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21.08.2023 - 11:54 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty
I am making transcripts for The Wartime Kitchen and Garden, a fascinating series starring Ruth Mott and Peter Dodson, with a voiceover by Peter Thoday. This is episode four (of eight). [You’ll find the other transcripts, and other relevant posts, under the Home Front tag.]
[Content warning: this episode contains images of a cooked pig’s head.]
Episode 4 transcript
00.59 [Peter Thoday] Below the peaches in the glasshouse at Chilton gardens, rows of spring cabbage make sturdy progress. Growing this catch crop of early vegetables allows head gardener Harry Dodson to save the peach trees from being grubbed up as a wasteful luxury.
01:18 [Peter Thoday] A few miles away, in the back garden of the house where she’s billeted, Chilton’s land girl Annie plants marrows on the Anderson shelter. But for many in 1941, this crude structure was more than an extension of the vegetable garden. It was all that stood between life and death.
02:00 [Peter Thoday] Everyone was urged, by the Ministry of Food, to save kitchen waste. Joyce, the young evacuee billeted with Ruth Mott, puts the vegetable peelings in the special pig bin.
02:11 [Ruth Mott] Well, it [the pig] was the most important person about, really, because it ate up all your scraps. And you sort of thought, eventually, that you were going to have a nice meal off of it, and some rashers, and some different things.
02:23 [Peter Thoday] The pigs were killed by an authorised slaughterman, but many housewives had to overcome their squeamishness to butcher the resultant carcass. Brought up in a large country kitchen, it’s nothing new to Ruth Mott. Today she makes brawn from a pig’s head.
02:39 [Ruth Mott] The most peculiar thing about it, really, is the fact that you can use every piece
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