Priscilla also helped on the small-holding and, as was custom in the village, carried their mid-day meal up to the fields where the men were working: ‘Just before half past twelve we always started to look down the road for the little figure of my grandmother, bringing up the dinner baskets... Our dinner in the harvest-field was always hot; none of your makeshift lumps of dough with onions stuffed into them: a dish known as a Bedfordshire Clanger; no lumps of cold bacon and bread, no plain bread and cheese, no sandwiches. In one basket would repose a steak-and-kidney pie, perhaps a rabbit pie, or a beef pudding, together with basins of new potatoes, carrots, peas or beans: all wrapped in clean white napkins. In the other there would be, perhaps, an apple pie or, what I myself loved best of all, a pie of a small yellow local plum of extraordinarily good flavour and rather squarish in shape and touched with a faint blush of crimson, very like an apricot... Always indefatigable, my grandmother was back at half past four, this time with one basket and a big blue can of tea... My grandmother always baked her own bread... with it we ate with dark red plum or damson jam and afterwards there was perhaps dough-cake, a bread with currants and sultanas in it, and another great favourite of mine, caraway cake, which my grandmother baked exquisitely’ (The Vanished World, pp.53-56)

In 'A Feast of Memories' H.E. remembers Christmas Days spent at his grandparent's house with what seemed an endless feast of food: rich roast beef, fowl, plum puddings, trifles, jams, jellies, cakes and honeycomb, followed later by cold meats and succulent pork pies. The Lucas household always struggled to make a living. In 'Mary Fennell – A Memory', Mary remembers Priscilla leaving a single stack of corn in the family’s fields for as long as she possibly could in an attempt to glean every last ear of corn for the family before any public gleaning could take place, and the Christmas feast would have been scrimped and saved for all year.