Wednesday 5 October 2011

Pies and broth do you good.

Cooking is easy.....it becomes difficult if you want it too....
When I was young I cooked chips with almost everything until I realised that there were other ways of getting your carbohydrate .  We didn't use pasta or rice or fancy things like that in the period after the war when things were still on ration. Anyone who had a bit of land grew vegetable or potatoes or kept chickens.... Handy people used to use either dogs or guns to bring back rabbits and my Gran's rabbit pie was the stuff of drooling day  dreams...together with her sheep's head broth!  Both of these delicacies took time and trouble to make but they were worth it!
Now we have food totally undreamed of back then , much of it is prepackaged, and I am still cooking. Nothing points out the difference in class than what we have grown used to in the last decade.
My first husband loved pies, steak and kidney and the wonderful Lancashire potato pie, not quite understood by southerners.  My second husband does not like pies, unless they have got mashed potato on top rather than pastry.
I do love to cook...and finding another man to cook for has been great! On my own I did not cook....I bought ready dinners and left most of them even though they have improved no end.
My neighbours tell me that there is always a good smell coming from the house....and my husband brought up in a middle class household has got used to some of my peasant cooking.
Today, even with flu I am cooking....sausage and mash with onion gravy, very easy.  At one stage this would have had eyebrows raised but today he'll be very glad of it.
Mind , I am not yet ready to try the sheep's head broth!  

2 comments:

Ray Barnes said...

That must be a great relief to the sheep.
Hope your bugs depart at speed Jean.
Blessings.

UKViewer said...

Being a veggie, lots of the dishes you mention (although not sheep's head) were part of my past. Regional flavours vary, but as you say, in the post-war period, beggars couldn't be choosers when it came to the availability of food and what to cook. I was in care for a while and spent many hours hanging around the kitchen watching food being prepared and even now, 50 odd years later can still make a mean dumpling.

But we've discovered that with quorn and other meat substitutes, you can recreate many of the traditional dishes of the past. Love it when we do.