One hundred years of one house in Chorlton part 41, making breakfast

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.*

Now I don’t like making porridge.

It either turns out like lumpy concrete or runny and undercooked.

But the family continue to insist on it and I just don’t get any better.

And that got me thinking to what Joe and Mary Ann did for breakfast during their fifty years here.

I suspect it would have been a cooked breakfast and apart from the war years when was food rationed it would have included lashings of bacon, eggs and toast and I guess porridge.

After all oats were cheap and mixed with water or milk were pretty filling.

My own grandfather always made his the night before and Dad preferred salt rather than sugar.

Later when John Mike and Lois lived here in the 70s breakfast was a cup of coffee usually drunk in the car or on the bus on the way to work.

I preferred toast eaten cold with ginger marmalade. although I did have a brief flirtation with muesli bought from the Eighth Day .

But for many in the past whether it was in inner city Manchester during the early 19th century or in rural Chorlton breakfast was eaten on the move.**

Most of the working class lived in rooms not houses with just a fire place for rudimentary cooking extending to boiling a kettle or a pot of something, and anyway lighting a fire was a costly affair which would then continue to burn long after everyone had left for work.

Likewise water was not always readily available and might only be available from a street pump and then not all the time.

On the way to work there were the coffee stalls which had the added bonus that in cold weather the mugs would warm the hands as well.

Some stalls were just simply a board laid over a pair of sawhorses and a can of coffee kept warm by a charcoal burner and others elaborate tent like structures.  A cup of coffee and “two thin” – two pieces of bread and butter might cost half a penny.

Of course the cheap food policy and the growing imperial markets offered up a new range of breakfast possibilities.

So that Joe and Mary Ann by the early decades of the 20th century had plenty to choose from.

But somewhere on that table would have been porridge which I suspect Mary would have cooked and I bet did it better than me.

*The story of a house, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20a%20house

**Fast food for the workers on our Victorian streets http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/fast-food-for-workers-on-our-victorian.html

Pictures; Suggestions for breakfast, Ministry of Food Leaflet, 1946, from the collection of Vince Piggott