'How to Leave Your Family' by Margaret O'Brien

Ingredients:

You will need

a level head

1 moon calendar

some ducks

1 pond

some bread, stale

1 dark night

1 farmyard

a blanket of snow

1 marmalade cat

2 owls, white

wings

Method:

First, it is essential to avoid weeping. Hatch your plan carefully and keep a level head. Timing is crucial. Lie to your sister when she notices you checking the moon calendar on the scullery wall. Spend some time by the pond observing the ducks and how they swim and then lift off to fly. Don’t be afraid to venture into the dark. Make some test runs. Take the bread you’ve been saving in your pillow. Although stale this will be your sustenance in the beginning. Be careful to avoid the snow covered farmyard, you don’t want to leave tracks. Likewise the muddy paths by the pond. Don’t talk to the marmalade cat as you pass through the kitchen, she cannot be trusted. But the two barn owls who keep watch in the eaves are your friends and wish you well. Spread your wings.

'Special's Off' by JF King

The words didn’t sound right coming from his sort of lips.

‘Escargots de Bourguignon
Pâté Lorrain
Moules Normande
Poulet à la Bretonne
Bouillabaisse Marseille…’

‘I know it is a code’, he screamed. ‘Tell me.’

The menu was embossed with the heading Café les Écrivains, I wished I was there again, those May days before the war. Not that my lips would be much use to me now.

The thug advanced again. By now he was onto the puddings

‘Tarte tropézienne…

Regions of France. Who are the section leaders, where will the drops take place, when…?’

A side door opened.

An officer entered, smooth type who actually knew what the food on the menu tasted like. Probably from last night.

‘Schenke is only doing his work. You and I are men of taste. Let us sort this out now and I will take you out for dinner. What do you say?’

‘It is a menu’ I repeated, ‘nothing more, nothing less.’

Schenke re-entered. ‘I hate menus, I hate choice, I hate…’

I never saw the smooth one again.

I rarely went to such restaurants again, even long after the war.

*

Mavis and I spent our honeymoon in the Tyrol.

A beautiful spring evening on the terrace.

The head waiter ambled over with the menu.

‘Choose something special for us, dearest’ said Mavis.

I passed the menu back to the head waiter to recommend a regional delicacy but he worked from memory.  His voice boomed beyond the Appetizers, echoing through the main courses. I intercepted him as he reached ‘the sweets.’

‘Do you not know the difference between a menu and a list, Herr Schenke?’ I said.

A chill descended.

I offered Mavis her going away coat. ‘There can be no delicacies for us here, darling’.
 
 

'Recipe for a New Mam (From a Family Cookbook)' by Denise Bayes

Take Dolly, freshly married to Stan, a joiner working long hours in shipyards on the bustling River Wear.

Add new baby daughter, curled under a hand-knitted blanket in a second-hand pram. Warm in a strip of late-summer sunshine.

Cream together the anxiety of motherhood with the heavy silence of the house until breathing becomes stifled.

Fold in the missed camaraderie of the lasses at the paper mill, the buzz of life before marriage.

Add a single high-pitched squeal from the bairn outside.

Stir in unknown quantities of maternal instinct.

Remove daughter from pram and drizzle a stream of kisses onto the tiny perfect  blonde head.

Bake, squashed together in the backyard, spine pushed against the warm bricks of the coalhouse.

Serve with happy gurgles of a contented baby bouncing on mam’s knee.

'Grandpa John's Favourite Dinner.' by Lindsay Bamfield

Grandma’s recipes are handwritten in an old exercise book. Blots and stains decorate the pages.

On page 23 is ‘John’s favourite dinner.’ John was my grandfather. I never knew him.

Grandma noted the provenance of the ingredients. All of it from their own small West Country farm plus sugar from the beet fields in Lincolnshire and vinegar from the local shop.

In honour of my grandfather’s 100^th birthday I recreate his favourite meal for his two daughters and six grandchildren.

I take my list to my local North London supermarket super-market and fill my trolley.

