If. If only. What if. If I hadn’t…. If only I had…. Regrets and spilt milk. Best left in the recesses of the mind, perhaps. But times such as those we are living through now have made us more introspective than we have been for a very long time, because that is what changed circumstances do to the human spirit. When we bake and stir and sweat and broil at the pot, we’re doing more than just make food to eat. We’re gnawing at life, we’re accepting the challenge to look within and without ourselves, to draw a deep breath and focus on the long view. Not the long view forward so much as the long view back from where we have come, back into the mists of our memory. Back to things forgotten.

Through the dark tunnel, if we close our eyes and focus hard enough, we might see our younger selves at the kitchen table and at the stove, and try to put ourselves into the little girl’s or boy’s mind. And there, next to the boy and girl, the dad, and the mom. To beckon towards them to try to get their attention, look, it’s us, here we are, do you see us?

If the boy had only listened to his mom more, and spoken to his dad more. If he hadn’t been distracted when the old man was making his pork pie crust and moulding the pastry into pie crusts with his cleanly washed hands, and committed to memory how he shaped them, focused on his face to see the intent, the near devotion, in his eyes to the task. Hands that knew how to shape wrought iron, now shaping salty pastry to put pork and gelatine in.

If only the old man could have known that one day the boy would go to Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire and stroll into the famous old pie shop and marvel at the row upon row of “Melton Mowbray pies” crispy and golden in their serried ranks, like little pie soldiers ready for battle. That the lad would put his mystic tuppence down and buy one and walk out into the dull morning sunlight and munch it while browsing in the lovely old town’s high street.

If only the old man could know that the boy had not forgotten the introduction to Winston Churchill he had given him when he was barely 10, when he’d done a school project on the famed wartime prime minister, and that this had developed into a deep fascination with a much earlier time in Churchill’s life. That Young Winston’s Boer War memoir was among his favourite books and part of his collection of Boer War tomes. That the boy had delved into it when writing a play about other heroes of that time.

And the potted meat. Why did the kid not pay more attention – on how many occasions, was it 10, 14, 25? – when the father made the beloved cold meat dish right there, in front of him, again and again and again, yet the boy now an old man does not remember anything about how it was made. If the older man now gone could tell the younger man now older than the father was when he died, could somehow impart to his progeny the recipe for potted meat – direct him to a yellowed scrap of paper in a forgotten book, say – the now older version of the sprog would be so grateful he would sob uncontrollably. This while the older, once younger, man wonders whether anyone has ever sobbed controllably.

The older-younger man now very far from being a boy keeps reminding himself to try to work it out. There’s a vague memory of dad being at the stove with lots of meat on big bones in a big pot, boiling. In water. Salt and pepper goes in. Is that a memory or just how you imagine it must surely have been? The bones can only be key to the whole thing, because otherwise how could the end result of that glorious potted meat have been so deliciously gelatinous?

The mincer! That’s what he used it for. The mincer that you knew all your life. He’d clamp it to the kitchen table and you’d help him feed the meaty mixture in, and it coiled out the other end, through the perforation of little round holes. The meat must have cooled down a lot first as it was hellish hot when being taken out of the pot with a ladle and put in a big bowl.

Mom’s big beige baking bowl, surely. The one now mystical in the mind, and given brushstrokes of love and cherished with an intensity not normally afforded an inanimate object. But something that is crafted is no longer merely inanimate, or merely anything. Paint is just paint until it is lavished on a canvass and given apparent form that draws the eye and thrills the soul. Clay moulded by a sculptor creates a face that reflects the man seen in the artist’s mind’s eye, so we see not the sculpture but the man the artist is seeing. And the boy sees his father through the art of the dish he sculpted before him. Yet took scant notes, so now must stab pathetically at the air like Don Quixote at a windmill.

If the parents could see not only the boy but the older girl too, now. How different they are from one another yet how similar in some ways. How they both knit, the sister at a rate that would fill factories, the brother having come to it only now so that he can make something for his grandson to wear. The great grandson, the one of whom it can be said, never was a boy more loved and welcomed. The one his grandad hopes to have alongside him at the stove one day and at the kitchen table. He hopes to learn how to make a Melton Mowbray pie and is determined to find out how to make the nearest he can to that divine potted meat that he used to love spread on hot buttered toast as a boy. And to say to the grandboy, look, this is how your great grandad made his pork pies, and tell him about the town in England where you can choose from hundreds of beautiful little pies and crunch them all the way down the road and back to your car, then say bugger it and turn round and go back to buy another one. Because that’s what grandad did. But don’t read that naughty word back there until you’re grown up.

And look, this is how Great Granny Betty made her meat and potato pie and with her own shortcrust pastry too. And this is how she kneaded her dough for the gleaming loaves of white bread painted with egg yolk to make them shiny and golden when they came out the oven. Look, here’s her loaf tin.

This is how your mom’s Granny Betty made her batter for the kingklip she fried in hot oil in the chip pan on Friday nights, with her chips made the way only she could make them. Ask your mom to show you how to make them the way her dad made them and the way his mom taught him to make them. Pass it along one day.

And in the kitchen far away, the little boy and girl look around to see where the other brother is, the one who…. But he’s not there, because he was no longer there even then. And we remind ourselves that we are the ones who were lucky enough to live long lives, that we know and love each other even now, and that we have never forgotten where we come from. 

And the older man that you are now wants to look around him at the younger generations of this time and look them in the eye, kindly and without condescension, and plead, please see us, we are here now. Talk to us, ask us things. Ask us to tell you and show you things we have learnt and seen. For you too will be old one day and you’ll want to speak to us. But we won’t be there. DM/TGIFood