From Pink Custard to Hedgerow Ketchup

A journey through culinary nostalgia

It’s that time of year for us northern hemispherians. Time for tartan scarves and cable-knit jumpers, for Instagram photoshoots of children throwing joyful handfuls of leaves and frolicking in perfect pumpkin patches. Even though it’s unseasonably warm here on the English south coast, the days are shortening, the leaves starting to colour, and my craving for carb-rich comfort foods has awakened.

Verity Walcott (food stylist, recipe developer, photographer and writer) has been indulging in some childhood food memories in recent weeks. Her recent reels reminded me of a post I’ve wanted to write since asking my own Instagram buddies to share their comfort food memories. 

Verity’s Earl Grey-infused spotted dick (a British pudding that dates from the 18th century, when the name wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow) looks infinitely more tasty and less stodgy than those I remember from my early school days.

The steamed puddings of my childhood weren’t produced in Insta-worthy ceramic bowls, nor did they have a perfectly browned crust. They were anaemic slimy affairs, made and served in colossal aluminium catering pans. Pans so large that the contents never quite cooked all the way through. School dinners of the 1980s never had a great reputation but, in the unheated Nissen hut that served as our primary school dining hall, the food was the only source of warmth. On winter days, we ate our lunches still bundled in coats and scarves and clung to those bowls of warm stodge before being turfed out onto the cold tarmac playground.

Artist Jacqueline Calladine has a similarly unfavourable memory of school dinners, and the pain of being forced to ingest every hated mouthful of smoked fish, in the hope it would be followed by her own favourite dessert. 

“On the occasions I did manage to eat my main course in time, I’d always hope the dinner ladies (for they all were women) had made shortbread. It always came in thick slabs and was covered with pink custard. I never did figure out why it was pink.”

— Jacqueline Calladine

Pink custard must have been a universal school dinner peculiarity. I too recall the endless speculation about why school custard was pink while custard at home was yellow.

In the days before the invention of artisan Madagascan vanilla versions, the only custard that existed was Birds’ Instant. A soft pink powder that, when mixed with hot milk, turned a lurid yellow. The colour subdued over the years as greater awareness of the problems of E numbers and food colouring prevailed. I loved it as a kid. Now I think it tastes of Play-Doh. My tastes may have changed but the happy, happy memory of Birds’ is still ingrained.

Cultural comfort

There are definite cultural differences in what classes as comfort food. I love salad. I grow and eat a lot of salad veg. But salad as a comfort food? Jen Wise had a very different type of salad in mind to my healthy version when she related her own comfort food memory.

My brother and I would sleep over at my grandparents’ house and my grandmother would make us “salad” for a snack. It consisted of a big bowl of wafers and cookies, mini chocolates and a few pretzels thrown in for some salty with the sweet.

— @jenwiseart

I think this type of salad must be a US thing. When I was a student and visited the States I was startled to hear the word used to describe any mixture of sweet and sugar snacks. Preferably with jelly and/or whipped cream. Of course, I understand the joy this kind of indulgence would give any child. The cultural difference is really just a difference in language.

In any language, carbs, sugars and fats are a consistent delight.

In my case, it was bread with cream [made from] fresh milk and sugar. Another one would be potatoes with cream - just that. And the crust of fresh bread by itself.

— @kasiawarpas

My comfort foods are cake and biscuits and relate back to 'treats' as a child. Always only allowed two. Memories include making butterfly cakes with Mom. I still make jam and love the click of the jar lids when they cool letting me know they are sealed.

— @kerudoccreation

Home baking

The sweetest thing

Jam and jam-making is another common and universally joyful memory.

For me it's the memories that get stirred into the rolling boiling pan of fruit and then sealed into jam jars to be opened over the year. I sometimes label the jam with the memory, for example, the summer fruit picked before my son went to uni, the scrumpy quinces quickly stuffed in a bike pannier.

— @vitamin_trees

Jam-making was a serious affair in our family. ​​​​​​​​​

Even getting out the jam pot was a big production. Big enough to house a Halloween pumpkin whole, it was only used in the autumn berry season. The rest of the year it lived in the deepest corner of the inaccessible corner cupboard. Invariably, by the time it was jam season again, the Big Pot would have aquired in a fine layer of sticky dust and be penned in place by those pots and utensils whose daily use made them worthy of a home at the front of the cupboard.

After several futile and rage-inducing attempts to lift the thing through the immovable barricade of aluminium pots, ceramic and Pyrex dishes, the whole cupboard would be emptied, the Big Pot extracted, and everything else replaced.

