Didn't yewer Mam tell yew to eat yewer greens, @Arethosemyfeet?
We weren't allowed to have 'pudding' (elsewhere known as 'dessert) unless we'd eaten our boiled cabbage and carrots.
These days I steam, roast or saute veg. I rarely boil it.
My brother, for reasons best known to himself boils beef - as in the Cockney Music Hall song, Boiled Beef & Carrots - and even bacon. He read somewhere that Celtic monks boiled bacon and that farm labourers did so in the 19th century. As our ancestors were farm labourers who lost tied cottages and livelihoods during the agricultural depression of the 1880s and started working in the tinplate mills, he wanted to do the same. Eat boiled bacon that is.
Digression over. Here are more ruminations on regional words ...
In Yorkshire a packed 'lunch' was always 'snap.' Miners would take their sandwiches to work in a 'snap tin.'
Oh that does sound a bit unusual! I was also coming to defend boiled bacon - it's basically the same as gammon but cut from the collar or shoulder not the leg of the pig. My great-grandmother (my maternal lineage has, ahem, short gaps between generations) regularly made boiled bacon and parsley sauce for me as a child in the 90s and delicious it was too. Boiled beef is usually brisket or a similar cut, braised more than boiled.
My mum has been a vegetarian most of her adult life, and I was a child in the 90s, so veg was cooked properly and not boiled to mush at home. Broccoli was my favourite vegetable (and still is, especially sprouting broccoli and its variants) and I got the shock of my life when I tried the broccoli that the school dinner ladies *had* boiled into mush....
(School puddings did redeem the dinner ladies though, my favourite was a corner piece of the giant jam tart cooked in a big rectangular tray, with custard)
(School puddings did redeem the dinner ladies though, my favourite was a corner piece of the giant jam tart cooked in a big rectangular tray, with custard)
I made one of those on Sunday.
Family were coming to lunch and I was short on time and ideas, but had a roll of Lidl ready-rolled pastry the fridge that needed using, and some cooked apple that also needed using - but not enough to make a pie.
As I unrolled the pastry I realised t was exactly the right size for my larger oven tray, so put the pastry on to it, complete with greaseproof paper from the roll, spread it with cherry jam and covered that with the cooked apple.
It went down surprisingly well with a jug of Birds custard, and the corner pieces were first to go!
Can see that, or something similar, appearing, at the table again before long.
(School puddings did redeem the dinner ladies though, my favourite was a corner piece of the giant jam tart cooked in a big rectangular tray, with custard)
I made one of those on Sunday.
Family were coming to lunch and I was short on time and ideas, but had a roll of Lidl ready-rolled pastry the fridge that needed using, and some cooked apple that also needed using - but not enough to make a pie.
As I unrolled the pastry I realised t was exactly the right size for my larger oven tray, so put the pastry on to it, complete with greaseproof paper from the roll, spread it with cherry jam and covered that with the cooked apple.
It went down surprisingly well with a jug of Birds custard, and the corner pieces were first to go!
Can see that, or something similar, appearing, at the table again before long.
My Old Mum was another one who boiled vegetables to distraction - if boiled meat pudding was also on the menu for Sunday lunch, the kitchen would be dripping with condensation...
It was many years before I realised that there were other ways of cooking vegetables, though I still eschew most of the cabbage family, unless the cabbage is red and pickled. It can be in a jar, or cooked with apple
She also made delicious jam tarts - either little individual ones, or the big one with pastry divisions. Her pastry, I may say, was exceptionally good, and probably contained quite extraordinary (or illegal) amounts of butter.
A variation on the theme was a little mincemeat tart, topped with icing sugar and a glacé cherry.
BTW, are pickled onions a particularly British foodstuff? I know other people pickle various vegetables, but onions?
Silverskin onions certainly, I think they are called cocktail onions elsewhere as they are used in a Gibson cocktail (a variant of a Martini with an onion instead of an olive).
I think 'mushy peas' are a particularly British thing.
I know a Frenchman who was horrified to find a radioactive-looking green mush on his dinner plate during a school exchange visit to Salisbury in the 1970s.
@Bishops Finger your mother's pastry skills sound very much like 'our Mam's'.
@Gramps49 - I suspect there are generational things afoot here as well as geographical or regional differences. I would imagine that on both sides of The Pond there was a tendency to boil vegetables to death until comparatively recently.
