Month: January 1983

DALL-E 2 helped me imagine this sack of Maris Piper potatoes

There’s not a lot of interest to the general reader in my diary for the first 10 days of that term. Just in case you are curious, here is an image of the first week.

Studying, shopping and…not much else – let’s talk about food shopping.

In our flat, Barnes L54, we had a rota, based on three of us eating at the flat (Hamzah was outside that rota, mostly eating Halal food with the Malay crowd in Q-Block Barnes) and all four of us needing to do our bit cleaning.

I’m pretty sure that Chantelle was at least semi-detached from me and Alan Gorman by this stage – doing her bit but basically shopping for her share of the food duties with her share of the kitty.

Alan and I would make occasional trips to Newcastle-Under-Lyme together for the big food shops. No doubt 12 January 1983 was such a shop.

Sainsbury’s was the focus of such a shop. Periodically we needed to buy, not only the regular groceries, but also a sack of potatoes. Normally, in those days, Maris Pipers, which were cheap and available in large sacks at Sainsbury’s.

Actually my cooking very rarely used the potatoes. I would tend to make the rice and pasta/noodle based dishes that added some variety to our diet. But Chantelle was a “meat, potatoes and two veg” sort of lass, while Alan was such a lad. Chantelle did sometimes do a mean spag. bol. (who in those Keele flats did not?) so it wasn’t all potatoes with those two. Alan I recall, was partial to pies and sausages. There was an excellent sausage-specialist butcher on the High Street and we’d often venture there for top quality sausages at affordable student prices. I have previously discussed – click here or below -the fact that, for those two, the main meal, in the evening, was named tea.

But there were other meals. Lunch (or as the other two might call it, dinner) would normally comprise something based on sliced bread. One of the staples we tended to have to go on that sliced bread was a form of liver-based pâté sold in tubes at Sainsbury’s at that time for relatively small change.

Forty years on, I don’t think Sainsbury’s sells that stuff any more but Asda sells something similar – see image below.

White bread, own-brand margarine and that variety of pâté was never our dinner (tea) but was quite often our lunch (dinner) and/or our supper. Alan insisted on pronouncing that word pate (which might rhyme with gate or hate) – he had no truck with a pretentious pronunciation such as “pâté“. To be fair, I don’t think merchants like Sainsbury’s dared to put the accents on labels for such comestibles in those days, so the tube label probably read “pate”.

“Supper”, students of this Ogblog series might recall, is the ad hoc meal later in the evening (especially favoured by Alan) after a session down the boozer or possibly after a session of evening study.

Indeed, the sack of potatoes came into its own for supper, as quite often, the preferred “dish” was a chip pan full of chips.

Actually “our” chip pan (by which I really mean Alan’s) was filthy-looking on the outside but didn’t look “caked-on-gunge-like” inside, because we permanently kept it topped up with oil/fat, so it would never dry out. We mostly used rapeseed oil as the chip fat – that was the cheapest source of cooking oil in those days – which seems strange, forty years on.

Mince was very reasonable at Sainsbury’s back then, but my “dining on a budget” bankable meat protein was chicken livers, which you could get at that time for 29p per pound in Sainsbury’s, jammed into conveniently small frozen tubs, so I could have a few on standby in our tiny freezer drawer. These would serve two purposes:

• a signature dish of chicken livers and rice – the livers casseroled with tomatoes and onions to make a rich gravy. My wife, Janie, even today, talks highly of that dish of mine, although it is some while since I have made it;
• occasional production of a batch of chopped liver (gehakte leber) with egg and onions, using my mother’s recipe. Strangely, I might yet find a yellowed piece of paper with that recipe in her own hand, inside a recipe book somewhere. It is a course form of pâté (or do I mean pate?) which I used to make using a potato masher or, I seem to recall at one stage, a hand-controlled grinder device that my mother let me take to Keele with me as she by then had a better one. I recall that Alan very much liked this dish, although I’m not sure whether or not he preferred it to the flavour-enhanced tubes. Whether Alan’s youthful exposure to this quintessentially Jewish dish played a part in him marrying a Jewish lass many years later we can only wonder.

I’ll write more about shopping in Newcastle and some more sophisticated dishes at some future stage, but for now, I think I’ve ground out enough material from this topic.