I pulled up a chair and began to help Bette cube the apples. I told her that Mum used to make the same thing for me and she turned to me with a brighter look on her face than I had seen before.

‘She did?’ she said. ‘Oh, I’m so glad. I taught her when she was a kid. I wanted her to be able to cook something nice for her husband, you know? And for her family.’

‘And she taught me to cook it, too,’ I said to Bette. ‘So I can be your perfect sous-chef.’

Bette smiled to herself and tunelessly hummed while she stirred the onions in the pot. ‘It’s from the Women’s Weekly,’ she said. ‘South-Indian Chicken Korma.’

I tipped the chicken pieces into a plastic bag full of flour and shook them about. ‘We call it “Skip Curry” at my place,’ I said.

‘Oh, that’s funny,’ she said. ‘Why do you call it that?’

‘Oh, you know, because . . .’ But watching Grandma concoct the Anglicised goo, it suddenly seemed unfair to ridicule it. It must have been bold and cutting edge for her to even attempt a curry back then. She didn’t have the benefit of a multicultural inner-city experience like me. ‘You know, I don’t actually know.’

Instead I told her the Skip Curry anecdote my dad liked to tell. How one day when Mum and I were home together when I was four, Dad came home from work to find Mum asleep on the floor and me cooking Skip Curry for dinner. The way he told it was full of humour – fancy coming home and finding his two girls had switched roles. Mum and I had been playing Mums and Babies together, the way he told it. I was the mum and Cathy was my baby and I made her a bed of cushions and sang her a lullaby, and Mum had fallen asleep for real, a really deep and lovely sleep from all my lovely singing, while I actually made a pretty good start on the Skip Curry, chopping the onions and the apples, and arranging everything. He was lucky he got home when he did, he said, because I was getting ready to light the stove.

Bette laughed and shook her head, enjoying imagining me as a precocious four year old. I handed the floured chicken to her and she tossed it into the hot oil with the onion and browned it off, and then scraped in the sultanas and the cubed apples. She spooned in curry powder from a tin and poured water over it all and then covered it. She tipped white rice from a no-brand bag into another big pot filled with an excessive amount of boiling water, just the way Mum used to. I suddenly realised I was quite looking forward to tasting it again. I remembered that after Mum had given up on it I kept making it myself and adding things to it – authentic Afghan and Indian and Sri Lankan tweaks I’d picked up from other families: adding things, taking other things out, upping the spice, frying it off first, trying to make it just less awful somehow; trying to make it what a curry was supposed to be. But one day I stopped doing that. Making it and changing it didn’t seem right. The more ‘authentic’ it was, the less authentic, somehow, it seemed to me. I’d decided that the recipe had to remain pure and untouched, awful as it was. It came from my mum. It was one of the few things that had. So at first I left it alone, and then I stopped making it altogether.