From time to time we must all face the mistakes and miscalculations of our foodie pasts. Sometimes this takes the form of a poor digestive experience, or of breath that would stun a camel, and sometimes it takes the form of going through your kitchen cupboards in the hope of having a bit of a tidy. Dry-heaving and social failure notwithstanding, the tidy is by far the most daunting of the three.

For it is when we tidy those kitchen cupboards that we face all our past failures of judgment (such as the half-gallon bottle of Nam Pla I purchased on sale in a fit of enthusiasm for Thai cookery that lasted about a week) and fits of culinary amnesia (such as the five half-empty bottles of Tabasco Sauce that prove that I for one do not check the cupboard before shopping). Perhaps even worse, we must face that we - and our forebears - are sometimes unreasonably reluctant to throw anything away, regardless of how over the years it may have altered in flavour, texture, or general toxicity.

I speak with resigned affection of my mother, with whom I have lived for the past year. Now when I moved in with her I simply shoved all my kitchen staples in front of hers and never again ventured past the first row of jars or tins or bottles on each shelf.

Until yesterday. Yesterday a neighbor who was moving away presented me with a box of kitchen staples she’d no longer need. As she’s a professional cook I greedily snatched at the box and then attempted to add its contents to our cupboards. Nothing doing. There was simply no more room. The time had finally come to have a thorough examination of our cupboards and to let go of anything that might be past its prime.

Past its prime? What I found in our cupboards had me reaching for the phone book to contact a)the Center for Disease Control, and b) The British Museum. Before I list the horrors I encountered, I must first in my mother’s defense explain that she’s a 79 year old woman who was raised during British wartime rationing. Hence she views sell-by dates as lies of the devil, and firmly believes that there is no such thing as stale bread. I had to get her out of the house before I could even attempt to throw anything out.

So what did I find? Well, in no particular order, what amounted to three full pounds of brown sugar, all solidified to the point of being actual Jurassic amber; a tin of bicarbonate of soda with the price listed in shillings and pence; jars of curry powder, dill weed (who even calls it dill weed anymore?), marjoram, and cayenne pepper, each of which only gave off a faint odour of dust; a box of rice that made scuttling noises when I picked it up; two packets of Lime Jell-O that gave off a worryingly salty odour when I opened them; a packet of Betty Crocker Angel Food Cake mix with a sell-by date that pre-dated my birth; a packet of spaghetti that was sprouting leaves like bonsai bamboo; a tin of condensed milk with labeling written in what I believe may have been Swahili; canned goods so old the labels had simply faded away; and a packet of flour that had long since become plain old concrete. And those are just the highlights.

It was as exhausting an experience as it was terrifying. Some of her boxes and packets and tins had sat in those cupboards so long they had adhered to the melamine. I nearly lost an eye prising the flour off the shelf with a fork. Bits of rice and pasta had stuck so hard the shelves felt like a relief map of the Middle East.

But it’s done. The cupboards have been cleaned and sorted and all but alphabetised and are my pride and joy. I have vowed to sort through them again every three months, and to never venture out to the shops without first ascertaining that I am not double-buying.

Now I just have to figure how to break it to my mother that the bicarbonate of soda she presumably cuddled as a child has been filed under B.

By which I mean it’s in the bin.