Your mother's ( or father's ) recipes.

[Destinysdaughter]

Slightly inspired by the thread about the mythical MN chicken and what you can do with it, some of us were talking about our mums who were war babies and had a make do and mend mentality and made lots of great meals on a budget and from leftovers. Wondered if any of you had any great recipes passed on from your parents you'd like to share...? ( from any era )

Corned beef mixed with mashed potato, cooled and made into patties. Coat with flour.
Fried in oil until crispy and served with crusty bread and butter.
Sorry it's not a fancy recipe.

My dad always put a healthy dollop of milk in scrambled eggs 'to make them go further'. He got it from his mum, apparently.

I agree with PP, I always understood that scrambled eggs without milk was just a messed up omelette.

I thought everyone put milk in scrambled eggs?!

A pinch of sugar in anything with tinned tomatoes.

From my lovely grandmother: sausages patties. Sausages taken out their skins, shaped into patties, floured and fried in butter. Lush, if not exactly a health food.

Granny Highlove's sausage patties sound delicious.

Roast on Sunday. Leftover cold meat with jacket pots on Monday. Curry or sweet and sour made with leftover meat on Tuesday. Rissoles or similar made with leftover meat on Wednesday. I can't remember what we had Thursday and Friday, then it was cook your own dinner on Saturday then it started all over again.
We didn't have chicken as by the time our hens had stopped laying they were far too tough (all meat was home produced as were our veg), but my mum would have got a full MN worth of meals out of it - prob 20 as she'd have done stock etc.

Nana's 'Catalana'

Fry an chopped onion till soft
Add a tin of chopped tomatoes
Tear up slices of corned beef into the tomato mix - about half a tin's worth
Crumble in a beef oxo & stir in well

Serve with chips and lots of cheap white bread & butter.

Corned beef is so expensive suddenly! What happened?

My dad used to fry mince and onions and add HP sauce. Eat with mashed spud and turnip.

My mum's idea of a feast was two boiled onions but we won't go there.

Yeah my mum likes a boiled onion too - or one baked in the oven!

Not a recipe as such but my nan used to butter white bread, cut into squares and mix into our porridge. It's bloody gorgeous

I inherited DM's Be-Ro cookbook and recognised a lot of her staples, like Parkin, Treacle Tart, Ground Rice Tarts and Battenburg (always known as window cake in our house). She was an excellent pastry maker and her Meat and Potato Pie was the stuff of dreams.

BUT I looked all through that book and her handwritten cookery book and could not find a recipe for her oaty shortcake bscuits which were white, crumbly and the butter lightly toasted the oats. Nothing like flapjacks or oatcakes and I've never eaten them anywhere else.

I think she took that recipe to her grave just to have a good laugh at me!

Not so much a recipe but my dad used to make cauliflower cheese, serve it on a 'bed' of tagliatelle and top it with a heap of stir fried mix of onions, mushrooms and red peppers.
It was a hearty meal and one that I remember from time to time but never seem to get round to making. DH isn't too keen on cauli and it seems daft to make it just for me...

It's funny isn't it, all these stodgy meals pp made but much less obesity in those days?

Not sure if this is just a Northern thing:
Bread cut up and mixed with warm milk , and sugar on top.
Known as "Pobs".

My mum makes a great sausage casserole. Cheap sausages, par boiled potatoes, onions and oregano. Cook for an hour and add tomatoes for the last 15 minutes. It's lovely.

Bread, butter, very large sprinkling of sugar - then toasted under the grill

Was late supper at Granny's if we couldn't sleep - about 9pm

Chough, that is also an Egyptian thing. My mil often makes it for a quick and easy tea.

pinkmagic: Egyptian Pobs!
Well, I've learned something today.

According to DM, who was Derbyshire/Yorkshire, POBS stood for Pieces Of Bread Soaked
So during WW2 rationing she had Pobs in gravy, Pobs in milk and Pobs in dripping. the last (pure cholesterol congealed as meat cooked) would make any modern dietologist's hair stand on end!

Sgtmajor, now I've learned something else today.