People I’d like to make gingerbread for

Or, how to instil too much meaning into cooking

It’s a straight road, the road to Bempton Cliffs. On leaving the railway station you walk past the pond and duck crossing sign and enter the village, straight through and out the other side back into the countryside. There is an odour of muck spreading and very little traffic. The road has a small single-track pathway trodden through the grass verge, left unmowed so the morning dew soaks your feet and leaves your legs marked with nettle stings.

At one corner there is a blue plaque. It commemorates Jaw Bones Corner, the entrance to the field that was once marked by two giant whale jaw bones.

Where the jawbones are now is a mystery – at least as far as my Google searches go - as is their origin and why they were chosen to mark the entrance to a field in Yorkshire. All that remains is a plaque.

Human beings choose to commemorate and remember, something few other species bother with. There are stories of elephants scattering bones, the devotion of dogs to their former masters, and even dolphins can exhibit some signs of remembrance but humans take the act of remembering and commemorating to a different level.

What do you choose to remember? What do we mean by commemoration? Everything from raising statues, blue plaques or heritage walking tours, to writing memoirs, recipe books, rituals to mark death days, keeping altars or photographs or mementoes. Remembrance Sunday services, funerals, gravestones.

My version of the gingerbread recipe is in a spiral bound folder, a present from my sister-in-law. The recipe folder has room for four recipes each under headings: soup/casseroles, salads, meat, cakes and drinks. You write on the cards which slot into a plastic folder. It’s meant to be very practical. It’s clearly the kind of thing you give someone who likes cooking when you don’t know them well. There was thought behind the gift. I started off trying to make it a place where I keep my most reliable, well-used, well-loved recipes but the salad section is empty. In fact, most of the other sections are handy places to put those cards of recipes you used to get in the supermarket. The dessert section is the only one that holds the well-loved ones.

The plastic pages are sticky. Cooking is messy. My grandmother never managed to make shortcrust pastry without flour ending up on the floor. Are you even a cook if your kitchen remains neat while you bake?

The act of remembering, of passing on traditions is an act of honouring others, those who meant something to us, the beloved departed, sure. But I wonder if sometimes we imbue these rituals with more meaning than they warrant? If I make the gingerbread cake recipe I got from my mother, am I honouring her or am I using something I know is tried and trusted? Does it count if I don't make the gingerbread mindfully, aware of the recipe's legacy? Does it count if I know the recipe is reliable, the way I can currently pick up the phone to my mum if I need her? 

My grandmother didn’t need many written recipes by the end of her life, she’d made them all so many times the instructions were worthless. In my constant quest for variety and interest in cooking I have an entire cupboard given over to recipe books, pages torn out of magazines and newspapers, and even more in photos on my phone or Instagram account from other cooks. We like to think that in this modern day and age, we have a range of wider dishes available to us, the variety and change that comes from a greater range of ingredients but truth is, many families cook a rotation of the same dishes over and again. The ritual of cooking a familiar dish, something I’ve made so many times I don’t need the instructions, can allow you to perfect it, but it’s more likely that we’re busy and familiarity is easier.

In A Brief History of the Dead, Kevin Brockmeier creates a midway world, a world where you go after you die and you cannot move on until the last person who remembers you has also died. So, following a worldwide mass extinction event of human beings, only a handful of people remain (the survivors have been on a research trip to the Arctic). It takes a while for the people in the midway world to find their common ground – because some of them have forgotten the survivors. Do you remember everyone you ever encountered? Of course not, but some people stay with us and others don’t. The ones who make an impression may not know their impact.

Gingerbread has an autumnal and wintry feel to it. Ginger was first cultivated in ancient China but spread to Europe through the Silk Road. It was the Ancient Greeks, apparently, who developed the first gingerbread recipe. By the Middle Ages, gingerbread was familiar across Europe, sold at fairs, with decoration and different shapes depending on the season. There are different forms of it with harder, shapable versions iced and made into houses, or people, or crumbly biscuits, while softer versions, more like cake, such as parkin, Lebkuchen or peperkoek, are all variations.

