Appetite: A Memoir in Recipes of Family and Food

Ed Balls

Appetite

A memoir in recipes of family and food

‘Wonderful’—Stephen Fry

‘Brilliant’—Claudia Winkleman

‘Joyous’—Caitlin Moran

‘Delightful’—Delia Smith

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For my mum, who taught me to love cooking…… and my dad, who taught me to love eating

Introduction

MY LIFE AND ROAST BEEF

All the family round the table, laughing and bickering. Roast beef, pink but not rare. Plenty of gravy, rich and spicy with a hint of red wine. Heaps of Yorkshire puddings, clean out of the tin. Steam rising from the carrots, broccoli and cabbage. And shiny roast potatoes, crispy on the outside and fluffy within. Just like my mum used to make. My perfect Sunday lunch.

My parents say I fell in love with roast beef when I was just three weeks old, their first child, born in February 1967. The local health visitor arrived at our Norwich home to perform the usual post-natal checks and was apparently aghast at how big I was already. Family folklore recalls her declaring that breast milk was insufficient to satisfy the appetite of this hungry child and recommended I be moved onto ‘solids’ straight away. ‘Just pulp him up a little of what you’re eating,’ she told my mum. I’d only been in the world twenty-one days and already I needed a roast dinner.

My dad drove into Norwich to buy a fancy new food blender. The Moulinex from France had been the must-have kitchen gadget for a few years but my parents had never previously been able to justify the extravagance. It’s striking now, looking back at the adverts of the time, to see how much things have changed since then. The Moulinex was presented as the next frontier for the Women’s Liberation Movement to ‘bring the fight for freedom right into the kitchen’. Wives and mothers were still expected to do all the cooking, but this push-button blender would make things quicker, ‘liberating’ them to throw off their aprons and even allowing them to go out to work as well!

That weekend, my small portion of Mum’s Sunday roast lunch was ‘mouli-ed’ to a smooth paste and I wolfed it all down. Today, the health advice is no solid food for at least the first six months. What can I say? We lived by different rules back then.

Sunday roast dinner remained the most important meal of the week when I was growing up, part of a fixed routine that you could set your clock by. My mum went to the butcher’s on Saturday morning – we had beef, pork or lamb in weekly rotation, chicken less often, and always with Yorkshire puddings. She would set the oven timer before we drove off to church on Sunday morning and when we returned home, around half past twelve, the smell of roasting meat was already creeping under the kitchen door, enveloping us like a huge fuggy blanket as we walked into the house. My parents always had a glass of sweet sherry, my dad carved the meat and we had the BBC’s Family Favourites on the radio in the background, with forces families requesting songs and sending messages to their loved ones serving around the world.

My younger sister and brother and I were expected to be sitting down at the table on time for the food to be portioned out, and there was always a hushed tension as the first of us poured the gravy over our full plates. No matter how many times we tried, for some reason there was never quite enough gravy to go round, and whoever went first had my dad watching like a hawk to make sure they didn’t overpour.

I loved my mum’s food, and cooking was one of the most special things she taught me. And it had to be her, because I can hardly ever remember my dad doing anything in the kitchen. He worked, gardened, carved – and ate – and my mum did the shopping, cooking, cleaning and everything else involved in looking after the family. It was her full-time job until I was eleven, and – Moulinex or no – it didn’t get any easier when she also took a part-time job with the NHS.

My dad did have one foray into the kitchen on the day my brother, Andrew, was born in 1973. He stayed at home to look after me and my sister, Joanna, and cooked roast beef and Yorkshire puddings, which were so good that we took a pudding into the maternity hospital that evening for our mum to eat. Dad declared it a triumph and promptly retired, never to cook again until my mum’s dementia turned their lives upside down.

Now, when my brother and sister and our families get together with my dad, and my mum visits from her nearby care home, it has become my job to cook the roast beef and Yorkshire puddings the way Mum taught me, making sure all the kids are sitting down in good time, and keeping a close eye on the gravy boat as it journeys round the table.

