Food then and now

Heinz tomato soup is my comfort food!

Dinahmo I still make rice pudding with evap. It's yummy!

My mum was a good home cook and made pies and puddings that I still make today.

Heinz tinned Chocolate or mixed fruit sponge pudding you had to simmer in a saucepan of water to cook before opening it, Oh how I loved those!

Condensed milk
Sterilized milk in a glass bottle Yuk!

First distinct food memorie was eating beetroot salad on a saturday evening, whilst listening to Archie Andrews on the radio......to this day, I cannot abide the taste. The worst thing in the world was to show my mum you enjoyed anything - you'd get it morning, noon and night until you wanted to gag.

Second was eating sticks of rhubarb, dipped in a screw of blue paper which held part of my nan's sugar ration...wonderful! Nanna was an amazing cook - my mum, not so much. I loved brown bread but we were never bought any. Once she discovered curry powder...voila! It covered a multitude of her cooking sins and everything, from then on, was curried.

Nan taught me to make soups (I still do), cakes, pies and pastries, biscuits as well. I still get praise for my shortcrust pastry and always think of my nan when I do!

I cannot remember anything "fancy" and didn't even taste mushrooms until I arrived in London in the early 60's.

Antonia. I could have written your first paragraph ?

Liver and onions with mash and sprouts! Still love it still make it! Hotpot made with stewing steak with spuds carrots and gravy thickened with bisto! All done in mums pressure cooker as were a lot of dishes.i used to have one upto sons being teens then got rid. Remember nagging mum for Nutella in 60s after having it in France in exchange holiday.she said no "you won't eat it and I'll end up throwing it away" ..........I still have Nutella most mornings.......at 65! Ski yoghurts always were with hazelnuts and sultanas WHY?!?!? Snacks? Barrett's sherbert fountains 4a penny chews fruit salad black jax tootie frooties. Loads of sweets but, having a dad with just perfect film star teeth, always brushed and looked after my teeth and still have all bar one and they are so good folks sometimes thing they're falsies!? I was slender all my life up to having hysterectomy in 2006 now I'm a mahoosive old bird and I cannot get used to it! Fruit and veg were an everyday event and old fashioned plain meals kept us full up!

We had a shop that included a butchery section. We had meat everyday except Friday when we had fish. I’ve been a vegetarian for many years now but I have vivid memories of eating liver and the disgusting cow heel pie which always made me want to leave home. We never ate packet or processed food even though we sold it in the shop. When yoghurts first came into shops we tried some for pudding and had them snatched away by Mum who declared that she wasn’t going to feed her kids on sour milk. Flavoured yoghurts weren’t then available . After tea, on Sundays, ( following a huge Sunday roast lunch) we had trifle and tinned pears and cream with which we had to eat triangles of bread and butter. One odd thing about Sunday lunch was putting sugar and butter on Yorkshire puddings while they were surrounded by the meat, veg and gravy. I never met anyone else who did this. We also had crackers with Lancashire cheese and strawberry jam which I think is quite unusual. I think our diet was fairly varied ,as my Mum was a trained cook ,but not nearly as varied as today and we were never asked what we wanted for tea. We just got meals put in front of us and that was that.

Always a roast dinner on Sundays even in the height of summer. It would be chicken, lamb or pork, beef was too expensive.
Leftovers on Mondays.
Egg and chips, always homemade chips never from the chippy.
Homemade porridge for breakfast with golden syrup, or toast & marmalade, or boiled eggs.
Fish every Friday, sometimes Plaice or fish fingers. Again homemade chips.
Knife & Fork stew, usually best end of neck lamb with dumplings.
Lemon meringue pie from a packet mix.
Homemade apple pie (mum's speciality) with cream
Rice pudding and jam.
Bananas & custard, still one of my favourites.
Steak & kidney pudding with suet pastry.
Pork sausages (Richmond or Palethorps) with mash and peas.
Homemade rice pudding with a sweet creamy skin on top.
Homemade custard tart with nutmeg on it - mmm!
We only ever ate salad in the summer, nothing fancy, just lettuce, cucumber, radishes, spring onions and beetroot, usually with tinned red Salmon.
Homemade trifle at Christmas or if we had visitors.
Dinners were always accompanied by a plate of bread and butter, probably to make up for the small portions.
We ate foods when they were in season so always looked forward to strawberries, runner beans, peas, peaches, melon and pomegranates when they appeared in the shops.
We never had rice, pasta, curry or anything spicy, Mum was suspicious of 'foreign' foods. It was always good plain English (or Welsh) food but well cooked.

I have not inherited her talent for good cooking !

Alioop

kevincharley I loved Nestle Sweetheart! My aunt got me started on it, I loved the pear flavour too.

I've never heard of it.
I must have had a deprived childhood

Fray Bentos meat pies; we still ate those when we were first married.

Hunters individual meat puddings.
Lot of meat and two veg.
Tomato sauce sarnies.
Boiled egg salad.
Brawn sarnies.
Banana sarnies.
Liver and onions.
Winkles and bread and butter.
Green lime ice lollies.
Black jacks that made your tongue black.Coconut tobacco, jubblies a d jamboree bags with a soft toffee in them.

kevincharley I loved Nestle Sweetheart! My aunt got me started on it, I loved the pear flavour too.

My mother made curries with leftover roast meat but I never ate Spaghetti Bolognaise until I was 18 at a friend's house (she cooked it, her parents were away).

Whoops Kevin! We overlapped re Sweetheart!

Heinz tomato soup'
pork pies
soft cod's roe, fried and served on toast

I dislike those three things till today, *Dinahmo, and broad beans.
I also used to buy scrag end of neck of lamb from Harrods
That sounds so posh but not posh iyswim ???

Heinz spaghetti on toast -carbohydrate on carbohydrate

This is bringing back so many memories!
Does anyone remember Sweetheart Dessert from the 70’s? It came in a tin and you mixed it with the same amount of milk - think it was Strawberry or Orange.
I once served it up to a boyfriend after a Vesta Prawn Curry thinking I was very sophisticated (think we had Liebfraumilch too!!).

My mum was ahead of her time. She and my dad went on their honeymoon to Barcelona way before package holidays.

Growing up I ate curries, paella, goulash, spaghetti (the long stuff in blue paper). She cooked with olive oil, that had to be bought from the chemists back then. My dad would go shooting and so we also ate a lot of game.

Despite sounding very wealthy and middle class, we were actually v poor, hence the shooting. Think dad was more poacher than lord of the manor.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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 !!!

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.