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Every household would have a cold meat day generally on washing
day, which was a big day at that time before washing machines. Cold meat and
mashed potatoes or something like that, and then they would have other steamed
pudding or rice pudding, afterwards which was of course done in the oven in a
pie dish. But if you had a big joint you would use a mincer to make the joint
go further by making a hash of some description on the second or third day,
perhaps a cottage pie or something like that, or rissoles so mincers were very
much more part of the household than they are now. I still have one but I don't
use it. I use my food processor if I want to chop food up now.
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The mincer
was made of very heavy metal. I don't know what metal it would be, iron
I suppose, with a covering surface, and it clamped on to the edge of the
kitchen table because it had to clamp very firmly. The two feet would go top
and bottom of the table edge so you had to be sure to put something under the
top edge, so that you didn't mark the table. And for that reason of course you
kept it on the kitchen table and not the dining room table. And you put a basin
underneath the outlet, you put food in the top, meat and onions and whatever
else, and we turned the handle and minced it into either fine or course grains
of food as you desired. So instead of buying minced meat in the butcher, you
didn't buy fresh meat to mince, you minced up part of the joint because most
people had a joint at the weekend, again meat being a great deal cheaper than
it is now. |
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