All the food that we ate when I was a child in the early 1900s had to be fresh and freshly prepared because there were no fridges; and all the cooking had to be done on a coal fired cooking range. If you bear this in mind, you will understand why our menus for the week were more or less fixed, although of course there were always the slight variations and treats.
Breakfast and tea were the same every day.
Bedtime menu. I strongly suspect that there was cocoa and probably bread and cheese or dripping at bedtime, but my mother does not say this in her written recollections. Pat Cryer
Breakfast. My father went to work very early and came home to breakfast which was usually bacon for him and porridge for us children. The porridge was not at all refined but coarse with a good many husks which I used to line up round the edge of my plate. It was made with water and sweetened with brown sugar. We did have milk on it but not very much and it was always cold, poured on once the porridge was on the plate. It made me think of a moat from my history book.
If you have an old photo which illustrates anything on this page, I would very much appreciate a copy. Pat Cryer
Tea. When we children came home from school at the end of the afternoon, tea was simple: bread and jam or bread and dripping (from the Sunday roast) and a slice of cake if any was left from the Sunday baking.
Sunday was the day of the main cooking which prepared the framework of meals for the rest of the week. So we always had a roast dinner at mid-day with a joint of meat that was large enough to last during the week, served with Yorkshire pudding or suet dumplings and of course vegetables. The meat was mostly beef because everything other than lamb was expensive, and lamb did not produce a particularly pleasant tasting dripping. (Bread and dripping was a regular meal after school during the week.) Dripping was the fat that came out of the meat when it was roasted and beef dripping was always considered to be the best. If women felt that the roast would not produce enough dripping to last the week, they would buy extra beef fat to put with the meat as it roasted. The process was called 'rendering the fat down'. When the meal was ready, the dripping was poured off into a basin. Sometimes hot water was poured in too: any bits would sink to the bottom, leaving the actual dripping clean. This was called 'clarifying' the fat. One week's dripping was often poured onto the remainder of the previous week's. No-one thought anything about germs.
Progress – if it is progress - has taken a lot out of the roast Sunday dinner of my childhood. In the summer, the children would have to shell the peas and help with the other vegetables where we could. The knives were sharp, so we were limited in what we could do until our mother thought we were old enough to handle sharp knives without hurting ourselves. There were always lots of vegetables because it was important that enough would be left over for meals during the week. An unforgettable noise was the chopping of mint for mint sauce. We children also had to top and tail the gooseberries and blackcurrants for the fruit pie. There was always a fruit pie with lashings of fruit to follow the roast. People seemed to eat more in those days.
As well as preparing the roast dinner, my mother always baked a cake for the week. It always seems strange to me, looking back, that people were so fanatical about not doing work on Sunday afternoons, when they worked so hard on Sunday mornings.
It wasn't uncommon on a Sunday evening to have cold meat and left-over vegetables for supper, followed by cold fruit pie.
Monday was washday and my mother had no time to do any significant cooking. For dinner [lunch] when we came home from school, we always had cold meat from the previous day's Sunday roast, served with bubble and squeak which was fried mashed-up cold vegetables, again from Sunday's lunch. We ate these with mustard pickle that one of us children had to go and buy from the shop at the shop at the end of the road. We had to take our own basin. It was sold from large jars and cost 1 or 2 pennies.
Tuesday for ironing day which was was still busy for my mother. So our dinner was the same as Monday's. This usually saw the last of the meat that could be sliced and eaten cold.
The remainder of the Sunday joint was made into a stew for Wednesday. For me, the best part of this meal was the dumplings that went with it.
The Sunday roast was finished by Thursday, but we still had a good dinner during the rest of the week. What we had varied. Sometimes, for example, it was meat rissoles; sometimes it was meat pudding. I often had to go before school and buy the meat for the dinner and it was always ¾ lb of leg of beef and a quarter of beef suet. I used to really enjoy these meals. Other everyday meals that I particularly remember are on a separate page.
These childhood recollections from the Edwardian era are of the weekly menu in a working class family in north London.