A “Traditional” Steak and Kidney recipe

I have to say that this is not one of my mother's, in fact it's not a family recipe at all!  It's basically the filling of a pudding without the suet pastry.

Take a pound of steak and kidney. Roughly chop an onion and two cloves of garlic. Layer them in a stone crock dish. Traditionally, you would roll the diced steak and kidney in seasoned flour, then layer them in the crock, and then pour in enough boiling water to almost cover the mixture. That makes a tasty enough meal. However, I'd rather add half a pint of gravy, made by adding half a pint of boiling water to a dessertspoon of gravy granules, a beef Oxo cube crumbled and a tablespoon of tomato puree, then stir thoroughly and add Henderson's Relish (or Worcester Sauce if you have the misfortune not to come from Sheffield). The liquid should come almost up to the top of the meat mix. Cover and cook in a very slow oven (about Gas 1 or 2) for at least 3 hours. If you wish, you could cook it in a slow cooker for over 6 hours. Half an hour before serving, you may like to add a few halved or quartered mushrooms.

If you want to have pastry with it, a nice suet pastry could make a pie crust. It doesn't need to be steamed, roll it out thin and use it as you would short pastry. Add the filling after it has been cooked, moisten with the gravy, top with suet pastry and eggwash. Cook in a medium hot oven (about Gas 7) for 45 minutes.

To make a Steak and Ale pie, instead of the gravy mix, just pour half a pint of a well-flavoured beer into the mix, and add a bayleaf to counter the bitterness of the hops which becomes more pronounced on cooking. Guinness works well or you could use a good bitter such as Black Sheep.

It's traditional to serve it with mashed potatoes and carrots, but a baked potato also goes down really well with it. Chips are overkill, in my opinion. But you've got to have something to mop up all that yummy gravy!

The missing recipe

There is one recipe Mom didn't pass down to me.

Believe it or not, she used to boil mushrooms! The large flat ones. I think she used to take the stalks out, and leave them whole. I do remember her skinning them, which defeats the object really because that's where the flavour is. Then I think she'd put some water in a pan and drop them in, then boil them for a few minutes.

I only remembered this this evening, when I wanted to cook some mushrooms to go alongside the sausages for tea. I had some large flat mushies, and instantly remembered the black liquor that they cooked in, full of mushroom flavour.

However, because I actually prefer mushroomes sauteed in garlic butter, I never took any notice of Mom's old recipe. So I can't reproduce it here because I can't remember it! Sorry!

The biggest treat

There is one food item I always associate with childhood treats: tinned red salmon.

It's still an expensive item, and these days I prefer fresh salmon, lightly cooked, served with small new potatoes, asparagus spears and mayonnaise. However, when I was a child, it always made an appearance for "high days and holidays".

I remember one special occasion at my Aunt Jane's. Her daughter, Pat, and her family was visiting on what the RAF call "R&R". They were on posting in Germany at this stage: Pat's husband Al was in the RAF, having done his National Service in that force and liked it so much he signed up to stay on. At this stage they had two children and were looking to settle permanently in this country, and so they were back looking at houses within easy reach of RAF Hartlebury, where he had applied to.

Their two children were born either side of me: Gaz was 9 months older, and Tone was 15 months younger than me. Gaz and I looked like two peas from the same pod, and we grew up as close as siblings.

So today Mom took me to Aunt Jane's for lunch with Pat, Gaz and Tone. We had tinned red salmon, mashed up with vinegar, thinly sliced cucumber, thin white bread and butter, and butterfly cakes which Mom and I had cooked the day before. The day was memorable for two events.

The first was that Pat ate one of the little vertebrae in the salmon. I was shocked! Didn't Mom tell me that fish bones were bad for you? Not these, Pat said. Because they'd come from a tin they were crunchy and safe! I tried one. She was right!

The second event was Al coming back from his interview, in his RAF uniform. I'd never seen a man in uniform close up before! He looked so dapper. He rushed upstairs to get changed, and came back downstairs in a pair of beige slacks. Then he stood by the front door having a smoke.

Oh no! Aunt Jane's poodle Snowy came and sniffed his slacks. Then he cocked his leg and peed against his slacks! No doubt Snowy could smell Butch the boxer on the slacks. (Butch was in quarantine kennels, but they had been to see him earlier in the week.) Al had to go upstairs and change his slacks - but the only other trousers he had was his uniform ones. So he had to wear those while the slacks were cleaned.

Patricia May Holding Varndell 1937 - 2012 rest in peace my favourite cousin xxx

Black Country Cuisine 1

Gray Pays and Fatty Baercon Bits:

Take 8oz gray pays. This will not be easy. The only place, as far as I know, that you can get gray pays for sale as human food is Wolverhampton Market. There was an outcry a few years ago when they were reclassified as animal foodstuff, and not fit for human consumption. Such was the outcry that they were reinstated (in Wolverhampton, at least). They look like brown spheres about the size of chickpeas.

