Food then and now

Oh my goodness, reading all your comments reminded me of my first stay in England in 1973. What an utter shock for a French girl! The food was so different to what I was used to and bless her, Beryl the lady from the family I was staying with, was a frightful cook! I starved for most of the 2 weeks I stayed with them. But they were a lovely family and I came back to stay with them several times.

Bijou I’d forgotten a cottage loaf!

i was born in 63, i split my time between my grans and my mums, not much money but our meals were good, during the week it was things like chopped pork , beans and chips. scrambled egg, peas and chips, there was always a big pile of bread on table sunday was usally boiled chicken so she could make soup, chicken, mash and veg, usually cabbage or turnip, but we got a pudding on a sunday trifle, rice or cake and custard, sunday night after our bath we gor egg mayo sandwiches (mayo was salad cream) and a cuppa, very few chidlren were overweight as we payed outside always running about, my punishment for breaking a window and telling lies was to stand at my bedroom window watching all the other kids play outside. the food was always simple, if you don't eat you go hungry, we would get money for the tuc shop or the shop to buy penny dainties, whoppers or black jacks, my gran would buy me pick n mix from woolworths or old english spangles. life seemed simple for kids, it is only when you grow up and realise how hard it must have been for some parent trying to put a meal on the table.

Antonia..... snap! Your description sounds like my house all year round .. apart from Christmas ....I was the posh neighbour ....we had a turkey. Downside was..... it went on for days after Christmas. Apart from that....we’re twins! I SO remember thinking Vests chicken curry a very exotic meal!!

Homemade rissoles, dry and tasteless, spaghetti bell (Mum was taught by an Italian when Dad was in the army). Mince was the basis for almost every meal. My sister sarcastically bought Mum a cookbook 101 ways with mince...Mum thought it the best present ever! From then on Shepherds Pie had a cheesy, crumbly topping. We had boxed lemon meringue and chocolate meringue pie, which was a lottery of was it runny (yummy) or solid (yucky). Mum tended to overcook everything, but especially boiled potatoes on a Sunday - our neighbours said they always knew when our Sunday Lunch was ready by the smell of burnt potatoes!

I remember the Corned Beef scare, I’ve never eaten it again.
I also remember spam fritters, one of my dad’s specialties, the potato was raw, and the batter oozing with fat.

We visited an aunt who gave us a salad including huge Cos lettuce leaves and celery sticks, We were allowed to squirt Primula cheese along the hollows - height of sophistication I thought!

My Aunty used to get potato fritters from the chippy ! I loved them , then she varied it with apple fritters , even better !
I think it was a Glasgow delicacy ? it was during the war and maybe fish was scarce some months
Mum was a brilliant cook and baker , so she was less than approving of shop bought!

Memories of my meals in childhood were always roast beef on Sundays - but chicken only at Christmas. Beef must have been very much cheaper than it is now, and cheaper than chicken - how things have changed.
Meals were always meat, potatoes and greens and carrots. My mother’s pastry was mouth watering, and we often had meat pie, apple pie, and I also remember syrup suet sponge pudding and custard.
We never had cream, except the top of the milk. No such thing as ready meals, or pasta. Rice was only for rice puddings.

My mum and her mum and sister were all “good plain cooks”. I was a boom year baby born after the war, and our food was all home cooked, Mum’s battered fish and scallops (sliced potatoes battered ) were lovely. We had a roast every Sunday, rice pudding or tapioca or sago. Being northern our evening meal was always called Tea, still is! Cottage pie, hot pot, meat and potato pie, called Tatie pie. Didn’t have chicken very often, and all home made cakes except at weekend when we had a half a dozen fancies from the bakers. We were well fed on a strict budget and no waste. Dad had an allotment so fresh veg and fruit. School dinners were a shock when I went to Grammar school at 11!

Have really enjoyed reading all stories and taking me back there.
I was born 1951, and rationing was still on, so things were always more difficult.
My Dad,s parents owned a grocery shop so were able to get bits first !!!!!!

