Cornholme Lunch Club

Cornholme Lunch Club meet every Tuesday at St Michael’s Church, and told us about their memories of growing and producing food including how to make a traditional pudding in the microwave.

Docks, Nettles, Comfrey and Drinks
Growing Stuff
Jams and Steamed puddings

Cornholme

As kids we used to go collecting docks and selling them for money for the fair. That is what they used to do in Hebden Bridge, yeah….dock leaves…those little ones not the great big ones, the sweet ones in the meadows….

Comfrey….we always had comfrey in our cupboards…and we used to dry it…it was horrible the smell but it was wonderful for grazes (???) and things like that.

My friend she used to make nettle tea…and she used to sell it – 2p a bottle. It was lovely…people enjoyed it…it was a lot like lemonade sort of thing…

I: So was it alcoholic?

No….Potato wine was good…we used to brew potato wine…that fresh wine was really lethal….

We had some by the canal and down by the brook, he used to have hens…we did as well. We had hens and a greenhouse and tomatoes and a vegetable patch and a greenhouse up at my brother’s up Calderbrook Road…We used to have hens…we had chicks and all sorts. There were loads of plots where the flats are…we used to grow potatoes in a bucket and they grew…yes we had about a dozen buckets.

Remember when sugar was rationed…and my mother said to us “now you can either have sugar in your tea or you can do without and have jam and we chose jam. I have never taken sugar ever since. I don’t like it.

Did you grow rhubarb? Oh yes.

I started doing steamed sponge pudding. I used to do them in the steamer…because I have still got my steamer… or I have done them in this electric one…but the other day I thought I will try one of them in the microwave so I shoved it in the microwave for three minutes and it was done. It was the old recipe but it is the modern day cooking. We had it for our tea and I thought that is bloody lovely is that…it really was and I was amazed…three minutes! I could have quite easily put that pudding in a steamer and it would probably come out just the same but you are cooking it a lot longer and you’ve got a lot of steam but the recipe that I use for my Madeira is 125g butter, 125g sugar, two eggs, three tablespoons full of milk and 200 of flour …