Our mam’s recipes

After the fast for morning High Mass,  by Sunday dinner we’d be starving,  barred from the kitchen while the Great Work was in progress. On the first bars of Somebody Stole My Girl, Billy Cotton’s lunchtime theme tune on the wireless, Our mam would sail in with the Yorkshire Pudding. 

It was a huge steaming rectangle,  not the small buns of the Godless South, that she’d cut into wedges and we’d smother in thick gravy. Only after we’d polished off the pud would come the roast. There was no room for dessert but sometimes we’d have fruit pie for tea. Occasionally the fruit was bilberry,  picked on the moors with our own scratched and  nettle-stung hands. They tasted of heather and gorse and bracken. You can’t get them in the shops.

Yorkshire Pudding

Ingredients

• 4 heaped tablespoons plain flour (8 oz)
• Half teaspoon salt
• 2 eggs and milk

Method

Mix eggs and flour together until smooth, then add enough milk so the mix has the consistency of thin custard. Leave it in the fridge to chill.

Pour into a roasting pan with hot oil. 

Oven 200° to very hot for 15-minutes,  check after 10 minutes.

Cut into wedges and serve with gravy before the main meal.

• A simple sourdough loaf
• Buttering it up: a weekend treat
• Elderberry jam: wild and wonderful
• James’s firecracker gingernuts
• Add some sunshine to your breakfast

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Fruit pie

Ingredients

• 6 oz sieved self-raising flour and pinch of salt.
• 3 oz fat ( butter for example).
• Fruit (par-cooked)

Method

Rub in fat until mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Add a little water for a stiff dough and work into a ball.   Split dough into two.   Roll out into 2 rough circles on a floured surface  

Grease pie plate or similar.

Place pastry base on plate. 

Brush edge lightly with olive oil

Place in fruit. (I always par-cook it.)

Put the second circle of pastry over the top. 

Moisten edges which overlap with milk or water and nip together. Brush lightly with beaten egg or milk. Dust with brown sugar or any sugar. Make three small slits in the top for steam to escape.

Middle of oven as for pastry i.e. about 180° 20 to 30 minutes.