I can't speak for the US of course but here in the UK food has changed dramatically and largely for the better during my lifetime.
I may have commented before about my mother's memorably awful cooking, but perhaps I overlook the fact that she was only nine years old in 1930 when her own mother died, just as the Depression was starting, so haute cuisine never had a chance then, even with kindly relatives coming in to help. She was married during the war with rationed food (and for some time after), and honestly, I don't think she had any interest in food or cooking anyway. She could make a good fruit cake. It took me a long time, but I did, of necessity, eventually cook my way out of my upbringing to the point where I could enjoy food.
As our ancestors were farm labourers who lost tied cottages and livelihoods during the agricultural depression of the 1880s and started working in the tinplate mills, he wanted to do the same. Eat boiled bacon that is.
Digression over. Here are more ruminations on regional words ...
In Yorkshire a packed 'lunch' was always 'snap.' Miners would take their sandwiches to work in a 'snap tin.'
Tinplate - Llanelli or somewhere else?
'Snap' as a word for lunch (and the tin, to continue the digression) stretches up from Stoke (sorry. 'Stook') through Macc and reaches the corner of Cheshire East near Stockport (and probably some Derbyshire too). It might be a specifically mining thing in these parts too - some des res Cheshire areas were full of coal mines 100, 120 years ago. I knew a bloke from Hazel Grove (now Stockport, and now pretty 'innit Bruv') who was 'reet broad' - but he died last year at 95 or so.
I wonder if the snap tin came first - the tin which held itself together (and kept coal dust out) with a 'snap'. Then what goes in the 'snap tin' - well, snap of course! Bit like my daughter once fixing me with a gimlet eye when I asked her (age about 4) what grows on oak trees - 'Oaks, of course'.
I mean, we have not even got into the complexities of being 'nesh' or terms of endearment used to greet strangers: "Honey", "Duck", "Dear", "Luv". Or the use of "Our" to indicate a relative "Our Kate" is the Kate who is related to us. "Our kid" normally the youngest child in the speakers family but it can be used more loosely as belonging to a group.
I had mushy peas and faggots last week. Delicious. The best place for root veg in my opinion is slow cooked in a pot roast with either a chicken or a joint of meat. Several hours in a low oven with creamy mashed potatoes.
Darllenwr reckons that we boil vegetables less because dental care has improved
I wonder if it's more to do with it being easier to cook different parts of the meal separately and for different amounts of time. If you can steam green vegetables in a microwave while your stew is cooking on top of the stove, for eg, it's a lot easier to only cook the veg for a short time. Cookware also heats more evenly and more reliably nowadays ime.
Interestingly enough, wartime Ministry of Food pamphlets are very clear about *not* cooking vegetables to death! I wonder why it didn't catch on, or if maybe once fuel was more easily available people cooked for longer just because they could? I wonder if Jane Grigson or someone like that ever wrote about the history of cooking vegetables. It is pretty hard going watching shows about historical cookery and seeing beautiful-quality meat and vegetables boiled into brown mush!
I think that really *celebrating* vegetables rather than seeing them as poverty food or something to just get down because you have to eat them is relatively recent in the UK. I actually think that some parts of the US have historically been better at this, due to a longer growing season and also cooking more vegetables on a grill/barbecue (in the sense that the UK would think of as a barbecue). Cooking vegetables without water being involved makes a huge difference. Once everyone figured out that you could roast cauliflower rather than boil it, vegetables stopped being a punishment for many people.
Also, I hate mushy peas personally but I also 2) can't eat non-split peas for IBS reasons and 2) hate foods with a mushy texture unless it's actually soup (and even then I prefer a chunky soup). Mashed potato is easily my least favourite way of eating potatoes, unless it's more of a crushed potato. Roast potatoes or even boiled new potatoes are far superior imo.
@Gamma Gamaliel in warmer parts of the US, even when vegetables are cooked for a long while it is more likely to not involve a lot of water - slow-braised collard greens cooked with bacon or cajun sausage are a very different thing to boiled cabbage. Californians have also tended to create a lot of now-famous salads - I do think that Americans generally do salads a lot better than British people do (the Midwest and non-Native Utahns* excepted, and imo Mormons generally are spiritually Midwestern), mostly because undressed salad is not a thing in the US like it tends to be here. Sad undressed British side-salads are very depressing. A Green Goddess or Crab Louie salad isn't there to be quote unquote "healthy" but to be delicious.
