It is the morning after Thanksgiving, uncharacteristically rainy and gray in the desert southwest. Relishing my solitude and a second cup of coffee, I settle in to read the Irish Times. When I spot this headline, I put down my cup. She doesn’t know it, but writer, Louise Kennedy, has just made my Thanksgiving complete. She doesn’t know me either, but she knows something about me, something I had until this very morning discarded as trivial. Indulge me while I tell you about the Hamlyn All Colour CookBook nailed here by Kennedy:

The book seems hideously kitsch now, but there was something heart-breakingly earnest and aspirational on those pages. There were tips on how to cut corners and save time and money, on how to substitute ingredients that were scarce or unavailable.

Like aubergines or Morelio cherries.

My Hamlyn (for years referred to as Old Faithful)  stands proudly beside a slick volume of recipes by Julia Child and Jaques Pepin. It is of little practical use in my Phoenix kitchen, in spite of the guide to metrication and the peppy opener by Mary Berry. Yes, that Mary Berry. A dust collecting memento of my schoolgirl days, with its metric measurements and ingredients and words hat make more sense back home – well not necessarily my home, but often in the kinds of homes where Frank Bryant’s  student, “Rita” fancied herself serving the right wine to accompany hor d’oeuvres that involved aspic jelly crystals, radishes fashioned into roses, and a garnish of watercress or parsley.  Neither piquant herring salad or sole véronique have yet to make an appearance in my life, but, to be fair, other dishes regularly did. There was mandarin gâteau and iced coffee sponge, and Victoria sandwich, slices of which showed up regularly at Tupperware parties, hosted by mothers like mine – unashamed celebrations of plastic and its place in our kitchen cupboards. The first time I wanted to impress a man with a home-cooked dinner, I turned to the “Continental Favourites” section for a Spahetti bolognese recipe. When I was asked to make cupcakes for my daughter’s class, I turned to #282, by any other name a “wee buns” recipe. The man is long gone, and my daughter’s all grown up, but the recipe is indelible. I  can’t bring myself to part with this relic from my Domestic Science class in 1970s Northern Ireland.

The Hamlyn was the first school textbook my mother didn’t have to back with brown parcel paper, because it came with its very own dust-jacket.  A stay-at-home-mother at the time, “backing books” had been one of her favorite jobs, and by the first day of school every September, she had rolls of  paper set aside for this special task. My teachers  were very particular about the way our books were backed. There was definitely an art to it, and so naturally it fell under my mother’s bailiwick. Each book she placed carefully in the middle of a sheet of brown paper, and with a few quick snips, folds, and tucks, she had it covered, ready for us to write our names on the front. I remember one September, because my mother was ill and in the hospital, I had taken it upon myself to back my new history textbook. Of course I couldn’t do it right. Like so many things, this was something my mother had made look so easy, but unlike my mother I had not learned by watching. It was impossible for me to get the brown paper neatly under the spine at both ends, so I gave up and went to school, book un-backed. For my sins, I was subjected to a memorably sarcastic tirade from a teacher who didn’t care about the fact that my mother lay in the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. She may as well have been on the other side of the world in those moments. Over forty years later, I can still feel the flush of embarrassment on my face.

The dust jacket of the Hamlyn, I’m proud to report, is relatively intact, bearing only a few tears and the odd smear left behind by busy buttery adolescent fingers. I remember how my mother pored over its photographs when it was brand new,  delighted to find so many cakes and sweets she already knew how to make without as much as a precise measurement, let alone a “method” like the one we had to painstakingly write out in our Domestic Science notebooks. My mother was a great baker, and when I was growing up, I loved her Baking Days. Ever Friday, by the time daddy came home from work, all the square biscuit tins left over from Christmas and  lined with greaseproof paper were filled to their brims with irresistible confections –  caramel fingers, melting moments, fudge cakes, shortbread, and butterfly buns.  Every Sunday, for desert, there was an apple or a rhubarb tart, Pavlova, Trifle, a Victoria Sponge, or a Swiss Roll.  Honestly, I am surprised we still have our own teeth.

Even though she had copied down many of these recipes, which I stuck inside a book for future reference, ma never took much notice of them. She did, however, take one precaution while baking and that was to  give my brother and me advance warning not to slam the backdoor as we were wont to do, if there was a fruitcake in the oven, she would remind us  “Don’t you bang the door or the fruit cake will collapse in the oven!”  I have resisted the urge to fact check this. I want to believe it is something only Irish mammies say.

I once called her for her fruitcake recipe, because it is suspiciously absent from the Hamlyn. I love a good home-made fruitcake and will never understand the disdain for it in America. They just haven’t tried my mother’s. Verbatim, she gave her recipe to me thus: “Well now, you just put your ingredients in, boil them, and then let them cool. Add your egg and your flour, put in your margarine, sugar, and water (or two cups of black tea) all your cherries, raisins, and sultanas. Be you careful when you bring it to the boil. Let it cool and then throw in two or three eggs. Stir it all up and put it into your loaf tin. That’s your boiled cake.”  

A pause before elaborating and remembering my original question: “Now for a fruit cake, you just cream your butter and sugar in the mixer until they are nice and fluffy. Put in your eggs and your flour and all your fruit. Stir it all up and throw it in the oven. It will take longer to cook than the boiled cake. Use a slower oven.”

I am none the wiser. I know if this were a fruit cake throw-down with Bobby Flay my mother would win hands-down, but my Domestic Science teacher would have dismissed her “method” as highly unsatisfactory without the obligatory list of ingredients and numbered directions that included the weighing of things copied into notebooks by girls – only girls – in the classrooms of segregated schools.  For those of you paying attention, a 93 percent of Northern Ireland’s children still attend segregated schools that overwhelmingly educate children from only a Catholic or a Protestant background.  It wasn’t until I was a college student in Belfast that the fight for integrated education was just beginning . . .

