2022 Frugal Living Challenge

JIL

I always think about the days before fridges, what happened then?

Was the beef wrapped up? If it was then definitely sniff test and cook.

Primrose

In the days before domestic  fridges, most women didn,t work, were full time housewives and did their shopping on a daily basis from a butcher who would have had a commercial fridge or probabky some kind of cool room.    Many houses had larders which were ventilated cupboards to the outside with a fine mesh grille to admit a hopefully cooling draught and some kind of marble slab on which to store meat & dairy products.. Glass milk bottles (no plastic then) were stored in a basin or saucepan of cold water.

simplelivingcottage

Thank you everyone for the porridge replies, I’ll try and soak it overnight and bing it in the work microwave.

HelenaPinky

I don’t know how long you’ve been away @Frugaldom, but last big topic was wine making and hayboxes (getting a stew to boiling point and then putting in a blanket box to cook in its own heat through the day) was discussed before that. Also speculation on possible cuts to electricity, like the 1970s miners strikes.

JIL

We had the cold slab in our first home @primrose
We also had milk delivered, that often the birds had got to, but we still used it.

How was the beef @wort did it get used? 

Whilst I totally agree and understand that food safety is very important, I do feel that sometimes it's gone too far and we have become a little too worried (if that's the right word) about dates and labels. 
The other day I wanted some salad, there was none at all, except some that was reduced to 10p. As it looked ok and it was rocket. I put it in my basket. When I went to pay, I was told it was yesterday's date, I couldn't buy it. I asked if I could have it and put the 10p in the charity box. I was told I couldn't.

Apparently it would be binned.  

cuddlymarm

JIL I remember leaving yoghurt pots outside for the milkman to put over the bottles to stop the birds and the milk freezing and expanding upwards out of the bottles. That didn’t happen often to us though because our milk came from my uncles farm 100 yards away and my auntie who delivered it came in for tea every morning . How’s that for food miles 😀

florianatwobob

We only got rid of our built in larder with the cold slab/shelf a few years ago when the kitchen was remodelled, when emptying the loft’s far reaches we found the previous occupiers meat hutch! 

I did find myself keeping bottled milk cold in a jug of water in the darkest coldest corner of my bathroom the other week when my fridge was in the blink (90 year old concrete floors and water from iron pipes of a similar ages have excellent cooling properties).

I remember seeing the blue tits having a nibble of the cream from the milk on cold mornings, either pecking through the foil or when the cream has mushroomed and lifted the cap. We had very brave blue tits!

London_1

When I was small we lived in an old rambling 13 roomed house that my late Dad had bought for buttons at the end of the war. No one wanted it as it was huge and far too expensive to heat, Our family of five all lived on the ground floor though, and the rooms on the first floor and the attic were left empty. It did have a very large garden though, so a great deal of fruit and veg were grown. Off the scullery was a door to the cellar where my late Mum kept the milk in half filled buckets of cold water, no matter how hot it was, we never had milk that had gone 'off' There was also a large walk-in pantry with a long marble shelf off the scullery where the meat 'hutch' was a wooden box with close-weaved wire mesh over the door to keep any beasties out. She also kept the rationed butter in a dish, and the dish in half filled bowl of water

 Butter was on the ration so it was imperative it didn't go rancid. Cheese was kept in there under al arge Mason baking bowl to keep cool wrapped in waxed paper. She never owned a fridge ,let alone a freezer, but we never had anything that was binned because if had gone off.
But I suppose as shopping was done every day or so there were never great stocks of stuff in .Dried stuff like flour salt etc was kept in white metal bins but again because of rationing not big store cupboards like today. Very little tinned stuff ,apart from perhaps what my Mothers sister who lived in the USA sent over in parcels.
Jam (if she had sufficient sugar) was home made and jarred up in kilner jars, but again it was getting the sugar because of rationing.

None of us went hungry though, and the soup pan was nearly always on throughout the winter as in the big square kitchen where we mainly lived and at there was a large kitchen range that was on for around 8-9 months of the year.There was always a kettle on the range as in the scullery the only hot water came from an ancient Ascot gas geyser with a metal arm that popped alarminly at times She had a cooker in there but more often than not the range was used for cooking, as it was on most of the time

In 1947 when there was a dreadfully hard winter, and even coal was rationed because of the  difficulty of moving it from the pits to the towns and cities because of the snow. We burned almost anything my brothers could beg or borrow or find just to keep the kitchen range alight. All the rooms apart from the kitchen which was around 15 x15 were enormous and you really couldn't keep them warm in winter at all.So our big kitchen was really our living room/dining room/sitting room and always cosy. When my late Dad finally gave in to my Mother and sold it in 1957 we moved to a far smaller place which was warmer and easier for her to keep clean. It seemed really odd at first living in a house that wasn't draughty and where you didn't have to scamper very fast from the light switch to your bed over the cold lino But we survived, and this coming winter ,although will be probably horrendously expensive, I shall survive as well as my house has never ever been as cold as our barn of a place when I was small. I looked on one of the websites that say house prices and our old house is still there in Blackheath but its divided up into apartments now.The large back garden has four houses built in and one of the apartments with three bedrooms on the ground floor was valued at £1.1million. !!! My Dad must be spinning, he paid £1400 for the whole house and garden in the 1940s But I still think we had ,despite the cold in the winter, the best of the tatty old Edwardian pile. My late Mum used to say the reason we had no mice in our house was it was too blooming cold for them  

JackieO xxx

Blackandgold_2

As a child we didn't have a fridge until I was about 12 years old but we had a larder with a cool floor where the bottles of milk stood, brought daily by the milkman. 
And this was in a terraced house in a London suburb; nowhere near rural.

annieb64

My grandma made the entire family give up taking sugar in tea during the war so she'd have sugar for jam and bottling fruit. They lived on a farm so were better off  foodwise than most people. Twice a year they were allowed to kill a pig . They would give some of it to neighbours and family-who would return the gift when they killed a pig. The rest was made into bacon and ham. On pig killing days they would eat things like the chitterlings and liver. The head would be boiled and made into brawn.
One of my mother's earliest memories was of having to carry a bucket full of pigs innards down the lane to her grandmother's house.

If they got hold of any cream grandma would put it into a jar and the children would have to take turns shaking it until it turned into butter.

Old clothes were cut down to make children's clothes. Jumpers were unravelled and knitted up into socks. Rags were made into rugs. 

Even after the war my grandparents lived a frugal life. They did stop killing a pig twice a year but started again in the 1960s when freezers became available.  The pig did go to the slaughter house then. They would share it with my parents and I'd come home from school to find my mother cutting it up on the kitchen table.