Emma’s lockdown lunches were an Instagram hit
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It all began with an asparagus and new potato frittata. I’d announced on Instagram the day before that in this new world we lived in – one where my partner, Tom, worked from home – we would be hosting daily #LockdownLunches together. The next day at 1pm, as promised, I launched Instagram Live and proceeded to cook the contents of my cupboards – potatoes, eggs, asparagus, red onions – all the while chatting along to my handful of viewers and instructing Tom to chop this and that.
For the next month, lockdown lunches became part of our new routine – a promise to ourselves that we’d take an hour a day to stop what we were doing, then cook and eat a good meal. Soon, though, what began as throw-it-together dishes – a spicy gazpacho here, a honeyed halloumi wrap there – shifted to the comfort foods of my childhood – homemade beans on toast just like Gran made them, buttery lemon risotto à la Mum (and Nigella!). Perhaps it was because I started feeling more at ease with our loyal, engaged audience, but light-hearted bickering with Tom gave way to storytelling about cherished food memories. Then, at the end of week three, I rediscovered the battered red book that sat quietly in my desk drawer.
Spicy beanpot with cheese crumble. Red rice and wholefood salad with carrots, currants and parsley. Stuffed courgettes with walnut sauce. Jenny’s green vegetarian chilli. These are just a few of the recipes written in familiar hand on the yellow-edged pages of my family’s recipe book. Started in the 1960s, it was passed down to Mum in the Eighties, then back up to Gran and Grandpa after she died in the Noughties, and now it was mine.
Decades of personal food history lie within the book’s pages – from the tuna fish mousse Mum would make for her and Dad’s dinner parties in their first home together, to the corned beef, onion and potato panackelty Grandpa grew up eating in Sunderland. Notes from Mum such as ‘Don’t forget the moisture in the meat!!’ are inked into posterity, as are the various food stains on the pages – sticky, splodgy reminders that this book once lived, in various kitchens, alongside those who no longer live.