When my mother was a little girl, her family used to receive food parcels from a family in the Netherlands, whose father had been a prisoner of war in the same camp in Poland as my grandfather. When they returned home, they kept in touch, and the Dutch family sent the English food parcels – a thank you for the war, and to make up for the rationing and general misery of immediate post-war Britain. I think gingerbread was probably in those parcels. They also had tins of apfelstroop and coffee-flavoured sweets called Hopjes. These are family favourites, a part of us, and somehow, passing the gingerbread on, using it as gift or something to share keeps that part of us alive.

On a train journey home from my mother’s house once, I sat at a table opposite a mother and her young son. They were going to Stratford Westfield and the son and my daughter bonded a little. She let him play with her scratch and colour book. I chatted lightly to the mum. I don’t talk to strangers easily but there was a connection there, I felt, an easiness to our conversation over the four or so stations until they got off the train. We could have been friends, I thought, as we waved at them from the train as it pulled away. I look for her every time I make that journey. It must have been at least seven years ago. She will be in my midway world and she won’t know why.

When I was a child, my mother used to fill our Christmas stockings with a gingerbread biscuit, iced with a picture of Santa or a sleigh or something similar. She wanted to continue the tradition that came from the Dutch food parcels. It was a strange consistency, that gingerbread, not crispy like a biscuit but too strong and chewy to be a cake. One year, I remember immediately on Christmas morning after opening the stocking I took the biscuit to my room and ate half of it right there, unable to resist the sweet tangy feel of the spice and the chewy dough texture that contrasted with the hard sweet icing. I remember that greedy delight more than any other present I received that year.

First, the preparation. Turn on the oven, sort the shelves ready. Grease and line the tin. The first part of the recipe is the wet ingredients. You weigh the butter out first in the vain hope that the residual grease on the measuring pan will help the treacle and syrup scrape off into the saucepan. It never does. Sugar is next. Dark, crumbly. Treacle third, the black oil of it leaving a dark streak on the scale pan as the weight of it sinks into the yellow melting butter. The dark sugar has started to heat and bubble with the fat, little hillocks of brown. The temptation to stir is strong but I turn to measure out the syrup instead.

The syrup and treacle must always come from tins. There are now squeezy plastic versions of the packaging which feels inauthentic and wrong, in addition to the pollution issues. The tin lids must be levered off with a spoon and be slightly sticky already from past use. The syrup pours out in a golden fall, folding naturally back and forth as it lands in the measuring pan. The first tin I use hasn’t got enough in, and I scrape the last bits out with a metal spoon, where parts of it have turned granular in the corners. A small pool of residue gathers in the top of the tin ‘sill’ between the opening and the edge and I wipe it with my finger in an effort to clean it. Discarded lids and spoons have left drips of stickiness on the worktop already.

In my first proper job in a bookshop, a young person used to come in and order books from us. They were all LGBT+ books, nothing smutty, mainly academic but I remember one of them was the script of Beautiful Thing, the film. (Have you seen it? It’s lovely.) After a few weeks the boy’s father came in and spoke to the manager – his son was no longer allowed to order books and if he came in, we were forbidden to serve him. It seemed terribly unfair and all the staff were incredibly sad and resentful at the measures. He was trying to discover more about himself, educate himself, he wasn’t doing anything wrong. But he was a minor and there was nothing we could do. He never came in again. I remember him too.

In the saucepan, a low heat and only now do I stir it. The sugar, syrup and treacle have all melded into a black swirling mess with half the melted butter floating on the top.

Lastly the spices. The ginger first, then ground cloves. For all the name, gingerbread, it’s the cloves I think that gives the cake its real kick. Cinnamon last. And now the yellow of the butter has gone and it’s all a brown swirl in the pan. Adding the milk, the white liquid immediately sinks below the surface and a stir reveals a flash of pale brown that then mixes to retain the deep conker sheen.

