One hundred years of one house in Chorlton part 22 cooking a meal

The continuing story of the house Joe and Mary Ann Scott lived in for over 50 years and the families that have lived here since.*

I don’t tend to do nostalgia.  It is as my mum used to say a false trail where the days were always sunny, you were always happy and girlfriends never dumped you.

But sometimes objects and memories have a habit of bouncing back and setting you off in all sorts of directions and so it is today.

I am looking at Meta Givern’s Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking.  It was first published in two volumes in the USA in 1947 and ours is the first reprint done the following year which means they are older than me by just one year.

I think they were given to mother soon after she settled down with my father and they have been part of my life.  Not that she used them over much.  They have American measures and many of the foods listed would not have been available in those post war years when there was still rationing.

But I have them in front of me now and they have stood the test of time.  I suppose each generation produces a new essential guide to housework and cooking.  Long before Mrs Beaton and stretching back into the 18th century there was a ready market of the expert guide to running a home.

And as you do I have begun to wonder what cook books Mary Ann would have used. Like so many people of their generation Joe and Mary Ann lived through a real sea change in eating habits.  It would have ranged from jam roly poly pudding heavy with suet to Vesta packet curries, and behind which there is the story of the march from handmade food to the convenience stuff.

Along the way it would have taken in our Imperial past, the privations of rationing during two world wars and that explosion of new foods brought on by the boom of the 1950s and the new look 1960s.
It is easy today with the food of the world at our finger tips and a choice that once was only available for a few short months to forget that the diet of our grandparents was not as bland or boring as we might think.

The Empire, better forms of food preservation and fast travelling ships meant that the tastes of Asia could be there to buy from the corner grocer’s shop.  In the same way during the 19th century the advance of the railway across Britain meant that fish from the North Sea and fruit from Kent could be on a table to eat at the other end of the country on the same day as they were landed or harvested.

After the last war the fridge and freezer along with a handful of other helpful electrical kitchen gadgets as well as decades of cheap food played their part in providing Joe and Mary Ann with new and greater quantities of things to eat.

And then of course there were the TV chefs who perfectly manipulated the television and brought cookery lessons into the home.  It was after all the golden age of DIY with magazines and later TV programmes given over to home improvements of which cooking was just another way of making life that little bit more comfortable.

So I guess in the fullness of time the Scott’s sat down to Coronation Chicken that 1953 dish first served at the Queen’s Coronation meal which was a mixture of cold chicken with mayonnaise and curry.  It sounds quite tame today but against the backdrop of years of rationing I reckon it would have been pretty exotic.**

Of course I will never be able to know what they liked let along what they ate but I am fairly confident that they would have marched with the times and much of what they might have eaten is there in Meta Givern.  Here are appetizers like Apple Tempters and Shrimp Cocktail, traditional main courses of liver and onions, broiled, fried or roast chicken and a host of puddings.  Perhaps if they were feeling truly adventurous they might have eaten Italian Style Liver Macroni and Tomatoes followed by Baked Pears with Marshmallows.

But I am getting carried away with myself, in my youth in the 1950s olive oil was what you used for medicinal purposes, and pasta was not yet a staple.  In fact I shudder to say that in our home we ate spaghetti cooked in milk and sugar, still ate apple sandwiches along with bread spread with beef dripping and ate our tinned fruit salad with the top of the milk.

In time the supermarket was to help change all our eating habits but that as they say is for another time.

Pictures; from Meta Givern’s Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking, 1948, Chicago

*http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20a%20house
**Although there will be the food pedant who points to a similar dish called Jubilee Chicken and served in 1935 for the silver jubilee of King George V