I’ll start with my name. Judy - it’s because of a cake. My parents had decided on Susan, an equally trendy name for babies at the time and my four year old sister went and told her friends her new sister was called Judy. Someone’s mum whipped up an iced cake saying ‘Welcome to Judy’, so here I am. And apparently there’s a survey somewhere that says it’s the happiest name.
I can’t remember that nor can I remember eating little green tomatoes rolled in mud or making my first cake unsupervised at about three. My mother did though.
I can remember my father growing vegetables, my grandmother shelling the peas and slicing the beans and my mother boiling them on the Aga. I grew up surrounded by cookery books and food. I remember making vanilla butter fudge with my father. I remember blackberrying, picking so many that I could still see blackberries, and feel the scratches, when I closed my eyes at night. My mother, a biologist and a chemist, was reading nutrition books by Gayelord Hauser and Adele Davies and giving us Hovis bread and salads. Looking back I appreciate how much I owe to her enthusiasm and thoughtfulness about food.
At school we girls had cookery lessons, life skills such as how to make trifle with pink custard – but not how to keep the custard steady while running for the train.
My real break came when I started off my A level year, studying Chemistry, Biology and English Literature – a decidedly odd combination for those days. In fact I went from rabbit to guinea pig.
I was half-ok dissecting a dogfish but I baulked at the rabbit, fleeing the lab and sitting outside with no idea what to do. I realised I didn’t want to be responsible for the death of a little animal just for me to cut it up. I decided to quit Biology. Soon after I was summonsed to head mistress’ office. I was offered Cookery A level instead as the teacher wanted to start it in earnest the following year and would take me on as a guinea pig for the two years. I had a wonderful cookery teacher to myself for a third of my timetable for two years, learned to cook everything in the Good housekeeping cookery book plus a few romantic foreign dishes such as curry as well. I made my sister’s wedding cake with white icing and hundreds of handmade sugar roses, three tiers balanced on little plastic pillars, very late sixties. I made cream horns, béchamel sauce, coq au vin and radish roses. I learned every possible garnish, seasoning, sauce, cut of meat and suitable spread for particular occasion. I learned to plan, prepare, work to time and clean up. And I passed, nicely.
My French exchange family were keen for me to visit them again and invited me as au pair girl for the summer after A level, so for a whole summer I read cookery books, shopped, cooked for the best ingredients and ate with a family of seven, all in French. As well we ate out in fine restaurants so that I learned the best of French cooking, one of the finest national cuisines in the world.
Then it was off to University in Sussex, living on landlady white toast and bacon, canteen macaroni cheese and Mars bars. I got slightly podgy and mildly spotty. Sometime then I remember the contrast of a café which was serving new dishes such as soaked wheat in a chopped up salad and lentil bakes. Soon this was what we made in Brighton flats, leaning towards the economy of beans, salad and rice.
In my twenties I was off travelling further afield, to Indonesia. There I ate hot spicy peanut sauce on salads with tempeh, bean sprouts, and what looked like bee grubs, hot curries and banquets of tiny side dishes with exquisite, and hot seasonings. When we stayed a while in one family guesthouse I made a meal, some kind of Chile Con Carne I think and a trifle. I was wanting to show them something different, and in warm weather with makeshift approximate ingredients, a wok set over an open fire and no refrigeration it was well, slightly different. They ate it and seemed pleased with my efforts.
Then I lived in Iran for a year, another gastronomic joy. Mountains of fresh herbs in the markets, roadside cafes with the best rice in the world and the tastiest kebabs. Chicken and rice baked crisply at the bottom of the pot, Rose flavoured vermicelli ice cream and fresh flat bread with melon jam, pomegranates and oranges. I ate dry goat cheese with nomads and drank lemon sherbet in the bazaar. I travelled to Afghanistan alone in Ramadan and the bus driver bought me watermelons to eat in the daytime. At nightfall we stopped to eat in tiny cafes where we sat on rich carpets eating curries and drinking tea by oil lamp.
