“I might as well be comfortable,” says my father, dragging the Chippendale dining chair into the tiny, none-too-clean kitchen. These days, the fashion is for expanding the kitchen so that everybody can hang out in it all day, watching somebody else at work. But this was back in the 1970s and my mother came from a generation for whom the heart of the home was a prison cell with no remission for good conduct. She’d made her kitchen too small for more than one resentful inmate, in much the same spirit as she refused to own more than two pans, so there’d be no scope for culinary ambition, and no chance of excessive washing-up.
My dad seats himself behind where I stand, at the worktop beside the stove. He’s holding a notepad and a pencil. I have decided it’s time he learned to make cake for himself. He’s decided he’ll need to make notes.
My father met my mother at university. She was pretty and lively, her skirts showed delightful knees (it was the war, fabric was in short supply, and she didn’t stop growing till she was 21). And she made really good cake. Not the types he’d known in Germany, frothing with cream and fruit like props from The Merry Widow. These were stoical, wartime, Battle of Britain cakes, with powdered egg and rationed sugar, but a welcome treat on his first visit to her Yorkshire home.
He told us he’d married her for her cakes, and at first we believed him, as small children do. It seemed, by adult standards, pretty rational behaviour. Then we got older and stopped believing it. Obviously. Then it began to seem plausible again. What else kept them together? Who could tell?
In time, we started to make cakes, too, under my mother’s direction. Simple cakes – Victoria sponge, jam buns, marble cake – and squabbled over the wooden spoon afterwards. Saturday was baking day, but every day was cake day, because supper in our household happened at half-past five and it was called tea. She’d grown up that way in Yorkshire, and my father, being German, was used to a similar deal, with bread and butter and salad bits and cold things, and anyway, what meal could be more enjoyable than one that starts with doorsteps of bread and jam, and ends with cake?
So cake was a glue, and a token of affection. On birthdays, it transcended into love. I don’t remember much about the substance of my mother’s birthday cakes, but I do remember her painstakingly adding a Plasticine Bo Peep crinoline to the tin farmer from our toy farm one year, and scattering the top of the cake with his mangled sheep.
But cakes could also shield all manner of inadmissible emotions. As I got older, it turned out to be one of the few effective ways I could say sorry when I’d upset my father. Which was a lot. And when I made him cross, I made my mother cross, too, and then everything was my fault, which is not a situation I would recommend dwelling in for any length of time. So the quickest exit was through the mixing bowl. I ended up doing a lot of baking. I baked because it was easier than saying sorry, and often easier than giving him a kiss. It allowed me to do something Dad liked, without committing myself as to my motives. It could be delivered silently. I could share it, or I could watch him eat, insisting that I wasn’t hungry.
Then one day, home for the holidays from university, I decided it was time for my father to stand on his own two feet, baking-wise. I can’t remember why. Perhaps I decided to try not to annoy him any more. Perhaps the guilt of my furtive mixed motives was too heavy to bear. Anyhow, when my mother was out, I decided the time had come for the lesson.
“So, you start with the butter and the sugar. The easiest thing is to turn the oven on first, and put them in the bowl together inside it while it warms up, so they’re easier to beat.”
My father scrawls away. Even he can’t read his writing half the time, but it keeps him calm.
“How long?”
“How long what?”
“How long do you leave it in the oven?”
He’s a mathematician.
“Well, until it’s kind of squishy, but not totally runny. So you can beat it with a spoon.”
“How long will that be?”
“Er … Let’s just have a look now shall we? Yup, till it looks like this.”
First crisis averted, just about. He makes another note and settles back in his chair.
“Would you like to have a go?”
“I think I’ll just watch, this time. Concentrate on the theory.”
“OK, now you butter and flour the cake tin, so it doesn’t stick.”
“How much … ?” I’m looking in my mother’s secret place for the stash of butter papers that she keeps just for this purpose.
“This has the butter on it, a bit, anyhow, just swish it around the bottom and sides. And then you get a tiny bit of the flour – the flour you weighed out earlier, you see – and you just shake it like a tambourine, all over and round, so it sticks everywhere on the butter.”
