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

ash28

dibuzz wrote: »

I dont remember what we had most days but I do know I had never tasted turkey until I was in my 20's at my ex MIL's, as there were only 3 of us my mum always ordered a capon from the butcher. I can remember queuing up in the butchers on a Saturday morning but not what we used to get.
Sunday tea was tinned ham butties (we werent posh enough for sandwiches :rotfl:) followed by tinned fruit and carnation milk or home made meringues filled with cream my mum used to make in some sort of jug with a handle she had to pump.
My mum always claimed to be too busy for cooking so as soon as convenience foods became popular that's what we had such as instant mash, those awful filled crispy pancake things, tinned meatballs and those frozen lumps of reformed meat (lamb grills, bacon grills and I think there might have been a beef one too)
No wonder I'm a rubbish cook, I only learned to make gravy after I got married and had a constant battle to stop my mum throwing away the meat juices if she was here when I was cooking a roast

Fortunately my mother was good cook, as was my grandmother - OH's mother was awful..

Looking back it's surprising how many people were poor cooks - we tend to think of them as having been good cooks in years gone by.

I was born in the mid 50s, after rationing. My mother was born before the war in 1933 and most of my friend's parents when I was growing up were a similar age to my mother and some were terrible cooks.

I learned to cook by helping either my mother or my grandmother - started out by peeling the veg and generally fetching and carrying - not because I wanted to but because I had to, but it's surprising what you pick up - for them it must have been a bit like having a commis chef.

[Deleted User]

Isn't it interesting reading how we all as children remember standing in the butchers queue on Saturdays, I know I was responsible for getting in the shopping on my own from round about the age of 9, no list just knew what we needed from experience even at that age. I wonder how many of todays kiddlers would be able to cope. I know life was different back then and we all had village shops locally and no supermarkets in the area if you exclude the International Stores and thier like, but I was expected to help out with all the housework and do the ironing etc. as well as helping Dad in the garden and feeding the chickens. A different world, Lyn x.

modern_millie_2

Hi, I think you need to go back a bit further into the "olden days" for a really low meat diet. I am reading "Lark Rise to Candleford", Flora Thompsons's history of a rural village (Lark Rise) in the 1880s. Most of the villagers were farm labourers on a low wage. They mainly ate what they could grow - veg, a bit of fruit - savoury and sweet flour based puddings, using a bit of dripping - if they were lucky they kept a pig, which was mainly salted down and would last months, if not a year, added to stews and eaten as rasher with bread for breakfast. Potatoes were a staple, some wheat was grown and some was gleaned from the fields, sent to the miller who took a proportion of the flour in payment. Other foods - eggs, cheese, butter and milk - were bought, but probably in quite small quantities.


I'd recommend the book if you like detail, it's really a record of a lost way of life.

sistercas

i was brought up in the 70s , my mum was a working mother , i remember us having things like dried vesta meals - beef rissotto and chow mein ( with deep fried crisp things) we had dried potato - yeomans i think it was , we also had sardines on toast , omelette and ski yoghurts .

maybe because she was working she didnt have time to cook , who knows
I didnt know how to cook when i left home but fortunately my boyfriend ( now husband) taught me , he came from a traditional yorshire family - yorkshire puds roast dinners and steamed puds . one thing i do know is i feed my family fresh home cooked foods , i wouldnt resort to such foods , i think in the 70s they may have been the 'in ' thing

westcoastscot

Isn't it interesting? I recall having tuna for the first time, in bread rolls - also for the first time - at a boyfriend's house when I was 17. It all felt very posh!! We had tinned salmon occasionally, but never tuna, and never bread rolls - there were 7 of us so Dad used to make loads of big loaves a couple of times a week and it was doorsteps with everything!
I'd never had pasta of any sort until I came to Scotland in my mid 20's

editing to add: Cobbetts Cottage Economy is a great book about living and gardening in earlier times, when the staple was beans grown in the garden.

Cheapskate

Gosh, a lot of these posts bring back so many memories! I'm younger than some of you, born late 60s, but my parents were both war babies, so remembered rationing etc., and both grew up in working class areas with menus like so many have listed. My dad worked around the world all his life and mum had lived in Europe for a couple of years, both unusual for the time, and had experience of different cuisines. We had a lot of "foreign" food before it was trendy - curries, chilli, unusual spices dad brought back to flavour things, scrummy! Meat-wise we also had chicken Sunday if mum had enough money, esp if dad was home, otherwise it was something mince-based or vegetarian - she loves peasant food to this day, as do we all, and we also had a lot of egg and cheese based dishes.

Mum also used a lot of offal, I hated liver and onions but her braised liver was good, as was meatloaf and the way she cooked heart made it melt in your mouth - gorgeous! She made lovely rabbit stew (dad called it underground chicken as they did in his village when he was a kid!). Mum never liked roast dinners (beef, pork, lamb etc) so we never had them, but we never went hungry or lacked nutritionally. She was a fantastic cook and baker, and I really miss being a child sometimes! :rotfl: She saved the bacon fat, too, and we had drip bread as a treat, the stuff near the bottom was lush, all salty and bacon-flavoured!

I try to cook like her, lack of time is usually my enemy at the moment, but slowly getting back there.

A xo

lazer

I'm a child of the 80's however can still relate to much of this

We had meat every day (in fact I still do most of the time)

Stews, casseroles or potatos, veg & Meat (usually cheap processed - bacon, sausage, burgers, pasties etc). Chip Shop one Friday a month and fish good Friday and Ash Wednesday.

Mojisola

sistercas wrote: »

i was brought up in the 70s , my mum was a working mother , i remember us having things like dried vesta meals - beef rissotto and chow mein ( with deep fried crisp things) we had dried potato - yeomans i think it was , we also had sardines on toast , omelette and ski yoghurts .

It's hard to imagine just how exotic the Vesta meals seemed when they first came out - paella, chow mein, curry!

cat_smith

JackieO wrote: »

I came home to lunch from school as my village school in Blackheath was not great for school dinners, and I'd rather walk a mile and a half each way home at lunchtime than eat the grey unidentifiable meat and slop they dished up.

Ooooh Jackie. Where did you live? Which school? I was born and brought up in Blackheath.

dibuzz

westcoastscot wrote: »

Isn't it interesting? I recall having tuna for the first time, in bread rolls - also for the first time - at a boyfriend's house when I was 17..

Same here, I'd never had tuna or mushrooms. When I asked my mum to get mushrooms when we were shopping one day she told me I wouldn't like them and refused to believe I did.
She was the same with my kids too when they wanted to try something new, it was always "but you might not like it"
If she liked something that nobody else did she always said "oh you dont know whats good for you" even if it was something really unhealthy :rotfl: