Recipes

Recipes for food that can be served at book club meetings for 

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page

She was dying of cancer and when I went along to see how she was, she would reach up and pick me a fig off the fig-tree because she knew I like figs, although it hurt her to do it.

I especially liked to go the day she was making bread.  I would help her to cut the furze, and watch her set fire to it in the oven in the wall.  She always put a small loaf on a hot stone only for me; so I could have one all to myself.

The fish I liked best was conger.  My mother would buy the thickest part and stuff it like a fowl and bake it.  It was so good you would never have thought it was fish.

The crab I like best, me, is the spider crab.  I like to see him on the table in a dish: round and with his legs out like a spider, and knobs and spikes sticking up on his back.

The food I like best of all foods is ormers .... My mother knew how to cook ormers.  When she had cut the part you eat out of the shell, she would scrub the black edges with a scrubbing brush until they were perfectly clean; and that took some doing.  Then she would put them between two towels and beat them with a flat iron for half an hour, or more.  They are as hard as leather, but she'd roll up her sleeves; and she had muscles on her arms, my mother ... When they was properly broke up and soft, she'd fry them over in the iron frying-pan; and then stew them in the oven to finish up with.  Some people stew them with onions, but my mother didn't believe in that.  She said it take the taste away and spoil the gravy.  She liked them with just boiled potatoes.

Of course there was no wine, beer, or spirits in our house; but, for some reason, there was always a barrel of cider.  In the early days , it was made from our own apples; but when most of the apple trees had been cut down to make room to build a greenhouse it was delivered from Randall's Brewery in the Truchett.  My mother wouldn't touch it; but my father used to let me have a glass with my dinner Sundays.

I thought of the lovely rich gache Jim's mother made.  He must miss it.