Pig’s, sheep and stew
I was a poor student but I’ve never been richer. I had everything I needed – good friends, incredible music, a euphoric scene that was full of optimism, a girlfriend who I was in love with. I had it all. But one thing I didn’t have was enough food.
On a grant of £330 a year, subsidized by working holidays, I did not have a lot of spare cash. Once you taken the gig money out, petrol for the car or motorbike, and the essential albums, there wasn’t a lot left over.
Breakfast was a mug of milky cocoa. I did not eat lunch. Pete and I existed on one meal a day. Sometimes this was a mound of mashed potato flavoured with cheese and sometimes it was stew.
We toured round the bakers and supermarket scrounging scrag ends of bacon or rinds of cheese and stale bread. We would add the bacon scraps to the potato or grind up the rind (to a traditional refrain I had just written) to make a cheese potato. That was very tasty.
‘grinding up the rind
Hey ho me dearie-o
We’re grinding up the rind’
I part solved this food shortage by a trip to the abattoir. I discovered I could purchase a sheep or pigs head for one shilling and six pence.
If you boiled the head in a big pot you could either make Irish Stew with the sheep or brawn with the pig.
Our big pot boiled away and produced an inordinate amount of food.
For the Irish stew we merely added heaps of vegetables. It stayed on the stove for weeks as we merely added more vegetables and scooped out what we needed. I never became sick of Irish stew. You could vary that with the vegetables you added.
The pig’s head was a totally different case. It produced huge amounts of brawn. Far too much and it was a bit too sickly and samey. We became totally fed up with brawn after a while. We tried all sorts. We flavoured it with curry and all types of herbs. It still would not go down well. We were starving but there was a limit.
In the end we had to resort to Chow Mein from the local Chinese. It was two shilling and six pence a portion but there was so much it filled you up.
I’ve never eaten brawn again!
I was a poor student but I’ve never been richer. I had everything I needed – good friends, incredible music, a euphoric scene that was full of optimism, a girlfriend who I was in love with. I had it all. But one thing I didn’t have was enough food.
On a grant of £330 a year, subsidized by working holidays, I did not have a lot of spare cash. Once you taken the gig money out, petrol for the car or motorbike, and the essential albums, there wasn’t a lot left over.
Breakfast was a mug of milky cocoa. I did not eat lunch. Pete and I existed on one meal a day. Sometimes this was a mound of mashed potato flavoured with cheese and sometimes it was stew.
We toured round the bakers and supermarket scrounging scrag ends of bacon or rinds of cheese and stale bread. We would add the bacon scraps to the potato or grind up the rind (to a traditional refrain I had just written) to make a cheese potato. That was very tasty.
‘grinding up the rind
Hey ho me dearie-o
We’re grinding up the rind’
I part solved this food shortage by a trip to the abattoir. I discovered I could purchase a sheep or pigs head for one shilling and six pence.
If you boiled the head in a big pot you could either make Irish Stew with the sheep or brawn with the pig.
Our big pot boiled away and produced an inordinate amount of food.
For the Irish stew we merely added heaps of vegetables. It stayed on the stove for weeks as we merely added more vegetables and scooped out what we needed. I never became sick of Irish stew. You could vary that with the vegetables you added.
The pig’s head was a totally different case. It produced huge amounts of brawn. Far too much and it was a bit too sickly and samey. We became totally fed up with brawn after a while. We tried all sorts. We flavoured it with curry and all types of herbs. It still would not go down well. We were starving but there was a limit.
In the end we had to resort to Chow Mein from the local Chinese. It was two shilling and six pence a portion but there was so much it filled you up.
I’ve never eaten brawn again!