Cake upon cake: the joy of being cooked for

Sometimes, too much of a good thing is never enough. A beautiful weekend of family, food and champagne, and Olivia’s white pizza recipe.

Celebrating.

I begin, friends, with an apology for not getting this newsletter to you over the weekend. I’ll explain why in a minute, and in the meantime I thank you for your patience.

When you live on the water, the summer passes by in a series of airport runs and railway station pick-ups as you collect your latest visitors. This month’s visitors are the most precious of all. My mother has been here for a few weeks. As a lifelong Francophile, she’s enjoying being in France for the first time in five years. When my father was so ill, she could not travel. As his world shrank, so did hers.

We read together, write together, drink tea on the kitchen terrace, go on little jaunts in the car, watch our beloved cop shows while sipping Pastis (her), wine (me). We talk about nothing and everything. She tells me this is a happy house. We both agree it was this even before we moved in. I felt its friendly spirit the first day we walked through the door and went around each room, opening the heavy, old shutters.

We talk about my dad, who died in April after a long illness, bravely bourn, to use the language of obituaries. Slowly, stories of him when he was strong and well, handsome and funny, return, crowding out the difficult memories of the past few years.

On August 2, on what would have been my parents’ sixtieth wedding anniversary, my nephew Angus and his girlfriend Olivia arrived from Stockholm, flooding the house with their youthful, energetic light as surely as flinging open the shutters.

They are easy company. We all rub along nicely together. Angus goes to buy the croissants, pains au chocolat and that day’s baguette each morning, Olivia reads in the orangerie, Dixie the cat stretched out blissfully on her lap. There are long lunches and dinners, bike rides and trips to the beach, boules evenings in the little square in front of the house, visits to markets and drives through the vines or around the étang to favourite restaurants, and drinks in the courtyard of the Noilly Prat chais. The days go slowly, but time passes quickly.

We adored Olivia from the first time we met her. She is graceful and gracious, clever and funny. She loves animals and she loves cheese. My kind of person. Also, she is teaching me Swedish phrases, my favourite of which is kaka på kaka, or cake on cake, meaning something which is a bit excessive or over the top. Useful.

When they were here in February, it was Olivia’s thirtieth birthday. She wanted to make her own cake – a Swedish princess cake, as beautiful as it was delicious, layers of sponge, crème patissière, raspberry jam and whipped cream covered in a layer of green marzipan topped with a pink marzipan rose. I felt a little guilty. There was someone in my house, having a birthday and they were making their own cake. But sometimes you just have to let the good times roll, don’t you, and just not get in their way?

I have huge affection in my heart for anyone who will cook for me. Not my old friends, of course, who know they can plonk me down with a gin and tonic and a bowl of crisps and no one will be sad. Or we can eat piles of hot, buttered toast or huge bowls of pasta with cheese as we did when we were students, or just call out for pizza, because who cares? It’s new people. The ones who say, ‘I wouldn’t dare cook for you’, not realising I am the easiest and most grateful of audiences. I never know quite what to say to that. And also, it means I never quite know what to cook for them, when I invite them round, because I think they expect some kind of exhausting tasting menu, rather than what I usually cook if we’re old friends: roast chicken, potatoes, salad, cheese, some sort of small, rich pudding that requires no last-minute faff.

So this is another reason I love Olivia. She loves to eat and she loves to cook. While they were with us, she made this beautiful pasta in a tomato and vodka sauce, and the white pizza recipe I’m sharing with you today, an elegant combination of crème fraîche, goat’s cheese, mozzarella, walnuts and honey. It’s appropriate too, as it matches her cool Swedish self, as she wafts about the place in cottons and linens in shades of white, cream and honey.

Olivia’s tomato and vodka pasta, with her peach, nectarine and burrata salad.

Putting the caramelised onion and goat’s cheese on the pizza.

A couple of nights ago, Angus and Olivia wanted to take a walk before dinner. I suggested they take the dogs, but Angus demurred slightly so I didn’t insist, though I remember in that moment thinking it was a little odd as they are both so lovely with the animals.

Twenty minutes later they came back engaged. It made sense now. No one needs two scruffy terriers who slow down proceedings with their desire to sniff every lamppost and bench when they’re planning to propose, do they?

So there has been much hugging and champagne and talk about weddings. (Olivia: ’I want something simple and beautiful, with lots of cheese’.)

Grief is like being trapped behind glass. The world goes on around you but you are separate from it, an observer, stuck. Life is muffled. The glass lowers sometimes, only to slam back shut when you least expect it. You snatch greedily at the crumbs of what feels like the return of normal. And then happiness comes along and flings open the shutters, pulls back the glass. You aren’t watching yourself be happy, you are happy.

Families evolve. You lose people, new people come along, new ties and bonds and histories are made. Some days, the best days, are cake upon cake. Happiness is always appropriate, never too much.

Gracie, also feeling the love.

Love’s young dream, in the market.

Olivia’s white pizza

One in, one out.

You can make the dough up to the point where it has proved and doubled in size and then refrigerate it until you’re ready to use it. It’ll be fine in the fridge for a couple of days. Let the dough come to room temperature again before forming it into rounds.

Makes 2 pizzas