Beryl Pearson 1926 - 2012

The vast majority of my readers will have never met my mother, who died yesterday.  However I've decided to write a tribute to her here, because without her this blog wouldn't exist.

After leaving school my mum studied domestic science at college in Sheffield.  She then found a job by getting names and addresses from food jars and tins, and writing to the firms! She got a job as a cookery demonstrator for Cadburys:

I treasure this article about her, written in Home Chat in 1949.  She went to Cordon Bleu, in Paris, where the chefs only spoke French and the temperature of the ovens was precisely controlled by how much the door was open! She then worked in a hotel in Okehampton, and then became a domestic science teacher and married my father.

When I was a child there was always home-made food.  We’d come back from school and the house would smell of parkin (or whatever she’d been making).  My sister and I were encouraged to cook from an early age.  I can remember making sugar mice, and other sweets.  We wrapped brandy snaps around poles and, in those halcyon pre Eggwina Currie days, we always enjoyed eating a bit of raw cake or biscuit mixture!

Cookery lessons with my mum were also educational.  I think my parents would have liked me to become a doctor, so giblets became a biology lesson as well as a useful ingredient.  I was also praised for my surgeons work, when sewing up a stuffed Christmas turkey.  I learnt the French word for cabbage whilst making choux pastry.  When I did acids and alkalis at school, I already knew about them, because my mum had let me add vinegar to baking powder, to make "bombs", to show me how raising agents work.

My mum taught me how not to follow a recipe!  It became a joke in our house when my mum would say “I’m never going to follow that recipe again”!  Upon inquiry we would find that my mum had felt that the author had clearly made a mistake and so quantities and ingredients were changed or my mum had substituted ingredients depending on what was in her cupboard and adapted it depending on what she liked.

There was not much waste either.  My dad was a keen gardener and surpluses were preserved in Kilner jars and later in a freezer.  I loved to have home-made raspberry vinegar on Yorkshire puddings as a dessert.

I’m grateful to my mum for sharing her love of food.  It’s helped my education, and possibly helped me to find a wife.  Food can be a great social thing.  When I was in the scouts my patrol made fine chicken casseroles when others offered disgusting variations on corned beef hash.

I worry about today’s children.  Many hardly know what a vegetable is, and live on a diet of unhealthy processed foods.  But most of all they’ve missed some of the fun of good food - which my Mum was always happy to share...