Food, family and fillamilu

MEMOIR: Six at the TableSheila Maher Blackstaff Press, 215pp. £7.99

IT’S THE 1970s and ice-cream floats are all the rage. Spaghetti bolognese is a rare and exotic treat, a Marathon is the best chocolate bar to be had, and chicken and chips at Blake’s restaurant in Stillorgan could make for the greatest day of your life.

This is the world according to Sheila Maher, looking back at life as a nine-year-old living in south Dublin. Dotted with photographs and divided into short, anecdotal chapters, Six at the Tableis a childhood memoir about food, family and the occasional Tea Time Express cake.

It all starts in the kitchen. This is the nerve centre of the family, where the walls are painted a pale peach and the cupboards, made from the thinnest plywood and with white arched handles, give a sharp click when opened. An anti-drugs poster from the Eastern Health Board – where the father worked – hangs on the wall to be seen by all four children as a stark warning. This is the only room in the house where you’ll find the mother, who is constantly stirring, cooking and cleaning. Though mealtimes are not always fun – they are mostly cramped, loud events where someone is drinking too loudly or annoying someone else – the food is always something to look forward to.

Maher tells the story of her childhood through a series of meals at the family table. The second youngest, Maher is her mother’s right-hand woman in the kitchen, often helping but always watching. She goes through the average week in meals, building up from Monday’s casserole or steak-and-kidney pie, Tuesday’s weekend leftovers, and Wednesday’s casual quiche or burgers and chips to the “meal event of the week”: the Sunday roast. She lists the types of milk pudding they would have – sago, semolina, blancmange – and includes the menu for her brother’s birthday party, everything from the Viscount biscuits and cocktail sausages to the vol-au-vents: chicken for the children, mushroom for the adults.

The Maher household is, in general, a happy one. There are camping trips, days on the beach, a trip to see the pope and lots of childhood milestones, such as the first taste of Cidona and the arrival of SodaStreams. But everything comes back to the food, and mealtimes become the barometer of family life. When sibling tension reaches its peak, it’s all played out at the table, the mashed potato becoming one sister’s weapon of choice. When her father is ill in bed for weeks, Sheila makes an onion sandwich – his favourite – and eats it as a kind of “morose homage” to him.

Mealtimes also chart the changes in the culinary world in the 1970s. Her mother’s first attempt at making pasta is a bit of a disaster, but later it becomes a regular Saturday meal. The arrival of Delia Smith, and her TV demonstrations of how to layer potatoes or stuff cannelloni with a piping bag, mark a turning point in the Maher household. The grandmother brags on the phone one evening about a fancy new Italian dessert she’s discovered called fillamilu.

"We were not poor. We had a nice home . . . We were not deprived," writes Maher. While Frank Mc Court once said that the happy childhood is "hardly worth your while", Six at the Tabledefies that literary yardstick by describing a happy family. In her debut, Maher, who has contributed to RTÉ's Sunday Miscellany, includes too many nostalgia-driven brand names, perhaps, but delivers a vivid memoir that becomes a carbon-dating record of the Irish family through their food habits in the 1970s.

Sorcha Hamilton is an Irish Timesjournalist