Books Cumbria : History : Social : Cold Meat And How To Disguise It

Cold Meat And How To Disguise It
Hunter Davies
£9.99

Credit has been crunched, banks hammered, the economy battered, prices up, hopes down.
All classes are being urged to economise, make do and mend, spin things out, avoid waste.

It has been ever thus. In times of War, General Strikes as well as Economic Disasters, Governments as well as agony aunts, do-gooders, magazines, books and manufacturers have always exhorted us to tighten the old belts.

Hunter Davies looks back at a hundred years of handy, and often hilarious, exhortations as they were applied to Food, Children, Health, Clothing, the Home, Money and Savings. Some of the hints and advice are mystifying, but all are part of social history, and some could prove very useful in today's economic climate. For instance, you really might want to turn some cold scraps of meat into a succulent new dish or knit some old bits of string together in order to make a jolly useful dishcloth…


Publisher : Frances Lincoln
Published : April 2009
Pages : 160
Format : 134mm x 204mm hardback36
Illustrations : Black & white illustrations
ISBN : 9780711230514

Cold Meat And How To Disguise It
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Review


Hunter Davies, as always, has his finger on the pulse of the times. Just as our morose Chancellor tells us we are all heavily in debt and that over the next few years or more we’re going to have to tighten our belts, along comes Hunter Davies to show us how to grin and bear it. It’s a good old war-time adage, and Hunter, who grew-up in the thirties and forties in Carlisle, knows every trick in the book.
Over the years, he’s been so parsimonious that he’s kept every single magazine, bit of paper, old recipe for pigs trotters, bit of string, what-you-will, just in case it might come in handy. Now, desperately clawing his way out of this vast heap of detritus – he’d claim he was a collector of ephemera – Hunter finds himself gloriously vindicated. He knows everything everyone needs to know to get us through the next ten years.
Bread soup sounds wonderful – just two onions, bread, water boiled for ten minutes and a little salt and pepper. During the war, the government encouraged people to experiment in the kitchen, just the way Jamie Oliver does today. Everyone used dried eggs, but nettles, dock leaves and sheep’s heads could be turned into delicious meals. The Minister of Food, Lord Woolton, promoted a pie that was made mostly of carrots. Fifty years earlier, you might have sunk your teeth into lark pie. The larks had to be de-boned before cooking. Hunter would have us bring back all the old war-time recipes and save a fortune.
Of course, in times of austerity, one had to keep a sharp eye on one’s domestic economy. An anxious enquiry in “My Home” in 1938, wanted to know how to serve the guests warm food when she only had one maid. Hunter doesn’t have a solution.
But he wouldn’t waste any money on the kids: “Children, bless ‘em, can amuse themselves for hours with very little more than a saucepan lid and a wooden spoon.” Times are hard, “The nanny went when Lehman brothers collapsed. There are three Polish lodgers in what was once the nursery.”
People should stop wasting money on fripperies. As the old adverts would have it, “woollies can grow old gracefully.” Girls could save money on nylons by tanning their legs with brown gravy powder and drawing a line up the back with an eyebrow pencil. They might even knit their own stockings and save themselves from getting chilblains.
“Cold Meat And How To Disguise It” is the perfect book for our times. We’ve grown fat and used to luxury. It is time to put some backbone into our lives. It is time to start doing things for ourselves. We should mend our clothes, put lemon juice on freckles, turn our spare bedroom into an allotment and keep a goat, pickle anything that moves and “self-massage our deltoids using Ellman’s lubrication.”
Hunter is also prepared to draw deeply on his own experience for the good of the nation at large. “I always have my bath after my wife has had her bath, using the same water. Now this is something I picked up during the war, or like to think I did, though I was a bit young to remember George VI on the wireless telling us about his bathroom economies and how he got into the same bath with the Queen and they only used six inches of water.” Can we expect today’s leaders to display such moral backbone?
No-one is better experienced or more able to guide us through these hard times. Hunter’s history of “a hundred years of belt tightening” offers the perfect anti-dote to the prevailing gloom. All we can do is grin and bear it.
Of course, the best way to save money is not to buy a book like this. That, however, would be to deny yourself an evening of gentle amusement. It would be taking austerity far too far.