|
The Normal Man extracts
My grandmother was a beautiful cook. She could bake a cake that
you'd swim the channel for. Only she scorned icing. It seemed frivolous
to her, and because of this her cakes never received the recognition
they deserved. Children did not give her baking a second glance.
People who inclined towards high street fashion or fancy dress passed
them by. They were always the last to sell at the summer fete or
the Christmas bazaar. Yet those latecomers who did buy them or the
occasional polite guest who ate out of a sense of waste not want
not found her cakes so delicious, if they were discerning, that
they would fall silent and close their eyes while they ate in order
to feel entirely awake to the taste. They were so soft and airy.
Mountain breezes blew within them, my father said. If there was
fruit it was bursting at the seams with the plumpness that came
from a nights soaking in some favourite tincture. If they were sponge
and sandwiched with a little raspberry jam their yellow height seemed
to defy gravity and the rich smell of vanilla scented the room.
To my grandmother, icing was lacking in moral energy. It was too
worldly. It was an excuse for a cakes poor inner life, denoting
some anxiety on the part of the baker or an insufficiency on the
part of the consumer who demanded it. Only the true intellectual
or the pure in heart amongst her acquaintance saw that the worth
of her cakes lay beneath the so-sad appearance of their nude surfaces.
I tell you this because it seems to catch something of an important
dynamic at work in my family.
|
