Are family recipes surviving test of time?
TINNED STUFF...Tyne Brand had moved on from herring to spaghetti by this time.
IT wrapped around you like a big cosy blanket. Beaten eggs, grated cheese and milk, heated slowly in a pan until they separated out into a savoury eggy solid and a savoury cheesy soup.
With bread to dip into it, it was invalid food if you weren’t well; comfort food when you were tired, or teary.
Except I didn’t learn until many years later that this wasn’t actually welsh rarebit, which is what we called it at home. I suppose, now, it was really a version of curds and whey.
If I was asked to hand down a family recipe, though, this would be it, along with my mother’s stovies, and her meat loaf, if only I could remember it (did a packet of stuffing go in? I forget).
And there’s the problem.
It’s been interesting to read speculation this week that the secret family recipe has had its day, or are family favourites really surviving the test of time?
A study by Fairy has shown that only one-third of people have a favourite family recipe.
Better news is that the average person learnt to cook their first recipe at the age of 10, with 50 per cent being taught by their mum.
Favourite family recipes turn out to be things like stew and cottage pie; also spaghetti bolognese.
I suspect, mind, that the latter is a bit of a generational one; spaghetti tended to come in tins in my younger days.
Which brings me neatly to the accompanying advert which I came across the other day.
North Shields-based Tyne Brand was celebrating its diamond jubilee 50 years or so ago.
Tyne Brand had its origins in the Shields Ice and Cold Storage Co Ltd, which had been formed to provide ice to the North Shields fishing fleet – home-produced ice, not imported from Norway as had hitherto been the case.
Some of the early names associated with it were straight out of North Shields fishing ‘aristocracy’ – Irvin, Purdy, Hastie.
It started making canned food two years later. Tinned haddock didn’t work, tinned herring did.
It became Tyne Brand in 1942, and by the era of this advertisement, its range had expanded to include meat products, pastes, puddings, fruit and vegetables.
In 2003 Westlers re-launched Tyne Brand with a range of canned ready meals.
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Thursday 17 May 2012
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