I was standing in a supermarket queue the other day, idly listening to two ladies chattering.

Now one of the ladies was quite plainly the sort you never say 'How are you?' to, not unless you have 15 minutes and a strong stomach for details of obscure diseases and conditions. Unfortunately her friend did ask, and all of us in the queue were regaled to a series of maladies which had apparently afflicted every member of her family in the past month. And there seemed to be a lot of them.

From what I could gather most of her Waltonesque family had been struck down by coughs, colds, sore throats, headaches and the like, while the younger members of the family had all suffered what could loosely be described (and from her description and I do mean loosely) as bowel trouble.

'It's all that pasta and stuff they eat', she said to her friend, making pasta sound like some exotic drug. They both agreed that the lamentable eating habits of the younger generation with its love of curry and all things funny and foreign must have some bearing on their health and that good old British food was what was needed.

Now my grandmother held the same views, although in those days few people had heard of curry, never mind shish kebabs or sweet and sour pork balls.

She believed that food was one of the main weapons in combating disease. The other major weapon, apart from the general belief that anyone who professed to be ill with anything other than a fatal condition was a sissy, was a good layer of well aired clothing. I've almost certainly mentioned before her love of the liberty bodice, good wool (and very scratchy) vests, proper underwear and sensible top clothes. Long before the layered look became fashionable my grandmother donned and removed layers of cardies and jumpers in accordance with the calendar.

Clothes, she insisted, kept out germs. Damp clothes, especially wet socks, encouraged them, so everything had to be hoisted on a clothes airer above the stove to crisp up and gather its own little cloud of black sooty specks.

She always swore she avoided the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic because she dressed warmly and kept her head covered. I suspect she saw germs as airborne legions flying around searching out a piece of naked flesh. Actually she was living in Canada at the time of the epidemic so that could have been the reason.

On the food front we had summer food and winter food. The menu changed with the season, because of course we had seasonal foods. But more than that it changed with the thermometer.

You knew winter was on its way when the first dumpling appeared.

Now in the past I have written about my grandmother's cooking and received a couple of sharp letters more or less saying I shouldn't criticise a poor harmless old lady's culinary efforts. They quite obviously had not got the hang of my grandmother's character, which didn't include harmless.

I don't mean to offend. I look back with fond memories and gratitude because my grandmother's cooking really acted as an introduction to the delights of good food and the pleasures of eating. Not at the time, you understand, but later when I realised that cabbage didn't have to taste like old boiled socks and liver didn't necessary have to be grey to be edible. And you didn't have to ask after a meal you'd just eaten 'what was that?'

I do remember that she spent most of her time altering Mrs Beeton's recipes, such as removing seven of the suggested eight eggs and halving the quantities of meat or fish while doubling anything with starch in it. This made her seem like a paragon of virtue during the war, but she'd always done it.

Her winter menus consisted of anything which would 'stick to your ribs'. The dumplings certainly did that, in fact they felt that they would stick and not move any further on.

Almost all the winter menu consisted of something with starch in it which could be steamed in the copper. And because you didn't want to waste good boiling water the pudding was usually steamed as well. Any day of the week you could look into that copper and spot several rather greyish lumps steaming merrily away, leaking jam and gravy in all directions. The only saving grace, my mother used to say, was that my grandmother didn't insist on serving the water as soup.

The puddings usually contained my grandmother's home made jams, which all tasted the same but were usually so runny there was nothing left in the roly poly when you got it, or so stiff you had to carve it.

For a time we had home-bottled fruit to use, but my mother put her foot down when my grandmother blew up several jars of bottled pears because she forgot they were on the stove and the water boiled away.

There were also stew and hot pots, always made with something old - ie a fairly ancient fowl, bits of mutton from an athletic sheep, ox cheek or tail from an OAP cow. By the time it was 'cooked through' it could have been boiled elephant but it still had all its goodness in it.

The only let up from rib sticking foods was on a Friday when we had fish because it was traditional and in winter this was either boiled smoked haddock or a fish pie which was ninety percent potato and ten percent cod in a white sauce. Once a week there was a giant baked rice pudding, the only way rice ever entered the house.

Being a hungry child I ate the food anyway. There was no eating between meals, we never had 'snack food', it didn't really exist.

I think my grandmother's cooking efforts were hampered, firstly by her being impatient, secondly never measuring anything and thirdly by economising on ingredients without realising that if you substituted beef dripping for butter in a scone recipe the results wouldn't be quite the same.

Maybe there is something in the idea of stoking up with food fuel to ward of winter's ills. I don't remember ever having much by way of a cold. Indigestion yes, but never a cold.