ONE of my grandmother's most chilling sayings was 'a little bit of mould won't hurt you,'

I remembered this the other day when my daughter threw out a packet of bread rolls which had a little bit of mould showing on one of them.

My grandmother's saying wasn't chilling in itself if said when you found a tiny spot of blue on a slice of bread. What was chilling was that you couldn't help wondering how many times she said it to herself when you weren't there, and the tiny spot of blue was half a loaf sized and growing by the second.

My grandmother came from a generation which didn't believe in throwing 'good' food away if it could be helped. She came from a generation brought up on cookery books which devoted several pages to the instructions for washing down meat in vinegar to remove 'a rank smell'. Rank smells these days bring visits from the environmental health department. In those days it meant reaching for the Sarsons.

It was drummed into me that food was expensive and should never be wasted. Everything in the larder should be used up, unless it managed to get up and walk away by itself. Throwing away bread was said to be particularly unlucky, and even today I can rarely bring myself to throw away so much as a slice of old bread. I have to put it out for the birds, who now they have lovely take-away nut containers sneer at it and fly off.

Nowadays everyone throws away a huge amount of food. Not just individuals of course, but restaurants, cafes, supermarkets and canteens, because they are bound by strict food regulations and daren't risk serving a day old sprout.

But it's the same in ordinary households, with fewer and fewer cooks bothering to keep the remains of one day's meal to serve up next day.

A few years ago I had a cookery book which was called something like 'Fun ways with leftovers'. Now you wouldn't see that today, would you? Or at least a recipe book of that ilk would hardly be likely to topple Delia Smith from the top of the best seller list. I have to say here that there was a time I couldn't abide Delia - perhaps because she always looked like one of those women who if their house caught fire in the small hours of the morning would emerge with perfect make-up and an immaculate hairdo. I have come to enjoy both her programmes and her cookery books, but even so she doesn't make much of a move towards recipes for re-cycling food. Perhaps she doesn't expect any of her food to remain.

I on the other hand have lived through times when Sunday's joint came cold on Monday and Shepherds Pied on Tuesday and the bone, if there was one, made a basis for a stew on Wednesday. Boiling bacon started its days as hot with mashed potatoes, carrots and a parsley sauce, cold with pickles and fried scalloped potatoes and ended up in tiny pieces as a boiled bacon suet pudding. If you didn't eat any or all of these meals you were hit with Reason Number One why you should eat up all your food - ie small starving Chinese children would dearly love what you had on your plate; which to a small child seemed a logical reason but later on you wondered what difference it would make to the said children if your food ended up in the Rhode Island Reds at the bottom of the garden.

If this didn't work my grandmother would go on to reason number two eg. 'you should be grateful because in the war we only had one egg a week and nobody saw a banana for five years etc, etc.' If you didn't finish your meal quickly you got a lot more - stories of parsnip jam and Spotted Dick without the spots and a cheese ration of two ounces a month which barely covered one slice of toast for a Welsh Rarebit.

I now appreciate that women of my grandmother's and mother's generation knew how to create meals out of next to nothing - show them a ham bone, a packet of lentils and an onion and you would have a passable and filling soup by the end of the day. My grandmother's piece de resistance was the fritter - she would fritter anything if necessary, encasing everything from slices of Spam to slices of cooking apple in a flour and water batter and frying them. Even the cat used to move away pretty swiftly when he saw her manning the batter bowl.

Today's generation don't appreciate this kind of economy. They would shy away from a meat and potato pie with a meat content of no more than two tablespoons of Sunday's roast lamb shredded to oblivion. Which is strange because most junk food contains a very similar ratio of ingredients plus a lot of E numbers.

One of the things which horrified me recently was someone on television giving a recipe for bubble and squeak. Now bubble and squeak is the truly great leftover food. usually made on a Monday because of the leftovers from Sunday. It should, to my mind, always contain mashed up potatoes, including a few leftover roast spuds, cold cabbage and, if you have them, carrots, swede and parsnips. Onions, preferably roast onions, are a bonus. Add a little drop of really good gravy to moisten, and a handful of parsley if you feel like it. The whole lot should be stomped heavily with a potato masher, seasoned with salt and pepper, mixed well and then fried in a mixture of oil and butter until both sides are deep brown and very crisp. Served with cold meat, or on its own with a fried egg on top, accompanied by Branston pickle or OK brown sauce, it is a handsome meal.

THIS woman on television gave a recipe for it using, and this she said daintily, 'only freshly cooked ingredients and not the usual leftover stale vegetables which are customary'. Of course it's customary you stupid woman, the whole idea of bubble and squeak is that you use food which would otherwise be wasted. AND it tastes all the better for it.

Is nothing sacred? She's the sort who would no doubt call Spam fritters Spam en-croute.

Talking of stupidity - I note that the fear manufacturers have of being sued nowadays, a fear imported from the USA, means that they have to treat every potential customer as a total idiot.

The instructions on my new iron included the warning that putting your hand on the hotplate when the iron is switched on could result in a burn, and the surprising news that it is dangerous to switch the iron on and leave it face down because it could burn the ironing board.

The best one, however, was the advice that the iron's owner should not iron clothes which are being worn.

Now how many of you out there have ever ironed clothing when either you, or a member of your household, are wearing them?

Do you regularly apply a hot iron up your husband's trouser legs to get the creases absolutely perfect or squirt some scalding steam onto a moving blouse?

It may, on occasions, be tempting to run an iron up and down the chest of someone who, after you have spent 20 minutes pressing a favourite shirt, points out a tiny little wrinkle on the collar and demands a re-iron, but ironing people on the move is not, I would think, a common problem.