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| Parents of we five |
The pantry
What Smudge had started in the pantry, Rye finished, but first a description. It is a walk-in pantry with built in shelves along two sides. The second shelf up is on the same level as a concrete slab that makes the ceiling of the outside loo, not an end of the garden outside loo in a wee shed of its own, but one under the house roof entered from outside–down the steps into the garden from the back door–with a wooden seat, an overhead cistern and a chain flush pull. We think Number 64 was built by a builder for his family and a live-in maid. The maid's loo, then.
The concrete slab, leading to a small north-facing window, was the fridge before fridges existed. Mum used it to store chocolate, eggs, butter and the like plus Dad's bottles of brandy that he used to win playing snooker but which he wasn't allowed to drink after an operation to remove a cyst in his brain in case the alcohol disagreed with his medication. I think my teenage younger brothers found the bottles and prevented their contents from being wasted.
Rye and I found the chocolate and sustained our cleaning and sorting operations with it and mugs of tea. On at least one day we went from breakfast to the evening meal without eating anything 'sensible', but the unsensible things we ate did the job of keeping our energy levels up.
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| The eye-level concrete shelf |
On other days Teedee, who dealt with all the death-related paperwork and phone calls (thank goodness!), would supply us with soup and bread. The choice was always between cream of chicken, tomato or mushroom except the day I decided the pile of carrots at the bottom of the fridge needed using up and made some carrot and tahini soup without the tahini because the local Lidl, where Teedee usually shopped, didn't have any. I think I bunged a potato in the pot instead. Teedee did find the ground cumin and turmeric that my recipe required.
Before Rye got the pantry shelves in this order it had been difficult to find anything, they were so jam-packed with possibly edible MBUs ("might be useful" items) and what was, bluntly, junk, like the pile of plastic dessert tubs that were washed out and kept. We used the out of date olive oil and Teedee presented each of us with a jar of marmalade. The packets of breakfast cereal and teabags had been stored in the box room upstairs (the cereal in a wardrobe!) because there was no room in the pantry for them. Rye pretty much kept to Mum's habitual pantry placements. Mum was very efficient at feeding seven people but she didn't do any cooking, or even much making of tea, for the last few years of her life.
From the pile of baking tins you can see at the bottom of one photo, I adopted the proper Yorkshire pudding tins that had belong to my maternal grandma. They are 'proper' because of their size which is similar to that of a cereal bowl. Traditionally Yorkshire pudding was eaten, drenched in also 'proper' gravy (made from meat juices without commercial gravy seasoning because that's not needed if you make gravy 'properly'), as a separate course before the meat and veg course. Old tablespoon for scale.
The contents of a bottle of Baileys that Rye found had separated into solid gunk at the bottom and some curdled liquid. The plastic lids in the shoe box were for putting on one's mug of tea. Keeping a few makes sense; hoarding far more than you'll ever need less so. Spare teapot lid, anyone?
Not that I can talk 😂
It looks as if more posts will be needed to cover Jig's owl pellets and a few other things.
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