My Mum was the eldest in a family
of four, she had a younger sister and two liitle brothers. Her mother
developed MS while she was growing up and had an evening job in a cinema
while her father looked after the heating system at the City offices
of a Livery company (a Livery company is one that is a guild of the
City of London and a guild is an association for mutual aid, they originated
in medieval times when one of their functions was to provide masses
for the dead). They were a poor family so her mother had to be ingenious
devising meals to make ends meet. My Mum used to feed the other children
and her father while her mum was at her evening job, so she grew up
treating economical and nutritious cooking as natural.
When I was a child in the 50s at
infants and junior school (reception to age 11) I and my younger sister
and brother always went home for lunch because the schools were very
near. So did my Dad when he was working near enough to home so my poor
Mum had to prepare breakfast, lunch and supper. It's a very tall order
to keep meals interesting in those circumstances. The rule was to eat
everything on our plates or NO pudding. I was a horribly good child
so I did eat just about everything.
My sister and brother devised devious
ways of disposing of unwanted food so that they would get pudding. My
brother's was particularly revolting. He used to stuff his vegetables
in his cheeks and eat the things he liked with the veg still there (don't
let any children read this). Afterwards he'd go up to his room which
looked out onto a sloping a roof and spit the veg out of the window
onto the roof. Mum discovered this when she cleaned the windows
One thing I remember well is the
great spinach disaster. For some reason I'd had to have school dinner
one day and we'd had a dark green vegetable which I thought was spinach.
I went home saying how much I'd liked it so of course Mum bought some.
It was disgusting, none of us would eat it, so no pudding! I think that
it was actually spring greens which I still like very much. I do like
spinach now but children definitely have different tastes
We were always well fed with fresh
food, hardly ever tinned and we didn't have a freezer then so everything
had to be prepared everday. We used to have lovely milk puddings, rice,
ground rice and semolina. I still find rice pud a great comforter. On
Sundays we always had the traditional British roast, beef, lamb or chicken
with cold meat and salad, shepherd's pie or cottage pie on the following
days. Of course we had Yorkshire pudding with roast beef which I loved.
On Sunday morning she'd make a cake, make a roast lunch and various
puddings and jellies. One of our favourites was an orange jelly made
with half the usual amount of water, allowed to semi-set and them have
the remaining liquid made up with cider so that the bubbles set inside
the jelly and fizzed when you ate it. Another was rhubarb tart topped
with marshmallows which all melted and ran into each other when it was
baked so that the tart was topped with a pink and white chequer board.
In those days the milkman still
came everyday, a bread van called several times a week and the coalman
came regularly. Where my grandparents lived in North London the milkman
still used a horse when we were little. The horse knew exactly where
to stop, the milkman didn't have to tell him anything.
Later on when I was ateenager and
Mum had gone back to work as a specialist librarian it was my job to
do as she'd done and prepare supper so that Mum didn't have too much
to do when she got home. That's how I grew up treatingcooking as a natural
thing to do. She had learned in her childhood how to make a little go
a long way, something which I learnt from her.
As I said at her funeral "May
we remember the soul of my Mother, my teacher......"
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