Food then and now

No one has mentioned school dinners yet. Remember the stew with tough grisly meat, black potatoes and overcooked cabbage - and the puddings were always cake and custard.

I remember putting the grisly meat in my tunic pocket!

Sara1954
I also hated the texture of meat. My father would slice all meats very very fine so I could swallow them and "wouldn't starve".

If there is anyone on this thread who has not read Nigel Slater's book 'Toast' it is a must for those of us of a certain age!

I was a child before the war so no “foreign” or convenience food. Always roast on Sundays. Chicken or turkey at Christmas. Besides the usual stews we had rabbit and tripe and onions, liver and bacon, boiled bacon joint. Easter Sunday was salmon with new potatoes and fresh peas. Salmon was not filleted then but cut across with the bone in the middle which made it more tasty.
On wet days we made sweets. Toffee and coconut ice etc.
The only time we had yogurt was after going to a matinee of an opera Mum took us to the Express Dairy for tea.
Sliced bread was unheard of. Always freshly baked crusty loaf. If my sister and I were sent to get a cottage loaf the top would be missing by the time we got home
The milkman would come round every day. No bottles. You took your own jug to be filled.
On Sundays a cart came round selling cockles, shrimps, crab and whelks for Sunday tea.

My mum was in hospital for a while and the social services had my dad brought in from his HGV driving job to look after us, his signature dish was boiled whole onions and a slab of gammon equally unappatising swimming in boiled onion water, oh yuk. Corn Beef, mash and baked beans were my fav. and jelly and blacmange

Antonia, I don’t t remember you living in our house as I grew up, but from your description I think we must have been sharing ! You’ve certainly stirred some memories. I think the Lemon Meringue Pie was Green’s and it was delicious!

Food was pretty much as you describe for me when young. Now though my diet is is near plant based and full of colour....super healthy.

Generally meat, veg and spuds, mashed or boiled. Not much variety. My mum did make very good home made soups in winter though, and hotpots. Vesta curries and chow meins were very exotic!

Lemon meringue pie figures a lot here. My own mother made it from scratch, grated lemon zest etc. Divine. During the week we sometimes "only" had lamb chops with mint sauce. Mint from the garden, vinegar and a pinch of sugar. As for sweets we had them.often but small amounts. 2 oz jelly babies can't have been more than half a dozen.

Thursdays was good night, my mum used to borrow 5 shillings off a neighbour until she got paid on a Saturday. My sister had craft cheese slices, I would have a tin of Tyne brand mince with an oxo cube sprinkled on the top no veg or potatoes. My mum and dad would have a ham sandwich. When we got home from school we would have a sauce sandwich, if we wanted something sweet we ate a raw potato dipped in sugar or luxury of banana and sugar sandwich.

We kept lots of chickens in our large back garden, so eggs and chicken featured large in our everyday food. Also we grew lots of vegetables and soft fruits so we had a healthy diet before it was ever fashionable. I clearly remember the larder with rows of kilner jars full of bottled fruits, and pickled eggs too.
We even made our own clotted cream. Not so healthy, but delicious.

My dear mum absolutely hated cooking and baking and never once made home made cakes while I was growing up but still produced good meals every night for me and my dad. I ate a lot of fish fingers I remember with mash and baked beans. Vegetables were plentiful and she did cook a roast every Sunday which she claimed she hated making. I too remember the packet lemon meringue pie being whipped together (Greene's ?), tins of evaporated milk with tinned peaches, salad for Sunday tea with bread and butter. Dream Topping was an absolute favourite. Never went hungry but don't ever remember eating between meals. Very fond memories

We always had a roast on Sunday, then cold meat and mashed potato on Monday and rissoles on Tuesday. I remember lots of mince and lamb with a lot of fat and gristle which I hated. No wonder I was thin - hated milk so never had rice pudding or cream or custard when we had tinned fruit as a treat. Everything was very English. In the 60s my mother started making spaghetti bolognese. Real spaghetti but usual English mince in brown gravy with a little spot of tomato puree and of course, the dreadful ground parmesan out of a cardboard tube. How different from DH growing up in an Italian family in central London with fresh pasta, fresh ravioli from the deli, salami, coppa, and panetonne at Christmas.

Blossoming

We wouldn’t have been able to avoid Vesta meals for our large family

I remember lots of homemade soup, favourites being leek and potato or pea and ham. We also ate a lot of fruit and vegetables as my father was a greengrocer. Bacon butties were a Sunday morning treat. Sunday roast followed by Monday stew.

Yes, Vesta meals were best avoided ?
I only remember them after I was married though, and now and then did the Chinese one with crispy bits for a treat.There was never very much for two people.
Childhood meals were mainly dinners eaten at school, lots of veg, some meat or fish ( quite healthy meals actually) and all cooked at the school, not brought in.
Puddings, rice, sago, or tapioca or semolina, sponge with jam and coconut and pink custard, treacle tart.
Meals at the weekend were often things like cottage pie, corn beef hash or stew.
Most children were slim in spite of the many carbs they ate (and all the penny sweets.) Mainly because no junk food or the constant grazing most children seem to do now, and we walked everywhere and played out all the time.

