WORDS BY LISA MARKWELL

A few years later, my mother introduced me to the author Betty MacDonald. Why she’s not better known is a mystery to me – she writes about her life in depression-era America with wit and warmth. She wrote several autobiographical books, including Anybody Can Do Anything and Onions in the Stew, but the one I return to time and again is The Egg and I, in which MacDonald charts the year she spent raising chickens on a wilderness farm far from Seattle. She describes food wonderfully, even when the food isn’t wonderful. Coming from a family of less than enthusiastic cooks, this description of her grandmother’s baking always strikes a chord. (My own grandmother used to make cakes on a corner of a crowded kitchen table, mixing the ingredients with an ancient knife honed down to a shiv.)

Gammy taught us that when you bake a cake you put in anything you can lay your hands on. A little onion, several old jars of jam, leftover batter cake dough, the rest of the syrup in the jug, a few grapes, cherries, raisins, plums or dates, and always to use dripping instead of butter or shortening. Her cakes were simply dreadful – heavy and tan and full of seed and pits. She made a great show of having her feelings hurt if we didn’t eat these cakes but I really think she only offered them to us a sort of character test because if we were strong and refused, she’d throw them out to the dogs or chickens without a qualm.

Gammy said she did not believe in waste and she nearly drove our maids crazy by filling up the icebox with little dishes containing one pea, three string beans, a quarter of a teaspoon of jam or a slightly used slice of lemon. If Mother finally demanded a cleanup and began jerking dishes out of the refrigerator and throwing stuff away, Gammy would become very huffy and go out and get a twenty-five pound sack of flour and hand it to Mother, saying, "Go on, throw this away too. Waste seems to be the order of the day".

In my early 20s and living in west London, I became firm friends with two girls I worked with on a pop magazine. Francesca was vivid and dramatic, with knowledge of Spanish food and a taste for white Rioja. Marielle was half French and taught me more about food in our year of flat-sharing than I’d learnt in the previous 22. She wrote a feature for Elle, where we were working by then, on making an impromptu dinner from what’s in the fridge. In what I’d now call artistic licence when it comes to food writing, our fridge on that occasion seemed to contain such surprisingly smart ingredients as monkfish, pancetta and asparagus.

Francesca, meanwhile, grew sick. When it became clear that she had developed HIV and her career as a writer and artist was to be cut short, we spent time at her family home in Wales. Her mum Elisabeth gave me a copy of a cookbook she had written: European Peasant Cookery. She’s Elisabeth Luard, of course, and that book, and her writing, have inspired me ever since. But nothing she has ever written about food is as poignant as this:

It is very busy, this physical hospital world. Each night we are worn out with the hustle. Decisions must be taken about what to be brought for breakfast, for lunch, for tea, for dinner. Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, shepherd’s pie, side dishes of jelly and yoghurt. Trays are brought and removed untouched. We talk of Chinese take-aways, pizzas from her favourite bakery, we read recipes in glossy magazines – chocolate truffles, caramel baskets with vanilla ice-cream. Poppy [Fran’s sister] is despatched to search the canteen for baked potatoes with cheese, chips with tomato sauce. We steal space for reheating the chosen delicacies in the nurses’ microwave. Forbidden, but stolen just the same.

Francesca pecks at our offerings, smiling encouragement. ‘The mind is willing, my sweets - but the body––’ 

Ephron’s mantra ‘Everything is copy’, has become the inspiration for my own (very slowly developing) book. My mother imposing her coeliac diet on my furious teenage self; how great I looked when I had cancer, thanks to a diminished appetite; the cashew chicken dish which finally wooed my boyfriend into bed, and so on.

I wake up thinking about food, and go to sleep thinking about food. I read cookery books before sleep and last night, looking for a bit of Ephron to end on, laughed out loud at this: 

So this is my moment to say what’s been in my heart for years: it’s time to put a halt to the egg-white omelette. I don’t want to confuse this with something actually important, like the war in Afghanistan, which it’s also time to put a halt to, but I don’t seem to be able to do anything about the war, whereas I have a shot at cutting down consumption of egg-white omelettes, especially with the wind of this new book in my sails.

You don’t make an omelette by taking out the yolks. You make one by putting additional yolks in. A really great omelette has two whole eggs and one extra yolk, and by the way, the same thing goes for scrambled eggs. As for egg salad, here’s our recipe: boil eighteen eggs, peel them, and send six of the egg whites to friends in California who persist in thinking that egg whites matter in any way. Chop the remaining twelve eggs and six yolks coarsely with a knife, and add Hellmann’s mayonnaise and salt and pepper to taste.

I’ll have what she’s having.