1. Leg of Lamb – New Zealand

2. Potatoes – Spain

3. Carrots – France

4. Broccoli – Morocco

5. Mint – West Bank

6. Vinegar – Italy

7. Flour – milled in Britain with wheat from USA

8. Sugar – Paraguay

9. Butter – New Zealand

10. Apples – South Africa

11. Cream – France

Our dinner is a triumph – good old-fashioned fayre. ‘Just as good as Mum used to make it,’ says my aunt. But the ingredients clocked up more than 54,000 miles – over four times around the globe to reach us.

'Pantry Essentials For Any New Home' by Joyce Bingham

Dried porcini mushrooms.

I pass a big punnet of chestnut mushrooms, full of flavour and seek out the tiny packet of dried sliced mushroom, crisp and full of flecks of taste.

Two packs of savoury biscuits BOGOF, a bargain.

A selection of pasta suitable for any sauces be they tomato infused, sticky with cheese or coated in virgin olive oil.

I select a pack of twirly ones, avoiding the expensive green ones made of peas and spinach.

Chocolate, on offer, slip that in the basket.

Spices, best bought in small amounts to enable frequent replacement to ensure maximum flavour is retained.

Pizza seasoning and spices rub for spare ribs, perfect.

Family sized salted peanuts, too tasty to miss.

Herbs, buy in pots for your kitchen windowsill in winter and in your kitchen garden for the summer months

I find a tub of frozen crushed garlic; I don’t have a window in my kitchen.

Three for two, flavoured yoghurt, caramel and chocolate, just what I need.

The weight of the basket hurts my fingers, digging in and creasing skin.

I pack my bag with my new pantry ingredients, I realise I’ve bought nothing for dinner.

'Emily Makes a Fish Pie' by Maria Thomas

A chunk of butter drops into the pan on a low, low heat. Wait for it to melt into an oily pool, before floating in flour, as light and white as clouds that billow, coating surfaces with swoons of powder.

Her old friend, the warm wooden spoon, churns the mixture, under-and-over, round-and-round, until the liquid is absorbed, the mix swollen, desiccated. A splash of milk sizzles and is subsumed, splash, subsume, splash, subsume, splash, consume.

It is so soothing this – the practised movements, the repetition, the cooking-by-numbers comfort of it quelling the corner of her mind that is processing, calculating, doing the math.

The kitchen fills with the scent of nutmeg-warm milk and smoked fish as she begins assemblage – wilted spinach, plump prawns, golden haddock, pebbles of egg, glutinous sauce, topped with mountains of snow-capped mash.

She lifts the dish to slide into the oven - she won’t be able to say later whether she is clumsy and distracted, or angry and intentional - but it falls from her hands slamming onto the door, detonating, exploding on the tiles.

Her face explodes in sympathy.

Titanium tears clatter like spent bullets, wails sever the silence like an air-raid siren, pyroclastic snot floods her nose, mouth, blisters her throat. She gasps for breath, her lungs convulsed as if the air is poisonous. The devastation is boundless, razing.

In ten-minutes time, she will find herself prone amongst the debris – a war-zone of glass, twisted metal, shattered prawn-flesh, pebbles, boulders.

She’ll be calm again, empty, but know what she must do.

In thirty-minutes time, the kitchen will be tidy, curry ordered, repairman booked. In her fingertips she’ll hold a card - grosgrain ribbed, heavy, heavy - bearing the name of a clinic, and a consultant, and a number, which she’ll finally call.

NFFD 2022 Prompt #11: Elevenses

Elevenses

This is National Flash Fiction Day's eleventh anniversary, so this year, all our prompts have something to do with the number 11....

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If you're joining us from the UK, it's now about time for elevenses*...which seems to us like a perfect time for a spot of tea and some flashy nibbles.

Write a flash in the form of a recipe, ingredients list, shopping list, menu, wine list, or something else that has to do with food or drink.

* For those not familiar with elevenses, it is a very sensible eleven o'clock break for tea or coffee, and possibly a snack. 

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If you’re submitting this to us, make sure to note that this is a response to Prompt 11: Elevenses.

You can submit responses until 23:59 BST on Sunday, 19 June 2022 for a chance to be published here at The Write-In.