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Childhood food you can't match

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Childhood food you can't match

Postby WWordsworth » Fri Jan 07, 2022 7:17 pm

Something Lush said on a different thread about her aunt's Welsh cakes being much nicer than hers got me thinking.

My Gran made the most delicious chips I have ever tasted.
She would fry them in dripping and put them on the table in a clear pyrex bowl.
As I got older I asked what her secret was, and she didn't know.
Said she just cut the potatoes up and fried them.

My mother often made a plate minced beef and onion pie.
As far as I know there was nothing else added to the meat other than probably some s&p.
It was served with chips (good but Gran's had the edge), tinned garden peas and HP sauce.
It was so tasty. The 3 of us and Dad loved pie day.

I have been working on that pie for about 30 years now.
J really likes it but Mum's was far better.

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Re: Childhood food you can't match

Postby PatsyMFagan » Fri Jan 07, 2022 7:26 pm

The best liver and bacon I ever had was at my grammar school ... :yum

My daughter still talks about 'Nanny' mince and I have never yet re-created it. I do recall she would tip the raw mince into an enamel pie tin, make up a cup of bisto gravy, pour it over the meat, use a fork to break it up and as far as I recall, just bake it in the oven. I don't think that she used either onions or carrots.

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Re: Childhood food you can't match

Postby Pampy » Fri Jan 07, 2022 7:32 pm

We still refer to "Grandma" chips in my family. She used to buy her meat once a week and would lightly fry it all (to keep it safe, she said) and would then just cook it as she needed it. The initial frying used to generate loads of fat/dripping which she used to make her chips - they were heavenly!

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Re: Childhood food you can't match

Postby scullion » Fri Jan 07, 2022 7:35 pm

sometimes, the memory is better than the reality...
my aunt made the best shortbread when i was little but when i had some a couple of years ago it wasn't quite as good as i remembered even though she makes it in the way same.
there is nothing my mother made that i can't make better.
not boasting - my mother was of the generation that missed out on learning to cook because of rationing (i give her the benefit of the doubt) and then not being interested.

my mother used to pan fry chips like that (with dripping from other food) - they were grim.
soggy, white with dark brown edges and very greasy.

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Re: Childhood food you can't match

Postby Suelle » Fri Jan 07, 2022 7:54 pm

My grandmother made pork brawn (cheese) from trotters. Only my father and I liked it, out of a family of 6, so it was our treat. I've occasionally bought it since childhood, but it never really matched up to my memories.

I also loved pork dripping on hot toast, sprinkled with lots of salt. It couldn't even be reproduced these days, as pork doesn't have enough fat to give the bowl full of dripping with jelly at the bottom, and the toast was made over an open fire - the only cooking my father ever did! :lol:

I do think the memories brought back probably cloud our judgement as to whether things really were good or not. Similarly to scullion, my mother wasn't a very good cook. She was a good cake baker, so we had lovely stodgy desserts that made up for the plain meals (and probably to make up for the meagre amounts of meat).

I much preferred school dinners to my mother's cooking, once I got to secondary school. I remember so many things that she couldn't cook as well, including a thick beef mince stew. When I asked her to try to reproduce it, we got a watery soup with mince, diced carrots and onions floating in it. All it probably needed was some Bisto!
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Re: Childhood food you can't match

Postby Stokey Sue » Fri Jan 07, 2022 7:58 pm

Two things spring to mind - one is school dinner hippo pudding, two bolster shaped pieces of pudding baked in a butterscotch sauce, in a roasting pan, supposed to look like 2 hippopotamuses in a muddy river, nobody ever managed to make it successfully at home (including the school housekeeper, a friend of my mother's)

The other is the bacon made by a cousin of my father's in his butchery, that and his black pudding probably were better than factory made, but long gone

Oh and proper trench celery, now people make a great fuss about fenland celery, but I haven't managed to get any in the past few years, and that used to be the norm, self-blanching celery is a scam imo. My dad, my grandpa and a lot of other people I knew grew it

Neither my grandma nor my Nan (step gran) were good cooks, though if I make Christmas mincemeat I try to replicate grandmas, preserves were her thing.

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Re: Childhood food you can't match

Postby herbidacious » Fri Jan 07, 2022 8:44 pm

scullion wrote: my mother was of the generation that missed out on learning to cook because of rationing (i give her the benefit of the doubt) and then not being interested.
.


That probably describes mine too, although she was better at, and more interested in, making cakes and puddings. Apparently her mother was not a great cook either.

I can't remember anything that anyone made that I loved as a child :o Grandma made a good custard tart...

