My mother’s dinner parties included ‘exotic’ Smash

My mother came from that curious, half-liberated generation of women who were educated, but not expected to use their education. Imagine being her, getting so far from a little village in Yorkshire to Cambridge University. Of course she was terrified of being shoved back into the kitchen; most of her female Cambridge contemporaries ended up as housewives. She loved her work and she was brilliant at it: in the middle of the cold war she brought the Americans and Russians together in the International Mathematical Olympiad. She was never going to be the one turning carrot roses in the kitchen while the men folk rearranged the world order.

My parents didn’t have friends who just dropped by. For one thing, the family meal would never have stretched to an extra mouth. My mother, the lower mathematician, had a genius for dividing anything into five. Nor was it a household into which we could safely introduce schoolfriends or boyfriends. Nobody wanted the word out that my father, the higher mathematician, ate raw mince sandwiches for tea.

Coming of age in the blissful noon of feminism, with no apparent threat to my independence, I love the idea of cooking for a big table full of happy chat. My husband can’t bear chat and finds multiple conversations confusing; he vanishes into the kitchen as soon as there’s anything to wash up, and sometimes sooner. Like him, my mother was much less engaged by the fine grain of other people’s emotional lives than, say, drill bits or gardening.

But my father’s work brought a constant flotsam of foreigners through town. So there had to be dinner parties. The ritual invitations went out, either to two other couples to whom they owed one, or a visiting professor and his wife, on to whom my mother would tack some other people she didn’t like and didn’t mind alienating. Single people of either sex were proscribed, as requiring too much trouble to pair up.

The good thing about my mother’s dinner parties, from the point of view of the guests, was the absence of nasty surprises. The invitation was always “7.30pm for 8pm” which meant 7.45pm on the dot. The food was one of two menus: “coq au vin” or “boeuf bourguignon”, which was either lumps of chicken or lumps of beef, casseroled with bacon bits, pickling onions and some old wine lees. Plus instant mashed potatoes, and frozen peas.

In those pre-supermarket days, my mother considered any processed food exotic, so in addition to the Smash and the peas, these were also the only occasions when instant soup appeared on our table (asparagus flavour, which sounded posh but cost the same). Or it did until it was supplanted by “paté”, a not quite sufficiently ingenious way of using the remains of the Sunday joint and the remains of a loaf at once.

Her everyday puddings, delicious crumbles and sponges damp with autumn windfalls, were also considered too homely to present to guests, who were instead served instant whip rebranded as “mousse”, or a shop-bought sponge flan case filled with feral raspberries from our garden, whose native population of tiny caterpillars could still be observed from close up, suffocated in the act of fighting their way through a thick carapace of raspberry jelly.

My father, meanwhile, would be dragging out the ancient, clubfooted vacuum cleaner to marshall the hall carpet into stripes, and trying to find a full set of tablemats that hadn’t been put away stained with gravy or trailing their crochet edging. Under cover of the vacuum’s whine, we could detect the plaintive refrain: “I don’t see why we can’t have some nice goose, or a lobster or two. I mean, we don’t have people round very often. I don’t ask very much of you. You may not like the Ramachandrans, but they entertained us beautifully in Kathmandu.” (Or, worse, “They entertained me beautifully in Irkutsk.”)

Luckily, my mother was offstage in the kitchen, pre-boiling the kettle to rehydrate the soup so she wouldn’t get trapped there while other people were sitting around drinking Châteauneuf-du-Pape and defusing the nuclear arms race. His atavistic dreams of grandeur went unheard and unrequited, till the doorbell interrupted them. But that’s another story.

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