My culinary heritage comes in a broken line from my father’s side. He really became a cook after the recession of the 1990s. Big dinner party trophy cooking. A glory chef, inspired by TV chefs like Keith Floyd. Meanwhile, in the background on a Wednesday, my mother’s unglamorous peeling and boiling was still going on. Nonetheless this was in the broad sweep of history a massive shift. We can only build upon what we know, which in this case, was mid-century patriarchy.

My father cooked many great meals, but I do remember one nadir when he had collected wild mushrooms and made pasta with them. We were hard up; he didn’t pick out the greying ones and he also slightly overcooked it. The resulting slime resembled grey wallpaper paste. I really wish I had pretended it was delicious, but it was truly disgusting, and he wasn’t happy about an afternoon’s foraging going down the pan. A rare occasion of anger but looking back it wasn’t really about the mushrooms. As his mother had collected recipes and faithfully executed them in a tinny white gas oven, he built a new piece of his identity that rose above a more difficult workplace.

I didn’t want to know it at the time but one of his last dishes (years after the mushrooms) was a game pie. Still recovering from a trip to the oncology ward, he prepared a paving slab sized game pie with a medical pipe hanging out of his arm. The pie weighed several kilos and seemed to take whole hedgerows of wildlife pressed into strata in an exhaustingly manual thick pastry case.

As I cook with my daughters, I reflect on the meaning of certain items on their plate, items which connect all our culinary histories, and the personal meaning that some will acquire. While reassuring dishes do repeat themselves, sporadic innovations, driven by fashion and advertising, refresh and regenerate our menus in an almost unknowable ebb and flow, endlessly forward.