The Family Feast

Clarissa placed the hot, bubbling casserole dish in front of her and looked around the table. Her family.

It was why so much thought, care, and ingenuity had gone into the meal; why she had come up with a dish that should please everyone.

Lucy, her youngest granddaughter had recently turned 11. Long pigtails, and now starting to look really quite demure. They grow up so early now, Clarissa realised. Only a couple of months in secondary school, and now she’d declared that she was a vegan. It hadn’t made that much difference thought Granny, for the super-slim girl only ever picked at her food.

That was in complete contrast to June, Lucy’s mother sitting next to her, who ate anything and everything. Her generous figure responded in kind. Then there was Jimmy, who seemed to live on potatoes and bread. Carbs, nothing green, yet he was in the school’s first rugby team so he must be healthy enough, Clarissa reassured herself. In years gone by she had added extra potatoes to what she thought would be the normal amount for the seven of them, mainly to cater for grandson number two.

Mind you, catering for different diets or fads was nothing new to Clarissa. Her son, Gerry, had had allergies and tummy pains since he was a little boy and gluten free, lactose free and sugar free had all been part of the daily routine at different times while he had been paraded in front of a medley of specialists, all of whom had claimed to know exactly what the problem was.  Strange that none of their theories had made the slightest difference over the years. Equally strange how his food problems just vanished when he married June!

At the other end of the table was Ben. Tall, stocky and in his first year at Uni. Big Ben. His journey through childhood had revolved around chocolate. Picky wasn’t the word for it back then. Why, once, on one of his birthdays, Clarissa had even made him a special dish of chips with chocolate sauce on the side. Devoured with glee. “You shouldn’t indulge him”, her daughter-in-law had gently chided, while surreptitiously slipping a carefully dipped chip into her mouth, too.

And of course, there was Colin, her husband, her greatest fan for many years, loving everything that came out of the kitchen until his ulcers started to demand dietary care. Nowadays Clarissa and he ate high fibre, probiotic, fruit and veg based meals. Low fat and his beer down the pub had had to be cut out too. He might look a little pasty at times but his belt did up several holes tighter now.

Through it all, Clarrisa had manoeuvred without a word of complaint. Her famous baked rice pudding had been discontinued. The world’s best steak and onion pies were long gone. Her trademark toad-in-the-hole consigned to history. In their place had been concoctions with ingredients she had not even heard of before, let alone known how to cook. Spice mixtures from unknown lands, grains from wherever, vegetables and fruits now in the shops to reflect the cosmopolitan community they now relished.  She had embraced them all with care, diligence and not a word of dissent. Risotto, stir-fry, pasta shaped like plumbing tubes, all-in-one dishes with tongue-twisting names and unusual flavours. It was all done with good grace to replace roast dinners, pies, fry-ups or the liver-and-bacon she’d perfected in what she now called ‘her early years’.

Today’s celebration dish was a recipe from a thick and shiny cookbook taken out of local library. She’d apparently been the first person to borrow it.

Carefully selected from pages and pages of options with coloured photos and detailed instructions, she’d come up with the ideal answer. She’d not had all the ingredients to start with and her usual supermarket had not got Portobello mushrooms for a start, but the ordinary everyday ones were just as good, she decided. Baharat and nutritional yeast were new names to her, but she found them somewhere on the store’s shelves and she already knew where they kept soya milk.

Now here was the meal, looking just like the book’s photo and still bubbling from the last few minutes in the hot oven. Served alongside a bowl of dressed green salad that she knew only she and Colin would actually eat…  Her family looked on in puzzlement. “It’s vegan lasagne,” she announced, serving out the first portion to a stony silence.

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After the meal, while the rest of them were in the front room playing some new game on a device which apparently plugged into the back of the TV, she and Colin quietly did the washing up, putting the copious left-overs into the food-waste. There were even two sundae glasses of the special vegan butterscotch dessert which were completely untouched. True, there had been a couple of “this is nice” type comments, but none of them seemed really sincere…

Then Gerry slipped into the kitchen. “Next year, Mum, can we go back to your roast turkey with all the trimmings and then your trifle-to-die-for?”