Anyway, put the pays in a very large bowl, cover to double the depth with water and stir in about a tablespoon of bicarbonate of soda. That is very important. Now you must leave them to soak for at least 24 hours.

After that time, drain and rinse the pays and put in a large saucepan with enough water to cover to the depth of an inch. Bring to the boil. Now you can put it into a slow cooker, or cover and simmer very very gently, or transfer to a large casserole dish and cook on the oven's lowest setting. The cooking time is also at least 24 hours or until softened.

About 3 hours before you want to eat them, chop up some bacon pieces, fat and all, and add to the pan.

Just before eating, mash with a potato masher. They will be thick, sticky and sooo tasty! They taste like nothing you have ever had before. Eat them with crusty bread.

I didn't actually discover them until I went to a friend's pub in Bradley near Bilston. Annie had a large pot of something that smelled delicious on the bar, which she was selling for 50p a cup. They were so good.

There is a delicacy known as "black peas" which I have encountered in Stalybridge Station Buffet, which is very similar, and I wonder if they are in fact the same.

I am reliably informed that, if you can find "pigeon peas" or "gunga peas" in a West Indian store, they are about the same. If you get a tin of them, obviously you need to omit the 24 hour soak, but you will still need to cook them overnight to get them mushy enough.

For the sake of completeness...

I include in this blog two recipes that I only met outside my Mother's cooking: gray pays and fatty baercon bits, and grorty dick. These two recipes are staples of Black Country tradition and folklore, yet I never had either of them at home. When this dawned on me, I was quite puzzled as to why. The answer came following some painstaking family history research.

Mom was born in 1925 to John Howard and May Florence, who had married in 1909. Mom's brothers and sisters are as follows: John b and died 6 hours later, in 1910: William b and died a day later, in 1912:  Jane b 1913 d 1982: John (Jack) b 1919 d 1972: May b 1922 d 1923: Mom: Ernest b 1927 d 1998: Sydney b1930 d 1996. As you can see, Mom's mother's reproduction stretched over 20 years, and it was perhaps a blessed relief that she died in 1932 aged 39 of TB.

When my grandmother died, her surviving children were aged: 19; 13; 7; 5; 2. In those days, it was not the done thing for men to look after children, and the local authority tried to take the 4 youngest into care. This was fought tooth and nail as you can expect. Jane (my Auntie Jen) took over the role of mother on a permanent basis. She had actually been helping her mother for many years because of the ravages of childbirth and TB, as well as working in local factories. So my mom was effectively raised by her elder sister.

What did Grandmother pass on to Jane, and then to Mom? I suspect not a lot, actually. The reason for this seems to be, from what I've managed to piece together, that Grandmother's mother died during or shortly after giving birth to her. (I have to say this is speculation. When May married John, her parents disowned her for marrying beneath them, or for marrying a gipsy - or more likely, because she was only 16 - and I have only managed to tentatively identify the correct Robinson family.) This means that May's elder sister Emily must have raised her.

So to claim that this blog represents some sort of family traditional cookery passed down through the ages is quite misleading. Rather, it represents cooking borne of poverty, of necessity and of the ingenuity of some loving and resilient women, for whom I am eternally grateful.

The Wisdom of Pies 2

Andy walked through the door of the flat, followed by someone I didn't recognise. "Chris this is Brian" he called. "He was my friend in the first year of my degree, and he's just in town overnight. I said you were a great cook and we could have tea?"

My heart sank. We were as poor as the proverbial church mice: I was still a student, and Andy was a trainee social worker on about £50 per week. I hadn't been shopping that week, and in the fridge was some bacon, half a dozen eggs and some marge. How to stretch the bacon and egg tea I'd got planned?

Somehow I thought of pork pies. While I couldn't make a pork pie, I might be able to do a bacon pie with egg in! So I made some short pastry and lined a plate with it. I cut up the bacon and fried it off a little, then I put it in the bottom of the plate. I broke 4 eggs over the bacon and rolled the last of the pastry over the top of the pie. Then I baked it for half an hour at 180C and opened a tin of beans.

What a success it was! Brian was quite amazed that you could turn bacon and egg into a pie. And actually so was I. I haven't made another one from that day to this (must be about 33 years). And neither do I particularly want to, because it reminds me of being too poor - but not too poor to feed a friend.

Rice pudding

Couldn't be simpler really. 1 pint full fat milk, 2oz pudding rice, 2oz sugar. Cook in a casserole dish for 2 - 3 hours at Gas 2 or 3, 140 or 150C. You could add a knob of butter and a grating of nutmeg on top if you like.

Dad used to eat the skin, which was just fine because it used to make me gag. I only discovered the joys of pudding skin many years later.

So how did I get it so wrong last year? I put the pudding in to cook as per instructions above. I woke with a start at about 11pm, some 6 hours after I put the pudding in the oven. OMG! Nothing for it but to scrape the burn offering out in the morning, after it had cooled down.

But hang on. I looked inside the crockpot to find yes, some of it had burnt round the outside, but in the middle it was fairly solid and a deep golden yellow colour. Maybe it was salvageable?

