Losing Dad

On those Sundays when he wasn't working an extra shift to keep up the mortgage payments on a house he never expected to own, my dad, a telegraphist by trade, did the prep work for Sunday dinner. (Dinner, for those unfamiliar with a fading British vernacular, is the meal referred to as lunch in superior circles; and the feast called dinner by those who hunt foxes is known as tea to those who race pigeons.) Within the bounds of a cuisine that largely consisted, in British working-class households during the 1950s and 60s, of meat and two veg followed by "afters", in the form of some kind of spongy pudding leaking strawberry jam into a lake of custard, my parents, Denis and Kitty, were excellent cooks. And they both considered the fact that we had enough to eat a direct reflection of the principle of "fair shares for all", first introduced into British politics in 1945, only to be demolished by repeated blows from an iron handbag four decades later.

The absence of fair shares from my father's life prior to 1945 had been particularly acute. My paternal grandfather died when little Denis was three years old, plunging Florence ("Flo") Haney into poverty virtually overnight. Three of her four sons were sent to an orphanage, the fourth to an aunt and uncle who could afford to feed him.

As the orphanage contingent trickled home at the age of 14 and found employment with the Commercial Cable Company, where their father had worked, life became a bit less desperate for Flo. Even so, circumstances still made skimpy meals unavoidable. Food had to be stretched. Senile bread was rejuvenated by immersion in milk. A slice of fresh bread packed an increased calorific punch when smeared with condensed milk. Or you could daub it with a farthing's worth of beef dripping and add a dash of salt. Any bread that survived this onslaught of resourcefulness became bread pudding. Spotted dick was usually made on a Sunday and then rationed out to provide no-frills teas (that's dinners, remember) for a week. Saturdays saw Flo pushing the economic envelope with the purchase of eels, bought from the bucket and chopped up still squirming, or, in a very good week, rabbit, bought off the hook and skinned at home.

This was food keyed to survival. Perversely, however, I came to develop such an affection for this utilitarian fare - which has little to commend it nutritionally and absolutely nothing to commend it aesthetically - that from an early age I would actually feel short-changed when, for instance, my mother handed me a bowl of peaches, sweet wafers, and ice-cream. Why? Because what I really wanted at that moment was a slice of spotted dick. Or a wedge of my dad's canary pudding - a deliciously yellow hemisphere of sweet sponge topped with a plop of treacle. Or maybe, instead of dessert, some bread and beef dripping.

My discovery that in some circles an addiction to the lowlier comestibles is viewed as a character deficiency came at the age of 11, when I gained a place at grammar school. There, I quickly learned that I was being trained to disguise myself as a member of the class (middle) into which a fair proportion of my companions in academic adversity had been born. Never again would I dream of evincing in public a passion for condensed-milk sandwiches.

Some of my most vivid memories of the food I enjoyed in my youth relate to those dished up during ritual Saturday visits to my grandparents, who lived in a cavernous house in the London borough of Redbridge. A major source of warmth for the building was the stove, from which my grandmother would triumphantly extract glistening platefuls of kippers, mackerel, and impossibly yellow haddock - or, every other week or so, supremely portly bangers. The customary accompaniment to this steaming cascade was outsize slices of white bread (fondly referred to as doorsteps) slathered with margarine, along with multiple mugs of murderously hot and tooth-dissolvingly sweet tea that necessitated numerous trips to the outside lavatory.

On "banger weekends", the arrival of food would be announced by a crescendo of sizzling and popping, signifying that the next hour would be spent disposing of sausage after sausage after sausage. My grandmother would scoop them, as plump as the pig they came from and perfectly browned, straight from her enormous frying pan on to superheated plates. We would hack at them while they were still too hot to eat and shimmering with the lard in which they had been cooked. The savoury sauce mixed splendidly with the golden yolk of the accompanying eggs. Relishing every last speck of grease, we mopped up the resulting runniness with yet more doorsteps.

At the end of a day there, my parents had a tough time dragging me home. But I would remind myself that next Saturday night would be fish night, all right in its own way, and that two Saturdays from now I'd once again sit down to the best food, the very best food, in the world.

In November 1998, I visited my father for what I realised, the moment I set down my suitcase and embraced him, would be the last time. (He and my mum had divorced in the 70s, and I had moved to America.) Dad was all skin and dry bones, suffering from a serious lung disease, and the effort of eating left him prostrate for an hour.

The visit to my father was preceded by a sojourn with my sister, Joy - an artistic type and sometime vegan who plays the part of patient vegetarian whenever her unrepentantly carnivorous brother drops in. I asked to be escorted straight from the airport to the nearest concession offering what people of my background regard as a classic "stoke-up". Having received the fix I craved - egg, sausage, bacon, baked beans, fried bread, fried mushrooms, fried tomatoes - I resigned myself to a couple of days of wholesomeness relieved only by solitary excursions to a cafe nearby. Although I was genuinely grateful for the two excellent dinners that my sister cooked for me - fresh organic pasta with Swiss chard; moussaka with Puy lentils and eggplant - I was basically looking forward to the culinary monstrosities awaiting me at my father's apartment.

I wasn't disappointed. Lunch on my first day at my father's was a childhood midweek standard: sausages with onion gravy (meaning a viscous slurry of lifeless onions and irrigated Bisto), excessively buttery mashed potatoes, and the soggy tinned legumes commonly referred to by generations of English schoolchildren as cannonball peas. This dead weight of pork, starch and distressed chlorophyll was followed by a ready-made treacle pudding disgorged from a plastic tub. The whole repast took my father more than an hour to prepare and cook as he moved at a snail's pace around his minuscule kitchen. And it tasted just as good as it had 40 years earlier, when Denis could put together the same meal in a matter of minutes.

