Mum prided herself on her culinary skills. Her cooking
tended to be traditional, filling and lacking any nutritional content. Mum
loved her vegetables and the more she could pile onto your plate the better.
After all “If you had good inners” you could fight off any illness or disease.”
Unfortunately, she boiled vegetables
until all vitamin content was gone. Indeed, the water she’d boiled the
vegetables in where so vitamin rich that the hot cabbage water was often served
as an aperitif.
No account was taken as to the health of our teeth, and
sugar or syrup sandwiches where often on the menu for tea. Sometimes when mum
was out my sister and I would hold a spoonful of sugar over the flame on the
gas cooker and make toffee. I don’t remember fruit apart from home made toffee
apples. And cherries in summer which we would hang over our ears as earrings.
Sometimes on a Sunday we might have a tin of mandarin oranges. On very special
occasions we might have a tin of fruit salad, leading to arguments as to who
would have the cherries.
Puddings were stodgy affairs. Suet (beef or mutton fat) puddings were
regular family favourites. Mum would mix to gather the various ingredients and then
roll them up into one of her tea towels that used for drying the washing up,
The whole things was then boiled it in a saucepan. If currents were added it
was called “spotted Dick”. By far the most popular of her suet puddings was the
one when she added dates. Unwrapping it from the tea towel, a large slimy
sausage shape pudding would appear. For some reason, the end bits were the most
sought after pieces. Cut into thick slices, the pudding was then sprinkled with
sugar and drowned in syrup.
Another of mum’s “signature dish” was bread pudding. Stale
bread was put into the washing up bowl, and then squeezed together using her
hands whilst adding dried fruit and mixed spice. For a really healthy option
she may cut up and add an apple.
Mum’s sandwich sponge cakes invariable sank in the middle.
No problem, she could full the vacant hole with cream, icing or jam. “Turnovers”
were another of her signature dishes; puff pastry filled with stewed apple, or
if she ran out of apple, mashed potato.
My dad had a very sweet tooth and was always feeding his
sugar habit. He would bring home donuts or “cheesecakes” (Could never work out
why they were called cheesecakes; they were made of puff pastry with strands of
coconut on top) Whilst other people may bring a bottle of wine or a box of
chocolates when they came to visit, my dad would bring a bag of donuts. He once
worked for a Baker delivering fresh cakes in the morning and collecting upsold
stale cakes from the day before. He got the sack from this job for stealing
sale cakes. The baker had already sold the stale cakes to a pig farmer, who
noticed that quantities were not as they should be.
Fish meals mainly consisted of fish and chips bought from
the shop. But on Sundays a fish man walked the streets selling marine life off
a hand cart. Sunday tea would be shrimps which would need their heads and tails
and outer shells pulled off leaving a pile of body parts on your place. Winkles were eased out of their shells with a
darning needle and the black foot pads stuck all over our faces, making us look like we had the black death. Salmon
always came out of tin and put into a sandwich with lashings of malt vinegar.
Mum’s attempt at jellied eels and pie mash and liquor never
quite came up to the Pie Mash shop standards. Eels were bought at the market. A
slithering mass of wriggling black snakes. The fishmonger would haul out the
number you wanted and cut them up into inch long pieces whilst they were still
alive, and wrap them up in old newspaper. Carrying them home you could still
feel them still wriggling.
Stews were always popular with mum. Faggot stew. (faggots are traditionally made from pig's heart, liver
and fatty belly meat, bread crumbs and with herbs added for flavouring). Irish
stew made from neck of lamb and pearl barley. We had to pick the bones out of
the stew and try and suck the meat off. Most stews were accompanied by dumplings. If
we were lucky and there wasn’t too much gravy on them, we would fish them out
onto a saucer and have them as a dessert drenched syrup.
We ate lots of meat when dad worked as a delivery driver for a butchers, until he got the sack for stealing the meat. Minced meat stews was also common as was Cottage pie. Liver was popular with mum, which she would eat raw, because, she said, it was a good source of iron.
Salads were never eaten as a main course but were cut up into very small pieces for Sunday tea and a salad sandwich.
Boxes of broken biscuits were a family favourite. (Biscuits
that had been broken in the factory, boxed up, and sold off cheap)
We didn’t have a fridge until I was about 11. Until then,
if you wanted ice-cream we have to the shop with a bowl and then made would cut
off slices of ice-cream from a block. The choice was strawberry, chocolate,
vanilla or “Cosmopolitan” (which was strawberry, chocolate and vanilla).
Somehow we survived mum’s cooking, even if it left us with
a mouthful of tooth fillings.
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