When the larder is your history book ……..

History comes in many shapes and sizes, and I have been thinking of many of those recipes I have picked up over the years which offer stories from the past.

Italian pie, 2025

And here I don’t mean those elegant, sophisticated offerings from swish, shiny and very expensive cookbooks, but the simple ones which are best just described as “leftovers”.

A device for mincing, 2020

We all have them, passed down from parents and grandparents when prosperity was what someone else enjoyed

They were the leftovers made from the Sunday roast and repurposed for another day.  Or bits left in the larder which got overlooked but were perfectly OK to eat.

If you are of a certain age, you will remember the metal mincer which attached to the kitchen table and was used to grind remanets of the meat joint to make mince, rissoles or the forerunner of the burger.

In our house could be added “the soup”.  

It had no other name, was always just the soup and might on any occasion consist of cooked or raw vegetables mixed with pearl barley or lentils and flavoured with whatever stock was to hand with the option of a dollop of some kind of meat.  It was the dustbin meal and on occasion was even bulked out with the odd few Yorkshire puddings.

"The soup", 2024

Today many of these meals have had a makeover and in the hands of distinguished and not so distinguished chefs have become elaborate presentations.  

So, that humble dish of cooked cabbage and potato fried in the pan gains a posh name and a heap of posh ingredients, but for me will always just be bubble and squeak. 

What most of the original dishes have in common is their simplicity, and of course the leftovers.  

One of my favourites is what we call Italian pie. 

I guess because two of the ingredients are home made tomato sauce and mozzarella to which you add potatoes. 

The potatoes don’t have to be leftovers but will usually be the few that are have been overlooked in the larder.  

And all you do is cook, slice and layer the potatoes with the cheese, and top with the sauce and leave in the oven till it looks golden and the inside is a gooey mass of flavour.

The curry that began as something else, 2026

Most of these leftover dishes are impromptu and because you may never have the exact same bunch of combined ingredients, the offering is unique and more so because if you are like me, may well have forgotten what you added to it.

Mushroom creamed curry, 2026

In our house we often had mince with onions, potaoes and peas.  

But the final dish depended on which of our parents made it.  

So, in the hands of dad the meat was cooked in a thck cornflour sauce, which sat on the plate almost challenging you to cut into it, while mum's was lighter and came with gravy sauce.

Many of them will date back deep into the past and reflect what most of us would have eaten, long before processed food, the freezer, or the fridge and long before the use of canned food.

Now I fully accept that none of this is much of an original idea, but I think it still stands and might encourage people to look at what they been handed down and just how far back into the past those dishes go and indeed how far they have crossed frontiers.

For now, I will close with that Sunday meal of curry which began life as mushrooms gently cooked with cream and served with pasta.

Or the last of the green beans, a handful of tomatoes and some linguine which became a shared meal on Tuesday night.

Beans, tomatos, linguine,and fetta cheese

Location; our house

Pictures, left overs I have known, 2026,from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and Chris Payne’s mincer, 2020