YOU SAY POTATO (Con't.)
They belong to the solanaceae family

or to earth up my potatoes when the stems reached a certain height, it brought me up short.

Like all the other domestic skills I take for granted, it was my mother who showed me what to do in the garden, just as she taught me how to cast off a piece of knitting neatly, and lay royal icing over marzipan on a cake. None of which I think of as "knowledge".

Knowledge, for me, is learning how to conjugate a Latin verb, or bisect the angle of   more...a triangle using a pair of compasses, or commit to memory the dates of the 17th Century Anglo-Dutch wars. I associate such "knowledge" with formal education, school, university, and the things my father inculcated into me from as early as I can remember.

One of my first conscious memories is of my father showing me how the pieces move on a chessboard. Another is an early birthday present of a set of mathematical instruments, each fitting neatly into its matching slot in a velvet-lined, midnight blue leather case.

I do not think that this pure prejudice in favour of "masculine" education is entirely of my own making. We were simply brought up to take a well-run home for granted.

I remember my paternal grandmother - a formidable woman, with a razor-sharp intellect and an iron will - as permanently exasperated at the absence of any real role for her outside the domestic. She had been heavily involved in London local politics in the 1920s and 30s, but by the time I knew her, her intellectual energies were confined to the housekeeping, where she was only happy when performing a really difficult task with panache.

I have a vivid mental picture of her with a smile of satisfaction on her face as she whipped two egg whites into stiff, brilliant white peaks to make meringues on a flat dinner plate with an ordinary fork, the eggs held on the angled plate by the sheer force of her beating.

How to cook

My generation took cookery and gardening for granted - just things our mothers had shown us how to do. I grew up in a world where the selection of fresh fruit and vegetables in shops and on market stalls closely matched what could be grown in any allotment. So I could easily emulate my mother's dishes, without even thinking.

Today, the fruit and vegetables sections of supermarkets are piled high with unfamiliar produce from every time zone and season. The recipes I learned without noticing are almost irrelevant to an adventurous young cook who wants to prepare exotic dishes involving soy beans, or lemon grass, or callalou. Perhaps that is why TV celebrity chefs - demonstrating the latest fashionable dishes from the global kitchen - are so extraordinarily popular.

The tomato and potato were once strange foodstuffs, offering opportunities for an inventive new cuisine. Like them, all the exotic vegetables I just named will happily grow here in Britain.

So now that I have conceded that gardening is something that requires to be learned, I am going to expand my horticultural horizons - resist my urge to succumb to the nostalgia of what I already know. Next season I'm planting chillies, okra and pak choi in my multi-coloured pots among the chimneys.


  less