Inheritance Recipes

I have been listening to a feature on a BBC Radio 4 chat show, where guests talk about music that they inherited from their parents and music that they would like to pass on to future generations. It got me thinking about recipes that my mother passed to me from her grandmother. My mother grew up in a small rented cottage with two brothers and two sisters. The cottage was situated in a small village in a muddy valley surrounded by woodland, a mile from the sea. There was large garden where they kept a pig and some chickens. They had many fruit trees and grew vegetables and flowers. It was idyllic in many ways.

In Spain, this passing down of recipes is commonplace but in the UK this tradition seems to have been lost. I believe all of my mother’s recipes were inherited in turn from her mother. I also remember my father talking about his mother buying “queenies” (queen scallops) in Bristol and cooking them in milk. However this was not something we ever cooked at my childhood home. It would seem all my inheritance recipes are maternal.

I asked Valerie the same question and she immediately came back with baked herring and split pea soup

My list contains:

fried sprats

treacle tart

pickled red cabbage

picallili

faggots

fried mushrooms

stewed Bramley apples

egg sandwiches

beef curry with apples and sultanas