Sometimes this chain is broken, for various reasons. I didn’t work it out until later, when I met the recipe again in an unexpected setting and it shattered me.
My father is rather problematic, to say the least (I’ve gone minimal contact), and among many of the problems is his resolutely gendered approach to domestic life. Which means he won’t, and thus can’t, cook anything more complicated than boiling something or grilling something. So I have no idea what the childhood favourite family recipes he described to us sometimes, would taste like, because he could not replicate them, and would never even try, anyway. So almost all the family recipes of import in my family growing up were things my mother brought from her side of the family.
Anyway, in about 2018 I was at a really good medieval reenactment event, camping with a really good group of people, and we’d just spent the afternoon preparing a three course meal of sumptuous food cooked over an open fire and woodfired oven, and we sat to eat it, wearing all our fancy kit, under candle light in a majestic 14th century pavilion, at a grand table painted with the groups heraldry, etc. Excellent experience.
And the last dish as a dessert passed around the table was a basket of small cakes. It came around the table, passed person to person, and it came to me, I took a cake, and passed the basket on, continuing to engage in the conversation, etc, then I bit into the cake, and broke down and cried for three minutes.
It was exactly the texture and flavour of a cake I remember my Uncle giving to me when I was 5, in the house that he inherited from my paternal grandparents, that is now a tumbledown ruin on the other side of our farm. The taste and flavour threw me back 40 years in a second. I cried in part because the taste brought back a sudden flashback to a very dear memory, and I missed that uncle very deeply, and also because we’d lost him suddenly and stressfully in 2011, to medical misadventure.
Here’s the recipe, from Mistress Rowan, who made them:
Makes 4-5 doz
250g butter, softened
1 ½ cups raw sugar
6-7 eggs (depending on size)
2 cups flour (Hald whole wheat)
3 Tbsp caraway seeds
pinch salt
Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy
Beat in eggs, one at a time
Fold in flour, salt, caraway
Oil and flour tins (mini muffin or patty pan)
Fill tins and bake at 150c for 20 mins or until light brown
Sit 5 mins before turning out to cool
There is a sweet spot in timing when they will come out - too early or late and they stick fast!
So now I can make this cake, and remember my Uncle while I eat it.
And it’s been nearly another decade, and I’ve had some life changes, and a very explanatory mental health diagnosis (ADHD, which explains A Lot). And I’ve also worked out why I miss Uncle Robin so very dearly and deeply: Until I was in my teens, he was the only male figure regularly in my life who was both resolutely non violent, verbally and physically, and together with my mother, the only other adult close to me, who offered love, friendship and advice, unconditionally, and without hooks and punishments bound up in it.
My father’s way of being intentionally breaks generational chains of love and support. My mothers, and my uncle’s, kept that thread despite everything my father tried, and still tries, to do, to break it. But it took someone else’s simply prepared recipe to help me understand that.
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