What I'd made, inadvertently, was a caramelised condensed milk rice pudding, with all the yummy flavour of caramel from the burnt sugar, and of condensed milk as what had not been absorbed by the rice had been boiled away. I spooned what wasn't too burnt out, and poured a little top of the milk over it, and we had it for supper. "You must burn the pudding more often" said Hubby.

So don't assume that because something looks ruined that it necessarily is. Often something can be salvaged from it. Like the cake I made without any eggs. I cut it up and used it as the base for a trifle. Sometimes you can make something from the most unpromising disaster with a little ingenuity.

What Uncle Ernie, Army chef taught me

Ernie was quite a character.

As if he wasn't striking enough with the orange hair and piercing pale blue eyes, being 5' 2" square made him quite imposing considering his height. His long suffering wife Aunty Frances was a good six inches taller than him, and my God sometimes she needed it. They had 4 children, mercifully most of them were spared their father's colouring (although I did mistake a photo of his grandson for him once). After my mother's funeral, Aunty Frances told us of the day she got up at 5.30 am to go to her 1st cleaning job (she had many jobs all at the same time), and found a goat in the living room. Yes that's right, a goat! It was a pub transaction, typical of Uncle Ernie.

Anyway, one day Mom and I were making pastry when there was a knock at the door. It was Uncle Ernie, who just thought he'd pop in to see how his closest sister was keeping. Via a few pubs of course.

"Making pastry are we? Let me show you how to make proper pastry Ivy!" Mother was perplexed. The last thing she wanted was a pissed-up Ernie ruining tea for Dad. She only had enough stuff to make this lot of pastry. Ernie pushed past and started doing a running commentary on making rough puff pastry: only using a third of the butter in the mix, dividing it into 3, dabbing with butter, folding and rolling, resting a short while in between: all this while I stood mute in the corner by the larder absorbing his commentary and creation. Commentary that was interspersed with tales of Army life and tuts from Mom. After he'd rolled the pastry lid out and egg washed the creation, he said "Ta-ra" and went. Mom looked as if she'd been hit by the steamroller I saw outside the day before.

We drunk our tea and put the pie in the oven ready for Dad to come home.

Over tea, Dad said "Did Ernie come today?" Mom was shocked. "How did you know?" "I saw him outside the Plough," which was a mile in the opposite direction from Ernie's house, "and I thought he probably called in our house on the way."

A short while later Dad said "Who made the pie?" Mom had to confess it was Ernie.

"Tell him to put more salt in the pastry."

The Wisdom of Pies part 1

What every mother used to know was that a double-crust pie meant you could feed more people with cheaper ingredients and less of them. My Nan knew that a Robirch's Steak and Kidney pie, heated up in the Baby Belling specially for her only grandchild (me), would feed me so well I'd sleep most of the afternoon. What I know is that pies are today much maligned. People think they're fattening, full of cholesterol and Not a Good Thing for people. Balderdash! I'll tell you why.

If you're eating a pie, you need to adjust the way you think about what you eat. The crust is the carbohydrate part of your food, so you don't need chips or potatoes. (I am aware this is heresy, by the way. I am here to tell you good people how to eat well cheaply, which is an art we have lost by and large in this country. So pie does not need chips.) All a portion of pie needs as accompaniments are fresh vegetables and gravy. With the exception of pork pie if you're living North of the Trent, of course. There pork pies are warmed up, served floating in a sea of mushy peas, and crowned with a sprinkling of mint sauce.

Going back to my childhood, Sunday lunch was completed by pie for pudding. Apple pie or rhubarb pie by preference, but gooseberry pie also featured in season. With custard of course! These days I prefer to make crumble, but that's because I find rolling out pastry is a bit much on the old arms and I prefer to leave pastry rolling for savoury pies. A savoury pie for the main course meant you didn't have a pie for pudding, and vice versa. One can have too much of a good thing, you know!

I moved to South Yorkshire in my late 20s, and there I was introduced to the joys of Meat and Potato Pie by my new in-laws. I never got the recipe though, but I'll describe it to you. A layer of stewed beef on the bottom with some potatoes mixed in it, then thickly sliced potatoes on top of that making a rounded top, with short crust pastry over that, richly decorated. A hole in the middle to let steam out. Baked in medium oven for about 30 - 45 minutes I'd say. But served, always served with boiled carrots and Henderson's Relish. (Google it. They have a website and a Facebook page)

The pastry for pies needn't be this fancy flaky puffy stuff either! A good short pastry takes the crown every time. Mom would use half lard and half marge for hers: all butter is expensive, all lard gives a very short (i.e. crumbly) pastry but not much flavour. Plain flour was always used, but self raising will give a bit more rise to the pastry if that's what you want. Pastry benefits from being kept cold and handled as little as possible. Some women had "good hands" for pastry. I never quite knew what that means, but at a guess it meant they had long fingers and cold hands. The "long fingers" part would mean that, when they are rubbing the fat in to the flour, the minimum amount of flesh comes into contact with the pastry which keeps it cool. Mom always said you should use iced water to mix the pastry with, at the very least the water had to be as cold as you could get it and freshly drawn.

