Here’s a recipe I’ve kept for over 40 years, clipped from a newspaper article on unusual recipes.
Ingredients:
- all outer leaves and tails of vegetables
- all fruit peelings, stones and cores
- all saucepan and dish rinsings
- bread crusts
- remains of suet
- batter and milky puddings (but not jam or sweet puddings)
- cheese and bacon rinds
- skim milk
- sour milk
- remains of sauces (not sweet sauces)
- gravy
- vegetable water
- margarine (if liked)
- pepper and salt
- water
Directions:
- Wash thoroughly all vegetable trimmings and leaves (do not use potato peelings); use outer leaves of cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, curly kale, lettuce, leeks and onions; tops and peelings of turnips, carrots, parsnips, swedes (rutabagas), kohlrabi.
- Put all into a cooking box saucepan with plenty of water;
- Bring to the boil, boil 20 minutes; add some or all of the other ingredients
- Season to taste
- Boil 10 minutes without removing cover and place in the cooking box 2 to 3 hours
- Take out and rub through a sieve, and if necessary, reheat on gas ring
When times were hard, there were still ways to feed the family. What is the old saying? “Hunger is the best seasoning” something like that.
I remember my mother telling about the Great Depression. Grandmother sent the oldest son out with his BB gun and a hundred BB’s. She told him to bring home 50 sparrows because that was to be their supper. Now a sparrow only has one bite (small bite) worth of meat on it but the lesson was….there is food to eat.
Very interesting read. I recall how some cooks kept their left over vegetables etc., in a freezer bag (or container) in their freezer & when they needed a quick “soup” they just dumped what they needed into their pot, added stock & seasonings and had a hearty & flavorful meal. This seems to be somewhat like that.
It does work very well :)
I’d recommend making ‘veggie only’ stock, then adding the meat products after straining off the ‘dead’ veggie scrap, for an odd reason, I guess. Once you have cooked out all of the flavor and nutrients from the veggie scraps, they’ll break down very, very quickly in a compost pile, and you want to keep meat scraps out of the pile, unless you are a big fan of rats and possums :)
A good companion to this recipe would be to post the children’s story “Stone Soup.” Not sure how you’d get around trademark infringements, but I know there are a lot of versions of it floating around.