Home Cooking

Home Cooking

I often think of the amount of cooking Mum used to do for us.  I swear I have no idea how she did it.  She didn’t have any mod cons either.  I remember my brother and I bought her very first automatic washing machine for her for Mother’s day present when we were both in our late teens and we were 3rd and 4^th youngest of 10 siblings which meant she washed our clothes using a twin tub with detachable mangle for years and years.

    

 (These images remind me most of what it was like: courtesy of Google images)

Anyway, back to the cooking.  Homemade lemonade (and I mean with lemons and citric acid and all that stuff…).  It would quench your thirst alright but it was only a few degrees of separation away from the aforementioned tart vinegar.  Rhubarb with dumplings and custard were regularly on the menu.  The rhubarb was grown in our back garden and was well sprinkled with the urine of the local rats and our very many feral cats.  I guess once it’s peeled and washed it’s all the same.  Mum was what has to be called a hearty cook (i.e. no frills attached).  She threw suet and flower and margarine together with yeast (these are the ingredients I recall) and she would drop it into the pot of boiling rhubarb and up it would rise and it was delicious.  I remember having to get the bus into town (Dublin people call Dublin City Centre ‘town’) to go the yeast shop in College Street in the heart of the city to get this culinary miracle worker.

(The Irish Yeast Company, College Street, Dublin 2. Courtesy ofhttp://www.dublincitycenter.com/locations/irishyeast.htm)

Mum also used yeast to use up the milk in our fridge that had gone sour.  She made soda bread and brown bread which tasted magnificent.  It was always a good idea to stay close to the bathroom within an hour of consumption as it was a definite case of ‘it does exactly what it says on the tin!’ i.e. it gets you going if you have not been in a while and it keeps you regular if you have, either way you get a result.  In later years Mum had to allow milk to go sour in order to make her bread and she only had to go to the local shop for the yeast.

Pies Yum!!!  Mum made mince and onion and curried mince and onion (not enough cash for steak and kidney).  I can’t remember where she got the foil casings from (they looked like what we see now in the shop, the ones we throw away after one use).  Well my Mum would wash and dry them carefully to reuse over and over again.  Portion size was a bit off the scale in our house.  To eat 2 or 3 pies was not unusual as I think we had the mentality of eat it while it’s there as it may not be there tomorrow.  Alas, we did not have dinner every day (in the early years) but as if by miracle my Mum used to make those days even better because we got to have ‘Goody!!!’.  What is that you ask?  Well it was stale bread mixed with hot water (and a little milk if you were lucky) and a good lashing of sugar.  I tell you no word of a lie it was delicious and I loved it.  We probably ate the equivalent of a whole loaf of bread each during those meals.  This bread was seconded from the local bakery, I can’t remember exactly where it was but I do know that Mum would give one of my older siblings a black plastic bag and send them to the bakery and when they got back it was full of bread that was not suitable for sale or was past it’s best or something like that.  I’m not sure if any money changed hands for this bread or if they just gave it away to those who asked for it.

Steak: the holy grail of all mealtimes (not!).  This much sought after delicacy was reserved for the Dad of the house only.  Mum would buy rib steak i.e. tough as nails steak and turn it into the most succulent and tender steak imaginable.  How?  Well she used to boil it for at least an hour first and then fry it for god only knows how long and then smother it with onions and put it alongside a tin of peas and a mountain of mash.  Dad never complained.  Mum said this was something to do with the fact that he suffered with his teeth (aka a morbid fear of dentists) and was grateful that he didn’t have to chew it much.  She said the doctor once remarked that if he didn’t get his teeth sorted out soon he would not see out another 10 years with the state of his pie-r-eea (spelt phonetically as I don’t know how to spell it).  I later referred to it as gonorrhoea when I unfortunately picked the topic of my Dad’s bad teeth to talk about when I met my sister in law for the first time.  Let me just say it certainly broke the ice and 20 years later I still get ripped for it but I don’t mind.  Getting back to the steak and to my Dad’s terminal diagnosis, Mum used to say that it would take more than that to take him down and she was right as he is still going at the age of 81 in the year 2011.

I remember my Mum had cousins who lived in Wexford, Enniscorthy I think, and they had a farm and when they came to visit they would attach a trailer to their big car (my Mum and Dad never drove a car).  In it would be a couple of months worth of potatoes (an we went through a shit load of potatoes in our house I can tell you), there were other vegetables too but the one I remember the most and probably the only vegetable I never took to was Beetroot, like real beetroot, not in jars or anything.  They looked like pink potatoes.  Out would come the biggest pot in the house (later to be replaced by a pressure cooker) and in they would go to boil for hours.  I have no idea how my Mum got the colour of that bloody beetroot off her teeth.  My world seemed to stay pink for as long as it took to consume all of the beetroot which could be a couple of weeks.  I think most of us in the house ate it but I just couldn’t, something to do with the texture repels me from it.

Speaking of teeth again, Mum lost all her original teeth in her early twenties through pregnancy.  Is turns out there is some truth in the saying that the unborn child is a parasite within the body.  It’s a bit like the tax man; he/she always gets fed/paid first.  Anyway, dairy products were not in abundance for my Mum and her babies (and I guess that makes me a guilty party also – sorry Mum) got all the calcium and as a result my Mum got false teeth.  I never knew my Mum with real teeth so I spent my formative years just thinking that her dentures were her real teeth.  She was very careful to keep them in all day (not like our neighbour across the road, Mrs Dalton, who regularly went about her house with hers out which I found a bit scary when I was over playing with her little girl).  As you can imagine, pearly whites were not a common feature in Ireland and I just thought my Mum must be a superstar to have such white teeth which gave her the most perfect smile.  To this day I fail to see the negatives of having dentures but not having tried them I guess that it is an easy comment for me to make ….