“My mother had four siblings. They met once a year for an all-encompassing family potluck lunch at one of the siblings’ houses. Although the lunch itself and the location changed every year, one thing never changed—this was the arrangement for four types of dessert.
My oldest aunt was a woman with a spirit larger than life and a joyous primary colour personality. A sworn ally of us children in all matters against adults, she always brought jelly to the family potluck for dessert. She brought two, sometimes three, brightly coloured jellies cooled in faceted glass bowls. Flipping them was an occasion anticipated by all the cousins who would stand around the table while she carefully unmolded the jellies mirroring the bowl patterns in trembling delight to rounds of applause.
My mother’s trophy dessert was chocolate biscuit pudding cradling layers of Marie biscuit soaked in full cream milk and melted chocolate; it was a family treasure. One year, she experimented with an orange zest top layer and the entire family protested. “It was so perfect!” “Oh, but the classic CBP is the best.” “I wait for it all year…” “But, why?” My mother was in a strange mix of pride and annoyance that day, but we never endured the orange zest again. The chocolate biscuit pudding remained perfect for as long as we got it.
My uncle—a gentle botanist and a living encyclopedia of leaves, flowers, fruits, and everything trees—made a delicious peach dessert with fruits grown in his small hill estate. Peach slices in coconut sugar syrup blanched with a dash of cloves was a rare treat that made us children forget our general aversion to fruits. While we ate them, Uncle would tell us about how he took great care to grow peaches in the tropics that were so alien to the species and the difference in taste between the regular peach and the dwarf variety, getting us to guess which one he had used that year.
My youngest auntie hated cooking of any kind. But, her mother-in-law—a formidable matriarch, fantastic cook and baker who considered it blasphemy to attend a family lunch with no special dish—made a devastatingly good lemon meringue coconut pie for the family potluck. Each year, there would be requests around the table to repeat the recipe, although everyone already knew we would never dare to attempt it. It was the dessert that subdued the noisy household into a helpless afternoon coma in front of the TV, nodding on chairs and collapsing across every divan and sofa until some coffee arrived.
That was the 1980s. As the cousins dispersed one by one for higher education, jobs, new businesses, marriages and life’s other pulls, the family potluck also slowly came to an end without anyone quite noticing it. But, it remains a core memory holding place for precious conversations, expired jokes, and the close circle we grew up in. The four desserts—the bright jellies glistening merrily, subtly spiced cold peaches bringing upcountry cool to sweltering Colombo, the perfect chocolate biscuit pudding, and the crowning lemon meringue coconut pie—are the cardinals of this evergreen place I hold in my memory. Still, even the most mediocre lemon meringue pie or soulless peach in syrup can trigger longing in me. Still, seeing the giddily shaking surface of coloured jello puts a skip in my heart, momentarily returning me to the edge of the table, waiting for the jellies to be unmolded. Still, when I return home and my mother makes the ‘classic CBP’, we sit together and enjoy a bowlful together, remembering the family in those days—preserved in a technicolour filter, monumentalized at their very best, and still here to visit through taste, smell, and texture.”