Food then and now

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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

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.

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!

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".

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!

Things I remember from my childhood, Bread and Butter pudding, panackelty, yorkshire pudding, kippers, fish and chips with mushy peas and dandilion and burdock pop. I havnt had any of those things since I was 11

Oh how I hated rice pudding- the work of the devil..

I have just remembered a school dinner memory: At primary school we had to eat everything on our plates but I hated mashed swede so if it was on the menu I chucked mine under the table! Funnily enough I love it now

Father less stew and tattie chads. The first was potatoes and onions cooked in a frying pan and if you were lucky a tin of corned beef was chopped in. Chad where I come from are toads so this was grated potatoes flour and onion mixed with an egg fried in portions probably would be rostii now with a fried egg.
Monday wash day was all sundays left over veg and patoes fried as a cake with the cold cuts from sundays joint.
Mum did make good pasties and meat pie and used a packet mix to make lemon meringue pie. Sunday desert was always "Chinese wedding cake" as my father called it bakes rice with mik butter and sugar and a dollop of what ever jam was available .
Looking back my mother was a commercial cook eventually in charge of school kitchens but we never saw an example at home. Then the advent of the frozen foods.
My grandswere completely different one lived by the sea and her food was baised around fish and the other in the country and hers was all all products from the local farms and she made her own bread and teacakes/baps

Have a look at
www.1950s.co.uk/post/_food

We had plain meat and veg type meals bread and sugar angel delight etc .Mum still doesn't acknowledge that rice and pasta exist lol .I took over cooking at 15 and we started having spag bol etc had to cook something else for mum ! I made cakes and deserts too .Healthy eating nowadays no puddings etc

Toast made in the glowing red embers of an open fire and buttered at the hearthside

Chocolatelovinggran
Rice pudding, the absolute worst food ever invented.
When I was little I had a book with a poem in it, about a boy who grew into a croquet hoop because he wouldn’t eat rice pudding, and I really worried about it.

Stews, soup, spuds with veg and different meats. There was always a large chip pan with hardened lard in it, really health conscious lol, although when I stayed at my grandparents my granda went out with his spade to dig up what we were having for dinner that day. My mum used to bake apple pies, fairy cakes and fruit dumplings, although a massive treat was Angel Delight, Jelly Fluff or a Vienetta at Christmas.

After the typhoid epidemic that was traced back to corned beef it and all other Fray Bentos products were banned from our kitchen for ever!

That didn't worry me at all, because I detested them.

Anyone else who shared my disgust of Spam sliced and fried? I could eat it cold but not fried and served with fried eggs!

Oxtail cooked in the Rayburn oven and served with dumplings! There was nothing better, Kidneys sliced and boiled as stew and eaten with mashed potatoes. Liver and onions! Here it is still possible to afford liver, but not oxtail or kidneys even if you could find a butcher who is prepared to order then for you.

Custard - I could happily have eaten gallons of it - fortunately our school cook made marvellous steamed puddings and served them with custard. Three or four girls in the class asked to be excused the custard, so there was always a second helping of it.

Never served at home, as Daddy disliked custard and Mummy being a Dane found steamed puddings abominable. She accepted Christmas pudding with custard, although only eating a token helping of it herself.

I didn't eat all that many sweets as a child - sixpence pocket money at irregular intervals didn't provide unlimited sweeties. Fortunately, I had a couple of elderly aunties who were generous with sweeties when we visited them.