COMFORTS AND JOYS

Emma Mayoh serves up the first in a series of articles celebrating her life in food with a nostalgia-sprinkled look at family favourites

- Emma Mayoh

It all started with smiley faces and alphabetti spaghetti. Not the best thing for a food writer to admit, but we’re all friends here, right? In those early days of high school, arriving home on a wet winter’s day, and usually after my three-bus, the two-hour-long journey home, this was the meal that hit the spot – the Mayoh household version of the Heinz soup ad with steaming glasses and broad smiles. It was always the dish most friends requested when they came for tea – although alphabet letters and Findus crispy pancakes were seldom complained about either.

While these last splendid bastions of eighties dining don’t make it onto the Mayoh household menus anymore, the memories associated with them still have the ability to illicit a smile. It’s the comfort. Not just in the crispy-on-the-outside, soft-on-the inside potato of my childhood dream meals but the warmth of the memory. It’s a thing that’s followed me, like many, through lifetimes get tough – reach for the chocolate Hobnobs; shattered from those early days of being a new mum, Mrs Crimbles coconut macaroons to the rescue. Sunday roasts, apple pies, crumbles, cakes and croissants – they’re all capable of delivering that booster shot of happiness.

Lockdown, unsurprisingly, has offered more opportunity for comfort. Not just more, in fact, but an abundance. We’ve tried to be healthy – Joe Wicks’s frozen yoghurt bark with summer berries and lime really is delicious. But, in reality, it has been those glorious dishes that envelop you in a warm hug that stick in the brain.