The Kindest Person I Ever Knew plus a Fail-Safe Recipe for Crispy Fish
Plus The Power of Good Apples
These coffee pots belonged to the kindest person I ever met. She was called Anthea Morrison and she lived in a bungalow in Durham with red tulips and a bird bath in the garden. She loved to make coffee by the most old-fashioned of methods with very coarse coffee grounds in a coffee pot. She just poured hot water over the coffee grounds, stirred with a wooden spoon and waited for a few minutes before straining it through a tea strainer.
If you visited Anthea, without fail she would bake you a Victoria sponge cake and fill it with apricot jam (never strawberry). One of the recipes in THE SECRET OF COOKING was inspired by her: Anthea’s Apricot Sponge, although my addition of a glossy and rich chocolate ganache on top was not her style. But she did - always, always - serve the sponge cake alongside a plate of dark chocolate biscuits (as well as fresh scones) so I think of the apricot and the chocolate going together. Any time a child arrived at her bungalow, she brought out an assortment of games including a fiendishly difficult puzzle game and she never let any of my children say goodbye without giving them a book token and a bag of Murray mints.
[photo by Matt Russell]
People sometimes talk about kindness as if it were something weak or bland or boring. But it isn’t. Anthea - who was a retired English lecturer by the time I got to know her and a friend of my Granny - taught me that true kindness is something fierce and even stubborn. It is hard to describe her selfless qualities without making her sound martyrish but she wasn’t. She radiated a quiet joy which was so much fun to be around. We could chat for ages. Her company made you feel that life had shifted into a major key.
She never married or had a romantic relationship, so far as I know. She once told me it was just as well she didn’t have a husband because he might have expected her to get on an aeroplane and she simply couldn’t have done it. I felt there was a whole short story in that comment. But the love she gave to her many cousins and godchildren and friends was unlike anything I have known in its devotion. Here is a photo of her as a young woman from her funeral service at Durham Cathedral (a place which meant a great deal to her).
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I inherited one of Anthea’s brown coffee pots after she died and when I hold it, I feel her goodness. If I could have written another chapter of my book THE HEART-SHAPED TIN, it might have been about this coffee pot which so much feels like an extension of its owner (like the coffee pots, Anthea was often dressed in brown although she favoured camel jumpers and tweed skirts rather than the glossy chestnut brown of the pots). I adored the orderly but modest kitchen of her bungalow and the way her saucepans were always lined up so neatly.
I got to know Anthea because she was a friend and former student of my Granny’s. When my Granny fell ill, apparently terminally, Anthea travelled from Durham to Cambridge to visit her. The doctors gave my Granny a week to live; and she kept saying she was ready to die. But she lived for another eight years! And for all that time, except for a few short breaks to return to Durham, Anthea stayed with her, giving my Granny a whole new life she never could have had otherwise.
After Anthea herself died, someone found that she had a birthday card list consisting of more than 500 names! That’s more than one card a day for every day of the year. As a retired academic, her income wasn’t large but she must have spent well over a thousand pounds a year on birthday cards plus the stamps to post them. Any time one of my three children had a birthday, a carefully chosen card from Anthea would always arrive a couple of days early. We had no idea she had been doing the same for hundreds of other people in her life too.
Walking through Durham to post all those cards must have been one of the reasons she remained so fit and strong well into her eighties, even though she had suffered from a lot of health problems as a child.
A kindness this immense can become a superpower. At Anthea’s memorial service, a former colleague made a comment that stayed with me. He remarked that when she arrived in the English Faculty at the University, there were some hideous personality clashes and nasty office politics going on. But there was something about Anthea which made it impossible for the warring academic factions to be aggressive in her company. Her colleague remarked that if there is such as thing as a bad apple which has a rotting effect on all the fruit in its proximity, perhaps there could also be a good apple which sweetens the whole barrel. Anthea, he said, was a good apple. Her presence made everyone else behave better.
I’ve been thinking a lot of Anthea because so much in the world feels so angry and raw, with jangling nerves all round. Her qualities of fierce kindness are more needed than ever. Last week, I inadvertently hurt a friend’s feelings. It gave me some sleepless nights as I pondered just how sensitive all of our hearts can be, and how I could and should have done more to avoid my friend’s hurt.
It reminded me just how hard it is to be a ‘good apple’ and how important it is to celebrate the rare ones that we meet. The good apples of this world may not end up as the leaders or managers; in most cases, they lack the ego for this. But whatever group they find themselves in, they leave it in a happier state. This is the kind of ‘soft power’ we need more of. I can’t imagine ever having the sheer dedication to send 500 birthday cards every year but remembering Anthea makes me want to do better and let more of my friends know that I am thinking of them, despite the mad onwards rush of life.
Another reason why Anthea was on my mind was because something she loved to eat was a piece of plain cooked fish. She was a person of very sparing appetites - cake aside - and could happily lunch on half a piece of poached salmon. But she also liked fish with hollandaise on more celebratory occasions such as Easter. I suddenly wished that she were alive again because FINALLY, for the first time in my life, I have a method for cooking a really simple piece of pan-fried skin-on fish - I’ve mostly been using this method for Chalk Stream trout - which works every time and I wish I could make it for her. Instead, I’ll put the brown coffee pot on the table and imagine that she is with us still.
Fail-Safe Crispy Fish with Tamarind and Tomato Sauce
A boneless fillet cooked in a pan with the skin on should be one of the easiest ways to enjoy a piece of fresh fish. But I used to find that it often went hopelessly wrong. The skin would stick to the pan or end up flabby instead of crisp. Sometimes the skin would shrivel up and detach itself from the fillet altogether.
One dilemma was that I could never be sure exactly how to tell when it was time to turn the fillet. It almost put me off the whole idea of cooking skin-on fish, even though I adore the contrast between a crusty golden fish skin and the milky-soft flesh underneath.
That was when I made this glorious discovery…
