The family snap I posted a few days ago brought back some memories of growing up in the 1950s and 60s in rural Ireland that might, perhaps, amuse you.
All I’m writing about today is the soup. Dinner was a sit down affair in the dining room at 7.30 sharp, that’s when I got my gong ringing practice. It was slightly earlier than was really convenient but in those days there were two or three living-in maids who liked to have the rest of the evening at leisure to explore for husbands. They came from Mullingar and when one got engaged to a farmer’s son another would take her place. Barmeath was considered to be a desirable finishing school.
The butcher (John Durnin in Dunleer) provided “soup meat”. This was boiled up daily and after about five days the liquid would be strained off. I was a delicate child and the smell, wafting upstairs, used to make me feel sick. The solids, mostly bone, were then taken up to the stable yard and put in the dogs’ dinners. I cannot resist digressing; the dogs’ dinners were cooked in a clothes washing machine – a top-loading drum model in the tractor shed.
The stock was left to cool and the layer of fat scraped off. Then, if it was winter, it was re-heated with the quite unnecessary addition of some powdered Knorr, never a slug of sherry. There would still be some residual fat and my grandmother – who otherwise did not interfere in the kitchen, except to make Yorkshire pudding – used strips of brown paper to absorb this.
It was decanted into individual little lidded casserole dishes from which it was tipped into soup plates. Quite a lot of extra washing up in the days before there was a dish washer.
In summer the stock was served unadulterated by Knorr, jellied, in small white dishes. It was garnished with parsley for everyone except my grandfather who thought that the dogs cocked their legs on it and I suppose he also thought that the maids weren’t too fussy about washing it.
All this went on downstairs in the dining room; until I was thirteen and went to school in England I was not allowed to attend. I cooked my own supper in the kitchen and had it upstairs in the library on a tray, kept company by my terrier, Mini, and the television. I don’t want Mini to grab all the attention, so here’s a picture of my grandfather, Mini, trophy hare or maybe rabbit and me taken circa 1971.
Peter Sellers found a girl in his soup (Goldie Hawn), in the 1970 film version of Terence Frisby’s comedy that ran in the West End from 1966 until 1973.
https://youtu.be/vbKYWyPMGW4