*yes, people from Utah are really called "Utahns"!
My mother's domestic science textbook warned that undercooked vegetables are indigestible for small children, and she erred on the side of caution both with the length of time veg needed to be cooked to make it "digestible" and the age at which children ceased to be "small" children.
She's an excellent cook, and even she had to accept that children / grandchildren are no longer "small" once they are in secondary school.
@mark_in_manchester My dad invented a whole new race of fairies/goblins called cubbys - because they lived in the cubby hole under the stairs!
I like that a lot
@Jengie Jon , 'Our kid' was new to me when I came up here; I used it (unwisely, it's always unwise to assume familiarity with someone else's culture even after 30+ years) to refer to one of my daughters with a native Salfordian who assumed I was talking about a son. So around here it's gendered, and I didn't know.
We could get onto regional British names for food - are they bread 'rolls' or 'cobs' or 'bread cakes' or 'baps' or ...
Bedfordshire clangers (never had or seen one,though!)
Lorne sausage.
There's a chain of bakeries around here (south west Ontario) called 'Cobs'. I didn't know where the name came from, but that sounds as if it might be the source.
We could get onto regional British names for food - are they bread 'rolls' or 'cobs' or 'bread cakes' or 'baps' or ...
Bedfordshire clangers (never had or seen one,though!)
Lorne sausage.
There's a chain of bakeries around here (south west Ontario) called 'Cobs'. I didn't know where the name came from, but that sounds as if it might be the source.
In my area of Preston an off licence was a selly (selling out shop) and all sweets were toffees.
The off-licence near to us, (Birmingham '50s & '60s) was known as "the outdoor". That word was used for both the local jug & bottle shop, and for an out-sales hatch at the pub.
I don't really remember any generic word we used for sweets, except perhaps "sucks", which rings faint bells associated with my parents & grandparents generation.
Yellow Man was a popular sweet in my childhood, not least because you got a big piece for 1d. It was often the case you couldn't finish sucking it before the bell for afternoon school, so you wrapped it a corner of jotter page, to be retrieved - a bit furry - later.
In my area of Preston an off licence was a selly (selling out shop) and all sweets were toffees.
Our organist at church (mid 80s), a lady from Halifax, tells a story about her grandad taking her for a walk at the end of the war, and offering her a 'spice' (a sweet). (There were no sweets, sorry spices, and the thing turned out to be a fizzy indigestion tablet. But she says she knew no better and thought it was great!).
That reminds me of a phrase from my childhood, sometimes used in response to an enquiry about the health of a third party "her's bad in bed, and wuss up".
"Bad in bed" - that is as GG means it, unwell, and "wuss up -" a slightly sarcastic reference to the character of the sick person when she is in normal health, from the Black Country word for "worse"
Google's AI bot can't sort that out, thinking that "in bed" refers to "her" performance in bed, and that "wuss" means someone weak & ineffectual.
In Ulster, if talking of the complaint - 'she's in bed with her leg'. If of the treatment - 'she's in bed with the doctor'.
Which reminds me of the Anna Russell sketch “Introduction to the Concert (By Women’s Club President),” when she apologizes to her audience for the absence of the Chairman of Entertainment of the Women’s Federation for the Propagation of Music and Art:
“She’s awfully sorry she’s unable to be here this evening. She’s been in bed all week with the doctor.”
Audience laughs
“I think you’re very unkind, she’s having a horrible time!”
'Travelling Mercies' were alive and well 30+ years ago (OK) with the Sally Army, when I used to help out a friend in a band (not The band) at our local citadel.
As a Young lad I attended a Brethren assembly. Brethren (and Brethreness's) didn't die, they had 'Homecalls'. Happpened quite a lot. The GP surgery just up th road had displayed, "Homecalls, phone ****" .
My (older) Methodist friends often pray for travelling mercies.
I remember some "full gospel businessmen" types using that phrase
Many years ago, a team from the Bible College I was attending were on a mission at a church in Scotland. Each day at around 4pm they'd have a "cuppa" and home-made cake. One of the Deacons from the church often joined them and would give thanks to God for "these concrete mercies". One day, there were Rock Cakes ...
More from South Wales: any minor skin injury (scab, scratch etc) when you were still primary school age was a “baddie”.
