WHAT'S THE STORY WITH REHASHING MONEY-SAVING ADVICE?
WE THINK we have it tough in these crunchy times but at least we’re not living on giblet soup, making cheese out of milk so sour you could stand a spoon in it or extending the life of our undergarments by artfully stitching new gussets into place when old ones fray. Not yet, at any rate, but it is early days in this era of economic woe.
At the beginning of last year before the downturn had developed into a depression, Hunter Davies, the British journalist who famously wrote the only authorised biography of the Beatles – as well as ghosted autobiographies of Wayne Rooney, Paul Gascoigne and John Prescott to name just three – was hit with a sense of deja vu every time he opened a newspaper or magazine.
"Women columnists who just a few months previously had been telling readers how to track down that must-have bag for £495 or a £995 pair of Jimmy Choo shoes were now advising on how to make presents out of cardboard and shopping at charity shops," he writes in his new book Cold Meat and How to Disguise It, a look back at 100 years of belt-tightening.
Much of the advice which was being sold as fresh and insightful, was, Davies concluded, almost identical to the material newspaper and magazine columnists had been trotting out for generations, through world wars, general strikes, three-day weeks and various earlier economic collapses.
He did not have to travel far to make the connection between the old and the new. He is an inveterate collector and freely admits to having at least 20 different collections on the go at any one time and his house in the Lake District was absolutely wedged with magazines dating back to the 19th century.
The book is illustrated with dozens of posters and magazine cut-outs from the last century, most of which came from these collections. While he gently chides the current crop of money-saving gurus for rehashing advice from generations past, he is not above some artful pilfering himself and he cheerily admits to having thieved the title of his book from a money-saving tipster who published a book of the same name in 1904.
“I pinched the title, I pinched the cover design. And almost all of the illustrations, nicked. It’s not plagiarism,” he told Pricewatch last week, “it’s recycling.”
Recycling really is his thing, not so much for money or planet saving reasons but because, like many people who grew up in wartime Britain, he abhors waste. He shops almost exclusively in second-hand shops, collects discarded elastic bands and pieces of string to reuse and “will always reach for the bad fruit in the bowl which other people would turn their noses up at”.
While his book contains scores of tips, some of which could be practical in the 21st century, he says he never set out to write a money-saving book. In fact, he is pretty withering about the “scores of books” recently published which offer people “banal and obvious” tips (it goes without saying that Pricewatch kept schtum about its own work in this area).
At least one positive thing you can say in favour of today's money-saving books, they tend to be short, unlike Samuel Smiles's economically titled Thriftwhich was published in 1879 and ran to 150,000 words.
The four golden rules of Smile's Thriftwere "Spend less than you earn; Pay ready money and never run into debt; Never anticipate uncertain profits by expending them before they are secured; Keep a regular account of all that you earn."
After this, Davies says, the book quickly descends into preachy moralising in which the greed of women who spend their husband’s money on “dress and finery” is exposed and the poor get chastised for spending up to £10 on their own funerals.
Cold Meat, unlike Thriftand many of the po-faced money-saving books Davies dismisses, is written in a whimsical style which will be easily recognised by people familiar with his work spanning five decades.
His own favourite money-saving idea from times gone by is one which doesn’t even make it into the book. He reminisces about how his granny used to make cream cheese from sour milk. It sounds so simple to do, Pricewatch was almost tempted to give it a whirl. If your milk has gone off, don’t pour it down the sink but pour it into a muslin rag and hang it over the sink. The liquid drains away and when the muslin is opened you have fresh cream cheese, which, he assures us, is wonderful.
The idea of draining sour milk and eating the remnants is almost unthinkable because we have fridges and homogenised milk, but most importantly, because we are too soft for such fare.
While we complain about how tough times are now, things are still an awful lot better for most of us than at any point during the 100 years documented in Cold Meat. Could we cope with the deprivations of the war years or before? "We'd find it a shock, certainly," Davies says. "I think we would cope again. There is something in the human nature that likes deprivation. People can't sew or darn or put on a button . . . It would be hard, but I think people would cope."
100 years of top tips
Turning off lamps – and radio sets too – when you leave a room should be a matter of habit. Two hours' waste of your radio every day uses up half a hundredweight of coal a year at the power station.
– Fuel Sense Saves Money (1940)
The housewife would never get rough hands if she kept a box of ordinary starch on the sink. Every time she puts her hands in water she should dip them in starch and rub for a minute.
– The Best Way Book (1914)
Never throw sour milk away. For mixing cakes it is preferable to fresh milk and produces lighter cake. If very sour and thick, beat it up with a little water.
– Household Hints (1902)
Save all pieces of string that come round parcels of all kinds. Knot them together and wind into a ball and knit excellent dishcloths – the knots help to get the burnt marks off pudding dishes.
– The Best Way Book (1914)
In every economical house the knitting basket should be an institution and all the girls should be taught to knit. Knitted woollen stockings are not only more durable than bought stockings, but they promote the curculation better and so are preventative of cold feet and chilblains.
– Domestic Ecomomy (1896)
An anti-freckle lotion can be made by mixing together equal parts of glycerine and lemon juice and adding a pinch of borax.
– The Best Way Book (1914)
There are many ways of cutting up the remains of cold meat. Divide it into fancy shapes such as cutlets or fingers; the dish will be more pleasing in appearance.
– Mrs Beeton's All About Cookery (1920s)
