Thinking

Been a very odd sort of day - a bit different from the norm, and I've been doing a bit of thinking. Nothing too profound - God forbid. Watched this thing on the box about Fanny Craddock. The last bit of it was set in this OAP home - the set was very apt. Maybe 'cos I remember going round so many of them in the month or so before Dad died, with Mum & Jo, the room where she was eating her supper was very true to life. The strangely Ikea'ish furniture, the picture rail at waist height and the apallingly bland artwork on the walls. Nothing at all that an old person would choose to live with, but brightly apealing to the relatives. And all wipe down clean of course. The staff put her supper in front of her - fishfingers I think and mashed potato, and I thought dear God. It wasn't that I ever liked Fanny Craddock - she was a strangely caricaturish figure even back in the 60's, but imagine you've spend your whole life cooking - and yeah, I'll get on to the cooking in a bit - and someone slaps down a plate of fishfingers and mashed potato in front of you. Me, I can't stand mashed potato. Any other variety of the stuff and I don't mind, but mashed? The very sensation of it in my mouth makes me feel ill. So there I am, thirty, forty years time, is someone going to be trying to make me eat mashed potato? People talk about the elderly reverting to a form of second childhood, but is that because we're forcing that childhood onto them? Eat it up dear! I can hear the very voice of a brisk careworker in my ears and dear God it's an apalling thing.
Anyhow the food.
I spend a fair bit of time looking through cookery books. I have a fair few of my own, and my mum had a comprehensive collection. I even seem to remember a Bon Viveur one, a spiral bound paperback with strange black graphics on the front that was very redolent of the 50's. Most of my mum's though were Margeuritte Patten's, big hardbound books, and lots of big paperbacks. Colour photo's in batches strategically placed. My God the food of the 50's was something else. To judge it by my memories of those books, that which was not smothered in piped mayonaise, was drenched in aspic, and I'll bet there was aspic underneath a lot of that mayonaise. The best of the Margeuritte books was a jam and pickles book that I freely admit I still use today. Not that I do a lot of jamming or pickling, but I have the thing, and if I had a family, I'd be using it all the time. There are some particularly good pickle recipes in, that I remember clearly. My mother pickled and potted all the time. She was never a particularly hot jam maker, but there were always tons of bottles of pickles and stuff - she bottled fruit as if another war was coming, because we had a big garden and often had gluts. Whenever a pudding was needed, she'd open a bottle of damsons, or plums, and I seem to remember greengages. These are fruits you hardly see in the shops these days - ok, well plums are hardly a rarity, but when was the last time you saw a damson in Tesco's? I do occasionally see greengages, particularly in the station fruit and veg shop, but they (the shop) are exceptional.
Tons and tons of tomato's made it into bottles. Kilner jars, washed, sterilised in the oven, topped up to the lip with tomato's and then topped up with boiling water from the kettle. Then I seem to remember them going in to the oven, the kilner lids being put on and back in to the oven, the seal being made - then out and tightened. Then they'd be left to cool (I think) and the seal tested. Then they'd be piled into the pantry for storage. And I think if it was a particularly good year, some would go into the celler. Now I have a kilner jar, and I often think I'd love to put up a bottle of soft fruit for Christmas - but can I get a lid for it? Not a chance.