As a small child, my daughter’s reaction to seeing a figure of the resurrected Jesus in front of an Easter garden display was “Poor Jesus got baddies on his hands”.
Comments
We weren't allowed to have 'pudding' (elsewhere known as 'dessert) unless we'd eaten our boiled cabbage and carrots.
These days I steam, roast or saute veg. I rarely boil it.
My brother, for reasons best known to himself boils beef - as in the Cockney Music Hall song, Boiled Beef & Carrots - and even bacon. He read somewhere that Celtic monks boiled bacon and that farm labourers did so in the 19th century. As our ancestors were farm labourers who lost tied cottages and livelihoods during the agricultural depression of the 1880s and started working in the tinplate mills, he wanted to do the same. Eat boiled bacon that is.
Digression over. Here are more ruminations on regional words ...
In Yorkshire a packed 'lunch' was always 'snap.' Miners would take their sandwiches to work in a 'snap tin.'
My mum has been a vegetarian most of her adult life, and I was a child in the 90s, so veg was cooked properly and not boiled to mush at home. Broccoli was my favourite vegetable (and still is, especially sprouting broccoli and its variants) and I got the shock of my life when I tried the broccoli that the school dinner ladies *had* boiled into mush....
(School puddings did redeem the dinner ladies though, my favourite was a corner piece of the giant jam tart cooked in a big rectangular tray, with custard)
I made one of those on Sunday.
Family were coming to lunch and I was short on time and ideas, but had a roll of Lidl ready-rolled pastry the fridge that needed using, and some cooked apple that also needed using - but not enough to make a pie.
As I unrolled the pastry I realised t was exactly the right size for my larger oven tray, so put the pastry on to it, complete with greaseproof paper from the roll, spread it with cherry jam and covered that with the cooked apple.
It went down surprisingly well with a jug of Birds custard, and the corner pieces were first to go!
Can see that, or something similar, appearing, at the table again before long.
Will you make one for me, please?
It was many years before I realised that there were other ways of cooking vegetables, though I still eschew most of the cabbage family, unless the cabbage is red and pickled. It can be in a jar, or cooked with apple
She also made delicious jam tarts - either little individual ones, or the big one with pastry divisions. Her pastry, I may say, was exceptionally good, and probably contained quite extraordinary (or illegal) amounts of butter.
A variation on the theme was a little mincemeat tart, topped with icing sugar and a glacé cherry.
BTW, are pickled onions a particularly British foodstuff? I know other people pickle various vegetables, but onions?
I know a Frenchman who was horrified to find a radioactive-looking green mush on his dinner plate during a school exchange visit to Salisbury in the 1970s.
@Bishops Finger your mother's pastry skills sound very much like 'our Mam's'.
@Gramps49 - I suspect there are generational things afoot here as well as geographical or regional differences. I would imagine that on both sides of The Pond there was a tendency to boil vegetables to death until comparatively recently.
I can't speak for the US of course but here in the UK food has changed dramatically and largely for the better during my lifetime.
Tinplate - Llanelli or somewhere else?
'Snap' as a word for lunch (and the tin, to continue the digression) stretches up from Stoke (sorry. 'Stook') through Macc and reaches the corner of Cheshire East near Stockport (and probably some Derbyshire too). It might be a specifically mining thing in these parts too - some des res Cheshire areas were full of coal mines 100, 120 years ago. I knew a bloke from Hazel Grove (now Stockport, and now pretty 'innit Bruv') who was 'reet broad' - but he died last year at 95 or so.
I wonder if the snap tin came first - the tin which held itself together (and kept coal dust out) with a 'snap'. Then what goes in the 'snap tin' - well, snap of course! Bit like my daughter once fixing me with a gimlet eye when I asked her (age about 4) what grows on oak trees - 'Oaks, of course'.
I wonder if it's more to do with it being easier to cook different parts of the meal separately and for different amounts of time. If you can steam green vegetables in a microwave while your stew is cooking on top of the stove, for eg, it's a lot easier to only cook the veg for a short time. Cookware also heats more evenly and more reliably nowadays ime.
Interestingly enough, wartime Ministry of Food pamphlets are very clear about *not* cooking vegetables to death! I wonder why it didn't catch on, or if maybe once fuel was more easily available people cooked for longer just because they could? I wonder if Jane Grigson or someone like that ever wrote about the history of cooking vegetables. It is pretty hard going watching shows about historical cookery and seeing beautiful-quality meat and vegetables boiled into brown mush!
