Meat, Two Veg, and a Side of Comfort
From The complete art of cookery, exhibited in a plain and easy manner by Hannah Glasse. Wellcome Collection |
My grandad had been an electrical miner there since 1940, navigating the labyrinthine depths of the coalfield for over 50 years. To the world, he was a skilled man, an electrician who crawled through gaps the size of a washing machine door to repair machinery in the damp, explosive darkness. To his family, he was the provider who carried the silent weight of the 1974 strikes, a time when he chose to cross the picket lines and accept the label of ‘scab’ to ensure his wife and three young children didn't go hungry. That choice was made at the kitchen table, and it was the women of the north who ensured that the table remained a sanctuary.
If I ask any of my Welsh or southern friends who the best cook they know is, they’ll say their mum. But among my friends who grew up in the north, they’ll say anyone else. It sounds harsh, but we have to be realistic. When our grandmas were learning how to cook in the 1950s, they were battling a decade of deprivation, with staples such as sugar, butter, and cheese still being rationed. While my grandad was descending into the pits of Agecroft, my grandma was navigating a world where olive oil was something you got from the chemist to loosen ear wax, not used for salad dressing. Rationing didn’t fully end until 1954, so for women in the north without supermarkets or freezers, food was strictly seasonal: the winter salad was thinly sliced white cabbage and onions, and flavours were coaxed out of the blandest ingredients. This is probably why I like to think that meat and two veg was a carefully considered task of social engineering rather than a lack of choice.
This high-calorie strategy was designed by a fleet of women to sustain a workforce operating in the most inhospitable conditions imaginable. For a miner, the day was a descent into a cold, sunless underworld where coal dust parched the throat and damp chilled the bone. To survive it, their bodies required a specific kind of fuel: slow-release energy, high protein, and psychological comfort. My grandma was an architect of this calorific fortress, building it upon a balanced tripod of essentials that had been refined over centuries of Lancashire history.
The meat was typically a cheaper cut – either brisket, neck, or shank – which was then transformed through hours of slow braising on the side of a coal-fired range. This provided the essential fats and proteins needed for physical repair after a grueling shift. Beside it sat potatoes, usually mashed with a scrap of lard or roasted in dripping, offering the heavy carbohydrates required for twelve hours of labour. The second vegetable, often seasonal cabbages, turnips, or carrots, provided bulk and vitamins to ward off the ailments of a sunless life, such as scurvy or rickets. Everything was anchored by the gravy. Ask any northerner: gravy is a fundamental element of this meal. Thick, rich and very salty, it served to hydrate the parched lungs of a man who had been breathing coal dust all day, binding the meal into a single, cohesive unit of heat. In short, the perfect plate.
Growing up in the 90s, I spent every afternoon after school at my grandma’s house, where the kitchen was the center of her universe because it was the only place of absolute warmth. Her day was governed by the pit whistle for so many years that even long after the mines were closed, tea was still served every day at the same time. If you were home late, you missed out.
The coal range, the ‘black beauty’ of the north, was kept burning all day for a dual purpose: it dried the (hanging) damp pit overalls while simultaneously acting as a slow cooker for the evening meal. The goal was for the scent of steam to hit you the moment you walked through the door. That scent was the first signal that, as a miner, you were no longer just a cog in an industrial machine, but a man at the head of a hearth. The meal was a physical barrier between the brutality of the mine and the sanctity of the home. Lancashire’s culinary history is defined by this ingenuity. Long before the mines, the county was shaped by cotton mills and cottage industries where women worked alongside men. This gave rise to dishes like the Lancashire Hotpot, a one-pot masterpiece designed to be left in the oven all day. Traditionally made with mutton and topped with a lid of sliced potatoes, the bottom layers would turn to mush to thicken the gravy, while the top layer crisped into a golden crust. It was a complete meal that required no supervision, allowing women to manage the grueling laundry tasks of a mining household or to work their own shifts in the mills.
This plain and robust style was codified by women who understood the value of the honest plate. Elizabeth Raffald, a Manchester-based entrepreneur and author of The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769), ran a cookery school and sold food in the city long before the era of celebrity chefs. Her work, alongside Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), championed roasting meats and boiling garden vegetables over the fiddly French styles of the southern elites. They gave northern women the permission to ignore trends and focus on what worked: food that was ostensibly plain, but always enough.
This philosophy was passed down through oral history, from mums to grandmas who never wrote books but had the knack for a perfect suet crust or a smooth mash. In my grandma’s kitchen, this was a silent language of care. In an era where physical affection was often reserved, the quality of the meal was a measure of a woman’s devotion and her management of the meagre household purse. In some ways, and in some places, not much has changed.
The mines may have closed down in 1991, but the influence of those women remains via Sunday lunches of shepherd’s pie, sausage and mash, and the many variations on meat and two veg eaten either at home or outside. They took the simplest utilitarian ingredients and turned them into warm and sustaining shields against the world.
I see their resilience in every choice I make today. When I’m sitting in a restaurant, scanning a modern menu, my eyes are still subconsciously searching for that same sense of reliability that grandma provided. We owe the meat and two veg standards not to a lack of imagination, but to the incredible strength of women who fed the north through rationing, strikes, and the slow grind of industrial decay. My grandad survived 50 years underground because of the woman waiting at the surface. It is easy to call it a simple dinner, but in truth, it was an act of defiance against the cold and the overwhelming odds stacked against a working class family. It was the ultimate testament to the fact that no matter how deep a man went into the earth, there was someone ensuring he had a reason to come back up.
Even now, I still find my greatest comfort in the rising steam of a plate of meat and two veg. In that scent, I find my home.