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".