Viv's Family Recipes

---

Book excerpt

The recipes in this book are in the main from my family, but some are those that I have collected over the years from friends.

I had inherited a small book from my grandmother who also used it to do her accounts and they are dated 1909 and so it is quite interesting from the point of view of prices at that time. She also has a few recipes at the back. Many of them are steamed or boiled, but I think that in these days of microwaves, they may be able to be done in the microwave oven. I have to admit that I’ve not actually tried it, but I regularly cook steamed sponge puddings in the microwave for about three to three and a half minutes and it is usually quite successful.

I have said where the recipes came from whenever possible, although some I cannot remember. My thanks to all those, living and dead, who have given me their recipes, and apologies to anyone who is forgotten.

My grandmother was an excellent cook. Someone once said that she could make a delicious meal from an old boot! My mother was also an excellent cook, and when she married my stepfather, who was a farmer with a big family of his own, she had to cook for large numbers of people. She never really got out of that habit and there was always plenty of food when people went to visit. Some of the recipes in the book are hers.

Of course, my grandmother lived through two world wars, and my mother and her siblings through one. At that time food was scarce and people had to make the best of what there was. There were no ready meals or cake mixes. I am sure that this scarcity helped turn them into the cooks they were.

My mother had two sisters and two brothers. She was the middle one in the family. Her eldest sister was called Millie, but the younger sister was known as Nin. She was originally called Florence but acquired the nickname of ‘Nin’. Everyone knew her as Nin. She was never called Florence. There are some of her recipes here as well as Auntie Millie’s. There is also a recipe of my mother’s elder brother Eric’s wife. She was called Elsie.

Some other recipes are from family friends. It was a much more formal time when these were gathered, and people were not known universally by their first names. Hence some recipes being attributed to ‘Mrs someone’ or, if I had gathered the recipe myself, to ‘Auntie someone’ as children were not permitted to call their elders by their first names. If the person was a particular friend, she or he became ‘Auntie someone’ or ‘Uncle someone’.

The recipes have, by and large come from Auntie Millie’s recipe book, which I acquired on her death. The book has seen better days. I gave it to her for Christmas 1953! Others I have gained over the years, and when I got married, my mother gave me an exercise book in which she had written some of her recipes.

I hope you enjoy these recipes. I know some are not particularly healthy by today’s standards, containing large amounts of animal fat (e.g. suet), but remember that these were different times. There was rationing of many things, margarine was horrible and only used for cooking. People had less food to eat too, and so you needed to have things that filled you up.

Finally, in defence of the high suet or lard content of some things, people did more physical work. Housework was hard. You had to get down and scrub floors. My grandmother did not have a washing machine for many years in my youth. She had to get out a dolly tub about the size of a beer barrel and fill it with hot water. Then she had to grate soap from a bar (no detergents) and dissolve it in the water in the dolly tub before putting in the clothes. Then using what was known as a posser, she pushed up and down on the clothes for quite some time.

When she took them out into the sink, they were heavy with water. She then had to empty the dolly tub, re-fill it with rinsing water and then repeat a couple of times.

The wet clothes were passed through a mangle—a contraption with two rollers that were turned by rotating a handle, then they were hung out in the garden to dry. Also, remember that there were no easy-care fabrics in those days. Everything was wool or cotton.

This was just the washing. Floors had to be swept with a brush and occasionally carpets were taken outside and beaten with a carpet beater. They did not have fitted carpets.

Central heating was a rarity and so the fire grates had to be cleaned and occasionally ‘black-leaded’ (I don’t know what black lead was, sorry) as well as fuel being carried in from the coalhouse to feed the fire. It is no wonder women did not go out to work. Their days were filled up with housework.

Therefore, my grandmother’s recipes were rather heavy on the calories, but they burned them off quite easily with their housework.

Of course, during the 1950s, things began to be easier and most people had vacuum cleaners and fitted carpets were beginning to be more common, easing the dusting of the surrounding floor. (I still remember my mother crawling under the beds to dust the surround.)

Washing machines were now available, but most were twin-tubs with a washing machine and a spin dryer, so you could not put the washing on and do something else.