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My nan - my mum’s mum - was a superb “plain cook”. Her specialties were roast pork, which always had incredible crunchy crackling and, steak and kidney puddings that just melted … Both are impossible to reproduce quite the way she did them and she died in 1980, so it must be at least 30 years since I had one of her dinners, but I can still “taste” them just thinking about it.
And with them, recall fond childhood memories, shelling peas in her kitchen that I’d just picked from the garden that granddad grew in neat rows, alongside the potatoes, beans, carrots, onions …
Shamefully, I’m perfectly incapable of being self-sufficient enough to grow things, but, of course, vegetables that fresh had a lot to do with how wonderful and wholesome it was and, shows a distinct “advantage” of coming from a “poor” background. Poor materially, at any rate. Not in any other sense.
When we weren’t cooking or eating, nan would take me out walking for miles and miles around the countryside, or fishing on the canal with granddad, during my annual holiday with them, on summer days that, most curiously (for England), I seem to remember as mostly being sunny! 
We all love comfort food from time to time, for these and many similar reasons and can at least get to an approximation of their taste and the memories they invoke, so I thought you might enjoy this.
Though, of course, lots of grandmas are cooking for one, that is not necessarily the case at this site, What’s Cooking Grandma?, which features videos of various grandmothers all over the world sharing their recipes.
This video shows a yummy Lancashire Hotpot in the making, which you could make - enough for 4-6 - and freeze the extra portions for later too.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grA3EhLN0Vw]
Sponzurz
Thanks for the link. What’s Cooking Grandma is such great idea. Both my grandmothers died back in the ’80s, but I was the only grandchild interested in their recipe boxes (and now my mother’s). I even have one written by my grandmother of a recipe from HER grandmother. I’ve already started making changes, but I like knowing that I’m reading the same works.
Anyway, thanks for showing this to us out.
I meant to write reading the same words.
Taking it back a step further, you might also like to look at The Old Foodie blog that is in my blogroll. That, in its turn, reminded me of an 18th Century English cookbook (well, a modern reprint thereof) I once owned that had delightful recipes that called for things like a whole swan or a bushell of oysters. Perfectly useless to actually cook, but rich in historical references, some of which, occasionally, turn out to be useful in explaining funny old terms our forebears used.
Why is it gramas are always the best cooks…hehe