My brother and I were enlisted to wash, rinse and sterilise a haphazard collection of glass jars, collected and saved over the previous year. My mother was in charge of the actual jam-making. At least until the tedium of endlessly stirring a vat of boiling fruit and sugar got to her and we were allowed a turn.

We always checked the setting point a little more than was necessary, dripping a small quantity of jam onto a chilled saucer. Instagrammer and nature connector @flourish.wild remembers her family had a special saucer used only for testing setting point. That would never have worked in our family. Part of our joy came from the accumulation of as many jammy saucers cooling that, once cool enough, would be divided between us and licked clean.

All aboard the memory train

Artist, Deborah Rehmat has a similar memory of jam-making paraphernalia. Her family jam pot was a brown enamelled saucepan that served many purposes and sparked multiple memories — not all food-related.

“[It was also used to] boil handkerchiefs, and I used it myself to make coconut ice and fudge to sell at school 'good causes' sales. … Once when making it I missed the setting point and the whole think became a rock inside the pot. But that pot has terrific memories - I've just recalled doing tie-dye sessions in it, with old bits of sheet that I then made into a long skirt.... I was such a little hippy!

— @Deborahrehmat

I still love the smell of hot jam. The steam that fogs your eyeballs when you lean over too far to inhale. And the avaricious joy of accumulating a whole bundle of glossy, purple, jam-filled jars. From now on, I’ll be following Jenny @vitamin_trees’s example of labelling jars with the stories behind their creation, and build a visual and flavourful bank of connected memories.

Always, before the jam-making came the fruit picking. I have a thousand tiny memories of blackberrying in different places and at different times. As many memories as berries I’ve picked, perhaps. Although some are so small and so fleeting, I’m not sure that they truly count as memories. They’re moments, disconnected from time a place. Fleeting, private sensations. Warm sunshine on the back of my neck on an open heath. An unfamiliar dog by my side — offering him a berry and being rebuffed.

Other memories have been told so often that they become family folklore, the mental image clear but questionable. Our elderly labrador was a keen blackberry picker, frequently taking a whole bramble branch in his mouth and pulling to dislodge the berries, along with leaves, thorns, bugs and all. This is one of those stories that’s been told by so many members of our family that I’ve begun to doubt its reality.

Our regular foraging spot of my childhood was the local woodland where I would one day run volunteer workdays. But we grabbed any opportunity. There was always an empty ice cream tub in the boot of the car — just in case. Blackberrying spots were everywhere when you knew where to look.

Blackberrying best practice had rules. Only pick from above dog-wee height. And never from alongside busy roads. The latter, not just because of the potentially high lead content, but because we might absent-mindedly wander into traffic. I’m not now sure how likely either of those were, but rules are rules.

Making new comfort memories

It’s only as an adult that I’ve learned just how many food-for-free opportunities we missed. I was raised, very sensibly, not to eat any and every berry I came across. An overabundance of caution is no bad thing for foraging kids. But I’ve been overjoyed in recent years to learn that many of the berries we avoided because we were told they were poisonous, actually weren’t. Hawthorn berries, sloes, even rosehips, all went into the production of my recent hedgerow jelly. And my hedgerow ketchup has a richness of flavour that’s unlike anything I’ve ever found in a commercial condiment.homegrown

foraged and home-grown - berries and a cucurbit glut

My recent ventures in growing and foraging have changed my own idea of comfort food. Now, I find comfort as much in the growing and finding as in the cooking and eating. I’ve found true joy in getting to know the seasons and the flow from one crop to the next. In the tentative hope of a tiny seed realised in an eight-foot beanstalk, filled with food.

Always at this time of year, I’m dealing with a glut of overgrown courgettes and surplus cucumbers. Trying to eke out the last of the bean harvest and to cram as much greenery into our meals as I can lest any of it go to waste.

The grounding for this came from my childhood, but I’ve made it my own.

My own relationship with food has changed with age, as my ability to grow, forage and cook for myself has also grown. That relationship hasn’t always been the healthiest. At times, comfort has overcome common sense. At others, self-denial became a form of control when I had very little. But consciously acknowledging that I’m no longer under the insistent influence of dinner ladies armed with ladles full of cabbage or questionable puddings, that I can find sanctuary in old comforts while also finding joy in new, healthier foods, is a comfort in itself.

What about you? Were you traumatised by school dinners or do you still crave pink custard? Were you allowed to stir the jam pot, or was coconut ice more your thing? Share your own comfort food memories in the comments.