Treacle tart with vanilla icecream was the best thing that ever happened to me during my dismal boarding-school years in the 1950's on the Welsh borders - a bleak fate for a Spanish-speaking eleven-year-old fresh from the sunshine of South America. And it only happened on the rare occasions that my Edinburgh-born grandmother, my father's mother, fetched me from school on Sunday after church, and brought a picnic.
Edinburgh granny had bright blue eyes, tidy grey hair and wore scratchy hand-knitted cardigans and tartan skirts that smelled of wood-smoke and spaniel. A daughter of the landed gentry from the Borders who married a handsome young Engllishman who flew Sopwith Camels over enemy lines in WW1, she never lost her frugal Scottish habits. House rules were marmalade or butter, never both, on the breakfast toast, porridge left overnight to soak in the lowest oven was eaten with salt rather than sugar (though treacle was possible on Sunday). Elevenses was bread and dripping - delicious with a knifetip of the dark brown jelly that dropped to the bottom of the bowl. Kitchen scraps and leftover bread went to the feed the chickens - bubbling away in a huge two-handled pot at the back of the coal-fired range
London granny was very different. My mother's mother was was a belle from Baltimore, glamorous and unimaginably rich. A tobacco heiress, she never lost her American accent, wore a single string of pink-blushed pearls that was never taken off even in bed ("pearls have to be worn, darling, or they die"). She dressed at Balmenciaga or Balmain in Paris, played golf at Deauville with her friend from Baltimore, Wallis Simpson, changed her outfits four times a day, and smelled of Guerlain's L'Heure Blue mixed fifty-fifty with Shalimar - and just a little of the dry martinis she prepared herself (no olive, freeze the glass before you pour, fold the lemon-peel in half so that you can see the little slick of oil when you drop it in the drink) - the only domestic chore she ever undertook.
Edinburgh granny collected short lengths of string and tied them together to make a new length, wrapped scraps of silver foil into a ball till it was heavy enough to be posted to a society that raised money for war-orphans, and made sure everyone went to church on Sunday to pray for the dear departed, among them my father, an airman missing-in-action in the North Atlanic in WW2. Sunday lunch could be roast lamb with mint sauce (vinegar, unsweetened), or, if there happened to be an old hen past her laying days due for the pot, cock-a-leekie* with prunes from the rack in the attic, my favourite.
London granny lived in a double-fronted house with a basement and lift in Belgrave Square, treated her grandchildren as miniature adults and left us to the care of her below-stairs staff in the kitchen. Which was where I spent many a school holiday perched on a stool beside the pastry chef from Paris, learning to judge just how many eggs should be beaten into choux pastry dough for the teatime chocolate eclairs*; and how to layer a millefeuille with creme pattissiere and strawberry jam while swearing quietly under my breath in gutter-snipe French.
Edinburgh granny lived in the countryside an hour's journey south of London. It was possible, if you asked the conductor politely when you joined the train, to get the engine-driver to stop at the Holt, an optional platformless station, to allow my brother and me to jump down onto the track and make our way across a field by way of the orchard till we reached the back door of granny's house and the safety of granny's kitchen. The house was full of muddy dogs, cats, mice and spiders. In the attic, reached by a rickety pull-down ladder, there were bats overwintering in the rafters, apples wrapped in newspaper on slatted shelves, plums wrinkling into prunes on racks.
Daily chores included gathering eggs from beneath sharp-beaked hens that preferred the nettle-bed on the compost-heap to the nesting boxes in the henhouse. In summer there were raspberries, Highland whites and Lowland reds, to be gathered for jam; first-earlies and late-crop potatoes to be dug from the tattie-patch; and at Hallowe'en, a sharp knive was provided for hollowing lanterns out of turnips - big orange-fleshed swedes mashed with tatties and eaten with haggis at Hogmannay - lit from within by a nightlight and stuck on the gatepost like a severed head to discourage ghosties and witches.
London granny spent her winters in the south of France, ate breakfast in bed from a special wicker tray - orange juice in a cut-crystal glass, toast in a mongrammed silver rack, butter shaped into little curls, coffee with hot milk - and never appeared in public any earlier than midday, wearing a full-length tailored morning-gown in baby-blue nuns-veiling. Edinburgh granny lived south of the Border in England all her life, but never forgot her Scottish roots. Tartan rugs appeared at picnics; there was a patch of purple heather (with a few white sprigs for luck) by the front porch. And there was always a supply on shortbread with a Sottish thistle stamped in the middle, stored in a biscuit box by her bed. High tea on Friday was smoked haddock in milk, or jugged kippers - never grilled (an English habit) - packed into a blue and white jug with their feathery tails sticking upwards, then soaked in boiling water from the kettle, filling the kitchen with smoky fish-scented steam.
Bedtime for my brother and me was chalk and cheese. London granny appeared on Nanny's say-so in a flurry of exquisitely-tailored evening silk, and blew us each a moue-shaped kiss from the door without spoiling her lipstick (Elizabeth Arden's Red Door Red, since you ask). Edinburgh granny never handed out kisses and didn't approve of lipstick, but her blue eyes glistened a little when she sang us a lullaby from our father's childhood - "speed bonnie boat" - and tucked us firmly under the blanket with an eiderdown on top.
Above: my late father, Wing Commander Richard Longmore, with my elder brother and me, Feb 1942.
p.s. All paid subscribers (don't I just love you!) will be shortly in receipt of instructions for choux pastry eclairs and cock-a-leekie, not necessarily in that order.
p.p.s. prints of my watercolours, mostly vegetables and fruit, are available on my website, https://www.elisabethluard.org/shop-1
Wonderful! From cold and somewhat snowy New England, I’ve been transported over the pond. Thank you so! ~Jean
iMarmalade wthout butter? Ssuch deprivation.
I'll be making my second batch of marmalade today, adapted from a Katie Stewart recipe/