What do a 1940s home cook, a 2020s restaurant chef and a modern day home cook all have in common?
A dwindling budget and scarce resources...Not the most buzzy punchline?
I feel in some way that I am all of these things. A part of me is a 1940s housewife (it feels wrong writing housewife, but I think in this context it is largely historically accurate?), in the occasional moment of eery calm at home I wish I was still a Head Chef, and I am more and more the fast economising home cook in a race to the bottom in terms of stretching the dwindling pound as far as possible in the search for continued deliciousness at each and every meal time.
The 1940s housewife bit is, I think, an amalgamation of stories gleaned from my grandmother when I was a kid. I know that what I am about to report is a construct of my imagination, but at the same time, I am almost certain it is based on some sort of reality, if not my own reality, then a soothing quilt of anecdotes, overheard snippets and other peoples realities absorbed as a child when too young to decipher someone else’s memories from your own. We must all have childhood memories that are as real to us as if we were reliving them now, but in reality, they are a synthetic construct of being told a thing about yourself enough times that it becomes an irrefutable truth, whether you can really remember it or not. Right?
Anyway, it is in this vein that I have always held true that my grandmother, and many like her no doubt, kept an account book for her household spending. This was not the product of an overbearing marriage or mistrust on anyone's behalf, it was simply how things were done, I imagine. I’m guessing it was a habit strengthened by necessity during rationing after WWII, as well as being a byproduct of a time when banking was manual and slow, and much of a household’s weekly outgoing was either on credit or via cheque, so she wanted to know where she stood each week. The reality is, I can recall her telling me about this account book, in fact, I can remember playing shops with her where an account book was one of the most cherished props, but by the time I was old enough to remember anything of her day to day habits she was deep in a daily M&S Food Hall habit that was recorded in nothing else than the well-stocked shelves of her refrigerator and a pretty chunky monthly credit card statement to boot.
Fast forward, and as a Head Chef in busy restaurants which relied on close control of tight margins in order to stay in business, I similarly kept a daily account book. We didn’t call it that, of course. Day sheets, GPs, margins and P&Ls are the Head Chef’s stock in trade, but all we are really doing is keeping an account book, staying on top of incomings versus outgoings, and trying to do as much as possible with as little as possible. Same, same, but different.
Recently, conversations with friends in the food world often end up turning to the increasingly complex task of running food and drink businesses in the current climate. Costs of ingredients, labour, rent, rates and everything else, seemingly, have all gone skyward, and the very task of finding good people to work in hospitality has become Herculean, all whilst real household incomes and disposable spending are decimated. I’m often not the only one whose mind ends up going back to our grandparent’s kitchens.
What has come out of all this whining and moaning though is a list of currently-being-put-into-practice things that chefs right now and home cooks back then were using to make things go further, taste better, and cost less to produce in the running of our daily kitchens. It might be that not all of these legitimately came from the kitchens of our grandparents, but I’m pretty sure they wouldn't have felt out of place there, at least.
The list below is certainly not exhaustive, and it very much leans toward the oh-poor-you-no-Badoit-today on the first-world problems spectrum, but that is not to diminish the advice. One suspects that a broader survey of households, a census of cultural cost-cutting globally, and an open-source sharing of grandparental tips and tricks would no doubt throw up a list as long as an MP’s expenses claim that we could all glean magical advice from. I haven’t done that though. I’ve gone through my sometimes slightly hazy memories of conversations over drinks or dinners, or undertaken whilst standing side by side doing a menial task, and recorded what’s stuck.
Hopefully, though, this acts as a catalyst or inspiration. Failing that, stick your oar in in the comments below, put us straight, and let out an impassioned roar, that’s always cathartic I find.
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