Revisiting food from your youth.

You can still get Vesta Chow Mein - I love it and sometimes a whole pack to myself when I am eating alone on a Wednesday, when dear husband is out playing Squash! The crispy noodles are fantastic!!

I loved the Royal lemon meringue pie mix, it came with a little capsule of lemon oil that you stirred into the mix until it dissolved and made an amazing smell, best lemon meringue pie I've ever had.

Thought I'd already posted but it's not shown up. Mum and dad liked tripe and onions - I hated it and used to cut it into small pieces and swallow it whole. Disgusting stuff.

Only ever tried a Fray Bentos pie once was not at all keen. As for Tabioca pudding at school, terrible we used to call it frogspawn. We used to keep chickens so always had the eggs and when the hens got older they went in the pot

Never even heard of Rice Cremola but here is a recipe to try, if anyone makes it let us know how it tastes to your more mature tastebuds.

Rice Cremola
2 heaped tablespoonfuls of ground rice
1 tablespoon of custard powder
1 tablespoon of sugar
1 pint of milk.
Vanilla extract
Mix together the rice and custard adding a little milk to turn it into a smooth paste. Add vanilla extract. Heat remainder of the milk until it boils. Add milk to mixture. Stir. Return mixture to pan and simmer. Keep stirring. Once it becomes an even thick mixture it is ready to serve. The mixture can be baked and sprinkled with nutmeg.

QD stores sell Vesta curries for about a £1 and Iceland have the Fray Bentos pies for not much more than a £1.I do'treat' myself now and again although they are'nt on Slimming World plan!!!

Ooh yes, I'd forgotten all about Manchester tart which we used to have at school & I loved it! Also, like so many others,I loved butterscotch Angel Delight. The things I hated most were the nasty pink sausages mum used to cook every Monday & Tuesday - disgusting! No relation to the tasty artisan sausages we can buy today & I shudder to think what they were actually made of!

My mum used to cook Fray Bentos pies/puddings when I was a kid, but on one famous occasion she forgot to pierce the tin before steaming one of them and the damned thing exploded and spewed its contents all over the kitchenette ceiling.

I'm vegetarian these days, but my partner bought a Fray Bentos steak pie a few years ago, when I was in hospital. It's still sitting in the cupboard, now way out of date. One of these days I'll surreptitiously bin it along with all the even older (some by about 20 years!) tins.

Loved raw tripe with vinegar, like my dad. Had oysters, whelks, prawns and cockles (not at the same time) that were sold by the cockle man who went round the pubs. My dad used to bring them home for me when I was young. We had a Fray Bentos Steak & Kidney pie with new potatoes and peas last night. Still love them occasionally.
As a teenager I went to Weightwatchers and we had to have liver once a week. The recipe they pushed was liver cooked in tomato juice in the oven. Bleurgh!!

Raw tripe - ooh yuck yuck yuck!! I remeber my father liked cooked tripe, my mother hated it because of the smell!

Before becoming veggie I used to love the Fray Bentos pies and Brains Faggots though.

Oh what memories these posts have uncovered! No wonder my teeth are not good as I was brought up on bread and butter with sugar or condensed milk on. I used to give my children Angel Delight as they didn't like drinking milk, and Butterscotch was the best flavour. Vesta meals were trendy when I was first married as dried foods were just emerging. What were those dried peas called? They tasted so sweet. Being hard up with 4 children, one tin of Spam sliced thinly and battered could feed us all with chips, all deep fried of course! Oh how things have changed.

Ah butterscotch Angel Delight! My DD and our cat loved it! (She's an adult now but no doubt would still enjoy it, sadly our cat has passed now.)

My nan used to make lovely roast potatoes - using lard which I never use nowadays but my mum always did mashed potatoes which were OK but I longed for roast ones with the Sunday lunch so I now always have roast potatoes with a Sunday roast. Why she never roasted the potatoes I don't know.

I was one of the few people at school who actually liked pink custard! In fact I liked semolina too - another of my mother's favourites.

