Bake King made this pan from aluminum in the USA. It is about 16 inches long and 11 inches wide—model no. H843. My mum believes she bought it from Zellers, a defunct Canadian chain, shortly after we emigrated to Canada in 1974. It is my favourite possession. 
My mum is from Northern England, which means she was forged, like metalwork, rather than raised. She is a woman of convictions. The first of them: Whatever it is you’re doing, you do it as perfectly and completely as you can. There is honour in any work so long as you do it well.
In 73 years, my mum has never done anything half-assed. She has used her full arse every time out. (Sorry, mum.) When the three of us were kids, she was a professor, but she also did an enormous amount of housework, all to the highest standard. She must have been exhausted.
Her consistent excellence sometimes backfired on her. My dad farts with impunity, the Dizzy Gillespie of the butt trumpet. My mum has farted exactly once, in a park in London in 1983, and we still talk about it. That muffled quack was like watching Bruce Lee walk into a lamppost.
She ironed our underwear and sheets. (In high school, I had to ask her to stop ironing my jeans, because kids would make fun of the knife-sharp crease down each leg.) She had a rake to shape the carpet grain like ballpark grass. Her flowerbeds would have shamed the Dutch.
But it’s her cooking I best remember. My mum made us the most delicious meals: sweet-and-sour chicken; stir fry; BLTs with homemade chips; braised steak; spaghetti with homemade sauce; chocolate brownies and lemon meringue pie. I can still taste all of them.
Her signature dish was her gravy dinner, which we ate twice a year, on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. We never called it her turkey dinner, or her roast dinner, or her Sunday dinner. It was her gravy dinner, because my mum’s gravy is the best gravy in the history of the world.
She made it in the Bake King pan, from her grandmother’s recipe. This is a picture of her in the '80s with it. Look how she’s dressed. To cook! (Also: See those baskets? I bought her a basket, which she said she loved. I hope she did, because she got a lot of baskets after that.)
Anyway, I left home and had a family of my own, and I didn’t get to eat my mum’s gravy dinner anymore. Until a little more than three years ago, that is, when I got divorced, moved into a tiny house, and, at 42, needed my mum (and dad) again, this time to help me rebuild.
I wanted to reclaim an old tradition with my two boys: Christmas dinner like I used to have. It was part assertion, part desperation. I asked my mum to teach me how to make her gravy. She arrived Christmas Day with a battery of kitchen implements. Among them was her pan.
Sadly, I am not a good cook. I try. I know cooking is an act of love. I just can’t improvise, and my mum’s gravy isn’t science; it’s alchemy. It’s the juice from the turkey, plus potato water, Oxo, Bisto, and flour. But not in any measurable amounts. Her gravy is all heart.
So that first solo Christmas, I watched her make her gravy, and all I really understood was that it needs to be stirred constantly. The sound her spoon made on the bottom of her pan brought me back to childhood. It was weird for me to feel young and broken at the same time.
We had to eat that first dinner off our laps, because I forgot that I didn’t have a table or chairs. I felt like a failure. But there were my boys, and my mum and dad, eating my childhood gravy dinner on Christmas Day. For the first time I had hope: Maybe everything will be okay.
After, my mum left her pan. It was her unspoken way of saying: We’ll need it again next year. We’ve had two Christmas dinners since, each more joyous than the last. Now my girlfriend is here, too—she really is—in a nice house, and we have a table and chairs. I have been rebuilt.
Of course, my mum’s gravy remains total witchcraft. I swear what goes into it changes, but it always comes out tasting exactly the same. I’ll never be able to replicate it. I hope I don’t need to try anytime soon. I wish to hear the sound of her spoon for decades to come.
But I know when my mum is gone, I’ll make a pale copy of her gravy for my family in this pan. It’s a sheet of battered aluminum. It’s also a portal, a piece of glass through which I will forever see my wonderful mum, and remember how hard she loved us, perfectly and completely.
