Welcome – and why I’m here
I’m here because eating well is good for health and also for the agricultural economy which has taken a beating from Big Brother supermarkets. Yes, of course I still use supermarkets, but I’m picky and it depends on my shopping list where I’ll go. Some are just better than others for certain items. A good proportion of my veg. come via an organic box scheme from a farm a few miles away and I manage to grow a few things in containers and pots.
How did I get to start this blog? I used to blog on Today.com. Unfortunately, they wanted to move goalposts, dictate what I could and couldn’t write or link to. It was not a happy situation for a writer, so I made the decision to remove my blog ‘For the Love of British Food’. I rescued some of my posts which will appear here as an archive. I already had this domain, and when the possibility came to install WordPress, the decision was easy to re-start on a fresh page.
In the interim I contented myself with writing for Squidoo, and will continue to do so. It’s a handy way of creating recipe posts and earns me a few dollars a month. Plus I am hoping that my foodie Squidoo fans will follow me here.
So what’s going to be on the menu? British food in all it’s modern day multi-cultural variety, plus some side-dishes from the rest of the world. You won’t get bored, I promise, but if you aren’t from the UK, there will be enough trad.Brit to demonstrate the best of our food heritage.
I hope you enjoy your visits and will subscribe to future updates.
A Developing Palate
British food as it was when I was growing up could be wonderful or dreadful – Britain was just emerging from wartime rationing. I was fortunate to be taught to cook by my mother and two grandmothers with additional input from an array of aunts. We had family friends in the country who would add interest to our London diet by giving us seasonal game, my grandfather had an allotment and a back garden full of fruit trees and bushes so I think I ate a little better and more adventurously than some of my friends.
By the time I was a teenager, immigrants from the Caribbean, Asia and Africa were beginning to arrive in the UK, bringing their own food traditions with them. Also, people were beginning to go on holiday to Europe, and experiencing new and different foods which subsequently arrived in our shops and livened up British mealtimes. Unfortunately, it wasn’t all good news. Does anyone remember how awful Vesta curries really were? A packet of boil in the bag rice and another packet of something that looked like dry compost which you mixed with water and heated into a gluey sludge.
As I write this, I’m recalling a number of firsts – our first family holidays to France and Spain and Italy where I learned to love things like mussels, cheeses, pasta and food cooked with olive oil rather than butter or lard. I remember the first time we ever went to a Chinese restaurant and the first meal cooked for me by a boyfriend – jerk chicken, rice and peas and plantain. On a campsite in Sete near Marseilles, we got friendly with a Dutch family who had brought their chip pan with them and I became acquainted with the delight of chips (french fries) with mayonnaise. That one stuck!
Mum loved to read about food as well as cook, and her collection of cookbooks has come to me now, the most precious being Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cookery. The first two cook books I bought for myself were Katharine Whitehorn – Cooking in a Bedsitter and Jocasta Innes, The Pauper’s Cookbook. Ms Whitehorn’s book was given to a younger friend about to go to university, but I still refer to The Pauper’s Cookbook.
Of course I have added many food, wine and cookery books to my collection over the years and I’m a great fan of the celebrity chef and reality cooking shows some of which I will be mentioning and reviewing here.
And now I had better stop. The clock tells me it is time to get dinner on. It’s nothing exotic at all. I’m on a tight budget right now, so dish of the day is a homely sausage casserole. I won’t be following a recipe, I’ve cooked this so many times over the 40 years since I left home.
It’s never exactly the same each time, a herb or two plus or minus, veg. in season, a splash of leftover wine or cider as available. But, I don’t need to add packet mixes which are usually full of additives and colouring – just leave them on the supermarket shelf. I’ll try to write down the way I do it today. I’m going to be using a slow cooker (crockpot) so I can leave it to simmer and come back and write more before.