And yes, I remember the milk at school warming around the turtle stove - quite liked it. I wasn't a fussy child - wasn't allowed to be. Do find that the GC are fussy about food. Perhaps it was because of war shortages that we weren't.

School used to take all the unsold cakes, mash them up, cover them with chocolate and sell them the next day.

On Boxing Day my mother fried Christams pudding slices in butter and served them with a generous dollop of clotted cream - heart attack on a plate but so yummy!!

Reading back over this, I'd forgotten about sandwich spread - memo to self, must get some to put in my lunchtime sarnies!

My nana cooked some really nice stuff, particularly her fruitcake, but some of it was awful. There was something called "pork bones", which occasionally featured in pies but (even worse) with baked beans which mixed horribly with the gravy. God knows what cut of meat "pork bones" were - I remember they were very fatty and you had to pick out the bits of meat and avoid the little bones.

Never really liked Angel Delight, though we had it pretty often, but I would kill now for a Kunzel cake.

Anyone remember Findus frozen pancakes? We had them frequently too.

I love Heinz cream of tomato soup still have it on occasions. Brings back memories when I was a little girl, if I had a cold my mum always made me a bowl of soup. Can't remember someof the names but we had tin peas, shippems paste for sandwiches my favourite was sardine.
Usd to buy angel delight for my children.
Vesta curries as well. Happy days.

In case no-one's mentioned it yet - Heinz Salad Cream!

Great minds think alike! I have often wondered if I could recreate Rice Creamola by having ordinary custard powder with ground rice added. Might be worth a try I guess!

Another Butterscotch angel delight fan here.
OH liked ox tongue and dutifully I went to the "offal' shop, stupidly took the kids. The smell in the shop was awful.

Said tongue was prepared and skinned and put in a bowl , under a weight.

It was tasty, but kids refused to eat it.

Sadly the 'offal' shop shut down with the advent of foot and mouth. I do still buy ox tail as it is such a flavoursome dish, all that tail flicking to get rid of the flies

Yes we liked butterssotch angel delight too (with crumbled milk flake on too) or chocolate angel delight wih tinned pears or a cut up banana .
I liked vesta paella and some sort of dried minty peas , can't remember the name. I loved tinned spaghetti - never had any other pasta. Rice was always baked as a sweet milk pudding.
Yes we also had those packet lemon meringues - yum! Does anyone remember ice magic - a chocolate sauce which set hard on ice cream? Also my kids loved chocolate arctic roll. My DiL would be shocked by tge rubbish I fed my children. Perhaps nutrition is better today after all?! Certainly my school dinners were horrid and I hardly ate them - left me with a hatred of cabbage, swede and mashed potato for years!

There are 2 things I cooked as a novice that taught me 'You can try too hard' - First was an orange flan that involved peeling segments of oranges - and in the end was not nearly as nice as using tinned oranges. - The second - I can barely tell you - a dish that required lambs tongues. I bought them, but you were supposed to PEEL them - stomach just could not cope.

They were called Surprise Peas polly.

devongirl my mum used to fry leftover Christmas pudding in butter too!

DH used to love sandwich spread and still likes Heinz Salad Cream.

sandelf a friend's recommendation for cooking for a crowd was to use the KISS method.
'Keep it Simple, Stupid'

I'e never had a Fray Bentos pie either, are they the ones in tins? As teenagers, my friend and I would make Vesta Chow Mein and think we were terribly grown up! I bought one recently and told my son how delicious it was going to be - it wasn't!
Cremola was something that my mother made and there was a hot chocolate pudding similar to blacmange, but I can't remember the name.
My mum made sago pudding too, never liked that!
I still adore the butterscotch Angel Delight, don't know why they even bother to make the other flavours.
I seem to remember something called 'chopped ham and pork', was that Spam by another name? Also 'savoury rice' which was a mixture of rice and peas and tiny bits of carrot and stuff, which needed to be rehydrated in a saucepan with water.
Slightly different subject but, club biscuits? Why's the chocolate so thin now? Jam and lemon puffs, they were a thing of beauty, where did they go?

Thunder and Lightening was a treat, is anyone else familiar? My mum used to make me Frys chocolate cream sandwiches too. Oh golly!