As Time Goes By: You Are What You Eat
...People managed to make ends meet in those days of poor pay, and after the experience of shortages and rationing in two world wars my parents never liked to see food wasted. My Dad, a prisoner in the first war, always made a point of eating every scrap and Mum would say ‘Come on Fred, leave the plate!’ My mother was a good cook, and my husband said he only married me because my Mum made such good Yorkshire pudding...
Eileen Perrin recalls in mouth-watering detail the tasty treats of her younger days.
At Dunwich on the Suffolk coast you can enjoy excellent fish and chips in Watling’s Tea Shed, and fresh fish is still sold from a small tarred boat-shed next to it on the beach.
The fishing fleets are now sadly depleted at Lowestoft and Yarmouth where smoked red herring, bloaters and buckling were exported all over Europe. Herring girls came from Scotland to clean, gut and pack fish in oak barrels, working first at Whitby, then Scarborough, following the herring, as the shoals moved down the east coast. Russia took hundreds upon hundreds of barrels right into early 1900s. On Dunwich beach in the 1900s herring were sold from Chris Watling’s boats at 24 a shilling.
My mother, Kitty, used to speak of times she was taken in the early 1900s to see Dad’s sister Doll, who was cook in a large house in Enfield. In the vast kitchen, piled on the stone flags in the corners, were plums, greengages and damsons, to be made into jam. Doll’s husband Alf Kerley, the gardener, had peaches and nectarines growing against the garden walls. Kit was told that Harry Champion of the music halls, who made famous the song ‘Boiled Beef and Carrots’ was a visitor
there, and would get Doll to make him one of her special rice puddings to take home.
From where we lived in Islington there was a little shop over the road, where the selection of sweets, included liquorice cuttings, bootlaces and pipes, sherbert dabs, Palm toffee in slabs, wine gums, ‘rhubarb and custard’, milk gums, anniseed balls, which changed colour as they were sucked, ‘chops,
peas and potatoes’, sherbert lemons, Dolly mixtures, Wrigley’s chewing gum,‘tobacco’(coconut shreds covered in cocoa), tiger nuts, brandy balls, Imps (tiniest black cushion-shaped squares of fierce hotness) cough candy, acid tablets, fruit lumps, hundreds and thousands, love hearts, and pear drops.
One could also buy Piccallili mustard pickle, red cabbage or pickled onions by the cup, ladled from huge stoneware jars on the counter, The little lady who ran the shop, had a battered cardboard box containing grubby envelopes called the Lucky Dip. For just a halfpenny, one picked an envelope and
opened it to find a weight written inside, - how much you were going to get for your ‘dip’, ranging from 1oz. to 4oz.
At tea-time Dad would make ‘special’ Belgian toast. He toasted the plain side of a slice of buttered bread, then spread the melted butter side with raspberry jam: very nice, but I don’t know if it originated in Belgium or was just another of my parents’ inventions.
Aged about nine I sometimes made a saucer of melted cheese with thinly sliced onion, a little vinegar and mustard, put into the cast iron oven next to the kitchen fire, to eat with toast made against the fire bars.
When we could not get a crusty Cottage loaf we had Coburg, Farmhouse or a Split Tin. Dad had Hovis, as it was supposed to be good for rheumatism, and he always ate plenty of clery.On Sundays we bought watercress for tea, and shrimps and winkles sold by the half-pint pot from a costermonger’s barrow that was wheeled into our street.
Round the corner lived an old woman who sold bundles of firewood and made toffee apples, put upside down in a tin tray on top of an old apple box, outside her front door. When you ate them the apple tops had flat lids of brittle toffee and I always looked for the one with the most toffee. And all for a penny.
When making the Christmas puddings in our Islington kitchen, my mother chopped the suet and chopped small the large hard lumps of crystallised lemon, orange and lime peel. The sugar used was black and called foot sugar.(Another invention?) a grated carrot was added to make the pudding
lighter. Mum gave me the job of de-seeding the large raisins, and after blanching them in a pudding basin of boiling water, of peeling off the almond skins. She would put in the washed silver threepenny bits and then I had a stir. But before the depression years, Vera and I used to find half-crowns in our pudding.
I recall that the womens’ magazines of the day often gave away packets of small ‘silver’ charms to put in puddings, like tiny boots and horseshoes and wishbones, but we were not allowed to put them in.
In the 1930’s uncle Charlie was out of work as were so many others at that time. When we went over to tea Auntie Alice often gave us pilchards. At threepence a tin, it was good food value. To save coal Aunt Alice lit a paraffin stove. I can still see the rosy light shining through the openwork around the
top making shadow patterns on the wall.
Money was scarce and Mum would remind her sister Alice of the times when their Dad, Bert, a painter and decorator, was unemployed during the winter time, when they had only bread pudding for their dinner and sometimes a herring for tea.
With widespread unemployment money was short. I recall having just bread and butter and celery for tea; only Dad had a piece of Cheddar. In better times when Dad found work, he favoured gorgonzola cheese for supper. He would tell of going shopping with his mother, the daughter of William Hider, a
City of London cheesemonger. She always tasted before buying and the shopman would push a hollow metal tube into a whole cheese, bringing out a pencil of cheese about six inches long for tasting. From tasting Dad’s Gorgonzola I learned to appreciate the great blue cheeses.
To get me to eat things she thought I might refuse, Mum called things by other names. She had a wicked sense of humour. Semolina was called sema-colica, and, with anything that was supposed to be absolutely delicious came the remark ‘Come on Eileen, eat it up, it’s lovely. Chatna squirt!’ Now, I guess, looking back, this expression was direct from the army in India. Whether at Chetna or Chatna I can imagine the effect of Chatna squirt on the soldiers!
Mum was nothing if not inventive with her expressions. My hair was straight as a dye, and always full of encouragement, she’d say ‘Eat your crusts, they’ll make your hair curl’, or ‘If you don’t eat your greens you’ll never have a lovely skin like Rosie '(my lovely eighteen year old cousin).
People managed to make ends meet in those days of poor pay, and after the experience of shortages and rationing in two world wars my parents never liked to see food wasted. My Dad, a prisoner in the first war, always made a point of eating every scrap and Mum would say ‘Come on Fred, leave the plate!’ My mother was a good cook, and my husband said he only married me because my Mum made such good Yorkshire pudding.
One day I might write a cookery book for children, based on nursery rhymes with pictures at the top of every page with a rhyme and recipe below. What is the point of paying lip service to a healthy diet and organic food if the next generation does not know how to cook it?