I suppose if you never ate out and you only had one grandparent, that rather limits the possibilities!
Last edited by herbidacious on Sat Jan 08, 2022 11:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Childhood food you can't match

Postby aero280 » Fri Jan 07, 2022 9:17 pm

My mother was a good cook. She could cook anything. The two things that come to mind are steamed steak and kidney pudding and an egg and sausage pie. The S&K was normal but had mushroom in it. Not sure what else.

I've never made the pie myself, but it was made in a deep rectangular tin. Pasty top, bottom and sides and filled with a few sausages and chopped tomatoes and then covered with beaten eggs before the pastry lid went on. The lid needed the china supports. It was very nice. I must recreate it.

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Re: Childhood food you can't match

Postby liketocook » Fri Jan 07, 2022 9:49 pm

If we had beef on a Sunday sometimes my Mum would make a beef loaf on the Monday - finely chopped beef, grated carrots, a little mash and an egg all mixed together popped in a loaf tin and topped with bread crumbs then baked. We had it sliced with fried onions, Bisto gravy, tinned peas and chips. It was a family favourite that I've never quite managed to replicate despite having her recipe such as it is as it was made by eye rather than weights. Mine is good but not quite as good and my sister agrees.

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Re: Childhood food you can't match

Postby Pampy » Fri Jan 07, 2022 11:56 pm

I was lucky - both my Mum and maternal grandmother were excellent cooks and I still have a lot of their recipes that they wrote down. My grandmother's chips were nothing like those described by Scullion.

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Re: Childhood food you can't match

Postby Badger's Mate » Sat Jan 08, 2022 12:00 pm

Memories are funny things. My eldest cousin, not quite ten years older than me, remembers my Nan's cooking as excellent and fondly recalls her wonderful chips, cooked in lard. I don't remember her being so good at all. Mum on the other hand, did a lot of cooking and must have got it from somebody. I don't think Nan had any cookery books, Mum had a Good Housekeeping one, Be-Ro and something by Marguerite Patten. She also bought the odd one from jumble sales; some of the books were American - with ingredients like abalone, eggplant & zucchini, they might as well have been written in Japanese.

I do copy my Nan's method of making mince to a point, cooking it in advance and lifting the fat off the following morning. She used an Oxo cube and always had dumplings in it, I don't. I can't reliably make pastry or Yorkshires as well as I remember Mum doing them. I once stayed with my youngest cousin's family one night in the wilds of Cheshunt, which seemed quite rural then (memory again) and my Auntie Ivy cooking a delicious stew. Mum asked her as I had raved about it, she replied that it was 'just a stew'. Even now I can't think what the difference was.

ETA Pea soup! Grandma (Dad's Mum) made really nice pea soup. I've never matched that, but again it might be a memory issue.

Also the first time tasting something can be revelatory - new tastes will never be bettered or even perhaps equalled by later servings of identical food. I'm thinking of the first time I ate fresh coriander or had Thai curry, though there must be many other examples. Some things might be an acquired taste but others are especially memorable first time around and never matched.

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Re: Childhood food you can't match

Postby Pampy » Sat Jan 08, 2022 12:36 pm

You've just reminded me of my Grandma's pea soup! When I was young she lived in a huge old Victorian house which had a coal fired cooking range. Even when she had bought a gas cooker, she still used the range and always had a pan of pea soup on it, sometimes with a ham hock in it. Tastiest pea soup I've ever had!

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Re: Childhood food you can't match

Postby Pepper Pig » Sat Jan 08, 2022 12:49 pm

My mum made, and still makes, excellent shortcrust pastry. (At 93 she still makes apple pies for anyone in the village who brings her cookers). She used to make terrific, probably inauthentic, Cornish pasties. She did a lovely "best end of neck" roast lamb, a great lamb stew with pearl barley, toad in the hole (which she relishes telling my children I used to call "hole in the dinner")and best of all something called Savoury Mince Cobbler which was her mince topped with a sort of scone mix.

Less successfully she was very keen on junket (bleeurgh), rice pudding with skin (double bleeurgh) and stuffed marrow which always turned out like water with floaty bits in.
Last edited by Pepper Pig on Sat Jan 08, 2022 1:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Childhood food you can't match

Postby Seatallan » Sat Jan 08, 2022 1:08 pm

My granny made 'sops' (black tea poured over small chunks of bread, topped with a sprinkling of sugar). It's so simple but despite various attempts over the years I've never managed to make it taste like hers did. I suppose it's not just the food but the whole package- the smells, the atmosphere, the memories.... :)

When I was a student my mum had the most fabulous recipe for a vegetable crumble. She used to make it when I came home to visit with one of my best friends who was a veggie (she's the one who died a few years ago sadly). We both frequently reminisced about that vegetable crumble but I've never managed to recreate it and sadly I never did get the recipe from her (when I searched for it much later after she died I couldn't find it though I still have her copy of St Delia :D ).
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Re: Childhood food you can't match

Postby Earthmaiden » Sat Jan 08, 2022 1:10 pm

I can't match my mother's toad in the hole or macaroni cheese. I know exactly how she made them and she was never extravagant with ingredients but I can't ever get them quite as wonderful.

