I’m quoting Don Henley a lot these days. Not the current Don Henley, lip-syncing his way around the world on The Eagles’ endless farewell tour, but the one who gave us great songs like ‘The Boys Of Summer‘. I try hard to not spend my life looking back, especially given the simple fact that there’s a lot more, at least in terms of years, to look back on than there is to look forward to. These days, I rarely share social media memories, or even check them. Don’s advice, “Don’t look back, you can never look back“, somehow feels more relevant than ever.
I found myself looking back yesterday, as my partner prepared our tea (that’s dinner, as posh people call it), using as she was an old black saucepan that is certainly over 50 years old, but maybe older, much older, than that. We used to have two such bowls, which unlike many things that went astray when my first marriage collapsed amid the sound of violence and fury (hers, not mine), I managed to save. The other, the heavier of the two, was destroyed in an accident (we managed to drop it on the floor), but the lighter one remains.
It’s a Dutch pot in which my mum used to cook things – a bit of a revelation there – on a tiny paraffin-powered stove. Meats, usually cheap, gnarly beef or pork, ‘on the turn’, as my mum put it, purchased from Josef Packaert’s butcher shop in Nelson Street at the end of the day as he was closing down, at a knock down price, would go into the pot, to be slow-cooked for many hours until it was no longer excruciatingly chewy. The smell from the paraffin stove was all-embracing, overpowering, lingering day after day, preparing me for the day when I acquired asthma or worse, but it meant we could eat. Those old saucepans did a remarkable job.
Mum brought them from the Netherlands, I know not when, but the 1960s is probably about right. They rarely chipped, they were durable and reliable. We have newer pots and pans, but the old black pot remains the favourite for pasta and vegetables. My mum never used it for pasta, something I don’t think I discovered until I was in my thirties. Maybe it hadn’t been invented by then? It can’t have been big in the Netherlands or Bristol, if it had been.
We had a few other gadgets, as well as the paraffin stove. A slicer which my mum used exclusively for green beans, something else that didn’t survive the divorce. I suppose 1960s cooking equipment was better sent to the municipal tip than the cupboard at my house. Those were the good old days, if, that is, you enjoyed scrag-end meats and greens which were barely green.
I don’t look back fondly to those days and that’s why I generally follow Don’s wise words. As good mums do, mine shielded me from the poverty of our lives, so I never thought it odd that we had no fridge, no toaster, a cronky old oven with only one working ring and a grill that didn’t work at all, an old gas boiler to boil clothes and no heating beyond a single electric heater. But those old black pots, well, they were the height of luxury. No one else had them, I reckoned. They were for the exclusive use of the Dutch. You’re not much if you’re not Dutch, as my only uncle once said. The less about him the better, I’m afraid.
I suspect the one remaining pot will outlive me. Perhaps, it could be used to scatter my ashes to give everyone a bit of a laugh after my funeral? I don’t know if this is one of those “they don’t make things to last these days, not like in the old days” stories and frankly I don’t care.
There’s a lot of memories in that old pot, where mum made her Dutch meatballs, which I still make to this day, and mashed potato with “the top of the milk” (ask your grandparents, kids). And while it’s true that I don’t (yet?) spend an inordinate amount of time looking back, sometimes I just can’t help it. These are not bad memories, they’re quite sweet, actually, and they are a good reminder of how I should remain humble (not least because I have a great deal to be humble about).
Here’s to more happy meals with my old black pot.
