It's getting tough out there. Feeling the pinch?

annieb64

When I first moved to Manchester in the early 1970s there was a tripe shop right in the centre of town on one of the main shopping streets. It sold various forms of tripe, cow heels and elder.

Have never been able to face trying tripe although I regularly eat liver and kidneys. 

Longwalker

One of my favourite jobs as a trainee butcher back in the early 80's was stripping tongues and taking the kidneys from the suet. I had the longest ever nails. Stank to high heavens but I had nails to die for

Im now learning to pressure cook, omg why was I so scared of this method of cooking before? Well apart from growing up with those huge hob top pressure cookers. lol. Modern pressure cooking is a breeze. Esp with a instant pot, multi cooker type thing. 

I roasted a chicken, roast potatoes and cooked cauliflower and carrots in just over the hour, using the microwave to cook the peas and gravy and warm the plates 

And it was actually really lush

GaleSF63

When I was a child, on Saturdays i used to be sent to the local butchers for six penn'orth of lights (lungs) for our cats. I've no idea whether you can still get it; it was very good value. 

London_1

Gosh I remember forcing tripe down as a little girl post-war I loathed it and the smell put me right off .
Its probably the one food I just could not eat again.

Although we also had to eat tinned snoek, a fish from South Africa which was ration free. Apparently the government of the day had managed to get a huge consignment of this revoliting stuff and inflicted it on the population. I'm not in the least surprised that South Africa didn't want it to be honest. full of bones and tasted awful but apart from those two I will eat virtually anything put in front of me  
JackieO xx

Paspatur

Snoek
As rationing continued to get more strict as the war loomed on,  sources of protein became more rare. Meats, such as beef and pork, were rationed and allowable amounts were about 4 to 6 ounces per week, per person, but chicken and fish were not although difficult to get.  Fishing in Britain had become dangerous since there was the threat of bombing, even close to shore. The availability of cheap fish called snoek, or snook (a relative of the tuna and mackerel),  in South Africa allowed for eleven million cans of fish to be shipped to England; the government believed it to be the “savior of the fish problem” (Shephard, 329*). It did not catch on! Many people did not like the fish with the unusual and funny name and many remember it as being inedible, smelly, and foul-tasting. Most of the tinned Snoek remained firmly on the shop shelves. The Ministry of Defense issued recipes to make the fish palatable, but even that effort of  turning the salty fish into snoek paste, snoek sandwiches, and snoek piquant, did not prove popular.

The British government bought millions of tins of Snoek and with much of it left near the end of the war,  the unsold tins were given new labels and sold as food for cats and kittens

Katiehound

GaleSF63 said:

When I was a child, on Saturdays i used to be sent to the local butchers for six penn'orth of lights (lungs) for our cats. I've no idea whether you can still get it; it was very good value. 

we used to buy lights for our dog- hated boiling in the large saucepan as they expanded! (and Melts- what was that: answered my own question - google tells me it is the spleen) All kind of offal was available then.

 I think you have to be friendly with a butcher these days to get such things- one who supplies for a raw food dog  diet- so probably not that cheap. I guess it went the way of everything after 'mad cow' disease and not allowed to be sold where meat is for human consumption.

ladyholly

My dh likes tripe but only the honeycomb variety. I don't but he says the tripe in the south is nothing like it is in the north. We used to buy it at a branch of  UCP. (United cow products) who I believe no longer exists.

EssexHebridean

The last time we bought a whole lamb we asked the chap we bought it from for the pluck as well - as we'd decided to have a go at making what I'll call "Haggis-ish" to avoid upsetting any Scots in the room.... I blogged about it, if anyone wants to know how it went.  http://photozone72.blogspot.com/2021/03/this-weekend-we-were-mostly.html 

Having the whole liver was wonderful - although some of it got used in the haggis, it also did a number of further meals for us - and it felt absolutely the right thing to do to try to eat as much of the beast as possible. We'll probably talk to Peter the farmer about buying another lamb early next year I think. If you have the freezer space and are OK for the upfront expenditure it is definitely a cost effective way of doing things. As for the haggis-ish - we both agreed that although it was time consuming, we'd definitely do it again! we were honestly surprised quite how similar to commercially produced Haggis it was, just a slight textural difference which was explained by the difference in type of oatmeal used. 

Although I didn't notice any specific individual price rises when I shopped this week, a fairly "standard" weekly shop without much in the way of extras (I estimate around £8 of it was stuff that I could have not bought quite yet) came to just under £40 so the overall impact is definitely starting to have an effect - I found myself keeping returning to the receipt al afternoon as it felt hard to believe that there hadn't been an error in the charging somewhere! 

tooldle

Interesting to read about Snoek. My dad born in '31 was a big fish eater. Through the war years, whale meat was off ration and hence reasonably easy to obtain. Dad's family ate it in lieu of fish. He said it was horrible. He ate it as it was that, or nothing.

annieb64

I asked my Dad who was born in 1932 how rationing had affected him. He said his family were so poor before the war that he didn't notice any difference once it started.