The following day, he produced the lunch that will always remind me of childhood winter Sundays-chicken injected with a pound of butter, quartered potatoes roasted in the pan juices, carrot slices the size of silver dollars, and tepid broad beans as big as a bulldog's testicles. Tea (eggs, bacon, baked beans, and a hefty slice of two-day-old bread pudding) followed barely three hours later. My father then retired for the night, a little more breathless than usual.

The following May I flew to London for his funeral. During the two days preceding it, Joy and my wife, Pam, prepared a huge amount of forbiddingly healthy food for the prospective mourners. Armed with several bottles of Sancerre, I retreated to my sister's studio to pen a funeral oration. The wine disappeared, the speech got written, the funeral came and went. Disbelief and desperation grappled with the gratitude I felt for the love that my father had always shown me.

The day after the funeral, I took a wander through Crystal Palace Park. Towards the end of my mildly hung-over circumnambulation, I came across a brightly painted van reeking of cheap meat and displaying a menu blackboard headed by the two words that mean more to me when conjoined than any others in the English language - "bacon" and "sandwiches". In response to my order, the proprietor hauled several ribbons of scrag end of porker from a stainless-steel trough loosely covered with a piece of grubby polythene. A moment or two later I was handed a steaming heap of pig and squashy bread.

To sever the rind as surgically as possible and thus prevent it from stretching and snapping and scattering spots of grease several feet in all directions, I bit down hard. As I did so, a British Airways Concorde whistled overhead, shattering my concentration for a split second, during which I felt as nervous as an antisocial caveman surprised by an intruder with a bigger and better club. Instinct then reasserted itself. I chomped on grimly. The park began to empty. Another sandwich, then another. Grief, greed, and the need for another shot of Sancerre achieved perfect equilibrium. I headed home.

Two years later, I returned to London to visit my sister. Time had turned out not to be a great healer, but I was determined to squeeze as much pleasure out of my trip as a continuing sense of loss might allow. Food, of course, would be foundational to this endeavor. Upon my arrival, Joy, guessing quite correctly that green tea and tempeh would not be at the top of my want list, announced that a new and reputedly halfway decent cafe had opened in her neighbourhood. Two seconds later we were on our way.

The food was divine - the two fried eggs radiant, the chips uniformly golden, the bacon pleasingly pink and rimmed with an appropriate amount of fat, the beans properly steeped in their pallid tomato-flavoured sauce, the sausages a scintillating shade of brown and speckled with a spot or two of mustard, the tinned, skinned tomatoes a study in scarlet, the mushrooms ragged at the edges and oozing dark juices, the fried bread as crisp as a crouton. The tea was as bitter as hops. I was home again.

The week that followed was my idea of idyllic. Sadness was tempered by the fondest of memories, and my sister and I grew closer than ever. She admitted that it was only recently that she had begun to be able to think of Denis without bursting into tears. I owned up to feeling perpetually waterlogged. She fed me massive quantities of expertly prepared organic food and never complained when I disappeared to dispose of a sausage or two. And on the Monday on which I departed, we sat down in her backyard to a lunch that we had put together as a fairly authoritative re-creation of the teas we had eaten as children on summer Sundays. My sister avoided the meat, of course, but appreciated the historical accuracy of the pile of cold baked ham and the hatbox of a pork pie (with a hard-boiled egg imprisoned at its core) that I had purchased. The fruits of the sty were accompanied by good, crisp lettuce, quartered tomatoes, spring onions, cold new potatoes, and dollops of an organic mayonnaise that bore a striking resemblance to the "salad cream" without which no basic British salad was complete four decades ago. In between bites, I gazed at my sister's beautiful garden and conjured the time and the place in which we had first enjoyed meals like this one.

It's late on a summer Sunday afternoon in rural Essex, circa 1961. I'm looking at a small garden, plus vegetable patch, situated behind a modest semi-detached house. There's a rabbit dozing in its hutch. Butterflies bask on a ramshackle rockery. A hedgehog is tottering through the daffodils. The family cat seems frightfully proud of the sparrow between its teeth. The local crow population is making its habitually raucous return to a stand of enormous elms. The bells of the Anglican churches are sounding for evensong. (I'm not making any of this up.) Cutlery clinking on cheap china. Teaspoons clonking in mugs full of sweet, milky tea. My sister and I are sitting on our back-door steps next to a tank full of tadpoles. My father is eating his tea in a rush before leaving for a night shift, hunched over his salad in shirt and tie. My mother asks us if we want any more before she starts putting leftovers in the fridge. My sister, daydreaming, says nothing. And I hear myself saying, in a hopeful tone, "Bit more ham, please, Mum."

And now Joy is asking me, almost inaudibly it seems, if I'd like a bit more to eat before the taxi to the airport arrives. What I'm hearing very clearly is ghosts, ghosts whose vanished voices have momentarily obscured the sounds emanating from what is, supposedly, the real world. Suddenly, the scent of sausages and kippers overwhelms the fragrance of my sister's lavender. Maybe the healing has begun. I cut myself one last wedge of pork pie.

· Originally published in Gourmet. ? 2003 Cond? Nast Publications. All rights reserved.