I’ve been sifting through my Aunty Audrey’s recipes again. She was born in 1920, and although the family were what you might call middle-class, they were not well off at all as grandpa was good at spending more money than he earned. She had to leave school at fourteen to help support the family. She joined up during the war as a driver in the army, and after being demobbed became a secretary to a Cambridge professor. She didn’t have children herself but from the time I was about four and my cousin was three she had a Christmas party each year for her nieces and later her nephews. She loved preparing all the party food,, and later she joined an evening class – as a social thing but also to learn more about food, cooking and recipes. She had a whole collection of hundreds of recipes, which I’ve inherited. They are an interesting snap shot of what people cooked and ate, coping with rationing in the early 1950’s, and through to the advent of supermarkets. They begin to use the imported foods from around the world, and show a growing interest in cooking food and using recipes from around the world. Here is another of her recipes – liver and macaroni:
Italian Liver
2 slices liver (ox liver is better for size, but not as nice) – presumably Aunty Audrey meant not as nice as lamb’s liver
4 oz sausage meet
1 clove of garlic (or less) chopped and squashed almost to a pulp
1/2 a small onion (or less) chopped (NB to chop onion – cut in half, slice almost to root, then hold and slice down and through the other way and across)
1 oz breadcrumbs
chopped parsley
mixed herbs – 1/2 tsp each of marjoram, thyme, parsley
seasoning
1 oz butter for frying
a little flour to coat liver
garnish – macaroni, stoned black olives, sliced tomatoes, green peas (NB to stone olives – cut in spirals to remove stone and leave olive in shape)
1, put breadcrumbs,, sausage meat, herbs, onion, garlic, salt and pepper in a bowl and mix with a fork to make stuffing
2. put the flour, seasoned, on a plate, and use to coat liver
3. melt butter in a frying pan and fry liver on one side only for three minutes then remove from pan
4. put liver on a plate, cooked side uppermost and spread with stuffing, roll and tie with string
5. pour the fat from the frying pan into a saucepan and reheat (the recipe doesn’t say this but you may need more butter)
6. add the liver rolls and cook on a low heat for about half an hour
/or put liver rolls in a casserole with water or stock
7. 10 minutes before end of cooking time, prepare the macaroni – break up into boiling salted water and cook fairly quickly for about 10 minutes
8. strain cooked macaroni through a sieve, return to saucepan with a little butter and toss
9. to serve, arrange macaroni on a heated plate, take string from liver rolls and arrange them on the macaroni, garnish with olives, sliced tomatoes, peas etc
It’s interesting to see the instructions for chopping an onion, and to prepare the garlic – this was a cookery class, not a cookery course, for Audrey and the other women attending the class, cookery and domestic science would not have been taught in many schools pre-war or during the war. Audrey had attended a village school, and had become what amounted to a teaching assistant, before she had to leave school at fourteen.
My featured image is of green olives at a Spanish market.