Also to answer the souse question from Liverpool area. Yes it was a 'white' stew using what you have , some meat (lamb) and then onions, carrots, other veg , and potato pieces which used to soak up stock.......... you left it cooking at least 2 hours or more......... we would serve it with pickled red cabbage, piccalilli or the like. Normally served in a bowl to dip in bread.

The 'blind souse' refers to no meat cooked with it. 'So you must be blind if you can't see the meat !!!!!!' and a way to save money.
Also on the River Mersey, Camell Lairds was famous for ship building, but many a workers were 'blinded' in one eye while riveting the steel.

Special Sunday afternoon tea served on best china (white with pink rosebuds). Sandwiches with tinned salmon, tinned fruit salad with condensed milk, bread and butter, homemade cake.... and a large pot of tea.

Gosh ! Arctic roll,angel delight,vesta curry,those amazing super- filled fruit pies, dunkies,jubbly, fruit salad sweets, black Jack's,bubblegum, and those divine meat pies in a tin ! Happy Days.

I think the food was very bland and repetitive, probably not helped by the fact my Mum loathed cooking. I once spent a Sunday sent to my room because when she reminded me of ‘ the starving children in Africa ‘ she heard me mutter “ you can send them this “ !?

My Mum used “Mrs Beaton’s Cook Book “ She also made lamb curry as my Dad was in North Africa during the war,sherbet lemons on a Saturday and toast and marmite after school.I enjoyed reading everyone’s posts.

My mum used to make wonderful lemon meringue pie. A tin of condensed milk to which was added the juice of a lemon and two egg yolks. Occasionally she would just bake the filling for us.

At Christmas, during the fifties my Mum's uncle in S Wales used to send us a chicken by post. My FIL used to work for a large printing firm based in Suffolk and when my OH was young, the family would receive 2 game birds, shot by the elderly colonel who owned the business, through the post.

I remember that phrase nana58. I went to a Catholic convent school in the 1950s. The food was inedible. I remember complaining to the Reverend Mother that we had found a caterpillar in the lettuce and a fly in the salt cellar. She replied " my child, you are fortunate to have food, think of the starving in India " l said " quite frankly Mother,I'll willingly pack it all up and they are welcome to it" detention ensued !!!

Funny family story here. During the war my granny managed to get hold of a tin of salmon. She invited her sister Cassie for tea. It was enjoyed, then Cassie said she wasn't wasting the juice and dipped her bread in it. Sadly it was not juice but the contents of gran's tea cup. She had emptied it to pour a fresh cup.

My mum was a terrible cook - she put it down to being left handed so my grandma wouldn't teach her but she never stopped trying.
I remember sitting at the table staring in horror at things I was supposed to eat - stewed steak in watery gravy with great chunks of fat and gristle. Lumpy mash, cabbage boiled for several hours or so it seemed. Fruit cakes with a sold layer of fruit across the bottom as it sank in despair. Steaks cooked until they were either rock hard or disintegrating. Gravy that stood solid as blancmange in its boat and so on. My dad tried to help but he came from a household where men didn't lift a saucepan lid. He would occasionally make what he grandly termed 'savoury sausage casserole' which was raw sausages boiled in vegetables and water. My brother and I called it 'dead men's fingers' and porridge made with salt and water which became a floating grey rock in a sea of milk. When I was about 14 and my brother 9 or so, I remember saying this can't go on and tentatively offering to make Sunday lunch as a treat - we made beautiful creamy mash, roast potatoes, roast beef - all the things I'd learned in my home economics lessons. I'll never forget the look of delight on my dad's face. We were allowed to cook twice a week after that and we never looked back! I still love cooking and seeing people look like my dad did all those years ago.

