Kedgeree and Rhubarb Crumble provides a glimpse into a past that exists now only in memory. Jehan Rajab, née Tiki de Montfort Wellborne, is the daughter of English parents – a father who was a Cable and Wireless engineer and a mother who was a teacher. Born into a professional British overseas family, young Tiki grew up in the typical colonial environment to which the English middle classes exported their lifestyle and tastes. In this world the nannies may not have been starched and white, the furniture may not have been oak and polished mahogany, the drizzle and the fog may have been absent, but the food most certainly was as cook would have prepared it back home – with perhaps a few exotic additions and innovations like kedgeree which tiptoed its way into the pantheon of British cooking from distant shores. The venerable rhubarb crumble meanwhile managed to claim its rightful place in kitchens in all corners of the Empire. But Jehan Rajab, as she is called now having married a Kuwaiti, has produced an enchanting portrait of domestic life and cooking based on memories from a vanished world. As her parents moved from Brazil to Jamaica to the Cape Verde Islands to Portugal and on to Gibralter, she observed her mother’s culinary skills and has here collected the English colonial recipes for the dishes prepared by her mother – food which was such an important formative experience for countless Britons of the late colonial generation. Her story (and the recipes she gathers along the way) follows her mother’s passage through various imperial outposts, ending up with evacuation from the Cape Verde Islands to wartime Britain – not the ideal place or time for culinary expansiveness but nevertheless providing the author’s mother with numerous opportunities for experimentation in the kitchen. In this charming book Jehan Rajab has combined her mother’s recipes with the chronicle of a childhood from a forgotten world.