Three Women and a Boat by Anne Youngson

Author:Anne Youngson [Youngson, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473576827
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2020-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

BEFORE THEY LEFT LEAMINGTON, EVE went in search of a charity shop to buy a recipe book. She could have found a bookshop selling new books but was afraid the choice would be too daunting, so she decided to buy one in the first shop she found. It felt like an adventure and she remembered her grandmother, who had lived to a great, idle cantankerous age. She had always insisted that the jigsaws on which she depended to keep herself amused must come from charity shops. It was the thrill of never knowing until the end whether all the pieces were there. Much better to do a puzzle with a picture she loathed, she argued, than to be secure in the knowledge that every time she searched for a certain piece – a certain shape with a bit of green on the left-hand edge – it would always turn out to be there. On occasion, the puzzles were found to have too many pieces. Her grandmother loved it when that happened. As she pushed through the door of an animal charity shop, Eve knew how her grandmother must have felt, anticipating the joy of carrying home something that might be completely marvellous or positively useless. Looking forward to the challenge of making a masterpiece out of faulty materials.

There were only five cookery books on the five shelves of randomly stocked second-hand books. Any customer deciding to buy the first book that a hand fell upon was as likely to carry off a Booker Prize-winner as the self-published memoirs of a railway enthusiast. Eve’s grandmother would have loved it, and so did Eve.

Dogged persistence in reading the spines, not all of them the right way up, eventually revealed that her choice was between Delia Smith’s Winter Cookery, 1001 Things to Cook in Your Slow Cooker, Italian Classics, Gluten-Free Cooking for One and Claudia Roden’s Mediterranean Cookery. Delia seemed the safe choice. The aunt in whose house she had spent so much of her childhood had been fond of saying, when serving up anything more challenging than casseroles and pasta sauces, ‘You can always trust Delia.’ But it wasn’t winter, and Eve didn’t feel like playing safe. She was surprised to find, on consulting the index of Italian classics, that much of the bland slop her aunt had served up – indeed much of the slop she had prepared for herself and friends, was classic Italian, albeit executed with fewer ingredients and omitting all the processes which presumably made the food as tasty as an Italian would expect. There was no slow cooker on the boat. She might have bought it anyway, for the outlay of £1.50, to force herself to be creative in adapting the recipes for any old saucepan with a lid, but when she looked inside, there were no recipes she could not have found in the battered Good Housekeeping that was already on the boat. The gluten-free book had dull recipes featuring alternative ingredients that Eve could not believe were either freely available in canal-side shops or at all nice.

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