If you're doing a steak and kidney pie you could use a suet pastry. These days you can get vegetable suet, but in my childhood all we had was Atora beef suet. I prefer to make suet pastry as you don't need to rub the fat in, just mix it with a knife until it forms a ball. Then you knead it to make sure it's smooth, and roll out. If you roll it thinly enough, it becomes very crispy which I like.

Some years ago Delia Smith showed how to make a one-crust pie, which was basically rolling the pastry out, putting the filling on the pastry, then bringing the edges up towards the middle and baking it like that. Mom used to make something similar if she had pastry left over: she'd get a saucer, roll the pastry out and line the saucer with it, put jam in the middle and bring the edges up. But Mom would join the edges in the middle. She called it a "turnover".

Banana magic 2

Sometimes you just want something sweet, hot, quick and simple. Mom had the answer: banana or apple custard.

Just make up half a pint of custard, and either slice a banana or grate an eating apple into it. Leave to stand until lukewarm, when the custard will have absorbed the flavour of the fruit. Just lovely!

When I went to senior school, they did something they called banana custard, but it was very different. Firstly it was a custard tart - pastry base, set custard, sliced banana. Secondly it was cold. It had its merits, sure, but what would have been good was if the custard had some of the flavour of the banana. So I suggested this to the dinner ladies. One wasn't sure if they could do anything about it, but another one winked and said "We'll see what we can do luv".

They actually did warm the tart up next time it was served, but the flavour of the banana still didn't come through enough. The weather was now warming up, and I resigned myself to not having my treat at school. Next time I had it at school though, there was a bit of a surprise: piped cream on top of the tart. Actually this was an improvement.

I can't say whether they kept experimenting with the dish because at the start of the next school year I started to bring in sandwiches for lunch. I suppose now they might serve Banoffee Pie, but I'd actually quite like to revisit a banana custard tart with the toffee sauce maybe.

Banana magic 1

Sometimes for lunch Mom would make me a banana sandwich. Two slices of bread, buttered of course, a banana thinly sliced over the bottom one and lightly sugared.

When I left home and went to university, I experimented quite a lot with food, but I always went back to the good old banana sandwich. I was actually quite pleased to see the wholefood stall in the Students Union selling something labelled as "banana sandwich", but it looked nothing like what Mom used to make! Still I had a go with it. Wholemeal bread, medium sliced: something that didn't taste like butter: and no sugar. I was not impressed and went for a chat with Tulio to see what he'd put in it.

The spread was some ersatz sort of organic vegetarian marge, and I reasoned that was what the odd taste was. I also told him I didn't think it was sweet enough. "Hmm" he said, stroked his goatee, and asked me to come back tomorrow when he'd have something special for me.

I duly returned the day after. Tulio's face lit up. "I have your something special Chris! You must eat it here though." So I stood beside the stall and tucked in. Wow! What a difference. Nutty, gooey, banana-y, in short - yummy. The magic ingredient? Smooth peanut butter. Never heard of it. Didn't have it again - until a few weeks ago.

I had treated myself to a bunch of bananas which were reduced in the supermarket. While making my lunch, I noticed in the cupboard a jar of crunchy peanut butter. Hmm. I wonder....?

Oh maaaan! Bliss! My mind went back to Tulio some 35 years earlier. How could I have forgotten such an amazing creation so easily? Shame on me!

Bunny boiling

Dad being of farming stock, he would come home sometimes with a newspaper wrapped package with a slight pink tinge to one end. I would be told to play outside, or play in my bedroom, but on no account was I to go in the kitchen until I was told I could.

A couple of hours later the most delicious smell would come from the kitchen. "Rabbit Stew in the name of the law" said Dad, no doubt pleased with his misquote of a mishearing. Anyway rabbit stew it was, and this is how it's made.

If you can buy your rabbit ready jointed then do so. Sometimes I get mine from my local market, and they are hanging up still in fur. The butcher takes them behind and sorts them out for me, although I do know how to undress a rabbit, having sneaked a peek at one stage!

Soak the jointed rabbit in acidulated water (that is, water with some vinegar added: about 1 tablespoon vinegar to 1 pint water) for about an hour. Drain, rinse well, pat dry with kitchen paper.

Now roll the joints in seasoned flour and brown in butter (or oil and butter, or oil, or dripping, depending on what's available). Add a chopped onion and some sliced carrots, top the pan up with stock to cover and season. Cover and simmer for an hour and a half, or two hours (it's quite forgiving really). You could add shredded cabbage or cauliflower florets at this point. Serve with dumplings, or in a large Yorkshire pudding.

This will serve up to 6 people very well, especially if you add potatoes to the stew.