We discussed mince here recently and I think the quality of the meat an possibly fat content at that time had a lot to do with it tasting very good without many added ingredients. I particularly liked a 'stew' with a whole onion cooked in it and dumplings or a plate pie. I can make both quite well but ours only contained salt, pepper and a pinch of herbs and it was lovely.

My grandmother had trained as a Rural Domestic Economist and everything she made was delicious (and used more extravagant ingredients than my mother would have dreamed of using). Funnily enough, of all the lovely things she made, a bowl of warm semolina for supper topped with her bottled blackberries in the middle of winter is a cherished memory.

I had a friend whose mother made the best S&K puddings I have ever tasted. I always hoped we'd have that if I was invited to lunch - sadly, it was my first experience of them and I've never had anything near to as good since.

School food was mostly good and I can replicate most of it. We were rather fond of some synthetic cream a bit like Dream Topping which we called 'shaving cream', the like of which I have never found anywhere else!

Oh, there's my other grandmother's jelly with oranges too made with real orange juice she had squeezed, with bits of sponge at the bottom and pieces of orange in it. It was a labour of love but a real treat.

Loved junket & stuffed marrow - hated pea soup, especially with a ham bone (and still do!). We had rice pudding three times a week in junior school - Mrs Bensley made it on top of the stove with ordinary milk and I've always preferred it cooked that way so it isn't too creamy or thick (but don't mind skin!).

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Re: Childhood food you can't match

Postby Kacey » Sat Jan 08, 2022 8:57 pm

My Mum isn't a great cook so there's not much I miss from my childhood that I can't make better. There are however things we had as kids that I've ever forgotten, though that's mostly due to lack of money in those days.

For some reason we always had a 'mixed grill' on Xmas eve. We all loved our Xmas eve tea, it was never really a mixed grill in the true sense of the word, more like a traditional cooked breakfast, but bacon, sausage and eggs all at the same time was probably an extravagance. Whatever, it was magical.

My Nan was a plain cook but was really good at cakes, biscuits and puddings. Her repertoire wasn't great but I'd dearly love to replicate her autumnal plum pudding, which was basically plums in a suet pie with good custard. It just hit the right spot between sweet pastry and tart plums, I've never actually tried to make it but must have a go.

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Re: Childhood food you can't match

Postby Stokey Sue » Sat Jan 08, 2022 9:12 pm

One I probably could match if I had a big garden

My dad grew loganberries, I picked them, my mother made jam, bottled them, and of course made pies and crumbles

I found a little punnet at an extortionate price at Turnips in Borough Market in 2019

I sat and ate them very, very, slowly on by one overlooking the river. They are just the best of those composite fruits

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Re: Childhood food you can't match

Postby KeenCook2 » Sat Jan 08, 2022 9:38 pm

Thinking of cakes, my mother used to make the most delicious bakewell tarts. She always used the large boxes of soft margerine. She used almond essence, not ground almonds. Her pastry was lovely, always thin and crispy, and the tarts were quite dainty, but deep.

She also made the most fantastic quince preserve, from the quince tree in the garden. It was a wonderful red colour and tasted absolutely amazing - I've never managed to replicate it.
I asked my sister if she knew how our mother had made it but she said it wasn't something she did when she was growing up (I'm the baby of the family by several years) so she couldn't help.

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Re: Childhood food you can't match

Postby Pampy » Sat Jan 08, 2022 10:59 pm

Seatallan wrote:My granny made 'sops' (black tea poured over small chunks of bread, topped with a sprinkling of sugar).


My parents used to make "pobs" - milk poured over small chunks of bread and sugar sprinkled on it. They swore it was the best thing to eat if you weren't feeling very well.

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Re: Childhood food you can't match

Postby aero280 » Sun Jan 09, 2022 12:20 am

My mother used to make soused mackerel. Everybody loved it except me...

I used not to like clotted cream on tinned fruit or jelly, when it mixed in with the juice and sort of curdled. I lo
ved the cream on bread and scones with jam or honey. I don't mind it on fruit these days though! :D

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