I interview 80-year-old Dee from south Wales who likes her pwdin reis with black skin on it. Rice pudding was once eaten for Sunday dinner all over Wales, slow-cooked overnight to make use of a hot oven after baking bread.
Welsh grandmothers say it like it is
“I’ve had three heart attacks, love, and I’m still here, no point in being miserable”. There’s nothing quite like a Welsh woman of 92 to put this lockdown into perspective. Read Ella’s story and try these welshcakes.
Something about lists
A couple of years ago, the year my grandma finally passed, my grandad found her recipe for Gateau Paulette. Gateau Paulette was a cake she baked so often it had acquired her namesake. A golden loaf, presented on a rectangular china platter, perfectly risen. She’d serve it with tea, coffee, sometimes bowls of hot chocolate,
Start at the soup pot: Evangelina’s Filipino chicken broth
I interview chef and best-selling cookbook author, Melissa Hemsley and her brilliant mum Evangelina. Together, they make a colourful Filipino chicken noodle broth using chicken bones and veg scraps for the stock.
Granny Corbett’s Queen of Puddings
This month, I’m handing over to home-cook, Clare Shirtcliff, who shared with me her Granny Corbett’s hand-written recipe book, written in the 1920’s in Lancashire. Find also her delicious zesty, jammy, meringuey Queen of Puddings recipe here
Find it in the cupboard: spices and sabji
“If I had an onion, a clove of garlic and a tin of tomatoes, I could make a good dinner just by relying on my spices. That’s it, that’s a meal!” says Harvindar on the necessity of a well-stocked store cupboard. She shares her recipe for a cabbage coconut thoran and herby Punjabi chutney.
What wartime thrift can teach us now
While the challenges of Covid and those of the world wars are fundamentally very different, there are parallels we can draw between them. Wartime cookbooks can teach us so much about the thrift we’re re-learning now.
Mary’s Welsh cheese bread pudding
This costs about two quid to make, says Mary over the noise of her food processor, pulverising day old bread into crumbs. My husband and I spend no more than £30 on our weekly shop. Maybe it’s the mathematician in me but I am a great weigher of things, I don’t waste a thing.
Potato cakes and square-shaped soups
My first efforts at cooking were to open a tin of soup and a tin of baked beans and combine them. I called it STEWP. Chrys is laughing her head off, listing her first forays into cooking in early 1970’s Southport, northern England.
Fish heads and freezer wisdom
They’ll throw the fish heads in the bin if I don’t buy them. I stick them in the freezer to use in soups. They’re full of flavour, says Nolda. Read on for Nolda’s very frugal fish soup with Jamaican dumplings.
Stories of survival: notes from a Bosnian kitchen
“But in the homes, not only of the Turks but also of the Serbs, nothing was changed. They lived, worked and amused themselves in the old way. Bread was still mixed in kneading troughs, coffee roasted on the hearth, clothes steamed in coppers and washed with soda which hurt the women’s fingers.” – Ivo Andric, The