Sunday roast is an important family tradition, but it’s also one I love to share. The night before the general election in 2015, when I lost my seat and my political career suddenly ended, I cooked roast beef for all my exhausted campaign team with twenty-four Yorkshire puddings, just enough for one each. When I was eliminated from Strictly Come Dancing the following year and invited my partner Katya over with her husband Neil, I chose roast beef to welcome them into our family, while their tiny dog Crumble yapped around our feet.

And when our intrepid team climbed high into the African clouds, scaling Kilimanjaro for Comic Relief in 2019, I reminisced with Jade Thirlwall from Little Mix and Love Island’s Dani Dyer about roast dinners and family Sundays at home as we trudged along, a memory just as warming and comforting for them in their twenties as for me in my fifties. We agreed that when we got down, and could all gather again back home, I would cook roast beef and Yorkshire puddings for the team. And I did – easily the most glamorous back garden gathering our family has ever seen.

Little did I imagine then that those kinds of meals with friends would become impossible just a year later in 2020. Most painfully, our cherished family get-togethers with Mum and Dad in Norwich were put on hold. In lockdown, when so many of us had our immediate family thrust together for months at a time but were forced apart from our wider family and friends, I came to appreciate how important food, recipes and the ritual of a meal can be to our collective sanity and wellbeing.

It reminded me how important the combination of food, family and love has been throughout my life, a constant comfort in our changing world, and one which I’ve been lucky to experience in the kitchen as well as round the dinner table, as a dad as well as a son.

I’m a cook who loves to experiment, but there are some tried and tested recipes that have featured in my life so regularly that they have come to take on their own identity, irrevocably linked in my mind with the times I’ve spent around the table with the people I love. What were once just recipes wheeled out for casual meals have taken on a new significance as I’ve got older; as my kids have started to embark on their own adult lives, and my parents have become our guests rather than hosts, we are still connected by the food we love. This is a collection of the meals I love to cook most, and the memories they bring back, from childhood to Westminster to parenting. The world might have changed since 1967, but the best recipes last a lifetime.

ROAST BEEF WITH YORKSHIRE PUDDINGS

Serves 5

This is my favourite meal in the world, the most important recipe my mum taught me and one I have used again and again. It needs roast potatoes, parsnips, carrots and lots of green vegetables. There will definitely be leftovers: cold meat to eat on Monday with pickles; spare gravy to make a rich shepherd’s pie; and, best of all, potato and vegetables to be mashed up with salt, pepper and a beaten egg and fried in patties in a pan or baked in the oven to make lovely bubble-and-squeak.

INGREDIENTS

1kg beef joint (I always go for unrolled sirloin, but topside is also fine)

1 tbsp Dijon mustard

Salt and pepper

1 tbsp plain flour

Slug of red wine (optional)

450ml beef stock (I always try to use liquid stock – chicken stock is also fine and makes a lighter gravy – or use the vegetable cooking water if you don’t have any stock)

FOR THE YORKSHIRE PUDDINGS

85g plain flour

Pinch of salt

2 eggs

Dash of water

140ml whole milk

Vegetable or groundnut oil

FOR THE ROAST POTATOES

8 large potatoes, peeled and halved

4 tbsp olive oil

Salt and pepper

METHOD

Put the potatoes (and parsnips if you want) in salted water, bring to the boil and simmer for 10 minutes before draining.

Make the Yorkshire puddings: put the flour in a bowl with the salt and whisk in the eggs and the dash of water; then slowly beat in the milk to form a batter – I usually make the batter a couple of hours in advance, but last minute will also work. Cover and set aside. Turn the oven on to 220°C/425°F/gas mark 7. Drizzle the olive oil in a baking tray and put in the oven to heat up.

