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Rice Pudding
    Mother was desperate to be a homemaker, a woman capable of sewing on a button, darning a sock or icing a fairy cake. In the early evening, sitting under the standard lampin the lounge, head tilted and the tip of her tongue pinched between her lips, she spent what seemed like hours trying to thread white cotton through the eye of a needle. ‘Let me do it’ was met with a sigh and ‘I’ve nearly done it now’. Try as she might, buttons popped off within a day or two, toes poked through neat but ineffective repairs, icing pooled into the craters in her cakes or, on the rare occasion they rose, ran down the sides in rivulets and stuck the flowery paper cases to the plate.
    Mrs Poole made the beds, fed the winceyette sheets through the ironing machine with its long cotton-covered roller, and would sew a stray button on to my school shirt. Mother made up for this humiliation by making rice pudding. Warm, milky rice. Rice that never thickened the sweet liquid it floated in, so what should have been a creamy spoonful the texture of risotto had to be sipped, like broth. The skin browned and puffed into a black-and-gilt dome. The kitchen smelled like a kitchen should.
    The skin was removed in one perfect scoop and deposited in my father’s bowl. ‘It’s the best bit,’ he used say. Then the round rice was fished up from the depths and divided between us all. Then she would pick up the enamel tin and spoon out the milk. ‘Anyone for jam?’ she would say, passing round the Hartley’s strawberry. I was the only taker, stirring the sweet glop into the milk then regretting it when it stayed in blobs and sank to the bottom of the dish.
    Milky milky rice is considered a failure by rice-puddingaficionados, yet I preferred it to her occasional successes. Warm sweet milk was what a mother should smell of.

Butterscotch Flavour Angel Delight
    BUTTERSCOTCH FLAVOUR: Sugar, Modified Starch, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, Emulsifiers (Propane-1, 2-diol esters of fatty acids, Soya Lecithin), Gelling Agents (Disodium phosphate, Diphosphates), Milk Protein, Lactose, Colours (Plain Caramel, Annatto, Betanin), Whey Powder, Flavourings, Salt.
    Emptying a sachet of Angel Delight into half a pint of milk and whisking it for a minute and a half was as near as my mother ever got to making modern desserts. She remembered which flavour – Strawberry, Butterscotch, Chocolate or Banana – she had served last, and never risked boring us with the same flavour twice in a row. Butterscotch and Banana were the only truly acceptable flavours to us. We ate the others to humour her.
    Butterscotch Angel Delight was magic. Magic in the way that if you stood over it for five minutes you could actually watch the powder and milk thicken into a creamy dessert. Magic in the way it seemed to thicken further once you put it in your mouth. Magic in what seemed like a mean portion in the bowl became almost too much of a good thing in the mouth. Magic in the way that itmanaged to taste of both sugar and soap at the same time.

Mashed Potato
    At least twice a week my mother would make mashed potato and pile it in great, buttery, cloud-like mounds next to boiled gammon or lamb chops. It was the one thing my mother couldn’t get wrong. But then, good mash isn’t about cooking. It’s about the ability to beat lumps out of a cooked potato. Anyone could do that. Except, apparently, a school dinner lady. Mash was the only truly glorious thing Mum ever made.
    There was no moment so perfect as when you squished her mashed potato into warm parsley sauce or hot gravy with your fork. The soft potato pushing up in wavy lines through the gaps between the prongs, curling over on itself, stained with dark drops of gravy. No roast potato stuck to its roasting tin; no crinkle-cut chip; no new potato with chopped mint could ever get the better of a dollop of creamy mash. I looked forward to it like I looked forward