Ed Balls - Appetite: A Memoir in Recipes of Family and Food

Ed Balls

Appetite

A memoir in recipes of family and food

WonderfulStephen Fry

BrilliantClaudia Winkleman

JoyousCaitlin Moran

DelightfulDelia Smith

First published in Great Britain by Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2021

Copyright Ed Balls, 2021

The right of Ed Balls to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright-holders for permission, and apologise for any omissions or errors in the form of credits given. Corrections may be made to future printings.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-3985-0474-5

eBook ISBN: 978-1-3985-0475-2

For my mum, who taught me to love cooking and my dad, who taught me to love eating

All the family round the table, laughing and bickering. Roast beef, pink but not rare. Plenty of gravy, rich and spicy with a hint of red wine. Heaps of Yorkshire puddings, clean out of the tin. Steam rising from the carrots, broccoli and cabbage. And shiny roast potatoes, crispy on the outside and fluffy within. Just like my mum used to make. My perfect Sunday lunch.

My parents say I fell in love with roast beef when I was just three weeks old, their first child, born in February 1967. The local health visitor arrived at our Norwich home to perform the usual post-natal checks and was apparently aghast at how big I was already. Family folklore recalls her declaring that breast milk was insufficient to satisfy the appetite of this hungry child and recommended I be moved onto solids straight away. Just pulp him up a little of what youre eating, she told my mum. Id only been in the world twenty-one days and already I needed a roast dinner.

My dad drove into Norwich to buy a fancy new food blender. The Moulinex from France had been the must-have kitchen gadget for a few years but my parents had never previously been able to justify the extravagance. Its striking now, looking back at the adverts of the time, to see how much things have changed since then. The Moulinex was presented as the next frontier for the Womens Liberation Movement to bring the fight for freedom right into the kitchen. Wives and mothers were still expected to do all the cooking, but this push-button blender would make things quicker, liberating them to throw off their aprons and even allowing them to go out to work as well!

That weekend, my small portion of Mums Sunday roast lunch was mouli-ed to a smooth paste and I wolfed it all down. Today, the health advice is no solid food for at least the first six months. What can I say? We lived by different rules back then.

Sunday roast dinner remained the most important meal of the week when I was growing up, part of a fixed routine that you could set your clock by. My mum went to the butchers on Saturday morning we had beef, pork or lamb in weekly rotation, chicken less often, and always with Yorkshire puddings. She would set the oven timer before we drove off to church on Sunday morning and when we returned home, around half past twelve, the smell of roasting meat was already creeping under the kitchen door, enveloping us like a huge fuggy blanket as we walked into the house. My parents always had a glass of sweet sherry, my dad carved the meat and we had the BBCs FamilyFavourites on the radio in the background, with forces families requesting songs and sending messages to their loved ones serving around the world.

My younger sister and brother and I were expected to be sitting down at the table on time for the food to be portioned out, and there was always a hushed tension as the first of us poured the gravy over our full plates. No matter how many times we tried, for some reason there was never quite enough gravy to go round, and whoever went first had my dad watching like a hawk to make sure they didnt overpour.

I loved my mums food, and cooking was one of the most special things she taught me. And it had to be her, because I can hardly ever remember my dad doing anything in the kitchen. He worked, gardened, carved and ate and my mum did the shopping, cooking, cleaning and everything else involved in looking after the family. It was her full-time job until I was eleven, and Moulinex or no it didnt get any easier when she also took a part-time job with the NHS.

My dad did have one foray into the kitchen on the day my brother, Andrew, was born in 1973. He stayed at home to look after me and my sister, Joanna, and cooked roast beef and Yorkshire puddings, which were so good that we took a pudding into the maternity hospital that evening for our mum to eat. Dad declared it a triumph and promptly retired, never to cook again until my mums dementia turned their lives upside down.

Now, when my brother and sister and our families get together with my dad, and my mum visits from her nearby care home, it has become my job to cook the roast beef and Yorkshire puddings the way Mum taught me, making sure all the kids are sitting down in good time, and keeping a close eye on the gravy boat as it journeys round the table.

Sunday roast is an important family tradition, but its also one I love to share. The night before the general election in 2015, when I lost my seat and my political career suddenly ended, I cooked roast beef for all my exhausted campaign team with twenty-four Yorkshire puddings, just enough for one each. When I was eliminated from Strictly Come Dancing the following year and invited my partner Katya over with her husband Neil, I chose roast beef to welcome them into our family, while their tiny dog Crumble yapped around our feet.

And when our intrepid team climbed high into the African clouds, scaling Kilimanjaro for Comic Relief in 2019, I reminisced with Jade Thirlwall from Little Mix and Love Islands Dani Dyer about roast dinners and family Sundays at home as we trudged along, a memory just as warming and comforting for them in their twenties as for me in my fifties. We agreed that when we got down, and could all gather again back home, I would cook roast beef and Yorkshire puddings for the team. And I did easily the most glamorous back garden gathering our family has ever seen.

Little did I imagine then that those kinds of meals with friends would become impossible just a year later in 2020. Most painfully, our cherished family get-togethers with Mum and Dad in Norwich were put on hold. In lockdown, when so many of us had our immediate family thrust together for months at a time but were forced apart from our wider family and friends, I came to appreciate how important food, recipes and the ritual of a meal can be to our collective sanity and wellbeing.

It reminded me how important the combination of food, family and love has been throughout my life, a constant comfort in our changing world, and one which Ive been lucky to experience in the kitchen as well as round the dinner table, as a dad as well as a son.