I started off this post with the title food memories, not meaning memories of food but more the memories that are conjured up by eating food. What I’m really talking about is comfort food and the way food can comfort you by bringing back old and comfortable memories.
I’m going to start with ham sandwiches. To begin with I love bread and I love sandwiches. One of the recent highlights -if I can use that word in this context- of my brother’s recent funeral (maybe highlights is the wrong word after all) was the buffet. I really do love a good buffet. Sandwiches, obviously, pork pies, sausage rolls, salads; yes I love all that. Not long ago I was alone and missing my brother and feeling a little sorry for myself and so I made myself a cup of tea and a ham sandwich and as I was eating it a whole raft of memories seemed to sail by.
I used to come home for my school dinners and the usual sort of thing we would have for lunch were sandwiches. Sometimes cheese, sometimes corned beef but more often than not we’d have ham sandwiches. Nothing fancy, just plain old boiled ham on white bread. Later, when we had moved house and I no longer came home for dinner, my mother would make me up a lunchbox with sandwiches and sometimes her home made cakes.
Later still when I started work in city centre Manchester what did she push into my hands as I left for work? Yes, my trusty lunchbox filled with ham sandwiches.
When I was no longer living at home, I would occasionally spend my dinner breaks having a pub lunch or eating in our work’s canteen although usually I’d bring my own sandwiches. Even at my very last job, just prior to retiring, if you came across me in our rest area I’d be sat with a cup of tea and a sandwich, more often than not ham on white bread.
Probably the very first thing I could make for myself was tomato soup. Well, I didn’t actually make it. No, I opened the can, emptied it into a pan and warmed it up. To this day I love tomato soup. I sometimes even have it in restaurants. I just think soup is the perfect starter to a meal and I must confess, I’m more of a starter and main person than a main and dessert man.
Just thinking about tomato soup brings back memories of sitting in my mum’s kitchen slurping my soup and telling Bob, our dog, that no meat was involved and he was wasting his time tapping my leg with his paw as no tit bits would be forthcoming.
A slightly unrelated picture: Cheese in a French restaurant with a pichet of vin rouge
Mum had a very sunny kitchen and I can vaguely remember sitting there on the day I first started work, eating my porridge and drinking my tea and feeling slightly apprehensive. My dad set off for work on his bike and mum gave him his sandwiches and brew can before he left. Perhaps he wished me good luck as he left, perhaps he just gave a sort of nod to me and mum and then went on his way. Anyway, just as I was leaving, mum gave me my lunch of ham sandwiches and then I walked down to the bus stop and joined the other commuters on their way to work.
The dish that I first learned to actually make was boiled eggs. I like my eggs not too runny and not too hard preferably served with two slices of toast. I don’t have then very often these days but Liz does make really good boiled eggs. When I make them, they either come out hard or with the white not done enough although there was a time when I was much younger when I could do them perfectly. Two eggs and two rounds of lightly done toast make a lovely breakfast.
Boiled eggs and toast: Yummy
Another comfort food for me is a cheese and ham toastie. Cheese and ham are two of my favourite ingredients so why not add them together for a really comforting snack. Two slices of white bread, buttered on the outside. Add a slice of ham, some grated cheddar cheese and chopped onion and slap them either on a toastie maker or dry fry them in a pan. I tend to cook them on my George Foreman grill and they are so nice for a late evening snack with a glass of red wine of course.
Years ago, when I started work on the buses my friends told me that would be the end of my social life because of shifts and early starts and late finishes. As it happened nothing could have been further from the truth. Because we worked such odd hours it seemed to me that me and my colleagues were even more determined to socialise. After early shifts we were down at the busman’s club playing snooker, pool or cards. It was the same after a late shift. Our club was open till 12 so we would be able to get in for a last pint and a quick game of cards or pool. Personally, I have never been interested in cards but back in those afternoons after the end of an early shift I learned to play snooker. I was a pretty keen player for a while; I even had my own cue.
Sometimes we even went down to a local night club, Genevieve’s, where the bouncers used to let us in as long as we took off our bus badges.
After a split shift finishing round about 7 I used to either visit a pub not far from the depot or up to the club and something that they both served was a cheese and ham toastie. Eating one today reminds me of early evenings either in a Stockport pub called the Unity, now sadly closed, or our busman’s club. The only food the club served apart from crisps and nuts was a toastie. I’d usually have one while waiting for either the pool or the snooker table with a pint of Boddingtons listening to the banter of my fellow busmen.
Here’s one final food memory. As we’ve had a certain amount of hot weather lately, Liz and I have been having an increased number of barbecues. We are cooking the usual stuff of course; burgers, kebabs and steaks. We also have some vegetarian elements like padron peppers and mini sweetcorns. We also have been having home grown new potatoes. They are not actually cooked on the barbecue although we do tend to warm them up on the heat when they have cooled down. New potatoes are wonderful with just a knob of butter. At our last barby I ate them with coleslaw which brought back another bus related food memory.
In the last few years of GM Buses, when the government forced the splitting of the company into two separate parts, GM Buses North and GM Buses South, I was working in Metro Comms, our communications room. I was allocated to GM Buses North and I wasn’t very happy as our comms room was in the heart of GM south territory. Originally Atherton depot was earmarked for the North comms room and I bought a house in Newton-le-Willows, a short drive away. Then the company decided to switch comms to Oldham giving me an hour drive to work. Not only that, sometimes in the winter I would leave Newton in the rain and arrive at work in Oldham to find two foot of snow.
Still, we had a nice set up in Oldham, a nice comms room to ourselves which our bosses and supervisors rarely visited and a nice kitchen which we shared with a couple of computer guys and the HR staff. Naturally I usually had sandwiches for lunch but sometimes in the summer I’d walk up to the shopping centre and get myself a baked potato and coleslaw from a street food vendor who had a small stall with a portable oven. One day I made my way up there, ordered my spud and realised I had forgotten my wallet (a trick perfected by my colleagues in the Noble Order of Tightwads) and he said ‘never mind, give me the money tomorrow’ which was really nice of him.
There we go then, that’s my short list of comfort foods, all of which bring back good memories.
What are your comfort foods?
Ok. It happens to all bloggers and all writers. Even the greats like Hemingway and Dickens, they too had a moment when the blank paper stared back and them and nothing, just nothing came back.
159. Review a Cook Book
Not so long ago my team and I had a team night out. It was great for work colleagues to have the chance for a good get together, have a few beers and some food, and talk about things that were UN- work related. It was a pretty good evening, all arranged by me I might add, and the pub I chose for a meeting place was just opposite Manchester’s Chinatown, so when we were all ready it was just a case of popping across the road for our meal.
Letters from an Unknown Author! 