It was a cause for amusement in my family that when I used to cuddle my mother as a little girl, I would often inhale deeply and say, “mmm, you smell like stew”. I meant it as a compliment. It was a comforting, savoury smell: of softened onions nestling in the bottom of a battered cast-iron pan, or of crisp-skinned roast chicken, fragrant with garden bay. It was the scent of the carefully cooked family meals that clung to my mother’s clothes and hair and pervaded our home in rural Kent.

The kitchen was the first room you entered in our old farm cottage, the white weatherboarded house my parents had fallen in love with and abandoned London for. It was a shell when they found it, falling down, with no foundations and a mess of a grey slate roof, but they loved its remoteness, and the wildness of its garden. There I spent my childhood, mud-caked and running feral.

A partition wall in the kitchen traced the outline of the stairs and on it my mum had hung old wooden cooking implements – a honey dipper, meat tenderiser, mallet and whittled spoons. Some were things that had belonged to her grandmother – a brilliant home cook who had run a house at the age of 12 – and the rest were foraged from junk shops, like most of the other things we had. It’s as if these objects hung in homage to the kitchen rituals that had gone before, while my mother made her own magic with the produce from the vegetable patch, her well-thumbed Robert Carrier and Delia Smith cookbooks to hand.

Evening and weekend meals were precious as they were the occasions when we would be together as a family, and these were the times when I really got to know my father, a journalist who worked in London. Although my mum did most of the cooking, my father adored his food to the point of obsession, and certain things would occupy him feverishly when he got a taste for them. This seafood sizzle was one such fixation (along with homemade sausages, dressed crab, Kent cobnuts, broad beans and parsley sauce). He came to refer to it as his signature dish, because he cooked it so much. I remember the way he would excitedly hunch his shoulders at the kitchen counter as he prepped the spring onions, ginger and garlic meticulously in anticipation of how wonderfully they would meld together in plenty of olive oil with the caramelised prawn shells and sweet, supple squid.

His love of seafood was informed by our summers camping in France and Spain, but had its origins in childhood holidays spent on the Kent coast, eating prawns and whelks on the beach in Deal, the small seaside town that my parents would eventually move to. I think he savoured the luxury of seafood: growing up after the war with a single mother and two sisters meant childhood food was frugal.

In Deal, we enjoyed many a sizzle with seafood from the high-street fishmonger who uses local day boats. When my father died 11 years ago we carried his ashes out to sea on one of these boats; when the urn wouldn’t sink, we laughed through our tears.

We still eat this dish as a family when we’re together. My mum will cook it just as he made it, ut we each have our own way of making it now. I don’t put bacon in, as my father liked to (though it is a tasty addition). Instead I prefer the citrus notes of preserved lemon and the briny sweetness of a handful of clams. The key with this is to scrape all the juices from the pan and accompany it with some good crusty bread to mop them up.

Seafood sizzle

Serves 4
300g fresh squid, cleaned
4 garlic cloves, crushed
6 tbsp extra virgin olive or rapeseed oil
Juice of ½ a lemon
200g clams, cleaned
12 raw shell-on tiger prawns
2 slices preserved lemon, pith and flesh removed, finely chopped
3 spring onions, cut into matchsticks
1 tbsp fresh ginger, grated
2 red bird’s-eye chillies, finely sliced
Salt and black pepper
Wedges of lemon, to serve
French baguettes, to serve

1 Prep the squid by cutting the body into rectangles (about 5cm x 3cm) and lightly scoring in a crosshatch pattern. Cut each tentacle section in half. Marinate in garlic with 2 tbsp of the oil and half the lemon juice, then cover and refrigerate for about an hour.

2 Half an hour before cooking, take the seafood out of the fridge to let it come up to room temperature. Put the clams in a bowl of cold water with a tap dripping on it for 10 minutes to encourage them to give up their grit.

3 In a large, heavy-bottomed frying pan or skillet, heat the rest of the oil gently and add the preserved lemon, spring onions, ginger and chillies. Cook for 3-4 minutes, then add the prawns.

4 Turn the heat up. Cook for 2 minutes, shaking the pan to avoid catching. When the prawns are starting to colour – you want to see some deep caramelisation on the shells – add the squid and its marinade. Shake again, cooking for a further 2 minutes.

5 Add the drained clams, the rest of the lemon juice, season with salt and pepper and cover the pan, cooking for about 3 minutes, shaking to make sure it all cooks evenly, until the clam shells open. Spoon into heated bowls. Serve with lemon wedges and crusty bread to mop up those gorgeous juices.

Rosie Birkett is a food writer, stylist and author of A Lot on Her Plate and East London Food, both out now. @rosiefoodie