In all her 74 years of living, my mother, Marie, has never attended any formal tasting before. Exploring gastronomy was never her cup of tea; rarely would she even try new things outside of her multi-decade-spanning collection of eating and drinking habits. One such eating habit was the Irish staple of bread, butter and jam - a snack she had inherited from her late mother and one that had an omnipresence in my childhood similar to that of Catholicism, though thankfully without the trademark holy guilt.
Neelma is the owner of Jars of Goodness, a conserve producer based in Mombasa, Kenya. I've spoken with her many times about many things, but surprisingly, never actually about the Jars of Goodness conserves. Neelma's evenly measured speech patterns and patient responses leave the impression that she is truly present with you. I also sense that somewhere behind those calming traits, she is a formidable woman, though I am unsure in what ways. I say this to give a sense of Neelma and highlight that she has the type of charisma that makes me instantly interested in whatever she wants to share. Naturally, I wanted to try her conserves. Given the opportunity to sample these nuanced, eccentric, and uncompromisingly fair-trade condiments, I roped my mother in on a mock formal tasting of them.
It would be a nice narrative device to say that in doing so, I realised in the concluding paragraph of this article that it was a sub-conscious attempt to find another avenue - in a scarce number of avenues - that allowed me to simply connect with her; I knew this upfront, in truth it was the reason I wanted to write the piece. But by doing so, I walk the line of being overly personal and self-indulgent in a medium that doesn't necessarily warrant or even want it. Yet I want to connect with her, and as we grow in our dwindling years, I take every opportunity to do so.
I sit across from Marie at the sun-worn wooden table in her cream-coloured kitchen. Careful not to mark the already blemished wood, we have placed three dinner mats between us, each with a large plate centred on them. Scrambling to simulate a professional tasting, I have ensured the water we drink is room temperature, we have a selection of small plates at our side, and folded-squared tissues are within our reach. I have also obscured the label on every jar so my mother goes into every bite blind, the skittish thing that she is.
We plan to taste each condiment in three ways: a small amount to be eaten straight off a spoon, a decent amount liberally spread over sourdough bread and butter, and a dollop or so sitting atop a wedge of goat's cheese. The latter was inspired by Marie's sister, whom she visited the previous day and had sugar-free jam over cheese, a combination Marie likely considered as a new midday snack; despite rarely trying new things, she was often charmingly excitable over the tiniest adjustments to her eating.
The Winter noon is lighting the kitchen through two large pane windows. I dart back and forth from the table to a black faux-marble countertop, preparing and bringing the samples back to our plates, doing my best impression of a top-tier server. I also have music quietly humming in the background. This is to ease a strange worry of mine that a silence would fall between us and sap any social momentum we might gather.
The first condiment we try is an orange, ginger and coriander marmalade.
We pull the spoon out of our mouths. My mother's face elongates with pursed lips, an expression I interpret as both being impressed and relieved that this might be a painless affair after all. 'I can't tell what this is,' she says, licking her lips, thrown off by the fractional peculiarities of the marmalade.
‘There’s three ingredients,’ I tell her, ‘aside from orange, there is a herb and something spicey, you could say – though it’s not a spice, it’s actually a vegetable.’ I do my best to guide her but, ultimately, I think my hints are more of a hindrance. Stubbornly, she resigns in trying to guess the flavours.
‘Ginger and Coriander,’ I tell her, and she nods and ‘ahs.’
Marie was the fourth child of eight and was raised in a rural town in Meath, an eastern county in Ireland. Her father died when she was a child and her mother, Tess, raised the whole family alone, a privilege my grandmother had to fight for. Supposedly, both social services and the local priest called to the house and attempted to take Tess’ eight children from her, deeming that she was not fit to raise them without her late husband. My grandmother convincingly threatened to ‘bate the shite out of them’ if either the priest or the social worker set foot beyond the garden wall surrounding her small cottage. By sheer force of will, Tess fended off both the Irish government and God, so to speak.
I gather our plates, clean our spoons and prepare the next samples: a savoury fig, tomato and caramelised onion jam I hope she’ll enjoy with the goats cheese.
Marie's inner circle would know her as gregarious, kind and a little aloof, though she might seem shy and reserved to the rest of the world. Despite this, I can testify that on the few necessary occasions, she could become a force of nature similar to that of Tess. I am mindful of my mother's privacy, and knowing that she will likely read this (and likely not tell me), I will be scarce in the details of her life. However, I will say that Marie very much takes after her mother in that she might be the strongest person I have ever met. I did not always appreciate this, particularly in my youth, but it grew more apparent as I got older.
