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Traditional Brummie Food

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errolmckoy

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I am trying to put together a collection of traditional Brummie recipes, but this seems to be a lot harder than I thought. If anyone could help me out I'd be extremely grateful, and hopefully soon I can get a Brummie recipe collection post here. Thanks.
 
Brown Pea and Ham Soup. Chicklings.Brawn Pigs trotters. ox tail. The penny winkles. Not recipes as such I suppose, but foods my Dad liked.
Lynda
 
Brown Pea and Ham Soup. Chicklings.Brawn Pigs trotters. ox tail. The penny winkles. Not recipes as such I suppose, but foods my Dad liked.
Lynda


Thanks Linda, do you know what type of peas the brown peas were as the only ones I can find are African in origin.
 
A few from childhood...neck of lamb stew, ox tail stew, fish and chips, faggots and peas. All pretty basic stuff.
 
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Not a recipe as such, bread and dripping, I still love it, but can't get decennt dripping anymore.

Our gourmet food in the week used to be bread and sugar.bread and dripping bread and milk,and any left over bread was made into a treat of bread pudding we did have a Sunday dinner though. Dek
 
Again not a recipe as such, but rhubarb fresh from the garden with a sugar dip in a cone of newspaper - don't think todayskids would think much of it!!
John Knight, you need to come back to the Midlands, our pork butcher in Tamworth has lovely stuff - don't think it would post or I'd send you some!
Sue
 
Beans on toast or egg on toast ; or on pay day bacon egg tomotoes or mushrooms
and to round ot off a big round ring of black pudding fom the slaughterhouse at the back of the shop
from thompsons fresh made animals
in my day of being born was bread sopp and mae with water and a bottle of milk no farleys rusk i m afraid when i slowly developed
we used to have tripe for dinner or tea when we came home it was tripe with every think or in most cases we was brought up on bread and dripping
whilst our mothers parents ran a stream of coffee shops around us both ways from our house less than half a mile away serving . And eating
and selling to the public the best breakfasts you could buy whilst her and us starved on poor nutriction and our clothes falling of our backs
and shoes with big holes in the bottom but thanks to the birmingham mail came to our rescue the good old christmas charties fund
so yes our breakfast diets was made of some one said chicklins tripe but mainly bread and sopp and if you do not know what that is it was bread mashed up in water into a slopp wased down by orange label tea and hope fully no one nicked the 6d stamp of he side so we could buy some think else
the war years and who says they was he good years ah best wishes astonian
 
There is another thread as stated but a few from childhood...neck of lamb stew, ox tail stew, fish and chips, faggots and peas. All pretty basic stuff.
Rupert, all those are still regular meals for me, however the price of Fish & Chips now means that we don't have them as often as before. :-(
 
Our local chippie is no longer cheap, but their portions are enormous and one portion of fish and chips is more than enough for the two of us and we usually end up shoving left-over chips into the composter. My wife usually buys fish from M&S or Aldi, I think about £3.50 for more than enough for two, and big bags of frozen chips. Good cheap grub! Because she doesn't eat meat we long ago got out of the the meat-and-two-veg habit, and try to come up with a varied menu during the week. But good old Brummie bread pud is still a favourite, and she made a couple of hundredweight on Friday!
I still like faggots, but only if I can get them from a Black Country butcher. My dad had a bowl of tripe every Friday, cooked in milk - disgusting! But I was recently introduced to Chinese-style tripe (at Chung Ying) and that is something else!

Big Gee
 
There is a programme for 5 days at 9:15 - 10:00 on BBC1 called 100 Years of Us. On it today they showed that we were typical meat and veg until after World War II when Asian people started to arrive, hence one very entrepeneural person realised there was a need for asian food and they started the first curry shop. There was mention of faggots and peas and spam and also said that fish and chips was the only food that was not rationed during the war.
 
It's hard to imagine life without Asian food! Yet my dad held out until he was in his 80's, even though he'd never tried it; however, we managed to get him to order a biriani from the takeaway one day and he was hooked.

But that didn't stop my mom from making her weekly burned-offering - she would turn a nice piece of beef into a lump of charcoal.

Big Gee
 
There was one particular day in the year when my dad used to have wierd old Brummie food, I always thought it was some sort of old tradition.

From what I remember, his tastes were, Chick Peas, Black Eyed Peas, Bacon Bones ..?? Chitterlins. I think Pigs Trotters came in there somewhere as well. One look at fried Chitterlins was enough for me though, so I never tried any of the rest either. Although he used to cook up a great Liver and Onions, I dont think I'd fancy it now.
 
When we were little, in Small Heath, the old lady next door was a marvellous cook, and my sister and I were regular visitors, toddling through the back gate as soon as we could walk. It was 'Auntie Lou', as we called her, who taught me the basics of cooking.
We loved to be given a plateful of chitterlings (or chicklins, as we called them), served cold, with lots of salt and vinegar and thinly sliced bread and butter. I don't think they were fried - just cleaned, soaked, and boiled, then left to cool and served cold. I've never cooked them myself - they weren't generally available when I left home and started cooking for my own household.

Dad was a traditionalist, to say the least - never wanting 'any of that foreign muck'!. When he was living at my sister's she asked him if he wanted some quiche lorraine. 'Don't give me that foreign muck' came the expected reply. 'What about egg and bacon flan then?' asked my sister. 'Oh yes, that's better' came the reply.
 
from my childhood there was a lot of recipes which were filling and cheap like pies, stews and a lot of these were with either scottish or irish influence. there were other things like fried bread sandwich, or egg fry's, bread dipped in egg and fried, sauceage and bean sandwiches we had potato bread and soda bread, and bubble and squeek, anything cheap and filling including suet puddings but no main couse dinner recipe's we were mainly poor in the area we lived as kids baked potatoes with cheese. that type of thing.
 
When we were little, in Small Heath, the old lady next door was a marvellous cook, and my sister and I were regular visitors, toddling through the back gate as soon as we could walk. It was 'Auntie Lou', as we called her, who taught me the basics of cooking.
We loved to be given a plateful of chitterlings (or chicklins, as we called them), served cold, with lots of salt and vinegar and thinly sliced bread and butter. I don't think they were fried - just cleaned, soaked, and boiled, then left to cool and served cold. I've never cooked them myself - they weren't generally available when I left home and started cooking for my own household.

Dad was a traditionalist, to say the least - never wanting 'any of that foreign muck'!. When he was living at my sister's she asked him if he wanted some quiche lorraine. 'Don't give me that foreign muck' came the expected reply. 'What about egg and bacon flan then?' asked my sister. 'Oh yes, that's better' came the reply.

Talking about "foreign muck" I once made myself a curry (probably Vesta) and my mom wouldn't use the saucepan again!!!
 
There was one particular day in the year when my dad used to have wierd old Brummie food, I always thought it was some sort of old tradition.

From what I remember, his tastes were, Chick Peas, Black Eyed Peas, Bacon Bones ..?? Chitterlins. I think Pigs Trotters came in there somewhere as well. One look at fried Chitterlins was enough for me though, so I never tried any of the rest either. Although he used to cook up a great Liver and Onions, I dont think I'd fancy it now.

Thanks for reminding me of Pig's Trotters. Yum yum. Me and my mom loved them even though my dad wouldn't touch them. Got to go to our farmer's market and get a couple.
 
Having read all these posts about "proper" food, I must admit that tonight I'm having a couple of chicken tikka, salad, onion and yoghurt wraps. :)
 
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