My mother was a wonderful cook, but looking back she did spend a lot of her life in the kitchen. We ate very well, even when there was still postwar rationing. Vegetables from the garden - broad beans were my favourite. She and my father had been students in France, so her ideas were quite sophisticated. She couldn’t always get the ingredients she’d have liked - if you wanted garlic in the 1950s you had to grow it!

She made a wonderful coffee cake decorated with crystallised violets and those little silver balls.

We had huge breakfasts, with fried bread and bacon and eggs as well as Weetabix or porridge and, of course, toast and marmalade. Nobody was remotely overweight.

Sugar sandwiches after school - thin sliced white bread spread with Stork margarine and sprinkled with white sugar. How healthy is that!

But, we had half a dozen hens fed on scraps and corn and rabbits which we collected hogweed and roadside grass for, in our little terrace house garden. And and allotment half a mile away which we cycled to. We ate a lot of home produce as it came in season.

No fridge or freezer so Mum used to salt down runner beans in large sweet jars. A layer of sliced beans then a layer of salt. They lasted most of the winter and, despite being soaked in water before cooking, were absolutely disgusting. Surplus cauliflower was put into piccalilli.

Lots of the above are very familiar, I’m afraid I really didn’t like anything, I hated meat, the texture mainly, I would sit for hours trying to swallow it.
Cottage pie was left over minced beef, with mashed potatoes, no flavouring or veg, I hated stews and pies because of the grizzly meat.
My gran used to make pea soup, horrible, I think one of the things I disliked most was apple dumplings.
Every mealtime for me was a battle of wills, sometimes I’d be left at the table for hours, sometimes my uneaten meal would appear again in time for the next meal!
I know this isn’t in the spirit of the thread, so I did like butterscotch instant whip, and loved my grans apple cake, but sadly I can’t think of anything else.

My mum was an experimenter, so we had non traditional English food quite often, her moussaka was always one of my favourites. I remember her cooking mussels once, but as typical children, none of us would touch them. So we ended up with jam sandwiches and our neighbours enjoyed the mussels. We had an allotment, so there were always lots of vegetable and fruit, the freezer was full of damsons, plums, sliced apples, green beans etc. to last the whole year.

Breakfast in the week was porridge, made with water, we put cold milk on it, at weekends it was bacon and egg, one rasher of bacon each and a fried egg was cut in half between 2 of us.
Instead of a lot of sweets, we`d get cocoa and sugar mixed together in a cone of newspaper, pretended it was kali from the shop. Also half a pomegranate and a pin, kept us quiet for hours!
A special treat on Friday was fish and chips from the chippy. In those days they did only sell fish and chips.
My mother made her own bread, it smelt lovely and tasted even better.

I seem to think we ate more then. Cooked breakfast, main meal at lunchtime, high tea in the evening and a hot drink and biscuits at bed time.
I don't eat anything like that now.

Similar meals to the OP.

Mum always fried our sausages, never had them grilled. I used to love the little tins of sausages with baked beans, only had them as a very occasional treat, as mum didn’t like them.

Tea with sugar at every meal, I rarely drink tea nowadays.

Don’t think our meals were very balanced, think I eat much healthier nowadays.

I don't remember having any ready made dishes when I was at home with my parents. Always home made and delicious. No bought cakes or pies etc. My mother bottled fruit and made pickles, we had a spare bedroom full of her preserves.
Unfortunately I didn't follow in her footsteps, my cooking was perfunctory at best and I really enjoyed Vesta meals and chips from the chippie. My poor mother was horrified. I remember her giving me a kilner jar of Yorkshire pudding mix she had made so I could produce something halfway decent. No wonder I'm now married to a chef.

Blondiescot

Tizliz, you can still buy creamed corn online, or if you google it, you'll find recipes on how to make your own.

Amazon have it for £3.79 for 4 cans with £22.97 del. (that is not a typing mistake). I will look into making my own, thanks

I remember left over Sunday roast being minced in the old hand turned mincer to make cottage pie on Monday. Also toad in the hole, sausage sandwich for Saturday tea, chicken for Christmas Dinner. My gran used to make egg custard in the little cast iron oven above her fire. Also remember bread and dripping which I loved.

I was obviously really lucky to have a wide and varied diet.
Obviously some egg and chips too but my father in particular liked trying new things.

Both my mother and father had lived abroad, my Dad with the Army, my mother as a young girl/teenager. They brought back ideas that were alien to most:
German rye bread, muesli, pickled/soused herrings, curries, kiwi fruits, even the occasional mango.

We also ate offal.. (though rarely tripe as my mother didn't like it). I can still see the pig's heads in brine in the pantry!