Really mean things people do to save money.

I love and regularly serve liver and kidneys but the thing I cannot eat is lambs hearts which my mother would cook. It smelled disgusting and tasted worse. But mince for Cottage Pie always has grated carrot and parsnip added to the mince, more for flavour and added veg than for economy although I can be as canny as the next when it comes to saving on food.

Perhaps your MIL could not get out of the habits learned during the war years and rationing.
Even though she appears to have been quite well off.

I did have great difficulty encouraging my MIL to spend money on herself as she had spent most of her life hard up and only had a bit more money in her last couple or so years.

If she was so loathsome and used physical violence on him, why did your DH keep in touch when he grew up

So he and the OP could have a lovely time spending all her dosh?

I am in entire agreement with Eloethan. I had an Uncle who by the time he retired was a very senior civil servant with pension to match, but still bought most of his clothes in charity shops and, after his wife died, always bought the cheapest possible food, from the cheapest shops (we found the food he gave us inedible it was so nasty) but it reflected his poverty stricken childhood in Yorkshire during the depression, he never lost the deep sense of insecurity and inadequateness engendered by this poverty plus being brought up by an unloving mother and a father, deeply psychologically damaged by his years as a soldier in WW1

My DH eats pickle with shepherd's pie, however it's made. I have been known to add lentils and canned tomatoes to mince. When I was a child, my mother often made soup (broth made with stock from a ham shank), and a pudding for tea when meat was expensive. It was usually a steamed sponge of some sort. My dad called them rib stickers!

I think what bothers me is the implication that either the people are really mean or the things they do, when being frugal was an integral part of our parents' lifestyle -rationing apart, few people had the spending capacity or habits we see today.
What is wrong with padding something out, "stretching" a lb of mince to feed the family?
Cookery writers like the late Marika Hanbury Tenison or Jocasta Innes or Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall have all written cookery books using left overs, avoiding waste and making ends meet.

I'm with you there Alea, my (post war) mum was a good cook who could create a tasty meal out of very little. When my children were small and money was tight I did the same, including rice/lentils/extra veg in the mince at times! Nothing wrong with being economical, not to be confused with mean, that's a different thing altogether in my book anyway!

I learned to cook by helping my mum. Like most of her generation, she could feed a family on not a lot. My children learned to cook the same way, in the kitchen, watching, chopping and stirring. They were both shocked when they left home for the first time, to find some of their housemates didn't know how to make a spag bog sauce, either with mince or using only vegetables. Home made soups etc are all so good to eat yet don't cost a lot.
grannyqeenie is spot on, economy shouldn't be confused with mean.

In recent years I have been extending meat based dishes by adding evrything from large quantities of vegetables to pulses of all kinds, not from any sense of frugality but for a host of environmental and animal welfare reasons.

I am very unhappy about the industrial rearing of beef cattle which is routinely dosed with antibiotics (I am allergic to penicillin and have other drug intolerances) and the amount of land devoted to growing animal feed, and I now only buy more expensive organic meat from cattle that are grass fed and not routinely dosed with antibiotics.

I am also aware that a diet heavy in red meat is probably not a healthy diet and by extending meat based recipes, the portions of meat I eat in any meal are much smaller.

We all have our irrational small frugalities but meanness means deliberately making unjustifiable economies, to deprive other people of something we want for ourselves, with malice afor thought. I have met very few deliberately mean people in my life. Perhaps meanness lies in the eye of the beholder.

My mum had to feed six mouths each day and she did wonders with very few coins in her purse. She had to. One large cod fillet, about 1.25lb in weight, would be sliced into six portions, smothered in thick batter, fried and served with chips and peas, with rice pudding to follow. My DH would eat half of that fillet today. There was many a time when we four kids would sit down to one of our favourite dinners - cheese and onion pie. This was slices of cheese and onion topped with mashed potato and browned under the grill. It cost next to nothing but it fed four hungry children.
I agree with you Alea - I don't like the claim that this frugality is 'really mean'. Many of our parents' generation had known real hardship, through war years and the terrible Depression in the 1930's and I am incredibly humbled by those men and women who kept their families fed and clothed through sheer ingenuity and hard work. Rice with the mince? Well done, your children's bellies are full!
We don't know we're born these days.

To this day I do not know how British housewives managed to keep us all going in WWII. I'm pretty sure it couldn't be repeated - too many traditional skills (and just plain yucky jobs) have been forgotten. Our kitchen at home sometimes ponged a bit, when Mum was preparing a chicken that had yesterday been clucking in the garden... I was fascinated by the as yet un-laid eggs that she carefully preserved, although I never liked to ask her what they were for!

We laughed as we hung around the stove where a lump of horse-meat for the dog was cooking - and we salivated!

