Blackberries, Butterfly Wings and Minsky Moments
Patricia Byrne
Her recipe collection is on my kitchen table, held together in a sheet of folded cardboard tied with a thick, black elastic band. She had celotaped notes on the folder cover: ingredients for Festive Mince Pies, ginger-bread, and beetroot with apple and red jelly. Inside, she had used odd pieces of paper to write her recipe details - curry sauce ingredients on the inside of a Christmas card page; red biro writing on fragments of a bank document giving details of an Easy Lemon Cake. And then there are the glossy leaflets she had collected - Woman's Own Guide to Success with Cakes & Pastries; Supervalu Sweet Stacked Pancake Sensation; the McDonnell Good Food Kitchen guide: I bake it better with stork.
In the middle of this bounty of food ingredients, I had come upon smudged ink notes for a mixture of methylated sprits, linseed oil and turpentine to be used for removing furniture marks.
The hand-written notes for 'Nine Flighty Butterflies from One Easy Recipe' had started us off as children on our cooking careers. Now, I feel again the thrill of slicing the tops of freshly-baked buns, cutting the butterfly wings from the sponge pieces and placing them triumphantly on top of thick, whipped cream.
But it was jam-making that really took my mother's fancy. I thumb through more than a dozen pages of step-by-step jam-making instructions for bramble apple, blackberry, gooseberry, raspberry and autumn-medley mixtures. The pages are stained and smudged but I am glad that I rescued this bundle of sheets from the empty house after her death.
This morning I lowered the blind in the front window against the yellow autumn light that speckled the brown edges of the leaves on the horse chestnut tree outside. It is a day for fruit-picking. The recipes, jars and ingredients are ready. I do a whirl-wind tour of the house and put away clothes in a back-bedroom wardrobe, a room long vacated by my now grownup and departed son. My eyes are drawn to the cherry-red framed picture on the wall at the head of the bed, a rare display of artistic talent by my first-born, It is a child's drawing of an autumn scene: three large, brown horse-chestnut leaves stuck at random across the picture. Each leaf is outlined with bright red paint, the colour chosen when the picture was brought proudly to be framed. Two painted figures, with a dog nearby, appear to leap and dance above the ground among the swirling leaves. As they jump, they lift their arms toward the blue sky above them. There is a house in the distance. I marvel at my son's untutored strokes, capturing the magic of child's autumn dance under a blue sky. Now, in my mind, I see a group of children under the horse chestnut tree in the front, heaping conkers into a small wheel-barrow and piling them beside the garden shed in the back.
House chores finished, I set off to gather blackberries by the estuary. I kick golden rattling leaves, stoop to pick a prickly horse chestnut capsule which is starting to split open, like a crab shell, to reveal twin conkers side by side in a milk-white bed. I search out the blackberries in the hedges, scratch my arms with thorns, and feel nettle scotches on my legs. I reach for bundles of ripened berries which fall into the container with a mere shake of the branch. I stuff soft berries into my mouth, my fingers purple-stained from the juices. Late, I prepare the fruit, remove the stalks, take away any under-ripe berries and simmer them with water and lemon juice, add sugar, then rapid-boil the purple-black mixture.
The evening news on the radio is filled again with credit crunch stories and turbulence on financial markets. A man is explaining about a Minsky moment - which gets its name from the now deceased American economist, Hyman Minsky. I am trying hard to understand what the man on the radio is saying. It seems that a Minsky moment happens when investors take on so much risk that the returns they make are no longer enough to service their debts. When this happens, lenders call in their loans and investors are forced into a fire sale of their assets. Hard times are here again. We haven't had it so bad since the 1929 Depression. On the radio, they debate about how long the economy will stay in the doldrums.
I fold my mother's recipe notes; put them back into the cardboard folder that holds her finger prints; think of her setting out jam jars on a kitchen table in a yellow pebble-dash bungalow; imagine myself running from school through crackling leaves with the tastes of hot blackberry pie and thick custard on my tongue.
My son phones. Life is stressful, Millions are being lost: he is worried about compliance issues. Lehman Brothers have gone to the wall. How could this happen? He has never heard of anything like this before. I listen to him, offer encouragement. A funny thought occurs to me: I feel like asking if he has walked through fallen autumn leaves or picked conkers this year. But I don't say this; it wouldn't be well received. I tell him to look after himself, get a good night's sleep, eat properly.
The blackberry jam is setting nicely in an assortment of jars on my kitchen table. The evening sun is now low in the sky, no longer shedding light on split conkers under the tree in the front garden. A child who once danced among autumn leaves has grown into a young man stressed by the turbulence of financial markets. I am happy that today I opened once more my late mother's recipe folder and set out on the annual ritual of folding the fruits of autumn into winter sustenance.
