There is an old book of poetry entitled "Heartthrobs", which is a rich mine of such materials. I do not have it to hand, but remember a mother's reference to wine as "the adder's kiss". (Happily my own parents were not Prohibitionists and did not engage in such Calvinist austerities as water-drinking, but they did have the book about the house.)

Are there not any songs about wicked mothers, other than in the much older ballads like The Flower of Serving Men? Could Victorian mothers have been so uniformly sweet?

A few years back someone in Cape Breton released a 45 of a recitation about his greedy and ill-tempered mother, entitled "Tanks Ma, Bye". I distinctly remember that the mother took the last piece of pie for herself. This is similar to a song I once heard on a Grand Ole Opry repeat on PBS, where the singer complained that the reason he was so short was because his family would never let him eat the last potato.