They sat down to a lunch of eggs au gratin and baked apples. Unspoken, the challenging testing exchange went on beneath the ripple of superficial commentary and question, the small bursts of laughter that exploded between them like bubbles released under pressure. They were meeting to be reconciled after fifteen years. (Rosamond Lehmann, The Echoing Grove) Continue reading “Sibling rivalry”
Author: rebecca.selman@btinternet.com
Growing up
Joanna brought back … some small slices of cake. It was cake with two colours. Half yellow, half chocolate. Mama called it marble cake, but Joanna had some other name for it.
(Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls)
Cooking in a bedsitter
By the time John came back with a strange concoction, the room really looked quite a lot better. … John gazed round approvingly and pronounced judgement: ‘Smell bad, but look good.’ The exact opposite could have been said of the meal, but with the important addendum that it tasted delicious. (Lynne Reid Banks, The L-Shaped Room)
In my teenage years, as I transitioned from reading children’s to adult fiction, I would spend many an hour looking through my parents’ novel collection. Continue reading “Cooking in a bedsitter”
Simnel Cake
Then on Mid-Lent Sunday, instead of furmenty we eat Simnel cake: a cake made variously, but always with saffron for its principal ingredient. This I should fancy was a relic of Papistry, but I wonder how it originated. Lambert Simnel the imposter in Henry the Seventh’s time was a baker’s son, I think. The shop windows are filled with them, high and low eat them. (Elizabeth Gaskell, letter to Mary Howitt, 18th August 1838) Continue reading “Simnel Cake”