Food then and now

Antonia that was what we ate exactly, bought back memories, along with Angel Delight, which I hated.

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.

Oh I remember mum's meat pies, made with a tin of John West? stewed steak. Her pastry was always good, and we had it with very dark greens and mash. I think it was my favourite meal.
Loved bubble and squeak with cold meat and pickles on Mondays.
Our puddings always came with custard. Treacle(golden syrup) suet pud, or spotted dick.
I still love custard with puddings, and my daughter buys a carton when we go there for C.......s dinner. It's not the same without custard.
I can never remember going hungry, although money was tight at times.

I remember toast and dripping after the roast on Sunday
Or sometimes cockles and winkles from the stall outside the pub with bread and butter

Oh yes, for Monday tea we had fried left over mash and cabbage and carrot with an oxo cube sprinkled in on white bread and butter - delish

We ate a lot of Offal - Tripe, oxtail, liver, hearts, kidney, and boiled bacon ribs. All cheap meals that cost a fortune these days

What a nice thread this is memories of food. We never got chippy food like fish and chips mum couldn’t afford it. Her chips were everything but nice made with lard.
We got a lot of Scouse sometimes it was blind without meat. We had lamb neck soup oxtail soup and roasted hearts. Every meal was with over cooked cabbage as my dad grew veg. I inherited that from my dad I love my veg patch.
We loved frozen rissoles and cod bites and faggots and we used to get beef curry in a tin. One end was rice the other the curry. Fray Bentos pies were a favourite the one with mutton and carrots. Vesta meals were liked by all of us and tinned tomato rice soup was a lunch time must have for me.
We picked fruit in the fields where we lived right where I live now. On Saturday my mum and dad would fill the kitchen table with pies and crumbles with the fruit. Something I still do forage everywhere and anywhere I can.
I loved winter candy and anything with aniseed in and sherbet sweets no wonder my teeth were bad.

Steak and kidney pie, home made, I have never been able to reproduce my mother's pies. Roast beef or chicken on Sundays, with left overs used up in cottage pie or cold on Monday. Fish fingers for a cheap meal. DH was horrified on one occasion when we were given fish fingers and her dog was given specially cooked breast of chicken! Lamb chops in a hot pot, pork chops with apple sauce and gravy. We never had chips, but new potatoes, baked potatoes, roast potatoes or mashed with everything. Pasta was never seen, rice only occasionally with a chicken fricassee. Lots of fruit puddings, baked apples, gooseberry pie in season. Raspberries and strawberries were a very rare treat, only available for a few weeks a year, but they tasted much better somehow.

We never had custard, everything served plain or with cream. My mother used to make her own ice creams once we had a freezer bit in the fridge, lemon and sherry and rum and raisin being her specialities, with sometimes freezing problems due to the amount of alcohol!

I hardly dare mention that when living with my grandmother, the bread would arrive daily from Mr Stephenson in the little green Harrods van, he also brought hot cross buns and birthday cakes!

I remember the lemon meringue pie made from a kit! I still make the creme caramel (Greens) from a kit occasionally! The exotic ski yoghurts in those strange shaped cartons; I made a Dalek from one using the round bit from an egg carton, tin foil, and a cocktail stick.

Overcooked cabbage , mashed potatoes, corned beef and Irish stew from neck of mutton. Hardly any flavour in the stew, just carrots and onions and maybe a couple of oxo cubes. Later on we had Worcester sauce as well. Limp lettuce with the odd caterpillar thrown in. Have to say my mum’s puddings were nice,though. Eve’s pudding with apples and a nice cake top, lemon meringue pie, rice puddings with rose hip syrup in the middle etc.

That all sounds very familiar to me too. We ate a lot of salad like that - but usually with ham instead of salmon - especially during Wimbledon when my mum was too busy watching the tennis to cook. She also used to make the lemon meringue pie from a packet - it had a little 'bubble' of lemon for the filling, if I remember rightly. Spaghetti came out of a tin, and Vesta meals were considered very 'exotic'.
Cereal was really either just cornflakes or weetabix, although being Scottish, we usually had porridge instead. I was going to say that I don't really remember a lot of yogurt in the shops either, but I do remember Ski yogurts appearing at some stage.
Everything was made from scratch in our house and my dad was a very keen gardener, so almost all our veg and a lot of fruit came from the garden. Nothing went to waste.

Fantastic thread - jelly and carnation with condensed milk - jelly took forever to set as we had no fridge in those days! Egg and chips nearly every night for tea and if we had no eggs we had chips in newspaper and sat on the front step and ate them and pretended it was a treat from the chippy.

Eight in our family and we were all very slender

Lots of 'on toast' dinners too, things from tins on toast

Fruit pastilles...