Butter (enough)

The recipe card says "butter (enough)" and I've been staring at it for twenty minutes. It's my nan's handwriting. Blue biro, gone purple with age, on an index card that's soft as cloth from forty years of being handled by hands with flour on them. The card says "Tea Loaf." Under that it says "tea (strong, a mug), fruit (the bag), sugar (some), flour (SR), egg, butter (enough)." There is no method. There are no temperatures. There is a brown ring where a mug once sat. She died in February. My mum cleared the kitchen and found the box, thirty or forty cards, and gave it to me because I'm "the one who cooks," which in our family means I own more than one pan. I've made the tea loaf six times now. Six. It's never right. The first time I used a bag of mixed fruit from the supermarket, 500 grams, and it came out dense as a doorstop. The second I halved it and it was better but wrong. Third time I googled "tea loaf" and used someone else's quantities, and it was a perfectly nice tea loaf that had nothing to do with my nan. "What did it taste like?" my husband asked, kindly, on attempt four. "Like hers, but not." "That's not a lot to go on." "It was darker. And it was sticky on top. And there was something." "Something." "There was something." I rang my mum. Mum doesn't cook and said so. I rang my aunt Carol, who said she'd never made it because "your nan wouldn't let anyone near it," which I'd forgotten and which made me laugh and then cry in the space of about a second. Attempt five, I tried treacle, on a hunch. Closer. Sticky. Darker. Not quite. Then last week, going through the rest of the box looking for something else entirely, I found a second card. Not a recipe. A shopping list, in the same purple biro. It said "tea, marg, fruit (Sainsbos), treacle, MIXED SPICE." The last two words underlined twice. Marg. Not butter. She'd written butter on the card because that's what you wrote, and she'd used marg because that's what she had, for forty years, and she'd never told anyone because nobody asked.

And mixed spice. Of course. The something. Attempt six was yesterday. I soaked the fruit in the tea overnight, the way she must have, because there's no other way "a mug" makes sense. I used marg. I put in a teaspoon of mixed spice and then, thinking about it, a bit more. I put in "some" sugar, which I decided meant less than you'd think, because she'd have been rationed as a girl and never quite got over it. I baked it until it looked like it was done, which is the only instruction she'd ever given anyone about anything. My husband had a slice with a cup of tea, standing up, in the kitchen, the way you're meant to. "Well?" I said. He chewed. He didn't say anything for a bit. Then he said, "Your nan's kitchen. The radio was always on." It was. She had it on the windowsill, tuned to the wrong station. I've written a new card. Proper quantities, method, oven temperature, the lot. I put it in the box behind hers. Then I took it out again and wrote at the bottom, "butter (enough)," because someone's going to find that funny one day, and I want it to be a person who knew her.