This weekend was one of those family moments that made me look both in the past and in the future. My first-born celebrated his IB graduation. He completed his studies in May and has since begun the Environmental Studies Programme at the University of Helsinki. His younger brother, who will graduate next year, served as Flower Marshal at the ceremony. He has decided to apply to the Aalto University’s School of Engineering.
There was something rather satisfying in seeing them both at stage, each at a different point on the same educational path.
For many years, when the boys were small, I stayed at home with them. From the point of view of future pension calculations, this was probably not a great financial strategy. From every other point of view, I have no regrets. Economists would call it an opportunity cost. I gave up earnings, pension contributions and career progression in exchange for something much harder to quantify: time with my children while they were young.
The return on that particular investment is becoming rather apparent. My husband and I made a conscious effort to bring the boys up with books, culture and sport as part of everyday life, with an understanding that how one behaves matters just as much as how one performs, and with a certain can-do attitude towards life.
The grandparents played an important part in that too, especially their Scottish grandparents, who kept us supplied with what sometimes felt like an endless stream of books. Reading was simply part of the atmosphere in which the boys grew up, rather than something that had to be imposed on them.
They seem to have absorbed rather more of it all than we perhaps realised at the time.
I am currently editing a book based on my English-language food blog, The Enogastronomist. It will be called The Foods That Our Boys Grew Up With, and I plan to have a copy printed for each of them.
When I began the blog, I thought I was recording recipes. In practice, I was recording rather more than that.
Over the years, the posts accumulated into a kind of family archive. They contain the food we ate at home, dishes discovered on our travels, experiments that worked, a few that probably did not, celebrations, ordinary weekday meals and recipes that became part of the furniture of family life.
Food has a useful way of preserving context
A recipe may appear to be little more than a list of ingredients and instructions, but after enough time has passed, it begins to carry other information with it. It can recall a particular city, apartment, house, season, journey or stage of family life with remarkable efficiency.
I had always imagined that the blog might one day be useful to the boys themselves. At some point, they would leave home and perhaps want to cook something familiar. For years, that remained a theoretical possibility. It is becoming considerably less theoretical now.
And although the blog will remain there, I rather like the idea of putting the recipes into something tangible. A book can sit on a kitchen shelf, acquiring stains from various spills, and accumulate notes and loose scraps of paper, before perhaps eventually becoming part of somebody else’s kitchen.
So I am now gathering the recipes properly.
The intention is not to prescribe how the boys should cook and what they should eat. That would rather miss the point. Recipes change as they pass from one person to another. Ingredients are substituted, quantities adjusted, techniques improved and occasionally ignored altogether.
What matters is that there is a record of how our life tasted like.
In that sense, The Enogastronomist has become more than a food blog. It records what was placed on our table while two children grew into young adults.
A photograph album shows us what people looked like. A collection of recipes can remind us what life tasted like. I suppose that is one of the underlying reasons families have always passed recipes from one generation to the next.
Before long, both boys will have kitchens of their own and firm opinions about what belongs in them. They will discover new foods, new places and new ways of cooking, as they should.
But among all that novelty, they will also have a record of the foods that they grew up with.
