先日、娘が家内の助けを借りてドーナツを作りました。皆で美味しく食べました。
ドーナツと言えば、母のことを思い出します。戦後まもなく堺市に住んでいた頃、日曜日のランチが終わると（ラジオで1時から「尋ね人」という番組が始まる頃）、母はドーナツを作ってくれたのです。配給で貴重なバターの銀紙までフライパンで熱して用いるというやり方でした。後日この話をすると母は涙ぐみました。さぞかし物資が欠乏していた大阪で苦労したことを思い出したのでしょう。
この話は何度も家内にしたのだと思います。有名な料理研究家が著した上述の文庫本を見せてくれました。戦前・戦中・戦後を潜り抜けた女性による貴重な体験記です。ここでもドーナツがわずか１ページですが言及されます。
本書は、思い出の記というより、歴史的資料のように、史実が連続します。私も初めて、小学校時代に思い出したくもないほどまずい脱脂粉乳を飲まされた顛末を知りました。戦後の子供たちの成長に欠かせない栄養の素だったのですね。
A few days ago my daughter and my wife made a dozen of doughnuts, which were very delicious indeed. Doughnuts often remind me of my deceased mother. When we lived on the outskirts of Osaka soon after the Pasific War, she used to cook them after Sunday lunch, starting at 1 pm, when we heard the radio broadcasting the daily programme called ‘In search of the missing’.
Food supply was done on the rationing basis, which made it difficult to find butter, and so my mother made good use of even its wrapping paper by heating it on a frying pan. Almost fifty years later, when I brought it to her attention, she was moved, almost in tears.I think I talked about our post-war episode to my young wife, who took the trouble of securing a copy of an autobiographical account by a very famous food critic, Ms Ai Kidosaki, born in 1925, still flourishing, who experienced all sorts of hardships she had suffered before, during and after the war.
The title of her published book was War Fire, Doughnuts, and Love (probably rhyming with ‘I’), in which she made a short reference to her post-war cooking of doughnuts using the corn powder supplied by the US Occupation Army.The book was written in the nature of historical documents rather than a book of reminiscences. Here for the first time I got to learn how we had to consume tasteless skimmed milk at school: it was also supplied by the Occupation Army. Still, it remained a nourishing source for nutrition, particularly in that impoverished period.
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