I’ve got a million memories of the kitchen where he cooked this charity meal. These are bigger and more colourful memories than the ones about Mother. They feature what seem to be vats of olives and anchovies (though surely they’re only large tins); slabs of bacon and orange freckled ham hocks that look like orthopaedic shoes.

There I sit, pinning olive eyes to a potato with toothpicks.

I loved the smells in that kitchen, the height of the ceiling, the way the steam covered people up when the lids came off pots. No one took any notice of me when I was in there. I got to do just what I liked, just be a person among other people, everyone doing jobs of their own. The kitchen was my invisibility cloak.

There were actual spaces you could disappear into in the kitchen. There was a gap between an oven and a fridge that I discovered when a marble rolled in there and I crawled in after it. In that gap, puddles formed and dried and formed again, and a curious cottony mould grew on the lino. Once in there, I didn’t want to come out again. There was cold steel on one side of me, humming gently, and warm steel on the other, still. And I remember how secret and safe I felt, pressed in between those two contraptions. I unrolled the curious cottony mould from the lino and made it into a ball and wedged it between the bottom of the fridge and the floor. I peeled off another and did the same. But then, prodding and wedging and blowing my breath against the metal, I suddenly felt the fridge begin to move. I caught a glimpse of white shoes and felt the wheels grating on the floor. There was a slow clamping pressure against my stomach and my ribs, a great squeezing that grew more and more intense. I had to suck in my breath and jam up my shoulders, and I suppose I must’ve made a squealing sound, for suddenly the fridge lurched violently away, and the white shoes were upon me. I had light again, and I had space, and I was lifted into arms that smelled of oranges. And the person who belonged to those arms rocked me and pressed me into her neck and said, ‘My God, Oh my God!’ and that was you, Ornella. My first memory of you.

MILK PIE

Garlic was just an exotic word before 1956, says Papa. Sausages were fat and bread and offal scraps, wound through Grandma Blanche’s mincer and stuffed into intestines. Milk pie is the way Papa describes the culinary world he grew up in: spongy, creamy, white.

Starting out in life, Papa knew the following dishes off by heart:

Boiled Rabbit, which required 1 rabbit, 2 onions, 1 carrot and half a turnip, and could be served with a parsley or white sauce;