So many of my great friends, the people who were immediately there as support when I needed them, I met through work. We went through miscarriage, break ups, new relationships, pregnancy, birth and redundancy risks together and we all changed jobs or moved on to new towns. It’s the big adjustment you need to make as an adult, that the people who were there for you during hard times, were supportive and gave advice, comfort, shared their own experiences or needed your support too, many of them are no longer in contact. You leave a job, you leave more than the role. Sure, there are ways to keep in touch but how often do you do that? We pass through each other’s lives, a series of short impacts.

Someone I used to work with was an absolute crutch to me when my daughter was little and had to be rushed into hospital one evening having choked on some food. I couldn’t imagine work life without her support, right up until she left the job and I’ve never spoken to her again.

The sensible person has by now washed the scale pan of the stickiness so that it’s clean for the flour. I’ve not always done this in the past but these days I do. It also gives you the chance to run the hot water for the bicarb. I usually weigh the flour and have the sieve and the eggs ready nearby, because this last bit is all action.

But first the magic. This is the part I always love with a childish delight, watching the transformation. You pour in the bicarb, having made sure that it has dissolved in the hot water. It reacts with the warm, sweet spicy milk mixture and bubbles up, a light brown bubbly foam appears across the bowl. It’s immediate, a basic chemical reaction, science experiment before your eyes and never fails to cheer.

You sieve the flour into the bubbly mixture and simultaneously begin to beat in the eggs. I have never managed to do this part without getting some pockets of flour caught in a wet bubble and so have taken to beating this part in with a large whisk to try and get rid of them. As a child it was fun to break open the baked bubble and find a small pocket of flour still powdery inside but as an adult this seems to me like a construction failure. When it’s all mixed, you pour it into the tin sitting on the side and straight into the oven for an hour and change, depending on your oven. And now it’s the clearing up. Or you can try a lemon sauce for serving.

In the week before lockdown, when isolation and worry loomed, I went into the coffee shop I visited every morning near the office, mentioning to the barista that we were being sent home to work. “So, I won’t see you?” she said, with such feeling that I nearly cried. It felt like a link was being broken. It was nearly six months later when I visited a different branch of the coffee shop chain, and there she was, the same barista, and despite our face masks we recognised each other immediately. “Black Americano?” she said, and I knew she was smiling. It was so good to see her again, to reforge the link. If I could have flung my arms around her in joy at seeing her, I would have. I hadn’t known this daily interaction meant so much.

We’re providers, my family, have been for generations. In a basic sense, as farm workers and then as ‘licensed victuallers’ as the wording on the census says, grocers, or pub landlords. And when we were unable or unwilling to make a living providing, then the women had a proud baking tradition. My grandmother cooked, good Sunday roasts for family gatherings and as soon as we’d all helped wash up and clear away the lunch would start to think about tea.

Commemoration comes with meals, rituals around baking or cooking or eating. Memories are based around these too: bone handled knives, homemade apple pie, a slice of plain bread and butter before jam or cake or biscuits.

My mother baked. For a while she made birthday cakes for friends and acquaintances, and our kitchen cupboards had a series of homemade shaped cake ‘tins’ made from sturdy cardboard in the shape of numbers. An old broken Sindy doll of mine served as the topper to cakes of big decorated iced dresses. One birthday cake was a stable with plastic horses. The Shredded Wheat she used as a thatched roof topping caught light with the candles.

Making is a way of sharing love, of taking a moment to care. ‘I’ve made you this’ as a thank you, a comfort, a seduction even. My first date with my husband involved bringing him home and feeding him.

At Bempton Cliffs, we fall victim to the famous Yorkshire fog which obliterates views of nesting seabirds and the sea and so we wait, cups of hot chocolate from the café to wash down chunks of gingerbread. I sit and watch my daughter, whose gaze is following the swifts as they flit back and forth feeding their babies whose heads are stuck out of the nests in the wooden RSPB building. I will compile her a recipe book to give when she leaves home – recipes that stand the test of time, the ones that have been passed on, the ones that will remind her of my love.