|
Another snack we used to get (especially from my Nan), was sugar bread. Just spread the butter on the bread and rub it in the sugar bowl. Not very good for the teeth, but it made us eat the bread!
Speaking of bread, just like most things then, it never went to waste. All the stale bread was collected during the week and used for other tasty treats. It was mainly used to make bread pudding. Not the mass produced rubbish you buy now, but proper thick spicy chunks, bulging with raisins and currants. Bread and butter pudding was another way to use up the stale loaf and the milk that would ‘go off’ tomorrow. Currants were a necessary item in everyone’s larder but they had to be kept on the top shelf so that our little hands couldn’t get at them. Another thing that was always there, was a tin of Birds custard powder. Custard went with everything!
|
|
Because there were no refrigerators  precautions had to be taken against flies and heat. There were two miraculous inventions of the time that I remember very well. The collapsable muslin meat cover, and ‘Flit’. There were no aerosol sprays then, or if there was I never saw any. My mother used to apply her hair lacquer from a squeezy plastic bottle with a primitive type of atomizer consisting of tubes that looked like they came from the inside of a Biro pen. You squeezed the plastic bottle to force it up the tube inside. I think she would have been better off applying it with a paintbrush. At least it would have been spread more evenly! This lack of spray cans meant that ‘fly papers’ were hanging from the ceilings of most kitchens and were even seen in the butcher’s window. A roll of sticky paper pulled out into a coil (like a spring), covered in dead and dying flies that had been unfortunate to land on it and get stuck fast. Then one day, in walked mum from the shops with her ‘Flit’. This was a tin of insecticide mounted sideways on the bottom of what can only be described as a bicycle pump. You pumped the handle as hard as you could and a fine spray of fly killer emerged from the nozzle. The trouble was, that unless you could keep pumping at an almost impossible speed the pressure dropped and the spray became more of a squirt. You could see large droplets of the stuff floating down to the floor as you pumped. We came to the conclusion that it was better to give the flies a sentence of death by drowning in the end, and just aimed it straight at them.
 |
|
The next great gadget that mum came walking home with was the amazing collapsible muslin food cover. What this consisted of was a framework of four metal spokes covered in a layer of muslin, with a handle on the top. When you pulled the handle the spokes opened outward and formed a square shaped dome. It was just like an umbrella in reverse. If you cut the handle off a normal umbrella and placed it on the top, this is what you would be left with to cover the food, on a smaller scale of course. Any meat left over from the Sunday roast was put on a plate on the table, or the ‘flap’, and the upside down muslin umbrella was placed over the top of it to frustrate the flies, who could see the meat, but not get through the muslin.. Not only did this serve to keep the flies off the meat, but it also saved us from insecticide poisoning by stopping the oversize globules spurting forth from the dreaded ‘Flit’ pump landing on the food it was covering at the time.
We were lucky, my father was a welder, and a very good one, so he was always in work. This meant that eventually we were afforded the luxury of a super size ‘Astra’ refrigerator. The only real difference it made to me at the time was that it had a freezer compartment, and I could make my own frozen ‘Jubblies’. Apart from the convenience of being able to keep the milk a bit longer, it also meant that mum only had to wipe the ‘Flit’ off the fridge instead of washing it out of the muslin umbrella.
September 2006, and  guess what I found at a boot sale. A collapsable muslin food cover!
It was brand new, so they must still manufacture them today, but it is the first time I have seen one for over forty five years.
|
Generations brought up on bread and scrape! The meat dripping from Sunday dinner was always saved. Poured into a pudding basin when hot, it soon solidified into a thick white mass with brown jelly at the bottom. This was for ‘bread and scrape’. We spread the dripping on bread or toast with a bit of salt and pepper. If you dug down to the bottom of the basin you got the brown jelly seep through for a bit of extra flavour.