Many years later I had a couple of friends who bought a pub in Sheffield. They moved in and my husband and I helped them redecorate the pub over a period of time. One Saturday evening, our reward for painting the woodwork was rabbit stew in a Yorkshire pudding. Well the smell permeated the whole pub and she got asked to serve this dish to the customers. So every Saturday evening at about 6 pm, rabbit stew and Yorkshire pudding was served.

Mom's signature dish

Every great chef has a signature dish, right? Well my Mom was no different. I have her recipe passed down to me and this is how it goes.

"Take a pound of fry with kel. Put the kel in a dish of warm water to soak. Take the fry and boil it for about half an hour with an onion. Put it through the mincer into a bowl.

Soak enough bread until soft, squeeze it out into a nut and add to the bowl. Add sage and pennyroyal if you have it, with lots of salt and pepper. Add enough of the cooking water to make it stick together. Cut the kel into squares, wrap handfuls of the mix in the kel and put in a roasting tin. Pour the cooking water round the faggots and put the lid on the tin. Roast for 30 - 45 mins in a slow to medium oven. Serve with mushy pays, gravy and crusty bread."

OK let's translate!

You need a pound of mixed offal - liver and heart - from a pig. Ask the butcher to give you the diaphragm too. Not the lights (lungs), they make the mix bitter.

You also need about half a pound of breadcrumbs, made from stale white bread. If  you haven't made the bread into crumbs, don't worry: soak the bread until it's soft, then squeeze the excess water out. The bread will form a ball in your hands..

Put the diaphragm into soak in warm water.  This makes it easier to handle.

Now boil the offal with a quartered onion for about half an hour. Take the offal and onion out and pass them through a food mincer. (A food processor will do but be careful, you want chunks not paste.) Add the breadcrumbs, a pinch of dried sage and thyme, quite a lot of salt and pepper, and enough of the cooking water to make the mix bind together. Take handfuls of the mix and form into balls. Cut the kel into squares large enough to wrap round the balls and wrap each ball. Put the balls into a roasting tin with a lid, and pour the rest of the cooking water round them. Put the lid on and roast at about Gas 4/180 deg C for 30 - 45 mins.

Traditionally you serve faggots with mushy peas, which come from a tin these days but if you get dried peas, follow the instructions on the packet. Turn the cooking liquor into gravy with gravy granules (if you must!).

This food is the nectar of the gods. It has life-giving properties. When my Nan was run over by a car, she wouldn't eat for weeks and we thought we were losing her, but Mom's home made faggots went down a treat and she lived for another 7 years.

So let's hear it for the Black Country's own FAGGOTS AND PAYS!

This blog came about as a result of a panicky text from an ex-student of mine. "Help I have no gravy powder what do I do?" So Sue, you don't know it but it's all your fault!

The premise behind the blog is that people today don't know or were never taught how to feed themselves or their family cheaply. I'm not going to make any promises about "feed your family on £5 a week" although I've done that. Nor am I going to make any rash claims that such a recipe will cost you 30p a portion. What I will say is that these recipes are cheap, tasty and filling. I'll try and debunk how to handle things that are unfamiliar to you and make preparing these foods as easy as I can.

As time goes by, I'll ask for your ideas too. Let's help each other. God knows we need help these days!

Stew

How boring is stew!

Well it's boiled meat and veg, innit.

No actually, that's a white stew. White stews mean you don't brown the meat beforehand. Brown stews are where the ingredients are browned in oil, butter or both before the liquid is added and the stew is cooked.

I should explain that Mom only ever cooked white stews, and I found them boring for donkey's years. However, I got into stews a few years ago when I found myself hankering after one, and I've never looked back. I'll give you instructions for both white and brown stew below.

White stew of lamb
Take some stewing lamb. You don't need much and the quantity depends on whether you're using lamb with bones in such as neck, or not. About half a pound per person should do it. Put it in a saucepan and cover with water. Bring to the boil and skim the scum off the top. Put a lid on the pan and simmer the meat for an hour. Add some leeks cut up small, potatoes, carrots and swedes or turnips or parsnips, and a good handful of pearl barley, a sprig of thyme and a stick of celery. Simmer for another hour. Check for seasoning and serve in soup bowls.

Brown stew of beef
Take some stewing beef. I like shin, but shoulder is good too. Again, about 8 oz per person. Cut up into 1 inch slices and dust in flour, to which you've added salt, pepper and a pinch of mustard powder if you have it. Melt some dripping (or use a tablespoon of oil) in a large saucepan and brown the cubes of beef. When they are brown on all sides, remove to a plate. Now cut up an onion into small dice, crush a clove of garlic and chop a carrot. Add those to the plate and stir round until they are brown too. Return the beef and its juices to the bowl. Now add enough beef stock, or beer, or red wine if you're really posh to cover the beef and bring to the boil. Cook very slowly on the hob for 2 hours, or cook in the oven at Gas 3/150C for 2 hours. You can, if you have stuff handy, add things like tomato puree, Hendersons Relish/Worcester Sauce or soy sauce to enrich the flavour. It doesn't really need it but it's nice to ring the changes.

