We all have a weakness for food delivery apps and ready meals. But as SUSANNAH JOWITT found, with a diet of stews and puddings you can halve your grocery bill by… Cooking like granny!
- We must head back in time to the Warwickshire farm where my Granny cooked
- READ MORE: Masterchef 2016 champion Jane Devonshire’s roast pheasant
Giving a pig’s head a clean shave with one of my husband’s disposable razors is not what I had expected as part of my cooking prep — and yet that is exactly what I find myself doing during the week I try cooking like my granny, a gentleman farmer’s wife.
It’s all thanks to a controversial remark by French trade minister Olivia Grégoire, who advised the French population suffering from the cost of living crisis to save money by ‘cooking like granny’.
But does it work as a strategy? And how on earth will my Deliveroo-loving 21st-century family find it?
There’s no question we could do with tightening our belts, though. With two hungry 22-year-olds (my daughter and her boyfriend) back living with us after university, our weekly grocery shop has doubled from an average £80 to about £160.
Yet on the face of it, there’s no guarantee ‘cooking like granny’ will be that much cheaper. I’ll have to forgo the economy ranges, the budget pasta, cheap chickpeas and tofu-for-meat swaps, for example, as my granny wouldn’t recognise any of that as food fit for the family table. She and Grandpa were old-school, meat-and-two-veg types.
SUSANNAH JOWITT: With two hungry 22-year-olds (my daughter and her boyfriend) back living with us after university, our weekly grocery shop has doubled from an average £80 to about £160
We must transport ourselves back in time to the Warwickshire farm where my Granny cooked — but, unlike her, we don’t own chickens or milk our own cows, and we can’t shoot game or forage for mushrooms. So all of that will cost us.
Also out are expensive fruit juices, kefir yoghurts, chia seeds, Japanese rice crackers, smoked salmon and the sirloin steaks that we might have for treat night on Fridays. There will be no sourdough bread, Kettle Chips, pricey dips or snacking between meals. Already, I begin to see how drastic a change this week-long challenge is going to be.
Yet the prospect isn’t all horrifying: Ms Grégoire’s insistence on ‘grandmother education’ was as much about the principle of avoiding waste as it was about the preparation of meals from scratch and the use of traditional recipes.
As the daughter and grand-daughter of matriarchs, I am already a devotee of food-prepping, famous within my family for my creative approach to leftovers and my disdain for ultra-high-processed food and over-bossy sell-by dates.
But I have become a bit lazy, since working full-time, about traditional cooking, blurring the cook-from-scratch benchmark by opting for ready-chopped flash-fry Asian options or easily assembled mezze-style menus. I cut corners to cut costs, but if I put in the effort necessary for a nose-to-tail, back-to-basics, traditional meal plan, can I succeed granny’s way?
I pull on my pinny and plan a menu of three meals a day for a week, based on my memories of Granny’s cooking: the offcuts of raw pastry she would give me, having rolled out a tart; or the salty, fatty indulgence of her beef dripping sandwiches;
‘Gravy, gravy, gravy! Sauces with everything,’ Mum reminds me.
‘Usually gravy-based or white sauce. I remember her pride in using every bit of the pigs from the family farm. We’d keep the legs, ribs and head and send the rest to the butcher to be made into pork pies. Oh, the excitement when the pork pies came back to us!’
Being broke themselves, the kids embrace the cost-cutting agenda and promise to try everything once. The boyfriend’s excited about nightly puddings, but my daughter is concerned that the dominance of meat will wreck the gut health she has achieved with her kimchi and turmeric shakes.
It’s true my family matriarchs were thinking more about value and convenience than they were nutrition. Most lunches involved leftovers from previous dinners; most food was chosen with longevity in mind; sugar and salt were deployed generously.
SUSANNAH JOWITT: We must transport ourselves back in time to the Warwickshire farm where my Granny cooked — but, unlike her, we don’t own chickens or milk our own cows, and we can’t shoot game or forage for mushrooms. So all of that will cost us
Furthermore, fridges were small and freezer space had to be rented in town, hence the preponderance of jams and chutneys in the pantry.
