A Trip Down Memory Lane.

                 A very glamorous lady enjoying some ballroom dancing at Sinah Warren.

I know many of my posts are rather nostalgic, maybe it's my age, I don't know, but I have so many fond memories of my childhood days and feel that the world has somehow become a much more frenetic, cacophonous, blinkered and intolerant place to be.

A friend recently sent me a wonderful article about the high street of our youth, this evoked many memories of a time when the high street was the heart of community life. For the elderly and stay at home mums the high street was an essential life line, daily trips to the shops, where the butcher, grocer, bank manager and local cafe owner knew their customers, was a social occasion. I can recall vividly many a trip to the shops where, by the time my mother had chatted to shopkeepers interspersed with stopping to talk to neighbours, a round trip for a loaf of bread could take a good couple of hours.

A typical grocer shop where produce would be weighed and wrapped, not a sell by date in sight!

Before mammoth corporations destroyed the high street, customers would visit the grocers for cheese and freshly ground coffee, the bakers for freshly baked bread, the butchers for whatever cuts of meat he had available and the greengrocer for seasonal fruit and vegetables. If we were lucky, we children would delight in a visit to the sweet shop where for a few pennies we could choose a quarter of sweets from the glass sweet jars lining the walls.

As readers already know, my Italian grandparents owned a café in London. Around 2000 Italian cafes opened across the UK after the second world war and along with working man cafes,  they were a warm, familiar place where you could get a cheap meal, a cup of tea and a warm welcome from a friendly face.

 One of the few remaining Italian cafes, many having been forced out of business by corporate chains

I can also recall visits to radio rentals where my father would pay our monthly rent on our telly, it wasn't unusual to rent a TV back then. Ever the joker, I remember going in once and when the obviously new young member of staff asked my dad if he needed any help, he replied, 'No, we've just come into watch the telly if that's ok?' I can't remember who was more embarrassed, myself or the young girl in question.

When he first left school, aged fourteen, my father worked in his local grocer shop where his first job of the day was to wipe off any mould which had gathered on the sausages. Given our fanatical obsession with use-by dates this seems an almost unbelievable story, however, dear readers, it's true.

Sausages are traditionally the logical outcome of efficient butchery and, as I have been writing about, the notion of wasting nothing. All the scraps, organ meats, blood and fat would be salted to help preserve them, they would then be stuffed into casings made from intestines of the animal. These were a cheap meat dinner and most housewives repertoire consisted of sausages either in a casserole or toad in the hole or simply just bangers and mash (called bangers because there was so little meat content but lots of water and cereal which when they hit the hot fat in the frying pan, sizzled and spluttered like mini-explosions.)

Sausages have come a long way since then with strict rules about what goes in them. Anything claiming to be a pork sausage must have a minimum of 42 percent pork meat. However, there are still plenty of cheap, mushy, pink, flaccid sausages made by corporate chains who don't concern themselves with the horrific, intense farming barns the pigs are kept in. Sausages should always be made from free-range, organically raised outdoor pigs, preferably local, however, supermarket chains do widely stock outdoor-bred pork sausages and in the grand scheme of things they are still a very cheap meal, and quite frankly who wants to eat pink sludge?

With sausages coming in so many varieties there are endless ways to adapt them to different recipes. My current favourites are jalapeño or chorizo sausages which lend themselves well to this next recipe.

Sausage-ball spaghetti

Recipe
6 outdoor-bred pork sausages
2 onions, sliced
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 tablespoon tomato puree
400g tin of tomatoes
1 teaspoon dried chillies (optional)
1 cup of red wine or stock
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
400g spaghetti

Cook the spaghetti to packet instructions
Remove sausage meat from skins and roll into even sized meatballs
Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in a large frying pan, add meatballs and fry gently, turning meatballs until they are evenly golden

Remove meatballs and place on kitchen paper, set aside
In the same pan, fry onions, garlic, chillies and tomato puree for 3-4 minutes

Add tinned tomatoes

Give everything a good stir, swill tomato can with red wine or stock and add to pan
Place meatballs in sauce and simmer for 20 minutes
Drain pasta and plunge into sauce, combine meatballs, sauce and pasta

Serve in large bowls and season to taste

'Once a culture becomes entirely advertising friendly, it seizes to be a culture at all.'
- Mark Crispin Miller.

                                                        Loving my new oven gloves!

Love Donna xxxxxxxx