On Breakfast Clubs & Forming Tastebuds

You didn’t eat honey on toast at home. When she held it up expectantly, with a little wrist shake posed as a yes or no question, you nodded, not really knowing why but it was too late at that point. After that, it became part of your routine every morning. She liked to squeeze out spirals and they’d ooze over the crusts, so your post-breakfast ritual was always sucking the sticky sweetness off your thumb and index finger.

The winters were the hardest. The bus stop was precisely a 5-minute walk from your flat and the bus would pass at 06:20 exactly. If you left at 06:14 it would mean only 1 minute of waiting in the orangey dark. You’d all run to the back of the bus, and slump into a seat . From there, it was a 3-minute run to the school, at most.

Like a well-oiled machine, your parents held the door open and fed you to the belly of the city.

These were fears you didn’t talk to your parents about. And though it was mutually shared, you only confided it through looks passed over heavy schoolbags creasing your uniforms. It felt like a test. A trust fall, of sorts. Like a well-oiled machine, your parents held the door open and fed you to the belly of the city. In return, you got breakfast and a little bit braver.

As an adult, you start to pick out the different shades that exist in the folds of these memories. The eye cream dabbed under the eyes of a mother who didn’t want the dog in the first place. Whose alarm sounded an hour earlier that it should have to walk it anyway. Scrawly handwriting on notes stuck to heavy pots of Bolognese. Some things don’t get seen until hindsight kicks in.

Your education in food started at kitchen windows on a Southwest London council estate.

 By then, you’d mopped up the tomato sauce in your bowl with the last bit of bread, and how you’d click on the burner and swing your legs at the breakfast bar had become anecdotal. Slipping off your tongue as you mirror how your date cuts his pizza, fingers clumsy.

Your education in food started at kitchen windows on a Southwest London council estate. Plates were passed from neighbour to neighbour. Leftovers from christenings. Chocolate chip muffins, baked for a few extra moments of peace and quiet with a Danielle Steel novel. The smell of stir-fry would drift through the block on the rare weekends your father cooked and there would come that familiar tap on the double-paned glass. Milky shapes, bearing Tupperware.

 You have since learnt that there is a right way to hold your knife and how long it takes to make a lasagna from scratch. That the time you spent leaning against the cool metal of your bunk bed, finishing an essay on Hamlet, was the time it took for hands to move through the kitchen, wiping away any traces of future dinners in time to proofread your words.

It is easy to make jokes about your mother not knowing how to cook. To lean into the stereotypes that promise an easy laugh at dinner parties.

These are the things you think of now that you live in a country where food dominates most conversations. Of the brick walls you shared meals between. Of the other students you drifted through sleepy school canteens with. Adult fingers buttering bread and carefully counting change emptied into envelopes with your name on.

It is easy to make jokes about your mother not knowing how to cook. To lean into the stereotypes that promise an easy laugh at dinner parties. It’s more honest to admit that once upon a time, a mother could pay 50 pence a day for the promise that her child would eat breakfast. That making ends meet back then went hand in hand with a school system that held hers.

So, at dinner parties or restaurants, you reminisce differently. Let spoons dip and taste. Cook dishes that vaguely resemble the dinners you grew up on. You tell stories while you eat: not of how you made it, but of who made it for you first. And when you spot the outstretched arms to your left, steam rising from the ceramic dish in front of you, the fingers falling just short, you reach for it.