My Mum was a trained cook but we didn't really see it at home. Fatherless stew with corned beef if you were lucky, potato [Chads] Toads sort of rosttis fried with egg and bacon.
Her Cornish pasties and meat pies were good though and Grasmere gingerbread and at Christmas or christenings rum butter. Every Sunday we had baked rice pudding Dad called it Chinese wedding cake to get us to eat it usually with a dollop of gran's homemade blackberry jam/Bramble jelly.
One gran lived at the sea and used a lot of fish and the other in the country and her food was from local farms.
My one saving grace was the Italian food an Italian relation produced. Where she got the parmesan and pasta from I don't know we never had it

My mother cooked just about everything from scratch - the only processed things were baked beans and tinned peas, and very occasionally tinned fruit.

I don’t recall ever having fish and chips except very rarely, on holiday. At home they’d have presumably been too expensive, plus no chippy anywhere near and we had no car until I was 10.

We always had a roast on Sunday, but in the evening - always beef or pork, my father didn’t like lamb (he called it dead sheep) and my DM was ‘funny’ about chicken, which was very expensive then anyway.

She made a lot of cakes, and milk puddings, apple pies, etc. She was a good cook. Occasionally there would be a curry with rice, using up some of the leftover roast. But that was about as exotic as it got when I was a child.
She did later become a lot more adventurous - I still have her recipes for Chinese pineapple chicken and Beef Stroganoff.

A very fond memory was tea at a granny’s house - not very often, since she didn’t live near. Always orange jelly with tinned mandarin oranges in, Penguin biscuits or Wagon Wheels, and the biggest luxury, since my mother would never buy them either - Dairylea Triangles. I still buy those very occasionally and make a complete ? of myself

Findus steak and kidney pie.
Sausages (two at most), beans and fried egg.
Fish fingers (twelve between four of us).
Mackerel fried with home made chips.
Pork belly, mashed potato and frozen vegetables.
Vesta curries and risotto with extra meat (canned) to make it go further.
Tinned Irish stew.
Mum's Irish stew (sad meat boiled forever with carrots, swede, onions and other orphan vegetables).
Mince with Oxo and vegetables.
Tinned salmon with butterhead lettuce, large tomatoes, cucumber, radishes, beetroot and salad cream.
Birds' Trifle.
Bought Christmas pudding with tinned cream.
Roast dinner where a chicken alternated with shoulder of lamb.
'Pie' with mum's grey pie crust.
'Treat' tea with a cut up apple, orange and banana in a bowl with milk and sugar.

Mum was no great cook and didn't have much from dad to spend on food but I don't remember not eating anything except for butter beans and her 'Irish' boiled bacon, greens and boiled new potatoes.

My own children are a different kettle of fish and one likes to eat out at Michelin starred restaurants. Another world.

Just realised. Skimmed and semi-skimmed milk didn't exist then, did they?

My morning treat was selfishly pouring the creamy top of the milk on to my sugar-laden Weetabix before my brother got to it.

Steak and kidney pudding
Steamed puddings , not made with suet
Poor Knight's Pudding (jam sandwiches fried and served with cream)
Rice pudding made with evap - delicious
Heinz tomato soup
pork pies
soft cod's roe, fried and served on toast
mushrooms on toast
fruit tarts
milk jelly, sometimes made with evap so frothy
junket
peanut butter and jam sandwiches
Sunday roasts with lovely gravy to smother the cabbage with
Welsh cakes - when I started grammar school a friend's parents owned a tea shop. I took Welsh cakes to school for break and she took patisserie. We used to swap our cakes.

As a young adult, when my OH and I first moved in together I cooked and made casseroles. Occasionally I bought venison from a butcher just of Berwick Street - cheaper than beef. I also used to buy scrag end of neck of lamb from Harrods - I figured that they would have the cheap cuts for their normal clientele to buy for nursery teas! I used to cook it one day and leave it to cool. The following day I'd scrape off the fat and take the meat from the bones and then cook it again with veg. I got that from my mum.

Anyone remember strawberry sweetheart? A tin of thick syrup and strawberries that you mixed with milk. A real 1970's treat!