Week 49: Family recipe #52Ancestors in 52Weeks

My friends and family know I enjoy baking. I grew up watching my mum baking every week. She baked for the family, of course, but she also baked for the church, for the bowling club and even for my own school events when I was a teacher. She seemed to love producing cakes, cupcakes, traybakes, pies.. not just a few a a time, but dozens - enough to fill a baker's wooden tray.

She had worked in a baker's shop before she got married and her own mother, my grandmother, had had a love of baking too. It was something that obviously got passed on to her and then to me. I remember that every Hallowe'en, she would bake a 'clootie dumpling' - a steamed fruit 'pudding' wrapped in cloth. Inside the dumpling she would have wrapped small coins or trinkets in grease proof paper and it was always great fun to see if the slice that was cut for you had a wrapped coin in it. Nowadays that would contravene 'Health and Safety'!

For Christmas too, she would bake her Christmas cake. A heavy fruit cake, covered in marzipan and royal icing spread to look like snow. On top there would always be a selection of Christmas figurines. Although as a child I loved the cake, I would always have left the marzipan and the hard icing from my piece for my dad to eat.

I can remember the Christmas she got her Kenwood Chef food mixer from Santa! I think that would have been in 1965. With the whisk for 'eggless' sponges, the K beater, the dough hook and a magical thing called a liquidiser, I think it must her been her favourite Christmas present ever.

But for all that my mum passed down her love of baking, she didn't really pass down a family recipe for baking or for cooking. She did, however, pass down certain phrases like 'half fat to flour' for shortcrust pastry and '4 4 4 and 2' which stood for quantities of flour, sugar, butter and eggs to make sponges and cupcakes.

So today, I decided to bake too. At this very moment my Christmas cake is in the oven. It won't be a patch on hers, but it will still be good.

Comments

2024 Week 43: Lost contact #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

When we research our ancestors and their families, it is all to easy to become a collector of names, dates and places. After all, we want to 'know' who they were and where they lived and when, in order to get a glimpse into what their life was like. We look for photographs of our most recent ancestors to see what they looked like. We trawl censuses, Poor Law Applications, Wills and Testaments to get some detail about their rank in society, their jobs, their financial circumstances. We discover their families, the children they had, the children they lost. We may read their obituaries and gravestones and scan their death certificates for cause of death. Through research, we can slowly start to build up a picture of them, a notion that we know 'who they were'. But something will usually elude us - we will never truly know their feelings/emotions, even if we know the key moments in their lives. Take my grandmother, Christina, who lost her first four children and then anot...

2024 Week 19: Preserve #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

A few years ago, I came into the possession of a family bible. It was the family bible of my paternal grandparents, John McAra and Christina Walker. Until her death in 2018, the bible had been in the hands of my Aunt Inez, widow of my Uncle Will McAra. When I started enquiring as to its whereabouts, I found that it was her grandson, John, who now had it. John himself had no real interest in it at all, so he was quite happy to hand it over to me. However, it was, to say the least, in a bit of a state. The front cover was completely detached and there were many loose pages as the spine of the book was also damaged and detached. I had no choice but to take it to a book repairer in Glasgow, where it was repaired as best it could be. The bible itself had been originally published in Glasgow in the late 19th century. In Victorian times it was common for Christian families to have such a large bible in which they could record events such as births, marriages and deaths. The one I have al...

2025 Week 26 : Favourite name #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

As well as researching my own family, one of the other trees I have spent a lot of time on is that of my daughter-in-law, Lucy. Whereas my heritage is Scots and Irish, Lucy's is English and therefore some of the names I came across were quite different to those found in my own tree. One of my first favourites was a Francis Badger who appeared in the 1851 census for England! He wasn't actually a relative, but an apprentice to Lucy's 3 x great grandfather and who also lodged with the family. I did wonder how that surname came about - did the original Badger have a funnily shaped face? or perhaps a white streak through his hair?? Or was he just an annoying person?? I'll never know, but it was fun to find him! Francis Badger's entry at the bottom in the 1851 census for England. Source: Ancestry.co.uk However, my all time favourite name - and character - from Lucy's tree is a man named Golden Bridge ! He is Lucy's 5x great grandfather and he was born in Essex...

Roots, shoots and stories

Search This Blog