“How much … ?” I ought to have anticipated this. Mathematicians like precision. Except that he’s not precise at all in most practical matters.
“And now you get the eggs and the flour, and you’re almost done. You break one egg in over the butter and sugar, see how pale and creamy it’s gone? And then you shake kind of a bit – about this much – of flour in with it, just enough so it doesn’t curdle. And then you beat some more, and repeat it with the other eggs, till they’re all in. There.”
He’s still scribbling away. He’s covered two sides of A4. Did I really make it that complicated? Maybe he’s annotating it for himself as he goes.
“And then you just throw in the flour that’s left.”
“How much will that be?”
This time I’m not ready.
“Well – whatever’s left when you’ve put in a bit with each egg.”
Suddenly I get inspired.
“Let x be two ounces, and y be the number of eggs, so it’s xy minus y times a scattering!”
The mathematical definition of a scattering eludes me. His pencil hesitates over the paper for a minute, then he thinks of some appropriate notation. In sight of the home straight, I gallop on. “And then you just put it into the oven until it’s cooked.”
“And how long …”
“Oh well, as long as it takes to wash up the bowl, and have a cup of tea, and play the piano for a bit, and then a bit more. It’s cooked when you press it with your finger and it more or less springs back. And you mustn’t on any account open the oven before about half an hour, so it’s bound to be quite a bit more than that. But it does depend on the oven, of course. And what tin you use. Oh, and where you put it in the oven. And of course on how big it is. And things like nuts and fruit make a difference, too.”
He’s stopped writing. Probably some time ago.
“Tell you what,” I say, fully recovered from the urge to teach my father to beat eggs, in fact feeling considerably older and wiser for having a skill so arcane it can’t even be expressed on four sides of lined A4. “Tell you what, why don’t I just go on baking them for you for a bit?”
And so I did.
In fact, I’m still baking him cakes, and my mother no longer is, partly because she’s dead. She told me that she never liked baking, with a mother who spent much of her life in the kitchen but didn’t let her children do anything more creative than put the jam in the tarts. No grey-streaked pastry experiments in that household. She never much liked baking, but I suspect she did it as I did, at first – because she could, because it was welcomed, and because – at some level – she felt sorry for this underfed refugee who had nowhere to go in the university holidays, and who lived in a place that didn’t smell of home baking and lavender, and who so obviously needed a home. So she baked out of kind-heartedness and pity, and then for a while afterwards out of love. Maybe, like me, she also baked from guilt, or remorse. But by the end of her life, the dislike of baking, or indeed of any involuntary domestic chore, had overtaken all the rest. She didn’t stop baking – the conditioning ran too deep, and he never had taken out those useful notes I helped him to make – but she now did it in the most slapdash and rudimentary way, all at once for the whole week.
By then it was just the two of them, and she’d given up bothering to pretend that they shared the same taste in anything. So at the beginning of the week she baked a rice pudding (for her) and a Madeira cake (for him) and a bacon and egg flan (for her) and some sort of cargo cult casserole (for him), and they all went into the tiny oven in the tinier cottage kitchen at the same time, in an assortment of recycled Fray Bentos pie tins, old cake tins, chipped Pyrex and whatever else would fit in the cupboards, and they all came out at the same time, whenever she felt like taking a break from gardening. And the cake was soggy and pale, or crispy and brown, but it was still, in her book, A Cake, and she’d done her wifely duty.
So, to the hospitality cake, the pity cake, the guilt cake, the family cake and the love cake were added the duty cake, to be eaten through gritted teeth. In my turn, I added the gluttony cake, the showing-off cake, and the work-of-high-art-because-I-don’t-have-enough-creative-outlets cake, otherwise known as a pink fairy castle, with turrets and crenellations, or Spider-Man climbing a skyscraper, or a gorilla eating a banana – just like any other mum who doesn’t know when to stop. These days, my father lives on his own, and he has learned to make quite satisfactory cakes for himself. He says he still prefers mine. Neither of us questions the motive any more. We just eat.
