This week Marion tells us about her favourite meals

When I was young there was no such thing as fast food or takeaways – fast food would have meant getting to the chippy and back in record time.

Everything we ate was home cooked.

Every Sunday we had a joint – Oh, how I loved Sunday dinner.

Dad believed that the water the cabbage and peas were cooked in (the peas were soaked overnight) contained all the vitamins.

So, after being strained through the colander, we drank the liquid.

“Come then, my queens,” dad would say, “a nice drop of cabbage water.”

Then, with a twinkle in his eye, his next remark would be, “Who’s for a drop of my pea water, then?”

Usually the cabbage came from the garden and if we had lamb I loved to pick the mint, wash it and then chop it and make mint sauce.

After dinner mum would make two pies, one apple and the other perhaps rhubarb or gooseberries picked from the garden, which we would have for tea with custard.

The Sunday joint would have to last two days and on Mondays it was usually eaten cold with bubble and squeak – I think it was the cabbage that squeaked.

As Monday was washday it made – with the pies – a quick and easy meal.

We didn’t have a fridge but we did have a marble cold slab in the larder where leftovers were kept.

One day gran went to fetch the remains of the apple pie, picked up the cover and saw a field mouse.

As gran screamed the mouse scampered and the pie, plate and all went all over the kitchen floor.

All our cakes and rock buns were homemade and mum also made lovely faggots – I liked to turn the handle of the mincer and watch the mince come out.

Some meals I liked more than others.

Stew with doughboys (dumplings) pigs’ liver and onions, homemade scallops with eggs, meat pie – I could go on.

Although I was at school I always came home to dinner and I always cleared my plate.

I ate a lot but never put on any weight.

I went out into the playground after we had our school milk (unless it was raining hard) and, as I was allowed out to play after school, I was always running around.

Our games were quite simple.

Someone usually had a skipping rope so we took it in turns to skip.

Then there was hopscotch, or we played touch.

Mum used to say, “Not too late in mind,” but the time always went too quickly.

Then it was supper time – cocoa and biscuits or, if it was cold and we had a fire, toast done on the toasting fork.

I loved that, especially if there was dripping too.

Dripping, for those that don’t know, was the fat from the meat drained into a basin.

It would set hard on top but underneath would be the jelly – lovely on toast or bread and butter with a bit of salt.

Then it would be bedtime.

Gran would occasionally boil a sheep’s head.

Honestly – I found it fascinating.

The sheep’s tongue was lovely, and from the bones gran made brawn which we had in sandwiches or on a plate with bread and butter.

If there was any stale bread gran would make a bread pudding – all crusty and with lots of spice.

It wasn’t just the amount of food that was different from today.

If mum, or gran, or anyone from that era, could walk around a supermarket today they would be, to use one of my mum’s words, flabbergasted.

It’s just the variety of food, which is so different, but the huge volume.

Years ago we ate our way through the English seasons buying local foods.

In fact I still do.

New potatoes, broad beans and kidney beans, cabbages and sprouts, all the lovely fruits, strawberries, cherries, English apples – who could beat a Bramley apple pie or a crisp Cox’s – and lovely English plums, which this year have been so good.

It is very nice, sometimes to buy grapes, citrus fruits and bananas and I buy Fairtrade coffee and chocolate for my husband.

But why do supermarkets sell mussels from Chile?

See you next week, Marion