When first toying with the idea of writing a piece about Ne’er Day food memories, it struck me that I didn’t have any. Not a single one. Compared to Christmas Day, which is teeming with remembered tastes, and which I’ve written about before, now I found I’d stumbled onto a big culinary blank. What on earth did our family eat to usher in the new year when I was a child?

Gradually, certain images begin to reveal themselves as if through forgotten fog. The big bowl of dried beans, peas and barley that had been steeping in cold water since Hogmanay to swell them out before Mum made them into soup. Being allowed to sneak a piece of raw carrot from her chopping board as she prepared the vegetables. The boiled ham hock that had made the stock now being “pulled” with a fork, and the pieces being dropped into the pot. Being sent out to the garden to pick fresh curley-leaved parsley, and the delicious smell of it as Dad set upon it with his newly-sharpened knife.

As we waited for this lunch of hearty homemade soup to be ready, we would all be in the living room adjoining the steamy kitchenette listening to classical music from my dad's newly-purchased Reader's Digest LP collection – Ravel, Tchaikovsky and the triumphal March from Verdi's Aida were favourites – while reading the adventures of Enid Blyton's Famous Five and looking at the condensation misting all the freshly-washed windows of our little council flat.

Every so often, getting up to sneak a peek at my mum's handmade chocolate truffles, made with cooking chocolate and toasted coconut and rolled in chocolate powder, firming up in the larder cupboard (we did 't have a fridge, but this built-in press had a vent from the outside wall).

I'm informed that we usually had steak pie (other families had theirs straight after the Bells) but I barely remember it. I do, however, recall the rest of us sniggering with glee as one of my big sisters was forced to stay at the table until she'd eaten all the fat she'd surreptitiously removed from the beef on her plate. No doubt this was because the fat was deemed good for her, and it would have been an expensive treat. But the poor thing hated it and simply could not swallow it – especially as it slowly congealed as the afternoon wore on.

Mum and Dad would share a bottle of Sauternes, which they’d been saving all year, and we'd be fascinated by the dimple in the bottle of the pale green glass. We'd be given a dark fruit drink made by pouring hot water over homemade blackcurrant jam and pressing it through the sieve.

My parents were both secondary school teachers, so the practicalities of organising the meal to fit in with work wasn't an issue in our family. However they would both have remembered their own fathers going out to work on Ne'er Day, for it seems clear to me now how much they enjoyed the luxury of being with their young family. But I vaguely recall being bored. There was no Cadbury’s Selection Box to munch on as I’d finished mine on Boxing Day, and I don’t remember anything memorable on the telly.

The house would be sparkling and all the bedding changed, as it was bad luck to see in the new year surrounded by stoor, and you put out all your rubbish before the Bells because it was bad luck to carry it into the fresh year.

I remember being sent out to put all the vegetable peelings from the Ne'er Day soup onto the compost heap - a rotten job, especially in the rain or snow, because there was a big heavy lid on it that was difficult to remove. We had a ground-floor council flat, and my parents grew their own vegetables and herbs in their tiny back garden. Back then, growing your own and eating local was de rigueur.

Much later on, during early adulthood, Ne’er Day was spent recovering from the excesses of the night before. I remember coming up from London, where I worked in my twenties, to see in the Bells, and staying over with my best friend in her Edinburgh flat. She would have stocked up on tins of Heinz Cream of Tomato soup, because she swore it was the only thing to cure a hangover. I remember its salty-sweet, gloopy taste as we gingerly sipped it piping hot from coffee mugs.

All of this has come back to me as I sit in my own kitchen preparing a big pot of soup made with pearl barley and vegetables from my weekly organic box scheme. I'm older than my mum was way back then, yet I'm often struck by how like hers my home cooking is. It's comforting to think we've now come full circle.

Here’s to 2016 and another year of making good food memories.

@catedvinewriter