Dumplings
And a stew isn't really complete without dumplings. Mom used to make her dumplings with margarine, which may explain why I didn't like stew and dumplings when I was at home. They are much better made with suet, and you can use vegetarian suet for them. Take 4 oz SR flour, 2 oz suet, a pinch of salt, some pepper, and mix them in a bowl. Run a little water in the bowl and mix it all together until it comes into a ball. Drop the mix in spoonfuls into the stew. If you're doing the stew in the oven, put the lid back on or leave it off for a crispy crust. If on the hob, put the lid back on and boil the stew for 10 - 20 minutes, by which time the dumplings should be soft and fluffy. Serve immediately. Dumplings don't wait, people do!

My stew got the mother-in-law seal of approval at Christmas. I didn't know she was going to have Boxing Day evening meal with us, and I was given 3 hours notice. So I decided instead of the lamb curry I'd anticipated, to make a stew because I knew the amount of stew I make would feed us all. "I haven't had stew for ages Chris" she said as she cleared her plate and went back for more!

Why you should always have a roast on Sundays

I know it's a lot of money to spend in one go, but not to have a Sunday roast is, in my view, a false economy. You see, one roast will provide more than one meal and can be stretched to last most of the week. The nursery rhyme "Solomon Grundy" may be about "salamagundi", a medieval dish which started with a roast meal and continued in various forms during the week.

The roast which will go furthest is a chicken, especially if the meat is carved and served in slices rather than portions. It's still my favourite roast dinner with all the trimmings: roast taties, roast parsnips, carrots, cabbage, cauliflower or leeks and - of course - stuffing, which has to be parsley and thyme. And delicious gravy. These days I make it with gravy granules. More of that later! When you're preparing the cabbage or cauliflower, don't throw the stalks away. Save them for the soup.

The day after, strip the carcase of the remaining meat as much as you can, and put the bones into a large saucepan with an onion, a carrot, a couple of bayleaves and some peppercorns, and some thyme stalks if you have them. Cover with water, bring to the boil and simmer for 2 hours or so. Strain and you have chicken stock. You will never need a chicken stock cube again!

The meat from the carcase can make sandwiches, or you can combine it with a sauce or curry it. Making a casserole with extra veg such as mushrooms and sweetcorn is a great way to make this meat go further.

In the winter I make soup with the stock. If you make enough stock you can freeze what's left over. Anyway, you chop the stalks from the greens you had with the roast, an onion, carrot, celery, leeks - quantities depend on what you've got. Sweat them off in a large pan, in melted butter, ghee, oil, or just half an inch of water. When they've softened, add as much stock as you need to feed the number of people you have.

Now Mom's clever bit. Add a handful of either red lentils or pearl barley to the soup, or maybe even dried pasta or couscous. This will add body to the soup and make it feed more people. Cook the soup for about 45 minutes before adding what remains of the chicken meat. You can use a potato masher to blend the soup together, or a stick blender to produce a smoother soup. Or you can leave it chunky and call it "Farmhouse" if you like! Serve this soup with crusty bread.

Another handy tip is, if you know you won't be in a position to make stock from the carcase, freeze it until you have the time. You can add it to another carcase, or to a ham hock if you like. If I end up throwing a carcase in the bin without making stock from it I feel so guilty.

Trifle

I guess most people's idea of a trifle is sponge cake, fruit, custard, cream and decorations, and if I'm honest Mom's trifles fit that bill. But we're talking about the 1960s here! So in honour of Mom's trifle I wrote a poem. I'm going to try and do it in a monospaced font to see if it looks like it should:

|Hundreds and thousands|
|Tinned condensed cream|
\Birds homemade custard/
 \Tinned fruit & jelly/
  \Sponge cake in rum/
   |YUM YUM YUM YUM!|

To start with, Mom would go to Firkins the bakers on her way home from work (or late in the day if she wasn't working) and get yesterday's sponge cake which was sold off cheap. (A good tip. I wonder if Greggs do something similar?) Then she'd split the cakes horizontally and pour dark rum, sherry, apricot brandy or whatever was left over from Christmas (but NEVER Dad's Drambuie!) over them. She would make up a jelly using jelly cubes, hot water and the juice from a tin of fruit. When it was partly set she'd stir the fruit into the jelly and pour it on top of the sponge cake. The custard was always Bird's custard - making this quantity of custard from scratch would involve 6 eggs which could be better used elsewhere. No matter: Bird's custard is the best. When it was colder than the jelly, that went on top. The whole thing then went into the fridge. 

Whipped cream, eh? Not on your nelly. A tin of Ideal condensed cream, shaken for hours to within an inch of its life, then opened and spooned on top. It has a taste all of its own. That was covered with "hundreds and thousands", those little coloured strands of sugar. Sometimes we could afford silver dragees,or sugared almonds, but not often. A real treat was glace cherries, which would be chopped into pieces rather than left whole.

And so back into the fridge, to be served at celebrations or if friends of Dad's came round for tea. (I'm not sure Mom was allowed friends round. I wasn't.) 

