Back to 1950s cuisine to cope with COL

[Bleachedjeans]

I started a similar thread a while ago and I wonder if the responses are the same. I now make Sunday roasts with chicken followed by a meal of leftover chicken , veg etc on Monday. Homemade meat pie, egg and chips, stews, salads made with basics: lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber. Cut down massively on ‘fancy’ veg, herbs, spices. I’m really missing steak, asparagus etc. even my favourite ratatouille seems expensive these days and not the budget meal it used to be. I’m a keen cook but I’m now cooking like my grandma!
Still trying to maintain standards: no UPF, crappy pizzas, nuggets.
Anyone else?
Not really AIBU but I like AIBU 😊

We like a roast at the weekend but we now do pork instead of beef because beef is so pricey. I'm going to have a roast pork (something - probably not sandwich as we are out of bread!) WFH today.
We get a veg box and DH complains we don't use it all but I'm making a bigger effort to plan round it. Swede/celeriac/parsnips get mashed in with potato. We're having a carrot, cherry tomatoes (tinned) and chickpea tray bake this week as we will be getting carrots. So that's not very 1950s but it is cheap. It asks for feta but I'm trying to cut out dairy so I think I'll put in olives.

I'd like to think of some puddings that are more fruit based and not cake/jam roly poly. We sometimes have one on a Sunday and it's always apple crumble or stewed frozen berries (also not 1950s but can be cheap if bought in bulk, and more environmentally friendly than fresh).

I just put my boiled stock through the sieve. Boil for half an hour, sieve, chuck out the bones, reboil in a big pan till it's an inch deep, freeze in massive ice cube trays and use as stock.

I'm sure you are right, just that I can see why people don't. On the occasions when I have done that, personally I didn't find the end result special. I expect you're a better cook.

You do need to add salt to your own stock, but it's nicer than bought cubes.
I can't see why people make veg stock from peelings but I imagine they don't get veg covered in mud, like we do, but ready scrubbed from the supermarket.

Cannot beat sausage mash and baked beans tbh.

My mum maintains that "old fashioned" processed foods are fine such as beans, all bran, Weetabix, suet, pease pudding (if you can find it)...

And since I have discovered that mash freezes exceptionally well with butter and cream added, I have it all the time.

Re chicken, I’ve read more than once of people using only the breast and drumsticks of a roast chicken - and binning the rest. I suspect it’s not uncommon. Either a case of cluelessness or plain old CBA.

Sticking to local, UK grown, seasonal veg will always be cheaper. Forget the flown-in baby sweet corn, asparagus, etc. for a while.

I don’t need to do if for the sake of economy, but often batch cook minced beef with a good handful of red lentils, plus carrots, swede, etc. chopped very small. With a few additions (tinned toms/tom purée/garlic/spices/herbs/kidney beans it can then turn into bolognese or chilli - as well as the likes of shepherds pie.

Re chicken again, thighs are cheaper (and tastier) than the chicken breasts specified in so many recipes.

Re salads in winter, white cabbage is cheap, and sliced thinly is a good, crunchy substitute for lettuce etc., and unlike lettuce, will keep for ages in the fridge. If the outside goes a bit discoloured, you can just slice a thin layer off.

just as a thought if anyone out there fancies trying something different then do consider game - it’s generally very low cost/given away for free to those who will use it, local, free range and low fat. Plus it tastes fab. If you are willing to learn the skills like debreasting/plucking birds etc then there is a lot of meat for free or you might have to pay a bit for prepped. There is a brilliant FB page called ‘giving up the game’ that connects people with game to those who want it and it’s full of decent knowledgeable people willing to help!
it’s the end of shooting season about but there is still venison etc through the next few months and game birds for the next couple of weeks.
something to consider!

Ha, I'm on there too @OrlandointheWilderness and would second that recommendation!

Oh hello @TheodoreMortlock!
it’s brilliant isn’t it.

Frustratingly though I did one reply on FB (not GUTG but a local page) as someone posted that they were absolutely desperate and couldn’t feed their kids… I offered to take them a decent amount of game, stay with them and teach them to prep it and put them in touch with people locally that would supply them in the future. Completely for free! I got absolutely torn apart on the page for being ‘cruel’ by people telling them to buy 2 chickens for a fiver in Tesco or go to Iceland. I despair sometimes!!

So you’re just on the wind up then! Why don’t you get a hobby.

I would cook the bones to make stock as a base for soup. I've always cooked and eaten the way the OP describes. I love asparagus but wouldn't dream of buying it out of season - the air miles apart from anything else.

Unfortunately, any savings from doing that will be instantly wiped out by the supermarkets putting the price of whole chickens up. After all, if people are going to be buying less chicken because they're stretching it to three meals, that'll affect their profit margins.

Same reason why lamb shanks are stupid expensive now, pork tenderloin is overpriced instead of a couple of quid and coley is nowhere near the cheapness that it was when it was referred to as 'fish for the cat'.

It's still cheaper to buy a whole chicken (£6.60 for 1.3kg) than thighs/legs (£8.40 for 500g) at our local butcher. They sometimes have game in but currently only guinea fowl at £21 so perhaps not.
I could take a shot at the guinea fowl who bizarrely hang around our church on a small 1960s housing estate, but that would be cruel (due to me being an appalling shot, not due to it being inherently cruel to eat game). Or a whole jointed rabbit is £5.99.

I have those Elizabeth David books too and they are full of little footnotes giving details of the shops in London you'd have to go to to get exotic ingredients like salami or tahini.

Her books were very interesting but I saw a dramatisation of her life once and, apparently, she saw WW2 out in the comparative luxury of somewhere Mediterranean then came back to England and criticised the poor food. It would have been more useful, like Marguerite Patten, to help people use what they had. Maybe people bought the books as escapism. They were still seen as exotic in the 1970s.

I agree with this. Our herbs were chives, mint, parsley, rosemary and thyme. And spices were black pepper, ground ginger, pickling spice like mustard seed, plus allspice, cinnamon and nutmeg.

She was almost captured by the Germans in Greece and spent the rest of the war in Cairo so I think your dramatisation might have been a little romanticised.

Oh god it was so obviously a joke

One of my late Father's peculiarities was that after a Sunday roast he didn't want to eat the roast on Monday in any form and my Mother was an amazing cook. Naturally my brother and I made sure we 'dropped in' after work on Monday, the earliest one was told 'take the rest of that home or it will be wasted'! He wasn't difficult about food in any other way and none of us every found out why so odd about this one thing!

I’m with you OP. I’m desperately missing asparagus, but we just have to be patient and wait for it to be back in season.

I know !! I am also someone who makes stock from the bones for soup . I’m not sure I’ve ever left the 1950’s sometimes!

Anyway, can I add liver to your list? That's pretty economical I think and can be tasty if you cook it nicely.

Ambrosial as you say, cooked properly, if it's grey and solid enough to resole your shoes then it's only fit for the bin, or the cat, as it's way over-cooked, a la school dinners! I had liver and onions a couple of nights ago, a sure sign that Christmas season in over

I agree, eat seasonally . Out of season, imported fruit and veg is horrendously expensive, and usually tasteless to boot.

When we were kids we didn’t usually have a “cooked” evening meal in the week , unless it was something very basic like sausage and mash. Quite often it would be a something on toast ( say cheese or scrambled egg), or macaroni cheese. Meat meals like chicken or chops with veg etc were really only weekend meals. Must have saved a fortune on fuel costs too.

I do a deconstructed crumble, ie I cook the crumble separately in the air fryer and as I make a lot, what's the point of dirtying the mixer for one person, it goes in a bag into the freezer for next time I crave something with custard.