In article ,
Jaques d'Alltrades wrote:

We used to make bubble and squeak with leftover greens and potato, and
other stuff got bunged in too - meat scraps, swede and other root veg,
and sometimes, the previous day's gravy was re-heated to top it.

Our (proper) gravy was often used with stock as a basis for 'Mother's
Dustbin Soup'.

Yes, precisely. Now look through those books, and see how many
describe doing that - SPECIFICALLY that, as the cooking technique
is slightly different from when using fresh ingredients.

In particular, using significant quantities of meat or named cuts,
cooking all ingredients for the dish (rather than using leftovers)
etc. means that the recipes are NOT a description but an example.
I lived (briefly) in Cornwall in the early 1950s, and it was (and
is) a very deprived area.

Elizabeth Craig has a section on using up leftover chicken, and a
chapter on other leftover meats. Recipes include Beef croquettes;
Creamed ham on toast; Farmhouse curry; Ham (or any other meat) toasts;
Jellied meats; Lamb steaks.

My case is proven, I think. Do you SERIOUSLY think that the ordinary
household outside the affluent Home Counties and a few such areas HAD
that quantity of leftover meat in 1950?

I can assure you that we did not in Cornwall and, as I say, we were
not poor. We didn't even have in the late 1950s in Wiltshire, and
that was after rationing had stopped, though we were relatively
poorer then.

Whether there is more information to be found is unknown, but it
assuredly the case that quite a few people have looked pretty
hard and failed to find anything significant.

I would venture to suggest that they were looking in the wrong places
then. I'm not going to wade through The canterbury Tales, but I wouldn't
mind betting......

If I recall, there is at least one recipe in that. That is not the
point. Chaucer was NOT a peasant - he was a senior civil servant,
and he was NOT describing what the ordinary people ate on a routine
basis. The researchers looked in pretty well every contemporary
document they could find, fact and fiction, and there is effectively
damn-all on the ordinary cooking of before a couple of centuries
back.

Look, I am not just referring to the researches of random amateur
mediaevalists, but to those of serious academics. Many of them would
LOVE to find ANY reliable information on the ordinary household life
of pretty well any era before 1800 (and many after it). They can
get some pretty good data on the running of the Great Houses, and
even some down to fairly modest manors, but there is very little
indeed below that.

Don't take my word for it - go and look for it :-)


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.