Two failures only (not her fault) - whalemeat, and canned snoek that the government got a good deal on, but in the end mostly had to go into animal feed.

And here is my Mum's war-time Christmas Pud - not a patch on her 'real' one, but very good nevertheless... From her notebook:

half pound of Currents
half pound of Sultanas
half pound of Raisins
half pound of Mixed Peel
half pound of Plain Flour
half pound of Demarara Sugar
half pound of Bread Crumbs
half pound of Suet
six eggs
Milk (quantity unfortunately not specified)
Nutmeg & Spice
Carrot

Boil for twelve hours.

This made enough as I recall for two decent sized puddings and two small
ones.

It must have demanded some pretty frantic 'saving up' of ingredients!

My mother started the fruit mixture for puds and cake for Christmas in September,buying weekly and adding to an enormous mixing bowl. I think the mixture was probably fermenting by the time she cooked them. She said woolton pie was disgusting during the war but I suspect I could serve it to a veggie guest quite happily

www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/woolton.html

What a lovely photo Feetle.
Actually your mother's wartime recipe isn't very different from the one I use now, except that mine has some form of alcohol instead of the milk.

Thanks for the link, Stansgran
"Apparently neither the pie or the loaf were liked, but by the end of the War, the country was fitter and healthier than it ever had been.
As a whole the population, was slimmer and healthier than it is today. People ate less fat, eggs, sugar and meat whilst eating many more vegetables.

Many people ate a better diet during rationing than before the war years and this had a marked effect on the health of the population - infant mortality declined and life expectancy increased."
It also says Lord Woolton believed in 'educating and helping' people rather than 'instructing' them.
What a pity the present day food tzars don't follow his example!

@Janeainsworth - you know what gets me? They are so happy! Happy with one another, happy with their family (my young brother and me) - and all in the midst of a vicious war - that would have been a couple of years after we had been bombed out of our flat... It was the Zeitgeist...

It had long been true that the peasantry ate a healthier diet than the gentry in this country - anything other than meat was beneath the dignity of The Hall, while the Baldricks got by on rough bread and whatever veg. they could grow, plus they might be lucky enough to have a milch-cow.

feetle your mum's Christmas pud recipe looks very similar to my mum's - amended after the war to include a bottle of 'old ale' [I use stout] and brandy instead of milk! I have used that recipe many times and it is very good (I don't use as much mixed peel).

The front garden was dug up (by the elderly next door neighbour as DF was away) and potatoes planted, the back filled with other veg. My DB bred rabbits for meat. Fruit picked from auntie's farm and turned into jam with carefully saved sugar. Eggs came from the same farm. The jam was eaten on bread without butter.
DM made the best damson jam - can I find damsons these days? No.

I don't remember any of this being a post-war baby but heard so much about it!

Putting soya protein in with mince has health benefits. I bought some but keep forgetting to put it in. The time I did it we couldn't detect it anyway. It's all down to the herbs.

Alea reminded me of the lovely pork chops we used to get with the little bit of kidney attached, does anyone know why they don't sell them like that any more? I used to love them!

My parents and my husband's parents had to manage in war and postwar times and endured years of rationing. They were inevitably frugal. I well remember my mother making a packet of ten fish fingers go round four of us:- three for her and my father and two for we children. She also gave us a packet Vesta curry for one between four of us on Saturdays and eked it out with a tin of cooked meat.

My in-laws ate home grown veg from the garden and my MIL made jams, marmalade and chutney in season. All delicious, of course and better than anything you could buy. In the MIL's value system a woman who gave her family 'shop bought cake' was not in the top rank.

I absolutely love the extensive and luxurious range of food from all over the world that is available now at a reasonable cost but I am still frugal as I feel that this is only ethical as waste is to be avoided when so many go without. I plan meals and eat plainly in the week leaving treats (and alcohol) to the weekend. I, too, now make cakes, jams, bread, curd, marmalade and other preserved goodies.

It makes me smile to think of the tinned salmon (one tin between four) salad with tinned mandarins and tinned cream we had on Sunday afternoons in the old days and the sole, Champagne and home made Florentines we have now.

Our cottage pie always has a tin of baked beans and plenty of carrot in it - never have been a great fan of red meat and this way it tastes good and is good for us.
My grandmother was an East Prussian refugee from a seriously poor family. She could feed six people on a head of cabbage and I love some of her recipes.
Green lentils with carrots, leek, potato, seasoned with a dash of white wine vinegar, salt and pepper ... feeds a family of four for little more than £2. The grandchildren can't get enough of it.

If your dead MIL, on whom you spit, had been really mean she'd have disinherited her son and his ungrateful wife, instead she left the dosh and you had a good time spending it, due to her frugality.