Wartime recipes, substitutions and other related austerity hints

I recall my parents during the war acquiring from somewhere a very large Ali Baba tall earthenware glazed pot from somewhere. Iur lawn was dug up to grow runner beans and tomatoes and the only way the beans could be preserved (no freezers in those days!) was to salt them down.

You would put a layer of beans which had been "de-stringed" and topped and tailed in the bottom followed by a sprinkling of salt u TIL the pot was eventually full and the salt would dissolve, tue I g to brine, whixh would preserve the beans.

They would have to be soaked and refreshed in various washes of fresh water before they were even vaguely edible !

The onky problem with the crock my parent acquired was that the external base hadn,t been glazed on the outside . It was placed on the base of the glazed fireplace tiles in our unused "parlour" and the salt permeated the base of the pot and completely wrecked the fireplace tiles on which they were stood. The pot was subsequently abandoned and I don,t think my parents ever attempted to preserve beans that way again after their first year's harvest.

What my mother would have given for a freezer. I do recall being forced to eat meal after meal of runner beans in fried tomatoes during later summer/autumn years, with the juice mopped up with a slice of bread or toast.

Occasionally we would have chips with it as a treat. The neighbour next door used to borrow my mum's chip pan which contained solid lard but Mum stopped loaning it to her when she claimed that it was always returned with half the solid lard missing, at a time when fat was severely rationed.

My memories of winter were always of wet steaming clothes on the clothes horse in front of a miserable little coal fire. We could never get a look in as getting the washing dry was a priority, even after the mangle had removed surplus water. And on frosty days, shirts would hand solid on the washing line like scarecrows!

And settling down to listen to Childrens Hour on the wireless (as it was then called). and just as you got to the exciting part of the story, the lights would go out, the wireless would fall silent and there would be a rush to light the candles kept permanently on the mantelpiece as yet another power cut kicked in.

I also recall the risky business of my dad holding up a newspaper across the fire grate to encourage a draught when the miserable quality coal wouldN,t burn. After it had caught fire several times he eventually made a large metal plate with a handle on it to hold across the gap to "draw" the fire which stopped the washing on the clothes horse risking being caught alight. No Heath & Safety police in those days!

And one bad winter, (1947 i think ) we had to use a bucket for a toilet for ages because the water in the loo cistern had completely frozen up, as had the water in the loft tank, so no running water in the bathroom either. (And no soft Kleenex toilet tissue then. Just scratchy hard Izal toilet paper which mad your backside really sore!).

It's hard today imagining that houses could get so cold as to allow that to happen but most houses only had one miserable little fire in the living room and coal was severely rationed too. I recall one winter weekend my dad took my brother's pram down to some nearby woods and returned with it full of old bits of wood and some logs off fallen trees. . My mother wept when she saw it because we had completely run out of coal, the house was freezing, the washing couldn't be dried and she had two small children to try and keep warm.

It's only when you become an adult yourself living in a world where life is so much easier now that you realise how hard caring for a family was during that time.