Second to Nan

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 14 February 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sheila Dillon revisits the idea of our grannies’ cooking and how it shapes us, hearing from listeners who sent in their own stories. Why does learning to cook from your granny seem to be such a powerful experience? What about those grannies who leapt at the chance technology offered to escape the endless cycle of cooking from scratch? And – for those of us who feel we’re relying too much on processed food - can we find a granny substitute to help us put down the takeaway menu and pick up a peeler?

Guests include: Dr Polly Russell - food historian Alicia Weston - founder of Bags of Taste Sophie Beckett - Public Health Research Officer at Birmingham Museums Trust Jonny Murphy "The Hungry Hooker"

We'd like to thank all of the listeners who wrote in to us following the broadcast of the programme "Nan the Wiser", but we'd like to say a special thanks to Matthew, Lynn, Mary, Tony, Marie, Peter, Rob and Giselle.

Presented by Sheila Dillon Produced in Bristol for BBC Audio by Beth Sagar-Fenton. The Assistant Producer was Jo Peacey.

Archive from Birmingham's Food and Drink Oral Histories Project: Interviewee: Doris Evans, 1984. From the City Sound Archive, courtesy of Birmingham Museums Trust Interviewee: John Baker, 1984. From the City Sound Archive, courtesy of Birmingham Museums Trust

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before you listen to this BBC podcast, I want to tell you why I love podcasting.
0:04.7	Hi, my name's Tommy Dixon, and I make podcasts for the BBC.
0:08.4	I'm a big fan of stories, always loved a good book.
0:11.4	But when I started commuting for my first job, I discovered podcasts.
0:15.4	I was blown away by how a creative idea and the right mixture of sounds could take you into
0:19.2	a whole new world full of incredible stories. You know, the type that make you go, wow. And that kind of inspired me to
0:25.2	give it a go myself, which to cut a long story short led to a BBC training scheme and a whole
0:30.0	new career giving other people that exact same feeling. So if you want to hear amazing stories
0:34.2	that make you go wow like I did, they're just a tap or click away on BBC Sounds.
0:40.8	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. A couple of months ago, we made a program called Nan
0:47.0	the Wiser about grannies, how they influence the way we cook and have shaped how we eat.
0:53.9	That program triggered a feast of memories from listeners,
0:57.6	mostly of the delicious kind and a few of the terrible.
1:01.3	I learned the basics of cooking first at my grandmother's apen strings.
1:06.1	Her gravy would have won every prize going.
1:08.7	That skill was passed down to my mother.
1:15.5	And thence to me, it made an excellent base for Mother's Duspin soup.
1:18.0	A staple in the winter household.
1:22.4	On Fridays, we'd have stewed ills in parsley sauce.
1:26.4	They wriggled in black buckets, and the vendor grabbed them and nimbly chopped them on the marble slab.
1:29.3	Nans' parsley sauce was lovely and parsley doesn't taste the same now.
1:34.3	Granny and I made everything from scratch.
	...

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