I  was what they call around here “a first generation” college student, the first in the family to go on to university – to go away to school.  Although university was  less than twenty miles away in Belfast, it was still away, a phenomenon Seamus Heaney explains to Dennis O’Driscoll in Stepping Stones:

“Even Belfast was far away to me. In those days, I was outside the loop, my family had no familiarity with universities, no sense of the choices that there were, no will to go beyond the known procedures, no confidence, for example, about phoning up the local education authority and seeking clarification about what was possible – no phone, for God’s sake.”

For Heaney, a university education in Belfast, was a world away from the Broagh and necessitated a kind of verbal dance with his mother, when he returned from it to the family home, full of new knowledge, new words, and new sensitivities. I can almost picture him as I can my young self – in that tight space between elevated and plain Derry speech, watching every word, weighing its impact before uttering it. My mother and I have danced that very dance, her telling me to this day, “sure you know all them things.”

There were other tricky steps to learn, moving through Northern Ireland’s various dances, but once learned, they are indelible. In May the Lord in His Mercy be Kind to Belfast, based on his interviews with the people who live there, Tony Parker makes the unsettling but astute observation that those born and brought up in Northern Ireland have a mutual need to know, right from the start, about a person’s background, so they can proceed in the dialogue, in the longer relationship, without saying the wrong thing, “the wrong word.” We know that our last names or the names of our schools, or the way we pronounce an “H” or an “A,” are also clues we use to help establish who we think we are.

“Derry” or “Londonderry?” “The Troubles,” “the conflict,” or “The Irish Question?” “Ulster” or “The Six Counties?”

It was in a secondary school in the outskirts of North Belfast that I cut my pedagogical teeth. A student teacher who didn’t know any better, a ‘blow-in’ from Antrim, I took a black taxi to school every morning. On my first day in  in Rathcoole, then the largest housing estate in Western Europe and a loyalist stronghold, I held my own. On the second, I faltered when a first former, showing off for his mates, asked me if I was a “Taig,” a derogatory word for a Roman Catholic. He said he thought I was “by the look of me,” but he had his doubts. My surname was Protestant, but there was ambiguity about my first name, Yvonne.

At the time, if I’m honest, an honest answer may not have been the right one. There I stood, chalk in hand, knowing where I was but not entirely sure of who I was. And, that’s what I told him. Thus we began a kind of partnership, the pupils and me, knowing we had some control over went on within those walls, but not so much beyond them.

At the same time, before Home Economics was standard fare on the Northern Ireland curriculum, the curriculum included Domestic Science. Other than Physical Education, which I had skillfully avoided with a note from my mother when I “had cramps,” it was my least favorite subject.  It involved the planning and cooking of meals which usually failed –  in spite of quick tips from May Berry on every page of the Hamlyn All Colour Cook Book – baking, and, God help me, knitting.  There was time set aside for sewing, during which I learned how to finish the edges of something, presumably a blanket, with blanket stitch. I even learned a kind of embroidery, stitching all six letters of my name in green thread on a red gingham apron, all the while wishing I had been christened with something shorter, “Eve” perhaps.

There were no boys in Domestic Science, nor were there any girls in Woodwork, Metalwork, or the exotic-sounding Technical Studies.  There were, however, some grown up people who had noted the fundamental unfairness of this situation and pledged to remedy it. They obviously had some clout too, because along came  The Sex Discrimination (Northern Ireland) Order of 1976  making unlawful the inequality of access for boys and girls to all areas of the curriculum. Landmark legislation, this enabled boys and girls, in the same classroom, to partake of Craft, Design, and Technology, although it would be another 14 years before a National Curriculum would be implemented.  Along with these efforts to make Domestic Science and Technical Studies curricula more gender-neutral, was the work that continues today to confront the fact that schools in Northern Ireland were segregating Protestant and Catholic children.  Since 1974, All Children Together (ACT) had been imploring churches and government to take the initiative in educating Protestant and Catholic children together. Finally, in 1981, a small group of Belfast parents dared to change the course of history, to force the issue, to confront aloud what happens to the heart of a country and the identity of its children when they are educated in segregated schools. Ordinary Catholics and Protestants, we already knew what happened. It was time for change, to demand an answer to questions such as this, asked in 1957 by  Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Lester Bowles Pearson:

How can there be peace without people understanding each other, and how can this be if they don’t know each other?

As I learned in Rathcoole, there is no better place to learn about one another, to learn about humanity, than in the classroom.

In 1981, Lagan College became the first integrated secondary school in Northern Ireland to offer such a space for boys and girls, Catholics and Protestants. Named for the river that runs through Belfast, Lagan College, under armed guard, opened its doors to 28 children. It is different today. According to the school’s website, as of January 2017 there are 1270 pupils on the Lisnabreeny site with more than 150 staff.

It is now a 21st century school with a curriculum that includes Home Economics, the central focus of which is “the consideration of the home and family in relation to the development of the individual and society and is designed to enable students to acquire the knowledge and skills to improve the quality of life for themselves and others. During the three years, they will address the areas of Diet and Health, Family Life and Choice and Management of Resources, using a variety of teaching and learning techniques.”

That sounds infinitely more important and doable than the Domestic Science of my youth, which leads me back to where I started, to the Hamlyn All Colour Cook Book . . . to Northern Ireland, to a place forever apart of which I will forever be a part.

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