Topic: Want to Try the Old Ways??

[Wicker]

I love finding old recipe books at boot/jumble sales and one of my favourite finds is a very tattered Farmers Weekly one some 65 years old.  Covers absolutely everything (I never tire of reading it) so here's a sample .. something a bit different for a starter perhaps??

PIG'S FEET AND EARS
Cleanse the feet and ears very thoroughly, soaking for some hours.  Boil them in salted water until tender.  Take out of the water and dry them; cut the feet in two, slice the ears then dip in batter and fry in hot fat.  Serve with a little melted butter season with mustard, and vinegar poured over.

and, girls, never feel you have to pay money for expensive cosmetics this books is full of DIY cosmetics, e.g:

HAIR-SETTING LOTION
Mix 1 tspn glycerine, very gradually, with 6 tblspns of elderflower water, 1 tspn rectified spirit and half tspn fluid ammonia.  Damp hair well with this before putting it in waving pins and it will be effective even in wet weather.

[teresa]

Oh Wicker whats does it have on preserving vedge and fruit?

[Mrs Ava]

Mum has pigs trotters in her freezer which she loves!  Not my thing I have to say, and pigs ears...we always gave them to our old English sheepdog!

Think my hair would fall out if I plastered that on it, altho I bet it would stop my fringe getting in my eyes when digging on the plot.

[Wicker]

Teresa, just every conceivable type of pickle, jam and marmalade.  Short section drying herbs, onion rings and apples (peeled, cored and suspended on canes in the "cooling oven" after cooking).  
Emma Jane - those surplus apples could be "Reserving apples" - peel, core and quarter 3 lbs apples, pack tightly in wide mouthed bottles.  Add 1 lb sugar and 1 small tspn alum (aluminium sulphate) in boiling water, cool and almost fill bottles with it.  Put bottles into fish kettle, set on fire and cook very gently untuil the fruit goes soft.  fill bottles to the brim with well fitting corks which have been dipped in mutton fat.

Whole section Pig Curing and By Products tho - anyone tell me what part of a pig is it's "fry" ??? O.k. found it on google - sweetbreads, heart, liver, lights and melts! So there we have it - or not!

[busy_lizzie]

Wicker, My Dad used to eat all those weird bits of animals innards that people shudder over now.  He loved tripe, pigs ears and trotters, lights, which were cows stomach intestines and one day I came home from school to see a bowl with a sheeps head soaking in it, in the kitchen, or scullery as we used to call it then. Pretty revolting when I think of it now.  None of us children would touch anything like that but he seemed to flourish on it.  :o busy_lizzie

[Wicker]

Loads of nutrition in all that some too, busy.  I am off fishing folk and in my mother's day when the catch was short the fillets were sold and the fisherman's wife made "croppin heids" which are fish heads stuffed with oatmeal and onions - eyes and all..... Wonder what Captain Birdseye would make of that?

[teresa]

Seem to remember my gran saying a pigs head boiled up and the meat choped up in the jelly left to set.
Think she called it brawn?
Lights and sweetbreads were also very populer mum loved sweetbreads lambs fried.
Then how about a chickens inners cooking them up in water to use as a base for the gravy. Now I have done that one, then given the bits to the dogs.
All these most likely go in to dog food now.

[tim]

Brawn? Gourmet.  Just put your mind into neutral while eating it!! = Tim

[Sarah-b]

Think us UK folk have got a bit squeemish over the years. In France, they are still busy eating all sorts of odd things that we would find distasteful. A few years ago we went to a rather nice restaurant in Paris and one of our French friends with huge relish, tucked into a sheeps feet stew. At the end of his meal he had arranged all the tiny tarsals, metatarsals, carpals etc around the edge of his plate.

[gilgamesh]

I suspect many people do eat all of the offal etc. - but without knowing it. Ever seen "mechanically recovered meat?" Looks vile, but once in your pie/sausage/burger/readymeal, you pay top dollar for it & scoff it with relish.

[Wicker]

Apologies in advance for resurrecting this old thread but part of it wondered where all the piggy "extras" went and guess what in the supermarket yesterday there were neat little packets of dried "Pigs Ears" as a dog treat!  So now I know..  There were also doggy "Tripe Sticks" - now Mr W likes tripe but I don't - would that be an easy way of giving him a treat I wonder :-\