Free The Dressmaker's Daughter by Kate Llewellyn Page A

shelves, too. Now, daily, I am moving a big jar of Madhur Jaffrey’s grandmother’s lime, garlic, chilli and ginger pickle around in the sun, where it must stand for a month to prove before it can be eaten.
    In the cookbook German Food, there are many references to adding chutney, marmalade or sauce to gravy and my mother always used tomato sauce in her meat gravy for roasts. Now Sophia, my granddaughter who is eleven, knows to run to the pantry when she and I are making gravy and to slosh in a good slurp of tomato sauce. When we run out of sauce, as we sometimes do, we use my lemon chutney.
    So where did this passion for preserving and for cooking come from? It can only have come from Granny and her inheritance from her family of the need to preserve food in those long German winters when things were scarce. Our passion certainly did not come from the English side of the family; if we had had their thin palate, we’d all be eating blancmange and junket along with our jelly. And we’d only have cream on it once a month, not twice a day.
    My brothers and I are all brawn fanciers. It may take a heart of steel, but I have made pig’s-head brawn, which is delicious if you don’t have a closed mind, and which, when trying to live as a writer, has the bonus of being very cheap. It is the equivalent of the sheep’s-head stew that the Thirties novelist Warwick Deeping (whose books Graham Greene loathed) mentioned in a novel I read when I was about twelve. Tansy, the heroine, and the narrator, ate a lot of this stew and I was impressed and never forgot that lesson of the economics of being a writer.
    There are aspects of a fairy tale in having two halves of a pig’s head in a large pot boiling on your stove. At any moment, a prince may appear. In my case, however, it was brawn that appeared, and in some ways it was more satisfactory than a prince may have been. I have had my fill of princes. Unreliable to a man, they have caused my children and me grief and I have squandered time that I could have used better. When I threw these men over, or they me, one of us was bitter. And there is nothing useful that can be made from bitterness, except bitter almonds – they make a very good cake called Mandeltorte.
    I am no longer bitter, more humbled by my folly and my grotesque need than anything else. How are the foolish to learn if not through pain?

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Church
    M y brothers and I were taken to all sorts of churches, with the exception of the Catholic church – or the Roman Catholic church as it was then called. Baptised in the Anglican Church, to which our father belonged, we went wherever Jane, Mary or Gertie Swiggs were teaching Sunday school.
    As a result of this, I know hymns from the Methodists, the Baptists, the Church of England and the Church of Christ. We were, in fact, nothing if not catholic in our religious practice.
    Dressed in our best clothes, we were collected by one of the Swiggs girls and walked to church every Sunday. My mother had a rest and I think that was possibly the idea behind this devotion. It was mainly to Sunday school that we went, rather than to the church service, although occasionally we arrived just as the service was ending. I can remember the local grocer standing in the pulpit some days, spitting in his fervour.
    A farmer and his wife taught Sunday school, along with our girls. There were tables holding sand in which we placed small camels and men in djellabas. Mary, the crib, the baby Jesus, angels, Joseph, wise men in the form of three kings and palm trees we arranged around our deserts. I liked these games but can’t remember any suggestion that they had anything to do with God.
    My brothers and I came home with printed homilies on cards dangling from silk cords, which we hung on the walls of our rooms. ‘He is faithful that promised.’ Or:
God gives the desolate a home to dwell in;
    He leads the prisoners to prosperity,
    But the rebellious dwell in a parched land.
    Psalm