Below Stairs--The Original Downton Abbey

I recently read the book Below Stairs: The Classic Kitchen Maid's Memoir That Inspired "Upstairs, Downstairs" and "Downton Abbey" by Margaret Powell. I didn't think I would find anything at all relatable in it, but it turns out there's much the author (a cook) has to say about food and nutrition! This Guinea Pig recognizes the importance of healthy food in your belly...

www.goodreads.com

True, she wrote about how they didn't wash hunted animals before eating for fear of losing the flavor and I seem to remember something about food getting infested with maggots. Nonetheless, Margaret the maid and cook was also appalled at the rise of processed food! Even though she goes to great lengths to explain just how much time and effort went into making food in those great manors, she believes 100% it tastes better and is better for us that the newfangled foods.

About processed foods: "Nowadays they are at their wits' end to put things on the market to put back the flavour into food, the flavour that's come out with freezing. But it can't be done. No one can delude me into thinking that it can be, but of course if you've not had it the old way you don't know the difference."

About the taste: "Even nowadays when you see an economic recipe and they say you can't tell the difference from the original, well probably you can't if you've never eaten the original, but if you have there's a vast difference. It's like using margarine instead of butter, the top of the milk instead of the cream, having cheaper cuts of meat instead of the best, and having frozen salmon instead of fresh salmon. None of it tastes the same."

An excerpt that makes me so thankful for potato chips: "Nowadays everybody buys potato crisps in bags or tins, but in those days they had to be done by hand. First of all you peeled the potatoes, then you got a clean tea cloth and laid it out full length on the table and sliced the potatoes by hand so thinly that when you held them up you could see right through them. They were like little rashers of wind. You laid each one separately on the cloth. Then you covered them up with another cloth until they dried. They you melted fat--lard, not dripping because that was too coloured...You melted a portion of that in a frying-pan, a very deep one, and when it was boiling and blue smoke came off, you dropped these crisps in, one by one, because if you dropped two in at a time they stuck together..."

Margaret spent time grating Parmesan cheese by hand, making all sauces and condiments from scratch (horseradish sauce, hollandaise, tartar, mayonnaise), and mincing beef through a sieve!

I also thought the following two quotes were profound.

This one because it reminds me to really care for people by showing and doing: "In fact, all my life in domestic service I've found that employers were always greatly concerned with your moral welfare. They couldn't have cared less about your physical welfare; so long as you were able to do the work, it didn't matter in the least to them whether you had back-ache, stomach-ache, or what ache, but anything to do with your morals they considered was their concern."

And this one to remind me that sometimes kids need to do things they don't want to and it's in their best interest (it's not always about mushy, gooey, feeling good feelings!): "But the great thing about school in those days was that we had to learn. I don't think you can beat learning; how to read and write, and how to do arithmetic. Those are the three things that anyone who has got to work for a living needs. We were forced to learn and I think children need to be forced. I don't believe in this business of 'if they don't want to do it, it won't do them any good'. It will do them good."