WEIRD FOODSTUFFS FROM MY SIXTIES CHILDHOOD

When I was growing up in the Sixties and Seventies my Parents, siblings and peers ate foodstuffs that we would today consider strange. In those days, for example, every part of an animal was consumed. Not just the tasty cuts of meat but also indefinable tubes, flaps and clumps commonly known as innards, guts or entrails. My parents called it offal and some of it really was!

So here's a culinary root through the more obscure edibles in my Parents' shopping basket:

Offal

Ah yes, blood, guts, giblets and such! These were the inner workings of livestock, usually brown or purple, which after percolating urine, collecting toxins and sloshing acid, they then end up on the plate! Some of these, yes, organs, I did eat as well  - but not all!

Like my parents, my siblings and I were partial to liver, when accompanied by onions and mash. We were also keen on kidneys, which looked like plump roast chestnuts when cooked. They did have a nutty sort of taste, emanating from their secret work on the darkest bodily functions no doubt!

Still edible, although an acquired taste for sure, was tripe, the anemic steak of Northern champions! In fact being the stomach lining of cows, tripe was only just food. It looked more like something from a shark lobotomy, with its thick floor topped with a  lattice of white flaps. These conveniently filled with vinegar and cushioned the rings of raw onions scattered here and there. It was the closest that meat has ever come to being fish. Mish! Or Feat!

Speaking of feet, I recall a pan of pig's [or pigs'] trotters boiling away on the stove ALL the time! My mother may never have stopped boiling them for all I know. It reeked to high heaven and when I plucked up enough courage to peer into the pan it looked like some milky martian froth expanding and bubbling like something from Quatermass! These jellied shoes where destined to trot around my Dad's stomach. Yuk!

Animal blood didn't go to waste either, a veritable slick of protein, which went into making the sausage of the cobbled streets - black pudding; a taxidermized delicacy only rivaled by the pumped Haggis across the border. I still love it to this day to my own Family's utter disgust!

Udderly unpalatable, at least to me, where the more important masses of the heart, lungs and worst of all, the brains. A weed amongst feeding men, as far as I was concerned the Sheep and Cows needed their organs more than I did!

Which leaves only one area of offal to dissect: the unmentionables, the nether regions, the meat and two veg, yes, the dangly bits. Those tough baby boomers, having lived through World War Two and braved the ravages of rationing, were a generation determined to eat everything - and I mean everything, including animal genitalia! 

Cuts of choice were sweatmeats and wazzles, both of which were essentially the mammalian plumbing, just as they are on humans, largely responsible for the transport of at least two types of ikky fluid! How could anyone possibly eat them?

Snacks

Mushrooms in Milk - a favourite of my old Mums, these were mushrooms boiled in milk on the stove. The process of boiling made the milk turn black. Can you imagine, black milk! Its like something from Rosemary's Baby! Even worse was the two stage format of consumption: the mushrooms were sieved and eaten on buttered toast and the black milk was poured into a cup and drunk! Mushroom milk! Yuk!

Bread and Milk - a true favourite of mine this time and still a treat now even though its made from the humblest of ingredients: milk, buttered bread and sugar. Thats it. My Mum would slice the buttery bread and drop it in a pan of sugared milk, bring to the boil, simmer until thickened and serve. Pure sloppy ambrosia!

Fried Eggs and  Boiled Potatoes  - another of my Mother's favourites, the boiled spuds, preferably New or Jerseys, would be sparingly laid out on a plate and two perfectly fried eggs placed on top, broken, so that the yolk ran down and over the potatoes. A pinch of salt and voila!

Cockles, Mussels and Whelks - simple pickled shellfish - I have never been offered these anywhere else except in my Parent's house in the Sixties. My Dad had dishes of them laid out on his custom-built bar [yes, he had a bar!] in the Telly room, his own mollusc beauty parade complete with small two-pronged forks! Like bottom feeders at the pool, my Dad's customers - me, Mum, my sibs - would queue up waiting for a dish of pelagic life. I say life, they were of course dead. 

Like the increasing pearl sizes of semolina, tapioca and sago, with similar hamstering effects on the human mouth, these molluscs grew in size. With Winkles having never being available to the everyman in jars, Cockles were the smallest of the home vinegar shoal and looked like a pile of small yellow Medieval slippers. Easy to eat, several could be swallowed whole without the need for chewing rather like how a whale would gulp krill. Although delicious, for some reason, cockles almost always look out of place on pizzas.

Next in size, requiring at least one tenuous bite, were mussels. Looking like small fat ears with black hair trim, mussels were and are simply gorgeous. Sometimes gritty and occasionally squidgy, these blackbeards are, I'm pleased to note, a staple of the modern sea-food pizza.

Finally we come to whelks, the giants of the bar's sea snacks. Even the name demands respect, sounding like a punch or a slap. Leviathans that they are, like Moby Dicks bathing in brine, they're almost impossible to describe. Captains of the rock pool, these sailors took me at least three nervous bites to navigate into my food pipe. Biting into them is the closest I have come to survival. Largely white and grey, looking like alien windpipes, whelks are almost never found on pizzas, which is a shame as, like my Dad, I do love them!

Only shrimps and prawns were missing from the bar. Pink and brazen, those flirts of the sea would have simply lounged in their vinegar like hussies! 

Dry Roasted Peanuts - these snacks were often found skulking in bowls on the bar top like dusty craters. A showy relative of the simple salted peanut, the dry roasting technique basically coated them in sand. A better name would have been dune nuts. Like gravel from the local desert, these babies were impossible to eat without grimacing, as the process of oral desiccation began immediately. Like eating regolith, the only solution was a long swig of Canada dry or tizer, which is presumably why those clever people at KP sold so many !

That's it for now. Next time I will look at Party Food and Drinks!