Blubber (not, it's not another one about my body... settle down!)

I'm in Melbourne all this week while my ex has gone to the US. I've moved into her house and am being Mr Mom to my 4 (yes, count 'em, 4!) kids. They're all quite different to each other, as kids are, and I bond with them in very different ways. Yesterday I had a sublime bonding moment with my number 2 son, one of those things that adds a bit of texture and oomph to our relationship.

My children, and especially the boys, know that I'm unhealthily obsessed with food. If I'm not eating or talking about food, I'm usually thinking about it. And I do notice that we use food, and especially stories about food and shared experiences around food to reinforce our sense of insiderness. I notice my older son (almost 11) will often bring up some food-related experience as way of bringing us together, and he often asks questions of me like "What's the worst meal you've ever had?", or , more interestingly, "What do you think is the worst meal we've ever had?" To which the answer is usually a dinner we had in Greece. The boys and I reminisce about meals we've shared, we re-live these experiences as a way of staying together. It does seem more important now too; I live in a different city, I don't see them all the time. It's these things that tie us together. So every so often we go over the sequence of events that led us to have the best ribs we've ever had, in a roadside place in Florida, or the meal we had once in an Indonesian restaurant in Melbourne where the was a knife fight in the kitchen.

Yesterday number two son (aged 9) and I decided to cook what we call "pig leg soup", which is agreeably fiddly and messy to make and has a couple of other interesting qualities. When cold, it's quite solid, so you can tip a container of it on its side and it just doesn't flow. Naturally, we do this each time as a test of consistency, sometimes with dramatic results if we haven't gotten it quite stodgy enough. It's very gassy, but that's also amusing.

Constructing pig leg soup has two phases. The first phase involves putting a big ham hock in a saucepan with lots of water and a few other things (thyme, an onion, a leek, a bay leaf and so on) and simmering for a hell of a long time. At the end of this phase, we take the ham hock out of the pot, let it cool just a bit, then the fun starts. Number 2 and I each get a knife and we attack the ham hock. We strip off the skin and the fat, or as he calls it, "the blubber", and we eat about half the meat ourselves, up to our elbows in pig fat, scoffing down chunks of too-hot meat and bits of fat. As we go we tear pieces of meat into little chunks and put it back into the soup. It's very messy and very primitive and atavistic. Number 2 even eats some chunks of pure blubber attached to pig skin, he seems to have a double-copy of the fat-loving gene that my mother's family carries. We stand in the kitchen shoulder-to-shoulder (well, shoulder to hip; he's only 9) and as we strip the flesh from the ham hock and wallow in the grease and fat I feel a profound sense of being in exactly the right place. The light changes color, time slows down. I can imagine doing this with number 2 in 20 years time when he's a grown man and has a job and a car.

Years ago when we were living in London and my ex (she wasn't an ex then) had gone to New York for a week, I cooked roast duck. The duck was agreeably fatty and when I pulled the roasting pan out of the oven there was a big pool of duck fat there. I used some of it to toss the beans and pasta in (I really cannot cook at all but once in a while i stumble across something that works) and then I still had quite a big quantity of hot duck fat. I called number 2 (then aged 6) into the kitchen. I showed him what to do. For the next few minutes we stood side by side, silently and very purposefully dipping slices of bread into the red-hot duck fat and scoffing it down, mouths burning. We talk about it still.