Tell me your secret ingredient or things your mother used to make that other people don't

[ettieb]

What do you add to your recipes that make them great. Thinking about this as I was looking at people's recipes for cottage pie.... mine is HP sauce... sure other people use it too but wasn't in any of the recipes that people shared... my mother used to make a pudding which I think was called milk jelly....a packet of jelly made up with 1/2 a pint of boiling water.. cool a bit and then fill up to a pint with evaporated milk.. blooming lovely!

Urgh, same I can’t even look at mixed herbs anymore!! I’m not sure why my mum thought that exact dried herb ratio could be used in any savoury meal! It’s an odd taste that will forever remind me of the 90s!!

Crème fraiche or mascarpone in mash and salt. Preferably browned in the oven afterwards. Lush

I made mushroom powder with a huge bag of dried mushrooms from our local Chinese supermarket (I just blitzed them in the coffee bean attachment for my food processor) and add it to everything now. It adds flavour and earthiness but without the texture of mushrooms (which I love but DH and DC don't).

I add garlic powder, onion powder, mustard powder and a pinch of celery salt to pretty much everything I cook. I also go through a lot of Henderson's relish and paprika (both normal and smoked) but usually more in tomato or meat based dishes rather than anything with a white sauce base.

At Christmas just past I needed seaweed powder for a dish and just a pinch adds an amazing flavour to so many dishes so I've started adding that to my usual seasonings now too.

Blackberry vinegar. She used to make bottles of it every August and use it to flavour pork mince to make it more interesting.

She used it a bit like balsamic vinegar, which she could never afford to buy,

My granny put apricot jam and currents in curry 😀

Grated apple topped with golden syrup and cream or ice cream.
Delicious

We used to call the whisked jelly and evap Jelly Fluff
I used to love watching it being made

My granny used to put marmalade in curry! She was a terrible cook and I thought it was just her….

On a better note, my mum used to do an amazing pineapple and Worcester sauce chicken bake. Sounds odd but was salty sweet fabulousness.

Home made cheese sauce without the faff of roux/trying to avoid lumps

A teaspoon of cocoa powder in chilli con carne makes it extra delicious

Yorkshire pudding mix in the gravy… delicious

My dad would always put hot pepper sauce in every recipe. He was from Barbados. And also always a little bit of sugar with anything that had tomatoes in it.

My mother used to fill the centre of a saucer with a “face” of salad cream, then use tomato ketchup to add eyes, nose, mouth and curly hair. I mopped this up with white sliced bread spread with Stork. She called it a sunny dolly and I thought it was a huge treat.

Another treat was (white sliced) sandwiches filled with strawberry jam, mashed banana and Nestlé thick cream. Or Demerara sugar on hot toast.

No wonder my teeth are awful.

A couple of squares of dark chocolate in spaghetti bolognese or chilli con carne.....yum

I’m assuming that jam / marmalade in curry was a 70s thing

A couple of cloves in apple pies, sage in a sausage casserole.

My mum used to make curry sauce by heating up a tin of Campbell's condensed mushroom soup and adding a couple of tbsps of curry powder. Would not recommend.

It's today's milk you need jersey type milk

I sometimes add mango chutney to mine, so maybe not that different?

Ah lol
thank you-I’ll give it a go

Not my mum but my dad.
He made the most amazing Yorkshire puddings. Simple things to make I know but his were next level! Honestly I cannot adequately describe just how delicious they were.

He took his secret to the grave though, the git.

I've seen videos on SM where people mix sugar free jelly and Greek yoghurt for a low calorie, high protein mousse like dessert.

Whisked jelly and evap was jelly mousse in our house! Funny so many of us had mums who made this. Wonder if it was in a magazine or something in the late 1970s?

Anchovies in risottos, worcestershire sauce in beef dishes, sloe gin in duck, chicken casseroles and gravies plus redcurrant jelly. Sliced peaches and or bananas on curries

My mum would write down recipes from the radio