Salt the bottom of the joint and place into a roasting pan. Smear the mustard over the fat and season generously. Put into the hot oven and cook for 25 minutes. Then turn the heat down to 180°C/350°F/gas mark 4 and cook for a further 25 minutes for pink, 35 minutes for medium, or 45 minutes for well done.

At the same time, tip the par-boiled potatoes into the hot, oiled baking tray, season with salt and pepper and cook for 50 minutes – the same time as the meat if going for pink. (If you are cooking the meat for longer, simply put the potatoes in a little later.)

Pour a dash of vegetable or groundnut oil into the individual indents of the pudding tin, then put it in the oven. When the meat is done and taken out, turn the oven up to 230°C/450°F/gas mark 8. The meat and roast potatoes should be taken out of their roasting tins and rested, covered in tin foil.

When the pudding oil is hot, pour off any excess oil – it should sizzle if you splash a drop of water on the tin – and divide the batter equally. Cook the puddings in the oven for 15 minutes, making sure not to open the door before then.

While the puddings are in the oven, cook the vegetables, add a tablespoon of flour to the meat tin and put it back on the heat. When it starts to sizzle, add the red wine (if using) and stir. After 30 seconds, add the stock, stir to get rid of the lumps and leave to simmer and thicken. Carve the meat into slices, pouring the juices back into the gravy. You can always add a bit of water from the vegetables if you need more gravy, and add salt and pepper if needed.

1

GROWING UP

I started school in 1972. Every morning, from the age of five onwards, I would wave to my mum as she stood at the window and walk with my friends down our road, over the main village street, and down School Lane to the playground of our small primary school. I can barely remember any of the seventy pupils being walked to school by their parents.

In the holidays and at weekends, I would head off every morning to play with my friends in the fields around the next-door farm. We’d go back home for lunch and then head out again all afternoon for another round of Hide and Seek. None of our parents ever knew where we were and never seemed to worry as long as we came home in time for dinner or when we were hungry, whichever was sooner.

The food at Bawburgh School was good and stodgy, cooked in the small kitchen. It’s appalling to recall now, but my friends on free school meals were made to stand at the back of the line and wait till everyone else had been served. At morning break, we each had our mandatory small bottle of government-provided milk. In the cold winter of 1973, the milk was often frozen – as were we, sitting in our classrooms in coats and jumpers. The miners’ strike and the Three-Day Week meant we had no heating, but school carried on as usual.

The UK had moved over to ‘new money’ in 1971 and we got used to measuring our purchases at the local village shop in pennies. A can of coke cost 5 ½p, a bag of crisps 3p, while a penny could buy you eight ‘fruit salads’. The chewing gum machine outside only took 2p coins, which seemed extortionate, even for the pleasure of turning the handle and hearing the pack of gum drop down in the machine.

Comics were a much more extravagant purchase, which is why we pored over every story and cartoon they contained. Later, after we moved to Nottingham in 1975, I went down to the local newsagents every Saturday with my 50p pocket money to buy a copy of Tiger & Scorcher or Roy of the Rovers, a quarter of pear drops or pineapple chunks, and put the 20p left over into my Post Office account to save for Christmas presents.

Our house in Norfolk had a telephone, but it was a ‘party line’ with our neighbour two doors down, so if you picked up the receiver and Mrs Hindle was on the phone, you had to hang up and wait for her to finish. We had a black-and-white television – it wasn’t until we moved to Nottingham in 1975 that we could watch telly in colour. For children like us, it was the era of Tiswas and Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, Uri Gellar bending spoons, and the whole family sitting round to watch Bruce Forsyth’s Generation Game on a Saturday night to see who would win a fondue set or matching suitcases. Christmas didn’t start until my grandma arrived with the bumper two-week editions of the Radio Times and TV Times so we could see what would be on all three channels.

There was an order and ritual about almost everything in life: the milkman delivering two pints every morning; the man coming round every week to collect the money for my dad’s football pools; and a lorry driving down our close once a fortnight delivering bottles of fizzy pop – lemonade, cherryade, cream soda or dandelion and burdock – and collecting the empties.

