Off The Record
Alan Crosby reminisces about the changing dishes on his family’s table
The changing dishes on one family’s table
Most of us feel that family history is about more than names and dates – it’s also about experiences and the circumstances of people’s lives. When oral historians interview older folk about their childhood, a topic very often raised is food. Most of us have memories – good or bad – of what we had to eat, the foods we liked or disliked, whether or not our mother was a good cook (!), family meals and feast days, and the first time we ate, or even saw, a particular type of food. Today people in their 80s often recall their first banana, that weird import which was unknown for long wartime years, or the glorious sight of an orange, its vivid colour and wonderful smell and taste brightening the dreary days of rationing.
I remember my grandma’s cooking, from when we visited Mum’s parents in their small terraced house in inner- city Manchester. Grandma was proudly proclaimed as a “good plain cook”. Her meals were tasty, although very simple, and I can still savour them in my memory. My favourite was her “meat and potato hash“– cubed stewing beef, carrots,
‘Those were the days when olive oil was dripped into your ear if you had earache’
onions, potatoes and pepper, and occasionally a small quantity of tinned tomato, simmered for a long time, then ladled onto a large thick slice of bread which soaked up the gravy, all to be eaten with dollops of HP Sauce. My mouth is watering!
At home, though, things were different. My mother was much more adventurous, a very good cook ahead of her time. Dad was in the Far East during the war, in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Singapore, and he’d come back with a taste for hot spicy foods, largely unknown in England. Mum courageously embarked upon cooking curries, buying little stoneware jars of hot curry paste (‘ Veeraswamy’ brand, I think) and curry powder. The smell was so enticing. Occasionally we children were given much milder versions – Mum had learnt her lesson, because early on in her curry career she’d mistakenly put in a tablespoon of paste, not a teaspoon, and the resulting high- explosive mixture was inedible even to my chilli-friendly father.
But we children also ate other exotica. As a newly married Mancunian in an alien land ( Woking, Surrey!) my lonely mother made friends with Violetta (always known as Vi), an Italian lady who taught her the marvels of basic Italian cooking. So from our earliest years my sister and I were accustomed to twirling spaghetti, among our other social accomplishments. Those were the days when warm olive oil was dripped into your ear if you had earache, but Mum used it for cooking. And then there was garlic, apparently unobtainable in Woking. Fortunately Dad was a civil servant who worked in London, so in his lunch hour he’d go to the street market in Soho and buy a bulb of garlic, a small bottle of oil, and little tins of tomato paste. Spaghetti wrapped in dark blue paper was becoming more widely available. So we’d have Vi’s magnificent traditional family recipe for spaghetti bolognese for dinner.
When I listen to oral history recordings of elderly ladies whose recollections were captured in the 1960s and 1970s and whose memories went back to the later decades of Queen Victoria’s reign, I wish I’d asked my grandmother about these matters. Her mother was almost illiterate, born in desperate poverty in the very middle of Manchester… to have recollections of the food she’d eaten back in the 1870s and 1880s would be a real treasure.
As it is, I wonder if what I once heard on a recording might give a clue: an elderly woman, born in the mid-1880s in Lancashire, told the interviewer that “Me mam allus ’ad a sheep’s ’ead simmerin’ on t’ fire for broth”. It kept them alive – without those sheep’s heads I wouldn’t be here.