Today we do what we should do every day: venerate our mothers. Not roll our eyes at their advice – advice we should see as helpful and caring rather than interfering. Not get frustrated at their stubbornness, which we should see as resilience and steadfastness. Not sigh like it’s the end of the world when they say how amazingly talented your brother/sister (or your brother/sister’s son/daughter) is – again.

For me, veneration often revolves around food, so naturally this got me thinking of all the things I learnt from my mother in the kitchen, such as the importance of making a soffritto of two parts onion, one part celery and one part carrot as the base for any meaty braise, sauce or stew.

Like how I should substitute fennel for the celery in the soffritto if the dish is built around seafood.

Like how it should be fried in a mix of olive oil and a knob of butter.

These rules I stick to today as though they had been carved on stone tablets.

I assume this knowledge came from her time living in Rome, and this vegetable base, with added diced bacon, underpinned the rich bolognese we’d devour once a week when I was a kid – the one I still cook today.

There was more, like how adding an anchovy or a dash of Worcestershire sauce brings a noticeable improvement in flavour to stews without leaving a trace of fishiness.

She also taught me that drinking the dregs of adults’ pre-dinner drinks and devouring the last of the creamy chicken and mushroom vol-au-vents after my parents and their guests had gone in to dinner was wrong. Especially if you got sprung. As was slipping the thin after-dinner mints out of their wrappers but leaving the wrappers in the box so it didn’t look like a plague of pyjama-clad locusts with a taste for dark chocolate and oozy mint fondant had swarmed through.

She also taught me that fruitcakes should be overloaded with fruit and nuts and always be slightly undercooked. Basically, the cake was only there to stop everything else from running away.

And only a couple of years back, she taught me how to make those stuffed cabbage rolls that I demanded every time I came home. I suspect she had delayed sharing the recipe because she was worried that once I could make my own I wouldn’t visit so much. I suspect this is more a comment on me than on her.

It hit me halfway through writing this column that, rather than relying on my badly shot memory, I should just ask her what culinary lore she’d taught me.

So, I sat her down, gave her an orange juice with ice and a cheek of squeezed lime. She instantly spilt it on the carpet, possibly to see if there was an ulterior motive to this uncharacteristically caring action from her son. When the carpet didn’t start sizzling and the dog survived licking some up, she shared what she had taught me (see below).

When it came to baking, one type of biscuit stood above all others. Mum was even able to find the long-lost recipe for these melting moments in her scrapbook of recipes that she has now passed on to me. It is so radically different from the classic Australian melting moment that I’ve renamed them “communist melting moments” because they’re so revolutionary (recipe below).

Most importantly, she taught me that with kids you don’t need a massive repertoire – just a dozen or so favourites that you can rotate. Besides her eggy bread, cabbage rolls and bolognese, there were chops or snags with three vegetables, beef stew with dumplings, steamed leeks wrapped in ham and baked in a cheese sauce (witlof also worked well), a ratatouille loaded with eggplant and zucchini that had eggs poached in it, and lots of chicken – roast chicken, chicken noodle soup, chicken liver risotto, which her evil stepmother had been taught by Elizabeth David. Most of these I still make and have even included in my books.

I had totally forgotten her love of frankfurters: served like hot dogs in soft buns; boiled with mustard, cabbage and mash; sliced and popped on toothpicks with cubes of cheese and pineapple; and, a favourite, sweet and sour frankfurters. This is a fine example of early fusion cuisine in the years before Neil Perry and Cheong Liew made it fashionable. I can taste this still, and vividly remember the pop of the frankfurters and the twang of the tinned pineapple. It was the curried sausages of my childhood.

Reading that scrapbook, I know she still has more to teach me, like whether that almond curry made with apples and apricot jam or the leek and bacon souffle omelette would still be worth making – but only after I’ve made those sweet and sour frankfurters.

Matt’s Mum’s top kitchen tips:

1. The ratio for a perfect cake is butter, sugar and flour each measured to the weight of two eggs and mixed with those eggs.

2. Sunday night is not for cooking so serve eggy bread – fried stale bread that has been soaked in beaten eggs, salt, pepper and occasionally cheese if you have any old scrap ends.

3. Wasting food is wrong. In return, I taught her that the postal service didn’t appreciate me sending my unwanted stew in a cardboard box to Africa for the “starving children”.

4. Fancy dessert is a treat and essential when friends come over, whether it’s floating islands or that hack dessert she made of yoghurt whipped with cream and chilled, then topped with brown sugar and slammed under a hot grill to glaze like a creme brulee.

5. Crumbles are for Sunday lunch and then again for Monday breakfast.

6. Skin is the best part of rice pudding (we always ended up fighting over it).

Matt’s Mum’s communist melting moments
Makes 40

One of the first recipes we got to cook with Mum as kids, these biscuits signify teatime even more than buttered crumpets, a pot of tea and the wrestling or Doctor Who battling Daleks on the (black and white) telly. I found the yellowed clipping of the recipe among the crab quiches and chicken broccoli ones my mother had collected over the years in the treasured recipe scrapbook she recently gave me.

If we are what we eat, then I am “2.5 oz lard, 1.5 oz margarine and 3 oz caster sugar creamed together with a wooden spoon. To this is added half a standard egg (which, I must say, bamboozled me a little) whisked with 1 tsp vanilla essence and then 5oz of self-raising flour is folded in. Finally, they are rolled in oats and each decorated with a glacé cherry and baked for 15 minutes at 350˚F or gas mark 4.”

This recipe made me think (1) how much harder a simple task like baking biscuits was without a stand mixer to do the creaming, and (2) “wow, lard and margarine”. Those two have totally dropped out of favour.

My modern-day Australian reworking of this recipe uses spreadable butter, vanilla extract (not essence), and a whole egg – half eggs are so much harder to find in the shops these days.

Ingredients

225g spreadable butter
170g caster sugar
1 egg
Pinch of salt
2 scant tsp vanilla extract
280g self-raising flour
1 cup (90g) rolled oats
40 (200g) glacé cherries

Method

Preheat the oven to 175°C oven (165°C fan-forced) and line a baking tray with baking paper.

Cream the butter and sugar until pale and light. (Ideally use a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, although a hand beater will do. A wooden spoon is traditional.)

Add the egg, pinch of salt and the vanilla, and process until smooth and combined.

Fold in the flour.

Place the oats in a shallow bowl. Drop walnut-sized dollops (20g) of this very soft dough into the oats and gently roll into oat-coated balls.

Arrange balls on the prepared tray, leaving a good amount of space between each to allow for spreading. Press a glacé cherry in the centre of each. Bake for 15 minutes or until golden. Leave to cool a little – the biscuits will still likely be soft, but firm up as they cool – then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.