When the Yorkshires went into the soup ….. doing all the leftovers .......the Neapolitan way

Now if you are old enough to have listened to Educating Archie, sung along to Two Way Family Favorites and cowered behind the settee during Quatermass and the Pit, the leftovers from the Sunday Roast were the dinners of Monday into Tuesday and maybe even Wednesday.

It does of course make perfect sense, saves money and is a smack in the eye of all those adverts urging you to consume ever more expensive “luxury” processed food.

That said back in the 1960s I worked with someone who abhorred the idea of revisiting any bit of the leftovers.

Over the years I have paid lip service to the idea but more often than not forget the container full of a few roast potatoes, and handful of sprouts and some sad looking carrots.

Not so Rosa who is back with us for December.  She was born in Naples in the 1940s and grew up amongst dire food shortages, which improved only slightly in the immediate post war years.

So almost every item can be used up from a few slices of stale bread, a plate of pasta which got cooked but was never eaten and a shedload of other things.

And today it was the vegetables from yesterday’s dinner, to which she added two potatoes, an onion, some mushrooms and a tin of borlotti beans, with the one surviving Yorkshire pudding which pretty much reminded me of the dumplings mother and grandmother would add to a stew, or a soup.

The mantra was “add enough of them and by the time the family had worked their way through the dumplings, carrots and potatoes, the odd slivers of meat was left untouched”. 

Which is all I am going to say, other than to state the obvious that for large parts of the world's population over countless centuries, using the left overs was not a fad but a necessity, and many of the world's great dishes are meat free.

And will conclude with the correction that left over soup is not peculiar to Naples, because my German grandmother did the same as did Dad whose family were Scottish and countless others who read this.

Picture, Yorkshire pudding soup, 2021, from the collection of Andrew Simpson