I think that really *celebrating* vegetables rather than seeing them as poverty food or something to just get down because you have to eat them is relatively recent in the UK. I actually think that some parts of the US have historically been better at this, due to a longer growing season and also cooking more vegetables on a grill/barbecue (in the sense that the UK would think of as a barbecue). Cooking vegetables without water being involved makes a huge difference. Once everyone figured out that you could roast cauliflower rather than boil it, vegetables stopped being a punishment for many people.
@Gamma Gamaliel in warmer parts of the US, even when vegetables are cooked for a long while it is more likely to not involve a lot of water - slow-braised collard greens cooked with bacon or cajun sausage are a very different thing to boiled cabbage. Californians have also tended to create a lot of now-famous salads - I do think that Americans generally do salads a lot better than British people do (the Midwest and non-Native Utahns* excepted, and imo Mormons generally are spiritually Midwestern), mostly because undressed salad is not a thing in the US like it tends to be here. Sad undressed British side-salads are very depressing. A Green Goddess or Crab Louie salad isn't there to be quote unquote "healthy" but to be delicious.
*yes, people from Utah are really called "Utahns"!
She's an excellent cook, and even she had to accept that children / grandchildren are no longer "small" once they are in secondary school.
I have a feeling that the aunt responsible for cooking at that time may have censored those pamphlets.
I like that a lot
@Jengie Jon , 'Our kid' was new to me when I came up here; I used it (unwisely, it's always unwise to assume familiarity with someone else's culture even after 30+ years) to refer to one of my daughters with a native Salfordian who assumed I was talking about a son. So around here it's gendered, and I didn't know.
Lorne sausage.
There's a chain of bakeries around here (south west Ontario) called 'Cobs'. I didn't know where the name came from, but that sounds as if it might be the source.
There's a chain of bakeries around here (south west Ontario) called 'Cobs'. I didn't know where the name came from, but that sounds as if it might be the source.
Bwrw hen wragedd a ffyn - raining old women and sticks.
Not to be confused with Bwrw hen wragedd â ffyn - beating old women with sticks.
I've not heard that for many years.
Rather like, 'Ooh she's worried about her Gareth, mind. He do wet the bed leaking.'
Not to forget being under the doctor
The off-licence near to us, (Birmingham '50s & '60s) was known as "the outdoor". That word was used for both the local jug & bottle shop, and for an out-sales hatch at the pub.
I don't really remember any generic word we used for sweets, except perhaps "sucks", which rings faint bells associated with my parents & grandparents generation.
Our organist at church (mid 80s), a lady from Halifax, tells a story about her grandad taking her for a walk at the end of the war, and offering her a 'spice' (a sweet). (There were no sweets, sorry spices, and the thing turned out to be a fizzy indigestion tablet. But she says she knew no better and thought it was great!).
That's still used in the Hebrides.
Or, 'She's bad with her leg.'
Someone being 'bad in bed' simply means that they are poorly.
'He's bad,' means 'he's ill.'
There's a ballad - The Old Man to the Oak Tree' with the refrain
Sair fail'd hinny,
Sair fail'd now;
Sair fail'd hinny,
Sin' I kend thou.
"Bad in bed" - that is as GG means it, unwell, and "wuss up -" a slightly sarcastic reference to the character of the sick person when she is in normal health, from the Black Country word for "worse"
Google's AI bot can't sort that out, thinking that "in bed" refers to "her" performance in bed, and that "wuss" means someone weak & ineffectual.
“She’s awfully sorry she’s unable to be here this evening. She’s been in bed all week with the doctor.”
Audience laughs
“I think you’re very unkind, she’s having a horrible time!”
Also "travelling mercies" which I always thought of as a little wheeled box.
I remember some "full gospel businessmen" types using that phrase
Happy, innocent days. It was a lovely church.
Many years ago, a team from the Bible College I was attending were on a mission at a church in Scotland. Each day at around 4pm they'd have a "cuppa" and home-made cake. One of the Deacons from the church often joined them and would give thanks to God for "these concrete mercies". One day, there were Rock Cakes ...
And being 'called home' was standard talk for a death
As a small child, my daughter’s reaction to seeing a figure of the resurrected Jesus in front of an Easter garden display was “Poor Jesus got baddies on his hands”.