Remembering a Heavenly Hostess

A personal tribute to a sparkling soul, and a recipe for her favourite nibble

One of my favourite Nona stories is of a time, probably in her fifties, when she was sitting at the breakfast table across from her husband, who was screened behind an open newspaper, and she was glancing at the travel pages, perhaps feeling a bit bored. Suddenly, she whined, “I want to go somewhere I’ve never been before!” Out from behind the newspaper opposite, delivered in a tone as dry as a rusk, came the suggestion, “How about the kitchen?”

Nona Macdonald Heaslip did not cook. (Incidentally, Nona really was her name; it’s not a misspelling of nonna. “It means NINE,” she used to bellow, and then chuckle at the absurdity of it.) She could boil an egg, but that’s where her cooking skills – and indeed her interest in food generally – began and ended. Her fridge was always full, alas mostly with uneaten dishes long past their due dates. Even though she was never going to eat them, she refused to allow them to be thrown out until they were practically in a condition to crawl out of the fridge themselves. For the most part, Nona subsisted on triangles of La Vâche Qui Rit cheese and handfuls of mixed nuts. At night, she’d pick indifferently at a fishcake and a khaki-coloured shrub of broccoli that had been left under a cloche on the warmer by her devoted housekeeper, Carmelita. Unless, of course, she was going out to dinner, which was often the case. She once said that the greatest sound in the world was that of a martini being shaken on ice.