I show my meal plans to nutritionist Janey Bullivant for her verdict. ‘It is certainly a carnivore’s delight,’ she says, ‘and to be applauded for its fresh, whole food ingredients, slow cooking and re-purposing. But it’s limited in fruit and vegetables, which should make up a third of what we eat.’
Cost-wise, it stands up. Stripped of our usual buys, our supermarket bill plunges by nearly £40 — and our takeout/eating-out costs of £130 disappear. If we stuck to this for a month, we would save a total of £680 on our food bills. What is, at first sight, an expensive butcher’s bill of £83 is worth it for the sheer delight of chatting flesh with our 72-year-old local butcher, Mr Stenton, who has carved it all.
Core to this ‘grandmother education’ is the art of conversation. Talk to your aged relative/butcher/fishmonger and ask them what they recommend. You’ll eat more for less and your meals will be tastier for it. But one cost my granny would never have calculated is my labour.
Normally, I spend 10-20 minutes preparing lunch, half an hour preparing dinner, with breakfast taken on the hoof. Sometimes we let Deliveroo take the strain.
Now, I hardly seem to be away from the kitchen, up to my elbows in flesh or flour for what I work out to be an average of three hours and 40 minutes a day. It’s satisfying wringing every ounce of protein from a pig’s head, making stock from bones and veg peelings, wasting nothing, not even the pig’s ears, which I slice and deep-fry for a sneaky snack.
I don’t recall Granny complaining about being tied to the stove, but nor do I recall her being visibly happy when cooking. But I do remember her satisfaction when we ate everything on our plates.
Memory is like opening a can of stout: at first, nothing really happens and then, suddenly, it all bubbles out.
All families have a domestic history and I realise I need to pass on ours to my own young adults.
My seven-day menu of game casserole and jam roly poly
The total cost for one person to eat like granny for a week is £30.57, compared with the 2023 national average cost of £45 per person a week and to our own family’s average cost of nearly £75 per person. All costs are based on quantities for four people (or the total number of guests eating). Where leftovers are used, the cost of repeated ingredients is not included; if only part of a product is used, only the cost of that which is used has been included.
SUNDAY
Breakfast: Gentleman’s Relish on toast
Lunch: Leftover sausage croquettes and cucumber salad
Dinner: Roast chicken dinner
Pudding: Tinned sliced peaches and cream
A mix of leftovers from the previous day’s fry-up for lunch, a homemade staple of Granny’s (and my) cupboard for breakfast in the form of Gentleman’s Relish (spiced anchovy butter) is rounded off by a roast chicken dinner (roast potatoes, bread sauce from scratch, savoy cabbage and carrots, with a classic pudding and cream (Granny lived on a dairy farm.
The day is rounded off by a roast chicken dinner (roast potatoes, bread sauce from scratch, savoy cabbage and carrot (stock photo)
MONDAY
Breakfast: Grilled brown- sugared grapefruit with a cherry
Lunch: Rough Chicken Soup
Dinner: Granny’s Game Casserole with green beans and mash
Pudding: Six-cup Steamed Pud
Picking the chicken from the bones and making stock from the carcass gives us the broth and meat for Granny’s unblended Rough Chicken Soup. Leftover veggies and herbs are stirred in at the last minute, plus a good squeeze of lemon. At dinner, guests enjoy Game Casserole: pheasant (bought online) is casseroled with mushrooms, silverskin onions, thyme and a dash of cream, finished off with toasted breadcrumbs.
TUESDAY
Breakfast: Porridge with cream
Lunch: Granny’s Eggaroni Cheese
Dinner: Granny’s Irish Stew
Pudding: Jam roly poly
Two of Granny’s cheats on the menu: first, eggaroni cheese (mac ’n’ cheese without the macaroni, using hard-boiled eggs, chopped into chunks, with creamy white sauce poured over, more cheese on top, and grilled). I loved this as a child.
