Cooking

Main Street, Barkby, 1911. Compare this view with that on the main page of this Barkby and Barkby Thorpe website. Courtesy of the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester & Rutland.

Mr Bentley: How did you keep warm in winter in those days?

Mrs Baines: Oh, used to go in the spinneys and get the wood. And when they were falling the trees, you know, different – there used to be two men with a big saw, saw them down, and we used to go and get the shavings. Big branches of wood when they were out the road. We always got plenty of good fire wood, there weren’t much coal, we used to buy a bit of coal.

Mr Bentley: Did you have a stove at home, or how did you cook at home?

Mrs Baines: We used to have to cook at the, we used to pay a penny to go to the bake house, that’s how we used to cook. And then the fire what we had, me dad used to have a bar across and the frying pan what we’d got, it had a handle on and it used to hook on this here bar, and that’s how, that’s the only cooking, like. And, well, the pots as we had, if we could see them now you’d be disgusted. The pots as we had, they used to put the potatoes, and of course when they’ve killed a pig they used to give you the pig’s fry, and me mother used to do the potatoes and onions and pig’s fry all in this here pan over this, over the fire. Used to have a nice big fire with the wood and that, and she used to put all of it in the pan and that’s how we used to eat it. And we used to, from the farms they used to give us lard and dripping and that, and the bread that we used to have from the bake house, ‘cos she couldn’t make it herself, ain’t got an oven to make it in, but we used to take it the bake house and used pay a penny, and we used to get a meal like that. And I’ll tell you another thing, they had tame rabbits some of them did, and perhaps they’d let them run about, and we should go and get one and me dad’d kill it and we, and they’d do it up, take it to the bake house, and it was a good dinner for us then.

Mr Bentley: Did everybody go to the bake house then?

Mrs Baines: Yeah, well majority of them went to the bake house. There were no stoves and that like there is now, there were nothing like that.

©EMOHA with permission of Barkby Local History Group