Shopping

Regular shopping was done mostly within our village or the next one, with occasional trips all the way to Chelmsford (7 miles) for clothes or special items. Food was bought at the village post office stores, the local butcher, from the milkman who also carried most staples such as cheese, eggs, cream, orange juice, or the bread van. There was also a weekly grocery delivery - my mother would phone Mr. Pegram and read out her list, and next day he would arrive with all her items in cardboard boxes. The milkman was a friendly chap, in my school holidays he would let me ride with him in the electric float as he did the rounds of the village, and drop me off on his way back. The trip to the butcher was also fun, in those days they started with the whole animal and you could go and marvel at all the bits, and watch sausages being fed into their skins. At the end of the day he would scrub his huge wooden chopping block and leave it outside in the sun to dry.

I can't remember my mother ever buying a ready-cooked meal, apart from the treat of fish-n-chips, everything was home cooked and wholesome. Fruit and vegetables were very seasonal, particularly so as we grew a lot of our own. Choices were limited - Weetabix, cornflakes or Rice Krispies for breakfast was about as long as the list got. By comparison, choices today have gone crazy, partly because people want a lot more variety than we had, but mainly because they do short-cut cooking, where most of the ingredients are already in the packet (and probably a lot more ingredients in there than you would really want). Although I welcome the adventures in taste that we now have, I really think we have lost a lot of the emotion in cooking - Marco Pierre-White claims that preparing a meal is an act of love, (he said "luuurve") and I know that my mother expressed her love in the care she took with our meals. I don't think kids eating a stir-and-serve pasta sauce will feel the same way as we did.