Getting By

The Exile writes:

Women should get back in the kitchen, says the cookery writer Rose Prince. She has a point because men may be very good at preparing very expensive meals, but they tend to be pretty lousy at churning out the cheap, filling meals that people eat when times are bad. Women traditionally were just better at that type of game.

The problem, as Rose Prince points out in her article, is that British women these days have been encouraged, by cook books no less, to look to the can as the source of their raw materials. That is a big mistake if you want to save money as the local street market is always going to be able to undercut the processed food that the supermarkets sell.

Here in Mexico the American invented notion of the TV dinner is unknown and even the supermarkets stock fresh produce which is then made at home by a mother and her daughters. It's true that the local Walmart also has a small section for canned vegetables, but compared to its £5 billion British counterpart, that section is very small indeed.

If you want to see a still thriving tradition of cheap eating, then Liverpool is probably the place to look for it. Scouse is a type of stew that has been eaten in that city since God's dog was a pup, and its aim has always been to fill a stomach as cheaply as possible.

Most working class recipes such as scouse are actually not all the hard to follow. More importantly, since these dishes were prepared by women who tended to either work or had a platoon of children to care for, the cooking tends to involve long periods of time in the oven, with lots of simmering going on inside the casserole dish.

So, if you want to eat well when times are bad, then you could do worse than throw away all your trendy cook books and dig out your mother's old one. Then get yourself off to the market to buy your ingredients so that you can get cooking.

Girls, you really have no excuse, so it's off to the kitchen with you...

and

As the price of food in the UK sky rockets, more and more people are now growing some of the food that they eat. This being so, let's take a trip down memory lane to see how people of my parents' generation got by during the 1940s. One thing is certain, if you read what follows it will turn out to be a damned site cheaper than following the advice that is being given in this video. £25.00 for things that you probably have never heard of strikes me as a ludicrous amount to pay, even if the vegetable garden on offer really is "instant".

Let's start from the beginning: what do British people live on, vegetable wise? My mother asked that question of herself during the war and came up with the answer that potatoes and carrots formed the basis of her vegetable diet. I doubt if things have changed all that much, so why not start with the those easy to grow root crops?

My mother lived in a terrace house that had a back yard, but no garden. So she collected a few zinc buckets that had begun to rust through at the bottom and filled these with soil that she collected from the bomb sites and railway sidings.

She took a fair sized King Edward potato and left it until it started to sprout; this she then cut into two or three sprouting sections. Once that had been done she emptied most of the soil out of her buckets, leaving just two inches in the bottom. Each bucket got a bit of sprouting spud, and enough soil was then added to half fill the container.

Once the tops of the plants had fully pushed through the soil she filled the buckets to the brim with the rest of her soil and watered the plants once a week. So long as she remembered never to over water the plants, then in the fullness of time she would harvest about 3lbs of potatoes from each bucket.

If you want to copy her example, then the only thing that you need to remember is that the growing tubers need to be completely sealed off from any light, otherwise they will not be fit to eat: so don't use a clear plastic bucket. Other than that, and providing you don't over water the growing plants, then growing your family's basic vegetable is actually the easiest thing in the world.

Carrots are even easier to grow. Just buy yourself a packet of seeds from the local garden centre and follow the instructions on the packet. Basically you can grow them in a bucket if all you have is a back yard, and once the seeds are in and shooting, all you need to do is remember to water the plants.

If you have a garden, then things should be easier, as this old fellow proves. However, he lives in north London where the soil is rich. If your house was built on an old dairy farm the chances are that the soil is going to be heavy clay. You can still plant in that soil, but you might find that your crop is eaten up by the slugs who thrive in conditions like that.

Sure, you can spend an eternity getting rid of them, but this is all about getting by in a recession, isn't it? Do you really want to take on board all that hard work?

Why not do as a friend of mine in east Manchester has been doing for over 20 years and grow fruit? If you want to know more about that, then check back next Tuesday and read the second part of this series.