Food memories

January 12

By Alice Shopland, founder of Angel Food

I’m marking Veganuary 2025 by publishing a blog post a day.

Growing up, we had cheese at least once a day. I remember my sister Sue attempting to scoop out some ice cream that had frozen very hard. The force required to push the spoon through the rock-hard ice cream meant that the scoop of ice cream sailed past her bowl and landed in the bowl of grated cheese still sitting on the table. Sue and I both remember looking at Dad to gauge his reaction: he could be quite scary. After a tense pause, Dad laughed, and then we laughed, and every time we had ice cream after that one of us would say, “Mind the grated cheese.”

The after-school snacks I made myself always involved cheese: either cheese melted on toast or a Marmite and cheese sandwich (which was often just two slabs of Cheddar with Marmite in the middle, no bread).

Some of my other favourite food memories revolve around cheese too: learning to make Welsh rarebit at school (it seemed much more sophisticated than cheese on toast); mum’s cousin Beryl in Cheltenham making me a packed lunch for the bus trip back to London, including a wedge of homemade apple pie and a slab of mature cheddar to accompany it; eating very ripe expensive imported camembert with Grandma (so ripe, in its little round wooden tub, that it had a strong aroma and flavour of ammonia, which sounds disgusting but which I did like – I now know that would be considered over-ripe); Grandpa enjoying the combination of rock melon and gorgonzola (a taste he developed in Italy and so exotic compared with the stodgy food I imagine he ate as a child in the English Midlands and at boarding school).

In my teens, I stopped eating red meat and chicken, not for any ethical reason, just because I didn’t like the taste or the texture. I thought I was vegetarian, but I wasn’t: I still ate fish sometimes and wasn’t fussy about avoiding the byproducts of meat. I ate Bakewell tarts knowing they contained beef fat; when a real vegetarian friend declined them because of the beef fat I was a bit taken aback at her ‘purist’ approach. We visited a family friend for dinner, and I declined the roast beef but happily put the gravy on my vegetables, fully aware that it would have been made with the juices from the meat.