At some time in the 1960s, Birds themselves decided to produce boxes of trifle ingredients, which we tried but still went back to the original. If you want to you can try it for yourself. I don't make trifle now, I'm the only one in the house that eats it, and I'm fat enough thank you! But if I ever get the chance, this is what I shall make.

Bread and butter

Now I could write a book on the role of bread and butter in our family!

As previously noted, it was thin sliced bread for weekday sandwiches and proper bread for the weekends. We had our bread delivered by Barry the Breadman, who worked for Wonderloaf bakeries. He had a range of breads: thin, medium and thick sliced, always white never brown or wholemeal, wrapped in greaseproof paper. Uncut tin loaves, or bloomers, or my family's favourite Cottage loaves, or Coburg (round with a cross cut in the top): crusty cobs which went well with crumbed ham as a treat!

Today we have sandwiches as a snack, for lunch or supper. But we had thinly sliced bread with every meal. It was important to have a plate with sliced bread and butter on the tea table, it was always there at my Nan's house (just in case I got famished between meals). But the most bizarre place for bread and butter to turn up was with a trifle!

I'll write more on what exactly went into this "trifle" later. But the bread and butter served two purposes. One was to fill any remaining holes in the stomach after the main course. The other was, of course, to mop up the delicious trifle juices!

My Dad always took great pride in making sure we were well provided for: even if that meant that all that was in the larder was a proper crusty loaf, and all that was in the fridge was good Danish tub butter, that was enough for a feast. (Except when all that was left was Ifit.)

What to do with the stock from the hock or trotter

The cooking liquid from the hock or trotter is known as "stock". This is good stuff! Save it. Put it in a bowl with some clingfilm over it and put it into the fridge. You can freeze it too.

The best thing to do with this is make a soup. My favourite soups using this stock are:

Pea and Ham and
Lentil and Sausage

To make pea and ham soup, take 8oz of dried peas and soak them for 24 hours with some bicarbonate of soda. Drain and rinse them. Peel and finely chop an onion, a couple of carrots and some celery or a leek if you have it. Melt some butter, or add some oil or lard or dripping to a large saucepan. If you're watching the calories or have no fat in the house, put about half an inch of water in the bottom. Add the chopped veg and fry off until they're transparent. Now add the rinsed and drained peas and about 3 pints of stock, and bring to the boil. Turn down to a simmer and cook for another 2 - 3 hours. Chop some of the meat from the hock or trotter and add to the pan. This soup will serve 6. (Actually it serves me and hubby for 2 meals but then we're gluttons!)

Lentil and Sausage soup is even easier. Take 8oz of green or brown lentils and rinse them under the cold tap in a sieve. Fry some chopped veg as in the pea soup recipe, add the lentils and the stock and cook for about an hour. I think this soup tastes best with some frankfurters (hot dog sausages) chopped into 1 inch sections and added 5 minutes before you serve it.

Note I haven't told you to add any salt or pepper. This is because I want you to taste it to see if it needs it. Always be guided by your taste buds. If you've used a ham hock there may well be enough salt in the stock anyway.

Serve with crusty bread if you have it. If you're using thin sliced bread, toast it and cut into triangles. There's posh!

My favourite meal when I was aged 6

My favourite meal when I was aged 6 wasn't fish fingers and chips, nor was it alphabetti spaghetti (which didn't exist 50 years ago!), nor was it a McDisgusting burger - they weren't in the UK 50 years ago!

No, it was the glorious Pig's Trotter!

Mom could buy a trotter for 3d (three old pennies) from the butcher and one would feed a hungry little girl for tea, with some stew veg cooked in the broth. I used to love sucking the little bones. The skin tasted so good!

When you buy the trotter, ask the butcher to split it down the middle. At home, put it in a bowl and pour a kettle of boiling water over it. This will make sure there are no nasties there. The butcher washes all the muck and grot off before the pig is cut up anyway.

Put it into a large saucepan and cover with cold water. Bring to the boil. Scum will rise to the top, and you have to skim it off with a spoon. Throw it away. To be on the safe side you can also throw this water away and put more into the pan. Add an onion halved, a couple of carrots chopped into 4, and some bayleaves and peppercorns if you have them. Bring back to the boil and simmer for about 3 hours.

That's it: the trotter is cooked. Don't pour the cooking liquid away, just use a slotted spoon to take it out of the pan. Now you could put it into a soup dish and sit and eat it. Or another thing you could do is take the meat off the bones and put the meat into a bowl. Pour some of the stock from the pot over it, and you have a basic brawn. When it goes cold, have it in sandwiches.

If you don't like the idea of eating a pig's foot, then use something called a "hock". This is the part of the leg just up from the pig's ankle. It's a bit like a lamb shank, and we all know how delicious they are! My favourite way of serving a hock is with butter beans and cabbage. You can get ham hocks, which are cured. They are even more tasty. (Morrisons sell them for £2. They are so delicious!)

