchen.

Food does begin to receive more attention with the emergence of the novel around the early 18th century. But there is still often little focus on the cooking of that food, or on the characters who cook it. Cooking is not the preserve of many of the mothers portrayed in novels up until the 20th century; tending to be from the middle or upper middle classes, these mothers keep servants, including a cook. However, despite that, they still play an important role in the meals that are cooked for the family, through choosing the menu and issuing instructions to the kitchen staff.

For example Mrs Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To the lighthouse (1927) presides over a successful meal of the French classic boeuf en daube. Whilst she does not do the cooking, she has provided the recipe (one of her mother’s), serves the meal to her guests and even ends up taking credit for it: ‘”It is a triumph,” said Mr Bankes, laying his knife down for a moment. He had eaten attentively. It was rich; it was tender. It was perfectly cooked. How did she manage these things in the depths of the country? he asked her. She was a wonderful woman.’

Similarly in Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement, the opening section of which, set in 1935, is heavily influenced by To the lighthouse, the mother of the household, Emily Tallis, like Mrs Ramsay organises the cooking of a meal for her assembled guests, even changing the menu at short notice, much to the annoyance of her staff.

Whilst both Mrs Ramsay and Emily Tallis are mothers, there is no suggestion that the meals they oversee have been designed with their children in mind. However, that is indirectly the case in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, first published in 1813. Mrs Bennet, whose mission in life is to find suitable husbands for all five of her daughters, designs a menu with the intention of securing a husband for her eldest daughter, Jane. Towards the end of the novel Mr Bingley – who had previously shown some regard for Jane – returns to the neighbourhood with his friend Mr Darcy. Mrs Bennet invites both men to dinner and, anxious to impress, designs the meal accordingly: ‘…she did not think anything less than two courses could be good enough for a man, on whom she had such anxious designs, or satisfy the pride and appetite of one who had ten thousand a-year.’

In more recently published literature, reflecting the decline in domestic service since the Second World War for all but the wealthiest households, I did find more examples of mothers cooking, though not necessarily with much enjoyment.

In Kate Atkinson’s Behind the scenes at the museum, published in 1995, Bunty the mother – who finds little joy in motherhood, the reason for which becomes clear at the end of the novel – is often portrayed as cooking for her family and other guests. In a chapter set in 1953 when the protagonist Ruby, Bunty’s daughter, is just two years old, Bunty and her errant husband, George, are hosting a family gathering to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. As the proud owners of a television – and the only family members to own one – this gathering provides the opportunity to show off their latest purchase. To accompany the viewing Bunty lays on a tea-time spread which includes scones, ham sandwiches, sausage rolls and various cakes and pastries, all accompanied by Bunty’s irritated thoughts: ‘she can’t stand having all these people in the house. The sandwiches! The pots of tea! Will it ever stop?’

The strain of being a mother and cooking for a large family, though with markedly less resentment, is shown in Laurie Lee’s autobiography Cider with Rosie. Published in 1959, the book focuses on Lee’s childhood during and after the First World War. His mother Annie singlehandedly raised eight children – five of them not her own – when her husband left the family home. Financially constrained – so not in a position to secure domestic help – and with so many mouths to feed, Annie cooks basic but hearty meals, one such example being lentil stew , with Lee describing his mother’s haphazard efforts to serve the food and the children racing to finish their serving first in order to have first dibs on any leftovers (something Lee was notoriously incapable of doing).

Whilst the lentil stew episode illustrates a mother having to cook under straitened circumstances, Annie also displays the ability to cook food that is less functional and more likely to delight her offspring, for example picnics – admittedly organised with military precision – but which feature more child-friendly food such as cakes, buns, jellies and macaroons

A mother cooking to please her offspring also comes to the fore in D. H. Lawrence’s 1913 novel Sons and Lovers. As the title denotes, this is a novel where the relationship between the parent (mother) and her sons is paramount. The mother in question, Mrs Morel, victim of an unhappy marriage to a man who is her social inferior, focuses all her energies on her four children, particularly her two elder sons William and Paul. One way in which she shows her devotion to them is through food. When Paul has an interview to be an office clerk in Nottingham, his mother accompanies him and then insists on taking him out for a meal she can ill-afford  Then, when William, who has left home to work in London, comes home for Christmas, Mrs Morel devotes herself to filling her pantry full of home-baked goods: ‘There was a big plum cake, and a rice cake, jam tarts, lemon tarts, and mince pies – two enormous dishes. She was finishing cooking – Spanish tarts and cheese-cakes’

But what I was particularly struck by when I surveyed the many posts I have written, were those instances when women who are not biological mothers still mother children in their care through providing food for them. Two novels written nearly 200 years apart illustrate this nicely.

In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) the young protagonist is sent to the harsh boarding school Lowood by her uncaring relatives. Lowood is a place of deprivation and torment, where the boarders are often hungry or forced to eat inedible meals. However, Miss Temple, referred to as the ‘superintendent’ of Lowood, provides bread and cheese for all the children when the breakfast porridge is burnt. On another occasion, when Jane has been publicly humiliated by Mr Brocklehurst, the cruel master of Lowood, Miss Temple takes her and her friend, Helen Burns, to her room where she gives them cups of tea and slices of seed cake cut with a generous hand. Through this, and other kindnesses, Miss Temple becomes almost a ‘mother’ to Jane, who is heartbroken when she leaves Lowood to get married.

That ability to recognise a child’s need for food is also seen in Kit de Waal’s debut novel, My Name is Leon. Published in 2016, the novel tells the story of a child finding his identity as he navigates his way through the care system. Taken into care with his baby brother Jake as his mother cannot cope, Leon finds comfort and care with his new foster mother Maureen. He also finds a steady supply of food which has been lacking in his life. On his first evening with Maureen, she offers him a Jammie Dodger biscuit, and then another, ‘so Leon had three altogether with some hot chocolate’ . The next morning he wakes up to the smell of breakfast, and when he goes downstairs Maureen presents him with ‘Bacon sarnie with red sauce. All you can eat’. For Leon this breakfast ‘tastes like the best thing in the world with soft bread and lots of meat and the sauce that drips on to the plate and he’s got an enormous glass of orange juice which tastes sweeter than Coke and he has a bite of the salty meat and a swig of the sweet orange juice and he keeps doing it until everything is gone’.

Knowing that Mothers Day can be a difficult day for many people, and as I pack a supply of Annie’s macaroons from Cider with Rosie to deliver to my university student nephew whom I’m meeting for lunch later today, I find it heartening – and radical – that some of the best feeding of children in English Literature is being done by women who are not mothers.