Next up, the true country fare that is her Irish stew, the cheap cut of a small neck of lamb, cooked for four hours with pearl barley, potatoes and carrots. ‘It tastes almost medieval,’ says a guest. Never a fan of making pastry, granny makes her version of roly-poly using jam sandwiches, rolled and fried in butter.
Never a fan of making pastry, granny makes her version of roly-poly using jam sandwiches, rolled and fried in butter (stock photo)
WEDNESDAY
Breakfast: Grandpa’s Scary Mushrooms On Toast
Lunch: Cheese pudding
Dinner: Gammon knuckle & parsley sauce with bubble & squeak and frozen beans
Pudding: Jelly sundaes
Grandpa would roam for mushrooms on the farm and cook them for breakfast. We children feared we’d die a poisoned death, but the mushrooms, fried in cream with a pinch of mustard, were delicious. I have to use the bog-standard white version but they still taste pretty good. Cheese pudding used up any stale bread before market day’s fresh bread on Thursdays. In a casserole dish, you layer up stale bread slices with grated cheddar, pour milk over the lot and bake. The ham is brought to the boil in water, then cooked in Guinness for two hours, drained and roasted with brown sugar, cloves and mustard and finished off in the oven for 20 minutes. It’s followed by another cheat pudding: whipped cream with layers of red, amber and green jelly.
THURSDAY
Breakfast: Hot choc and dipping bread
Lunch: French onion soup
Dinner: Pigs’ tongue a la ravigote
Pudding: Iles flottante
The other granny, my Francophile mother, insists that we do a French day. My favourite breakfast on French holidays — stale patisserie from the day before, dipped into a bowl of milk with dark chocolate melted into it — is followed at lunchtime by a French onion soup, using the pheasant stock from Tuesday to deliciously rich effect.
Star of the day is the pig’s tongue: it’s boiled for three hours then, with the top rough layer peeled off (faintly traumatic), sliced to serve hot a la ravigote — with an oily, herby, mustardy sharp vinaigrette that sets off the unctuous umami taste of the tongue. This was a Granny special and I soon remember why. Every scrap is fought over.
Lunchtime involves a French onion soup, using the pheasant stock from Tuesday to deliciously rich effect (stock photo)
FRIDAY
Breakfast: Lamb’s kidneys on toast
Lunch: Kedgeree
Dinner: H-Bone of beef and trimmings
Pudding: Camp Coffee junket
Slicing the ureters out of the kidneys and peeling off the outer membrane, poaching them in milk and then chopping and frying them with butter and sage gets a big thumbs-down from this chef, even though it is actually delicious. It’s just too early in the morning for all that! Kedgeree for lunch is like a warm hug: a comfort food staple in our family that stretches a fillet of smoked haddock to feed four hungry mouths by mixing it with cooked rice, boiled eggs and curried onions.
The H-bone beef cut is taken from the rump but is no longer very fashionable because of its awkward wishbone-shaped bone. It’s not the prettiest and is a little chewy, but it’s tasty once it’s roasted for half an hour and left to stand for another 30 minutes. And just a spoonful of this junket (basically, coffee and chicory-flavoured syrup and milk boiled up with rennet and left to set) and I am whirled back to my granny’s dining room.
SATURDAY
Breakfast: Eggy bread in beef dripping
Lunch: Brawn, mini gherkins, parsley salad, sourdough toast
Dinner: Oxtail stew
Pudding: Blackberry & apple crumble
Leftover beef dripping for eggy bread (or a dab of Bovril and butter if there’s no beef dripping). Brawn (a kind of rough terrine, taking all the meat from a boiled pig’s head, pressing it into a jelly mould and letting it set in its own jelly-stock) for lunch is a tick in the ‘out there’ box. Oxtail stew is my daughter’s idea: she recalled my mum making it and made it at university.
A first for me — but utterly delicious.
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