I had a similar childhood to my mother in that I too lost my father at a young age. Thankfully, Ireland was progressive enough a country by then to see women as capable of raising families on their own. My father's dying meant that she became the singular sun I orbited around and was my most direct source to learn of the world. When I recall those mournful years, I am amazed at the grace my mother showed.
Trying to grapple with death, my favourite question as a child was the mono-syllabic Why – why did he die? Why am I the only kid in school without a father? Why do we die to begin with? Why did God choose to take Dad away? And why wouldn't he choose to take you, too? - and for all the crippling uncertainty that existed for me as a bereft four-year-old, my mother stoically absorbed my questions and comforted me in the ways I can only assume she herself was comforted with as a child. The undercurrent of these consolations was faith: she didn't know why God did such a thing, but trust that God won't do it again.
Marie’s faith was that of her own mother’s – the Catholic Church – and while I don’t have a relationship with religion and the death of my father made me a non-believer from a remarkably young age, I suppose I did have faith of sorts in my mother who was literally and figuratively a higher power. This faith was a kind of non-verbal, guttural compass that trusted in her to prevent me from bumping into walls as I walked blindfolded through early life. And I’m nearly thirty now, and she seventy-four, and life is good and she and I are great, and so the faith seemed well-placed. Laying aside the trauma of a los-
Marie's faith was that of her own mother's – the Catholic Church – and while I don't have a relationship with religion and my father's death made me a non-believer from a remarkably young age, I suppose I did have faith of sorts in my mother, who was literally and figuratively the higher power in my life. This faith was a kind of non-verbal, guttural compass that trusted her to prevent me from bumping into walls as I walked blindfolded through early life. And I'm nearly thirty now, and she seventy-four, and life is good, and she and I are great, so my faith seemed well-placed.
My mother's phone rings and without concern for the tasting, she answers and floats toward the south-east window to chat with the caller.
'Ma!' I say, 'you'd be thrown out of any decent tasting room for taking a call during.'
With a mouthful of bread, cheese and jam, she jovially tells me to feck off. I can tell from the warm but instant bickering that the caller is my mother's partner, a stoney man from the west of Ireland who is alarmingly allergic to rest and is currently nursing a back injury. I gather from the call that he is in pain but will not take painkillers nor even lie down for thirty minutes. Marie resists his protests by repeating, 'Don't be talking shite,' but her quietening tone is that of a woman who recognises a lost cause. I sip at the tepid water beside me and take a final bite of the rich and intriguing jam on the creamy cheese. While doing so, I scribble the details of this phone call in my notebook and note that I feel like this diversion is relevant, though I'm unsure how.
I stand and prepare our third sample, a condiment called Paradise in a Jar. My mother hangs up and returns to her seat. Reading through the ingredients of this pineapple, coconut and citrus jam, I say from across the kitchen that this might be a funky one. I look to my mother, who endearingly likens a deer in headlights – she doesn’t like trying new things – but I reassure her that Jars of Goodness has won awards for this jam.
Laying aside the trauma of a lost parent, I concede to being a particularly unusual child. My mother had me when she was forty-five – I like to joke that I’m the Catholic surprise – and I was the baby brother to four siblings. In a family of impressively pragmatic thinkers and workers, I was the wayward youngest. Not in any problematic sense, just that I was utterly absent in most mental capacities, inefficient at everyday tasks, and profoundly ‘away with the fairies’, as the Irish proverb goes. In summation, the opposite of my siblings.
When I think back on how feverishly I played pretend as a child, how I exhausted those around me with my eccentricities, or how withdrawn into music and films I grew in my melancholy teenage years, I don’t blame my mother for not really knowing what to do with me or how to relate. She came from a stoic family – even by 1950s standards – and her children up until me were obviously unique but overall reliably normal. I wonder even now if she sees me as some alien figure, worlds removed in every sense outside of family. There is little common ground on which we can meet; our interest in life diverges in almost every way aside from the value of loving and appreciating family. I say all this to reiterate the simple truth that I try to connect where I can.
My mother looks wary as she sees me struggling to get a balanced spoonful of Paradise in a Jar. The firm, beige and chunky glob appears to defy all rules she associates with jam.
‘Sorry,’ I say absently, ‘I’m just trying to give you a balanced spoonful that’s not too chunky.’
‘What are the chunks?’
‘I can’t tell you,’ I say, ‘but not to fear, I think you’ll like it.’ I repeat that this jam has won awards, wondering if the high regard of Kenyan food critics is something my mother would appreciate. The spoonful goes down well, a boozy, thick sweetness with sparks of tang that works nicely on the bread and butter, but we’re both especially impressed with the savoury goat cheese combination.
