“You have to keep beating it for longer,” my grandmother instructed me. “It isn’t pale yet. It’s still too yellow.” I didn’t ask how long this would take. I was nine years old, and I understood what my grandmother meant. You have to keep doing something until it works. It’s like asking: “Are we there yet?”

I watched for the miraculous transformation. The eggs, golden when first beaten, were lightening to a soft lemon colour. The texture was changing. You couldn’t see the sugar anymore; it had looked like sand, but now it was invisible, cloaked in the egg. My grandmother stopped beating, and lifted up the beater. A stream of thick liquid hung down, like the wet sand you used to reinforce a sandcastle. “Yes, that’s enough. Now add the melted butter. Slowly. Then the flour. We’ll need a bit more.”

My grandmother taught me to cook. She never weighed anything. The only measurement she used was a pink breakfast teacup, and it was more a useful scoop than a measure. Instead, she worked towards a desired result. You didn’t cook things for five minutes. You cooked things until you got the........

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