If It Wasn't Meat, What Did They Eat?

lillibet_dripping

This thread has brought back some lovely memories!
Remembering crisp sandwiches, what about cheddar cheese and Heinz salad cream sandwiches. Another favourite which I still eat today is ketchup on toast - Heinz of course.
Our favourite Saturday night tea, watching Z Cars or Dixon of Dock Green, was a fish finger 'salad' (butterhead lettuce, sliced tomato, sliced cucumber, grated cheese, grated carrot and Heinz tinned potato salad)
No, I do not have shares in Heinz:rotfl:

soba

From my childhood I remember Shippams or Princes beef spread butties, my mum and aunt eating cauliflower butties and occasionally evaporated milk sarnies with a sprinkling of sugar. Dripping or lard on toast was a favourite when watching the wrestling on a Saturday afternoon with my nanna.

We progressed onto Campbell's meatballs, Wall's sausages in lard in a tin, Heinz spag bol in a tin, and Vesta beef curry - the last two we thought were very exotic. Puddings were angel delight, arctic roll, HM rice pud or tinned fruit with Carnation milk and a round of bread and butter for dipping. Veg was always tinned - processed peas, carrots, green beans or broad beans and Smash was a favourite too.

A treat was a pouch of Spanish tobacco - I think it was strands of coconut in a pouch like Golden Virginia tobacco, and I remember buying a Curly Wurly and eating it all to myself and not sharing with my sisters.

ash28

It's interesting reading about the type of meals people ate during their childhood, one thing that sticks out for me, is how little that was made at home (for us) was made in a frying pan or chip pan.

There were 6 of us in the house and frying anything was a major exercise for my mother. By the time we hit our teens, on the rare occasion my mother made chips it was virtually a chip pan of chips each of us (the chip pan was quite small) and ages spent at the cooker, it was far easier for her to make a casserole or meat and two veg type meal. The likes of chips, fried eggs were almost never cooked and sausages were something that were put in liver casserole for those that didn't like liver, toad in the hole was not on my mother's radar. And her budget probably didn't stretch to meat that could be fried rather than stewed.

The nearest town to us was a fishing port and had both a Chinese takeaway and Chinese restaurant, a huge treat for us as kids was to meet my dad on Friday lunch time (payday) during the school holidays and they would take us to the Chinese restaurant for a fixed price lunch time special - 3 courses - fabulous, we felt so grown up, it was a proper restaurant with menus AND real tablecloths....that would be in the mid 60s when I was around 8 or 9.

The other "treat" was sitting in the car in a pub carpark on Sunday lunchtime (not every Sunday) drinking Coke out of small bottles and eating a bag of crisps while my parent's had a drink. Having the coke and crisps was enough of a treat for us not to mind waiting in the car.

Patchwork_Quilt

Thank you all for such lovely memories and such long posts. It's brought a lot of my childhood flooding back. I think the reason I bake so well and why I can't face cooking big lumps of meat stems from the way our family ate when I was a child. Certainly, my interest in growing my own veg comes of having to spend an hour weeding in my parents' veg patch every so often: I also remember picking wild raspberries with Mum on the golf course to make jam in the bottom half of the pressure cooker, which has inspired my love of home made preserves.

I think what this thread has shown, however, is that we had some very dedicated parents who were growing and cooking from scratch and that it's no bad thing to go back to eating less meat and having home made soup with a sandwich when budgets are tight.