In that world and at that young age, my cousin Frances seemed like the most glamorous person imaginable. She was ten years older than me, wore all the latest trends, and – most exciting of all – had a Saturday job at the Wimpy in Sheringham. When we went to visit my uncle and aunt up on the north Norfolk coast, Frances would entertain me, my sister and brother for hours, talking us through the menu she’d serve at weekends.

We swooned over her vivid descriptions of huge banana splits slathered with cream and sprinkles, Brown Derbies dripping with chocolate sauce and knickerbocker glories in glasses so big you needed an extra-long spoon to reach the tinned strawberries at the bottom. We watched Frances leave for her shift on a Saturday, dressed in her brown uniform and flat shoes, and in our dreams, we went with her, agonising over whether or not to have cheese on our hamburgers, and which dessert we’d choose.

But that’s where it stayed – in our dreams. We went to Sheringham every year for our holiday to look after the house and dog – and sometimes Frances – when Auntie Doreen and Uncle Frank, the local Barclays Bank manager, went off for their allotted fortnight in a Portuguese time-share. We had packed lunches on the beach and freshly cooked donuts from a stall on the front. But we didn’t go to the Wimpy bar or any other restaurants.

My parents thought eating out was indulgent, wasteful and not for people like us – especially since my mum, as she always reminded us, could cook just as nice a meal for half the price. Practically the only meal we ate not cooked at home was takeaway fish and chips, usually on a Friday night, wrapped in newspaper and hurried home in the car with the tangy smell of salt and vinegar wafting over the back seat.

Even on holidays, we never ate out in cafés or restaurants, certainly not at the north Norfolk coast, but nor when we travelled further afield. Our customary summer holidays in Sheringham stopped when I was ten: Frances had grown up and left home, and that meant my uncle and aunt could book their Portuguese timeshare slot outside the school holidays. But for our family back then, foreign holidays were too expensive, and we had to make do with the best that home could offer.

Instead, Mum and Dad booked holiday cottages in the wilds of England and Wales. Their idea of holiday fun was to climb up to the top of the Long Mynd in Shropshire, Scafell Pike in the Lake District or the Welsh Black Mountain, find a sheltered spot and light the Calor Gas stove. My dad would fight to keep it alight as the wind roared around us and we waited for the kettle to boil. Then Mum would pour sachets of cup-a-soup into plastic cups, the salty, lumpy liquid a relief not so much for our appetites as our freezing cold hands.

As a child, I loved those trips across Britain. Unfortunately, my dad wouldn’t leave things there. While on our holidays, he had a liking for days out in the car to see what we could manage to cover between breakfast and dinner – all the Lake District lakes, all the castles of Aberdeenshire – never getting out to enjoy them but just ticking each one off the list and cracking on to the next. These trips were so boring and my little brother invariably got car sick as we swung round country lanes. But we were on a schedule with no time to spare. Lunch was eaten on the move and my dad would even lean out of the driver’s seat to take his photos while still motoring along – just to have the blurred evidence of another landmark ticked off.

On those long days in the car, we yearned instead for a windy hike up a steep hill to drink something hot and powdered out of a plastic cup. Better still, we prayed for rain. Dark clouds meant that both car trips and mountain hikes were put on hold, and even if Mum and Dad felt obliged to take us on a soggy walk into the local market town to peer in the shops and buy fresh bread for lunch, just so we’d done something in the day, we would soon return to the isolation of our moor-bound holiday home. Safe and dry inside, with the fire lit in the grate, I could settle back and read a book, or indulge my eleven-year-old obsession with dice cricket.

The closest we came to actually eating inside a restaurant in the 1970s came when an American academic colleague of my dad visited London with his family for a sabbatical. My parents had got to know him before I was born when my father was teaching on the American West Coast, and kept in touch when Dad