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.