Cooking the old fashioned way: pasar gato por liebre

Image pinched from the Humane Society International.For obvious reasons I don’t have my own picture for this entry for the Cooking the Old fashioned way quarterly event. I’ve long been fascinated by the kinds of old-fashioned foods that we no longer bother eating.At mama Tomato’s, in country England not too far from the university city of Cambridge, almost everything is for the picking. Plums are eaten from the tree and eventually made into jam and chutney. Sloes and sugar are added to gin and marinated into a wonderful liquor. Dandelions and other flowers find their way into salad.The young leaves of stinging nettles are very much like spinach and become soup.The domestic cat, however, remains curled up on the bed.During WWII, my father’s family remained in London. His mother ingeniously faked baked bananas with turnips. And meat was in short supply.Unscrupulous black marketers would, as the Spanish say, pasar gato por liebre