In domestic life I’ve cooked, played with flavours and textures, worked things out from dishes I’ve eaten in restaurants, read recipe books for interest and then put them away to cook up something of my own creation. We grew vegetables in the garden and bean sprouts in glass jars on the draining board. I cooked for crowds, baked cakes, tried to colour rice yellow with saffron, figured out how to make chocolate Easter eggs, baked bread, kept soup pots bubbling and had rows of obscure herbs and spices, and bunches. When I had bunches of drying herbs hanging from the ceiling my daughter’s friends wondered it I was a witch or a druggie. It was nettle, a very nutritious herb for making tea.
I followed on from my mother’s interest in nutrition and read widely. Facing serious illness myself I dug deeper, gained help from a naturopath and moved further towards organic foods, vegan foods, food for health as well as for flavour. I suppose I was doing world cookery before world music was being called world music.
For a while I wrote a food and recipe column for New Zealand’s Whole Health magazine. And taught Indian vegetarian cookery, and studied up on wild foods. More recently I taught organic cookery here in Edinburgh at the Rudolf Steiner School. That was fun, I had them out on a Biodynamic farm, milking cows by hand, making butter, harvesting oats and winnowing them. I got them serving up great meals for fellow students and staff
It’s a perpetually disappearing art form, food. Meals are made and they are eaten. My meals are not permanent like Picasso’s pottery plates with pottery food stuck to them or my kitchen worktop permanently messy like Tracey Emin’s bed. I toy with textures, ingredients and seasonings, sometimes with garnishes. The dishes get washed and the scraps go in the compost bin. The diners know the meals will be good but, like me, they forget the details.
What did we eat on May 13th 1988? I don’t know, but I was eating for two and had a thing about mashed potato with grilled cheese on the top. Soon after that I embarked on feeding a child, mashing avocados and catering for very simple conservative tastes that gradually changed over the years. We’d never eaten much meat or fish anyway, but at seven my daughter turned vegetarian and took me even further that way – I wasn’t going to cook different meals each time.
Sometimes I’ve been bored with cooking, perhaps like a hack journalist turning out articles for deadlines again and again and losing sight of the thrill of the scoop. Eating out has usually cured that. Memorable was Korean vegetarian food on a stopover in Seoul. It was cooked by a gifted Buddhist monk from the mountains and gave me a whole new cuisine. Southern Indian ‘Masala Dhosa‘ - rice pancakes filled with the hottest freshest curries in Singapore have to be my all time favourite dish. Maori Hangis are the centre of wonderful gatherings and it’s magical when sweet potatoes and mutton steamed to tenderness in a hot earth oven covered with turf are dug up and shared round. The delicate flavour of Athol Brose at a Burns supper in Edinburgh is part of a traditional meal with a special sense of occasion. Eating in Thailand taught me more artistry with spice combinations. In eating out there’s much inspiration to be had for making raw and living food dishes – but more about that later.
One new taste moment for me was when in Brighton in 2007 and, asking for a shop that sold good chocolate, we were told there was somewhere else selling raw chocolate that was amazing. I was off after the scent, or taste actually. It was delicious, divine. We ate several bars in quick succession and I was ready to believe it had alchemical powers. I went online, bought the raw ingredients and had a new hobby, home made raw chocolate-making. I surfed further and got interested in other raw food. I’ve moved away from chocolate now except for rare treats, but that was what started me off in the direction of Raw and Living Foods and I’m very grateful.
But in the winter I had a deeper fed-upness with cooking, an aversion to going through the motions of dishing up meal after meal after meal after meal, after meal. I was tired and bored of the kitchen, feeling a bit weary from 20 years of parenting. It was time for me to take a break and have my food prepared by other hands. I kept thinking about some kind of a holiday with raw food. I read about the Hippocrates Health Institute in Florida and looked it up on line. For a few hours I toyed with the idea of going on their three week guest programme. Then I scrolled on down the page and read about their 9 week programme to be a Hippocrates Health Educator.. Next morning I woke up in utter certainty that that was what I should do. Within days I had sorted my diary, been accepted onto the programme and booked flights. Two weeks later on Valentine’s Day 2008, I was on the plane.
Staying at the Hippocrates Health Institute really was a transformational experience. Since then my energy and enthusiasm for food and for life has bounced back with gusto. Overall I’d say I’ve added an extra hour of useful productive time to my days. I’ll be happy to tell you about more about that, and about what I’ve been up to since Hippocrates, another time.
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