Across two empty plates, I ask her an open question about using jam on childhood snacks and how I always associated the condiment with her, Nanny Tess, and my aunts, particularly the late Bernie, who had taught my mother how to make marmalade.
‘Everyone was reared on it,’ she says, offering no more.
Even with me, the most probing of her children, she is notably cagey about her personal life. Whenever our conversations - either naturally or unnaturally - veer into vulnerability, we both grow cautious; her because she is not used to such things and me for not wanting to pry too much.
I once took a blunt approach to getting to know Marie and her biography by interviewing her; as this article suggests, I am an embarrassingly sentimental man. I had an idea to put together a project where I interviewed those I was closest to, starting with my first core relationship: my mother. It happened on a temperate St. Stephen’s Day over a brandy and hot whiskey, and we had an hour-long chat about the details of her life in her own words. While we both agreed that this was a wholesome get-together, excessive vulnerability slipped through in innocuous ways neither of us had anticipated. One such way was my third question for her, one to warm up the conversation, where I asked her to tell me about her favourite memory. I’ve only seen my mother cry maybe six times, five of which were for the deaths of my father, her mother, our dog, her brother and her sister; the sixth was when she told me about her favourite memory. By the end of the hour, she was exhausted, and while I wanted to know more I suggested we finish the interview at another time. That was five years ago, and every time I’ve asked for that elusive part two she has deflected the request, so I’ve since stopped asking.
'We have one more,' I say.
'This Kenyan stuff is not bad,' she says.
'This is another funky one,' I echo, though I do not elaborate.
In hindsight, I wonder if what I did next was cruel, but I don't think so; I merely sprinkled a bit of levity onto the situation. From the kitchen counter, I remind her that as part of the tasting protocol, we must sample the condiment in every form – the spoon, the bread and butter, and the goat cheese – and confident in her palate so far, my mother absently tells me she knows the score. I am cavalier in preparing the samples and bringing them to the table, doing my best not to make my mother suspicious. Her eyes fall downward to the plate before her and settle beneath a frown.
'It's spread very thin,' she says, examining the pale green blob stretched across the bread and cheese.
'It's a little runnier than the others,' I say, delicately scooping a spoonful for her to try. I hand her the spoon and she brings her nose close to the sauce to smell it. Thankfully, it doesn't omit any strong fragrances so she can't guess what she is about to taste by sight or smell. I do my best to remain composed behind a restrained smile. My mother is not at all a fan of spicy food, nor does she have a tolerance for it.
Spoon, bread and butter, and goat cheese.
My mother is not at all a fan of spicy food, nor does she have a tolerance for it, and at each taste she reacts like a woman desperate not to violently sneeze at mass. In perfect silence, her face contorts and her head drops into a bow with every bite. We laugh hard as we conclude, and for her own entertainment I make a point of not only sampling each item but eating every crumb and drop of the Jalapeño and Tequila Hot Sauce. I should say that I don't have a tolerance for spicy foods either.
We continue to laugh after the tasting is done, our eyes watery and our nostrils moist and expansive, and we make a cup of tea and sit opposite each other again across a newly cleared table. It is one of those times where I consider asking her to do this again, in a non-professional context where we just try different foods, maybe head into the city and try the latest and greatest restaurants, and in some dream world she becomes a food connoisseur in her twilight years. But I know that won't happen, and I've made peace with the fact that those kinds of things don't need to happen for us to be close - for our version of close. We have a relationship that simply is, and we've found a way to let one another be as they are in that relationship, which isn't something I always thought was possible.
The word 'Father' to me, in the strictest sense, is more conceptual than anything I have developed a relationship with. It is unsurprising when I have literally three memories of my dad, and while I see his picture and know he is mine, it's as if he takes up the place behind the role of father rather than the role itself, a kind of association that is more symbolic than emotional. Whereas, the word 'Mother' comes with a depth of nuance and complexity that no novel, painting, or song has even come close to capturing. And the remarkable thing about that is that our relationship is not particularly complicated or interesting, it's just that of a mother and son. It's something truly unique and truly common, an almost paradox.
I don't have any moral to ponder or prescribe at the end of this piece, a written body that is and isn't about a Kenyan condiment producer, in the same way that is and isn't about my mother. Even still, the bottom line is she liked the jams, as did I, and I owe Jars of Goodness for the modest gift of being able to sit down with my mother and make each
