tin. And in the factory-farming years that followed, when modern breeds and cheap production values meant that meat lost much of its inherent goodness and savour, the Oxo was there as a much-needed culinary sticking plaster.
The cube’s success also had much to do with the tactile pleasure of tearing open the red and silver foil and crumbling the compost-brown cube into the meat tin, in the style of the ‘perfect, squeaky-clean mum’ from the television adverts. Sadly, in my experience adding that diminutive cube to the contents of the roasting tin will be forever linked with well-done meat. I can’t imagine anyone who appreciated rare beef chucking a load of glutinous gravy on it. If you buy sound meat in the first place, the brown cube is effectively made not just redundant, but an intrusion.
I once had a friend who ate Oxo cubes like fudge, despite their high levels of salt. I often wonder what her blood pressure is now.
It is December 2004, and I am sitting in an old people’s home just outside Birmingham. I’m holding my aunt’s hand. My aunt is ninety-nine, my eldest surviving relative on my father’s side of the family, and probably the person I am closest to. The home was chosen not for its convenient location, or even its price, but simply because it was the only one I could find that didn’t smell of pee.
A woman moves past us pushing a Zimmer frame. As she gets level with us she starts to fart, a sound that goes on for what seems like eternity as she continues to move along in her bumpy, caterpillar fashion. My aunt, who has much the same schoolboy sense of humour as me, starts to giggle.
‘What is it about Zimmer frames that makes people trump?’ I ask, having heard her parp her way round the communal lounge on several occasions.
‘It’s all the pushing,’ she says. ‘Those things take a lot of pushing.’ Her giggle becomes a helpless, spluttering cough. ‘They just come out, you can’t stop them. You’ll be like that one day. And sooner than you think. Anyway, they give us too much cabbage in here. We had it three times last week.’
There is cabbage again today. The food is served with more care and grace than one is led to expect of such establishments, but they can’t hide the fact that it is mince and cabbage. Individual likes and dislikes are catered for with a resigned smile, and no one is left without help if they need it (and they had a raffle today), but it is still cabbage. The atmosphere, helped by a team of nurses and social workers who show a distinct fondness for their patients, is lively, and particularly jolly at mealtimes. But it is still cabbage.
A quietly-spoken Irish nurse and I struggle to pull my aunt up to the table, sitting her next to Nellie, a dear old lady in a neat cardigan and tartan skirt who constantly asks questions but is too deaf to hear the answers. I can tell she doesn’t like my aunt. No one does here, because she has a habit of throwing out the odd racist remark in front of the nurses, some of whom are Indian or from Ghana. She once asked me in something less than a whisper to pass round a box of Quality Street to everyone ‘except the black ones’. ‘Don’t worry, love,’ said a gentle, kindly black nurse, ‘we know she doesn’t mean it.’ Sadly, she did, and both the nurse and I knew it.
Pudding is jam sponge and custard, which seems to take the edge off matters. A sweet busy-bee of a nurse asks me if I would like some. It smells cosy, of warm sponge and vanilla, and I am tempted, but decide I might be stealing someone’s second helping, so I make do instead with one of my aunt’s barley sugars, which I inspect closely, as she has developed a habit of sucking them and putting them back in the wrappers. No one seems to notice that Nellie, who is absent-mindedly humming to herself, is sitting with one hand in her custard. I am tempted to lift it out myself, but then I’m not sure what I’d do with it afterwards, so I pretend I haven’t seen it.
A cup of tea and a biscuit becomes a major happening. My aunt looks forward to her milky tea all afternoon, constantly asking if it is teatime. ‘I hope I get the Custard Cream this time. They always serve me last, so I’m left with the pink wafers and the broken digestives.’ Broken biscuits are inedible to my aunt. In the 1950s, broken biscuits were what you bought when you couldn’t afford whole ones.
Feeding the elderly has none of the charisma of feeding children. There is no Jamie Oliver to improve the daily diet of old people. Fewer photo opportunities, probably. What celebrity chef wants to fill his cookbook with pictures of wrinkly people with no teeth? A child with a blob of custard on her chin looks cute; an old person with a blob of custard on hers simply looks demented.
Before my aunt came into the home, where she now gets three perfectly edible meals a day, she lived on Cup a Soup and cream crackers. Not a piece of fruit or vegetable passed her lips for twenty years or more. She could dance, albeit a slow waltz, till she was ninety-seven, then she started falling over and I had to get her into a care home. She was lying on her back in the hall once for twenty-four hours, like an upturned beetle. ‘Put me in a home and I’ll come back and haunt you,’ she once threatened. Now I see her every time I look in a mirror.
Many of the residents have their food put through the mincer, so the only difference between meals is the smell. It’s like baby food without the bright colours. My aunt wears a plastic bib to eat now, though she can still feed herself. It’s just that most of it ends up down her, rather than inside her. I’m not sure anyone notices. With what ends up around their mouths, down their cardigans or on the floor, I suspect no one realises that what old people actually die of is malnutrition rather than old age. She says she prefers her Cup a Soup, but they won’t let her have it, though I do smuggle in a Marks & Spencer crème caramel whenever I can. ‘Oh, and bring me a miniature of Bailey’s Irish Cream, will you dear?’
It must be interminably dispiriting to cook in an old people’s home, to watch your careful cooking, a neatly peeled vegetable or delicately filleted piece of fish, being pushed through the mincer, but that is the long and short of it. The advert in the Caterer and Hotelkeeper will insist that applicants must have passed their catering exams, should have the requisite experience and a love of cooking for other people, but it is unlikely to point out that everything the successful interviewee cooks will end up as a purée. One can only imagine they know that easily-swallowed food goes with the territory. Like having no hair or teeth and filling your pants, eating purées is what you do when you come into this world, and again when you go out of it.
It is difficult not to think of custard with affection. Though it must be said that to the British it is more likely to be vivid yellow and made with custard powder than the calm and pallid crème anglaise favoured by the French. Now even that shortcut has been superseded by ready-made versions available at the chilled counter, some of which are almost indistinguishable from a handmade egg custard sauce.
The point of custard, or more correctly custard sauce, is essentially to help a dry pudding – treacle tart or spotted dick, say – down the gullet, but it is also a pudding in itself, especially when it becomes the divine dessert banana custard. (I have always found watching slices of banana sink slowly into a deep Pyrex bowl of custard particularly agreeable.) Made somewhat thicker, it is firm enough to be used as a layer, along with sponge cake, fruit and cream, in a trifle.
Yet nowhere is it as welcome as with a steamed sponge. Ginger, jam or raisin puddings are rarely quite themselves without a steaming moat of custard, although somehow treacle pudding is better with cream. The main reason we turned to custard powder was not because of the cost of eggs, milk and vanilla, but because of the sauce’s reputation for curdling. ‘Curdle’, like ‘separate’, ‘split’ and ‘collapse’, is a word that brings unreasonable fear to the hearts of many British cooks. The truth is that nothing can go wrong if you keep the mixture from getting too hot, and even then a curdled mess can sometimes be rescued with a good stiff beating in a cold bowl with a wire whisk.