Sister Eucharia spent most of the next fifteen years in Madras (now Chennai), where the Presentation Sisters have a group of schools known as Church Park, and she rose to be the head of its teacher-training college. Her order was a missionary group called the Presentation Sisters after her ordination, she took the name Sister Eucharia. She took the path that, in her time and place, was the most glamorous imaginable: she became a nun. She was born poor in the rural west of Ireland in 1920, the eldest of eight children, of whom seven were girls. There was too much at stake.Ĭooking was a skill that my mother, Julia Gunnigan, acquired late and in unusual circumstances. It was a serious business, and although my mother was very good at it, I’m not sure she derived much pleasure from it. She knew what she liked, and ate it, and while she’d complain about putting on weight, she took a simple, reliable pleasure in eating and drinking. Love-hate relationships with food are common these days, but that’s not what I’m talking about: as an eater, my mother had a pretty straightforward relationship with food. This was true of all my mother’s dealings with cooking, though not with eating. That spag-bol recipe was a painstaking document, and one in which you could sense the edge of anxiety.
Foodie definition full#
If you don’t know, well, there’s a reason it took my mother two full pages of foolscap. Sweating an onion, browning ground beef, adding wine and cooking off the alcohol, seasoning with salt-all things you need to do in making even a basic spag bol-are all simple once you know how.
Foodie definition how to#
For the most part, recipes are useful only when you already have a pretty good idea of how to cook. I didn’t know what I was doing in the kitchen. I was a graduate student in English literature at Oxford at the time, but my mother clearly had a low estimation of my practical intelligence and coping skills. It covered two closely written sides of lined foolscap, and began with detailed instructions on how to turn on and light a gas burner. What stands out in my memory is not so much the dish itself-I’ve both cooked and eaten it so often that I know it by heart-as the recipe’s length.
It was for spaghetti bolognese, “spag bol,” a British recipe that blends a meat ragù of a northern-Italian type with the dry pasta beloved in the south, and was sometimes said to be Britain’s national dish. I’ve lost my copy of the first recipe my mother wrote out for me, which was also the first thing I ever cooked. My mother thought of food the way we all now do: as a means of self-definition.
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