By the way, if you think the £2 is expensive, you will be feeding more than one person for more than one meal with this ingredient. You've only used one pot, one ring. You haven't had to put the whole oven on. It's always worth spending more on something that goes further. Besides which it's the price of a burger and fries which feeds one person for a snack. And you've cooked it yourself, which gives you a bit of a glow!

Why I don't use pressure cookers

In the pressure cooker was a leg of lamb, some veg and some water. Mom put it on the stove top, put the lid on and put the timer on. Unfortunately she misread the instructions and thought you cooked it for longer than she should.

BANG!

And I don't just mean Bang.

I mean the sort of Bang that threatened to demolish the flat and its neighbours!

Lamb and veg all over the kitchen - walls, ceiling, floor...

And nothing else for tea.

So we had to have the staple food of my childhood, and my mother's and no doubt her mother's before her - "Bread and Ifit".

The pressure cooker, however, was not consigned to the dustbin: it had cost far too much! The base was still perfectly serviceable, and Dad used to use it to boil stuff up in. (You really don't want to know what stuff that was. It wasn't edible.)

Breakfast

When I heard kids were going to school without eating breakfast I was amazed. At the age of 7 I was making my own breakfast. I'd put some thin sliced bread in the toaster, push down the lever, take the bread when it popped up, spread it with butter and go to school, eating on the way. However, sometimes my parents would make my breakfast for me.

Depending on what was being advertised, I either had a boiled egg or porridge.

Boiled eggs, despite propaganda to the contrary, are quite healthy. So the yolk contains cholesterol, eh? Well the brain is 90% cholesterol. In fact, cholesterol is one of the building blocks of cells, and so eggs are the most amazing food for growing children!

When I was 9 my mom had her thyroid out, and spent the best part of a year in hospital. To start with, I stayed with my Auntie Jen and Uncle Arthur, but when it became clear Mom wasn't coming home anytime soon, I had to go home and basically fend for myself. This was because Dad worked shifts: either nights, when I wasn't allowed to do hardly anything in case I woke him, days which in fact were 6 - 2, or afternoons. That meant I didn't see my father for days on end. But Dad used to make my meals and leave them for me with instructions.

Breakfast, made by Dad, was boiled egg sandwiches. He'd use the doorstep bread - well, Mom wasn't there to shout at him! and boil the eggs for 7 minutes, then stick the pan under the cold tap for a while. He'd thickly butter the bread and slice the eggs on to the bread, then put them in a sandwich bag and leave them in the fridge for me. If I didn't fancy eating them first thing I would put them in my school bag and eat them at break. Oh eggy smells!

Breakfast made by Mom was porridge. This is so cheap even today. You can get a bag of porridge oats enough for breakfast for a week for about 50p even now. It's flexible and versatile too, as well as being nutritious and good for your heart.

If you're really, really poor like we were once, you make it with water. Maybe you can sprinkle some sugar on top of it when you serve it. When times were better we used milk to make it, sprinkle with sugar and pour some extra milk around it. When I left home and was fending for myself I used to put a dollop of jam in the middle. If you're into honey or golden syrup, I'm sure you could use those.

If you can't face the faff of making porridge first thing in the morning - and you need a really good pan or a microwave, in which case there really is no excuse - then put it together the night before. In the morning you warm it up. Couldn't be easier.

Just don't get me started on Ready Brek. We got some of that one winter. God it was dreadful. Tasted like cardboard. Haven't dared try it since!

Bread and Ifit

Sometimes I'd come back from playing out starving hungry and wanting some food.

"You'll spoil your tea" Mom used to say. "Here, have some bread and ifit."

When I got old I worked out that "you'll spoil your tea" was code for "I haven't got anything to give you" and "bread and ifit" was also code for "all we've got in the house is bread".

So what was this mythical "ifit"?

If it were butter, or if it were jam, or if it were cheese... you get the picture.

But this wasn't the cotton wool type bread we get these days, it was proper crusty bread with real flavour.

I remember when sliced bread came in, and Mother had to try it out. She soon developed the way to handle sliced bread: thin sliced for sandwiches, and proper crusty bread for weekends or a treat.

Thin sliced bread was a bit of a godsend. You could get more out of a loaf if you sliced it thin, and I remember her holding a bloomer loaf to her, buttering the end of it and then slicing that end off so thinly. However, Dad told her not to do it like that when she caught herself with the knife. (Modesty forfends that I should tell you what she caught - but I think you can guess!)

Thin sliced bread meant we could afford stuff to go on the sandwich. My favourite was Shippams Salmon and Shrimp paste. (Mmmm I'm salivating as I type this!) If you thinly sliced a cucumber and put the slices three in a row across the bottom slice, then spread the top slice thinly with the fish paste, that made it healthy too!

There was a reason for crusty bread at weekends. Dad would have a doorstop slice of bread (that is, a slice of bread over an inch thick) dipped in the fat of the Sunday roast. Oh yum! The practical reason for that was to take the edge off his appetite so there'd be more to go round. What a good idea!