Preparedness for when

mardatha

"What I'm really interested in is to know not what the affluent ate in thier manor houses or at court or festival foods, I'd like to find what the average woman in a hovel had available to feed thier families on and how it was prepared and cooked."
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Probably the GREEN stuff! :eek::eek::eek:

GreyQueen

Sorry to hear about hubby's health, ginny, and the depletion of the supplies.

I'm a pretty positive person, but I have this feeling of unease, such as the sense of heaviness which you sometimes encounter before a storm. That there's something really bad just over the horizon.

Yet everywhere I look, there's happytalk from the meeja despite businesses flickering in and out of existance like fireflies. I know a fair few people in a fair few walks of life, and some of my buddies earn x3 or x4 my just under £12k gross and even they are savingless and holding fire on capital expenditures and as for inessentials like holidays - pssht - just not happening.

I'm keeping a weather eye as I think when she blows, it will be all over bar the shouting in a matter of hours and it'll be too late to start prepping then. I'm adding to food stocks with a view that the worst thing which could happen is that I'll eat meals in 2016 at 2014 prices.

I'm also keeping an eye at some chazzers where they sell clothing and housewares for 50p each for good things which will keep. Just got a pair of unworn mens jammies for £1 for my brother and a deep US pie plate for another 50p which was something Mum was after.

I'm looking to store some usable goods which shouldn't decay in storage, such as clothing, with an awareness that one won't always be able to drop one's hands on a good shirt or pair of trousers for a bit of change. Am also well-supplied with household linen etc and have an ongoing quest for preptastic reading material to add to my knowledge as well as provide entertainment.

Meanwhile, some people are blithering about the Kardashians and One Direction and other BS and I wonder are they insane or am I the mad one?!

[Deleted User]

'S not you GQ and if it is there are an awful lot of us who are barking along with you !!! It's not so much that the rest of the world have taken thier eyes off the ball but that they don't actually know of the existence of a ball at all!!!

Butterfly_Brain

I totally agree about the shows Lyn alot of them are very middle class. Maybe Ruth Goodman and Peter:heartpulsGinn could do a show on how ordinary peasants survived over the centuries, so much better than the dire reality rubbish on tv that we have to endure these days.

Mar Kale really is a horror for you isn't it:rotfl:
There is a recipe for kale brownies with carrot.......I kid ye not
http://www.onehundreddollarsamonth.com/recipe-how-to-make-kale-brownies-with-carrots/

jk0

maryb wrote: »

looks like it's behind a paywall jk0, could you do a quick summary?

Oh well it's not actually the government proposing getting rid of cash and using electronic money, but a former member of the BOE's monetary policy committee, Willem Buiter. (Not sure whether this is getting a stooge to fly a few kites and see if they take off or not.)

This idea has been taken up by this Harvard Professor Kenneth Rogoff, who makes the point that there is $4000 in paper money for every person in the USA, so therefore most of it must be in the hands of criminals. [Can you tell that I'm using my sarcastic voice there. ]

[Deleted User]

I think KALE has come of age , in M & S yesterday they were selling tiny little bags of Kale and Beetroot crisps, about the size of a small pack of ordinary crisps for £1.99p each and that was a special introductory offer!!! Needless to say they are still on the shelf where I put them back to!!!

Butterfly_Brain

Most people in Medieval England ate bread. People preferred white bread made from wheat flour. However, only the richer farmers and lords in villages were able to grow the wheat needed to make white bread. Wheat could only be grown in soil that had received generous amounts of manure, so peasants usually grew rye and barley instead. Rye and barley produced a dark, heavy bread. Maslin bread was made from a mixture of rye and wheat flour. After a poor harvest, when grain was in short supply, people were forced to include beans, peas and even acorns in their bread.
Lords of the manor, did not allow peasants on his land to bake their bread in their own homes. All peasants had to pay to use the lord’s oven.
As well as bread, the peasants ate a great deal of pottage. This is a kind of soup-stew made from oats. People made different kinds of pottage. Sometimes they added beans and peas. On other occasions they used other vegetables such as turnips and parsnips. Leek pottage was especially popular - but the crops used depended on what a peasant had grown in the croft around the side of his home.
The peasants relied mainly on pigs for their regular supply of meat. As pigs were capable of finding their own food they could be slaughtered any time of the year. Pigs ate acorns and as these were free from the woods and forests, pigs were also cheap to keep.
Peasants also ate mutton. But sheep and lambs were small, thin creatures and their meat was not highly valued. People also used the blood of the slaughtered animal to make black pudding (blood, milk, animal fat, onions and oatmeal).
Animals such as deer, boar, hares and rabbits lived in woodland surrounding most villages. These animals were the property of the lord, and villagers were not allowed to hunt them. If you did and you got caught killing these animals, you faced being punished by having your hands cut off. However, many villages did get permission from their lord to hunt animals such as hedgehogs and squirrels.
Lords might also grant permission for people in his village to catch dace, grayling and gudgeon from the local river. Most villages were built next to a river so these could be a good source of food even if they were small. Trout and salmon were for the lord only.

The villagers drank ale and milk. The water from a river was dangerous to drink and the milk did not stay fresh for long. Usually the villagers used barley. This had to be soaked for several days in water and then carefully germinated to create malt. After the malt was dried and ground, the brewer added it to hot water for fermentation.
People in most villages were not allowed to sell their beer unless they had permission from their lord. To get permission to sell ale at a fair, for example, you needed a licence which had to be paid for.

[Deleted User]

That's the badger BB, just the kind of information we need to 'think' of what we'd actually live on without supermarkets to pop in to whenever we needed something we hadn't got in the cupboard! I've just been browsing my copy of 'FOOD IN ENGLAND' by Dorothy Hartley and it's interesting stuff. Apparently the lack of meat in the winter months was overcome by 'bleeding' the surviving livestock (making a cut in a foreleg and taking some blood from each of them) and making black puddings to supplement the potage and bread diet. I wonder what the RSPCA would make of that one?

jk0

MrsLurcherwalker wrote: »

That's the badger BB, just the kind of information we need to 'think' of what we'd actually live on without supermarkets to pop in to whenever we needed something we hadn't got in the cupboard! I've just been browsing my copy of 'FOOD IN ENGLAND' by Dorothy Hartley and it's interesting stuff. Apparently the lack of meat in the winter months was overcome by 'bleeding' the surviving livestock (making a cut in a foreleg and taking some blood from each of them) and making black puddings to supplement the potage and bread diet. I wonder what the RSPCA would make of that one?

Do you remember the story about the visitor to a farm asking why a pig had only three legs?

The farmer explained that that was a very special pig. Some months previously there was a fire at the farmhouse. The pig had broken down the farmhouse door, run upstairs and carried the farmer out on his back. Then he went back into the flames and did the same for the farmer's wife and kids.

'Amazing' said the visitor, ' So did he loose his leg in the fire?'

'Oh, no' said the farmer, 'He was perfectly all right after the fire. It's just when you have a pig that special, you don't eat him all at once.'

GreyQueen

Anyone recall to old playground song? Pease being a plural for 'peas' and a staple carbohydrate.

Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold,Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old;Some like it hot, some like it cold,Some like it in the pot, nine days old.