Aunty Molly

I was looking for the recipe for something the other day (Baked Egg Custard – was obviously feeling in need of comfort) and I came across a recipe for Spicy Peanut Liver. The recipe book is The Dairy Book of Home Cookery. It’s generally an excellent cookbook but it does have the odd foray into slightly strange combinations which made me think of the Seventies when we Brits really began to get into experimenting with flavours and textures in food. No one was keener on experimenting with flavours and textures in food than my Great Aunt Molly. Can any of us forget the Salted peanuts in Raspberry jelly combo, or the Raisins in the Fish Pie? How about that timeless concoction “Cornflakes in Treacle Toffee”. You could always wash it down with a glass or two of “Pitbauchlie Special”, a blend of dusty orange squash and flat lemonade. Most memorable was the Mackerel, Egg and Spaghetti mash which prompted Uncle David to look at his plate and ask “Is this something we’re about to eat or something we already ate?”

It wasn’t only food that she mangled. G.A. Molly was someone who could just never leave well enough alone. Nice simple frock? Let’s add 4 yards of rickrack and perhaps some sequins. She was well ahead of her time with activities such as decorative paint finishes, or at least drawing twiddly bits on things that really just did not need twiddly things, light switches for example. She was very inventive in her problem solving. When she found her face was becoming spattered with cast off when creosoting her garage (the word slap-dash was invented for her painting technique) she solved the problem by wearing a pair of tights …on her head - one leg left dangling so she looked a bit like Isadora Duncan about to rob a bank.

Molly and her ex-naval husband, Frank, never had children and after he died there was no one to keep her eccentricities in check. Most of the time they were small idiosyncrasies – turning up at Susan and Tom’s wedding wearing a woolly bobble hat with a rose pinned to it with her Berketex suit; taking directions literally when you said “Go straight on at the Roundabout” and leaving tyre tracks across the municipal flowerbeds as a result. Would it surprise you to learn that she drove a Morris Minor with a split windscreen and sticky out indicators? Didn’t think it would. Of course, being Molly she had done a bit of improvement on it but using house gloss paint to do it, creating a subtle and intriguing effect not dissimilar to a crackle glaze. She was only trying to cover up the dunt in it that had left some of the paint flaking.

She wasn't actually barking mad just potty and what concerns me most of all is that occasionally, usually when I find myself thinking about adding some tassels and beads to an unadorned jumper, I am struck with the realisation that I have some of her genes in me. As Jo said when I mentioned it "For god's sake - give them back!"