What was your childhood diet?

jannyannie

Hi
My MUm stayed at home most of the time, money was short and she would subsidise it by working on the fields. I was born in 1961, we ate home cooked food: roast on a Sunday never the same type of meat, she would rotate it and my Mum's awesome roast tatties, lots of veg, stew, HM meatballs, ham, egg and HM chips on Saturday, ham and egg pie, corned beef salad, toad in the hole (my favourite), sausage, mash and veg, later Mum learnt to cook pasta and rice. We didn't have puddings, we had ruit usually and apple or banana, we used to go scrumping too. Sunday was a treat we had a crumble for pudding, also on occassion we had fish fingers and angel delight. Milk and orange squash as well. My Mum thought processed food was rubbish, I agree my son doesn't get it either!

thriftwizard

I was born in '58 and we were a bit unusual in that my parents had lived for 8 years in Sri Lanka, up until just before I was born. My Mum is to this day not fond of cooking, but she did her best when we were growing up with an interesting selection of traditional West Country food with some highly unlikely exotic additions. Things like, egg, chips, peas (all home-produced) chutney, and a sliver of Bombay Duck! Which is actually a fish.

We lived on the western slopes of Dartmoor with a big garden which Dad spent many a happy hour in when he wasn't tending his parishioners; we kept 50-odd chickens (30 layers, 18 brood bantams & a fearsome but tiny bantam rooster) & raised cockerels for the village butcher as well as our own table. Surrounded by small mixed farms & with a big veg patch & small orchard & fruit cage of our own, and a stream with fish at the bottom of the field at the end of the garden, we probably ate far better than most people despite Mum's lack of culinary skills and her somewhat adventurous tastes. Milk came from cows, not bottles, and I well remember my horror on being presented with my first little bottle of "school" milk, which I refused to drink, telling my anxious teacher that it wasn't milk because milk isn't blue, it's creamy yellow! A fresh fish van came up from the coast twice a week; our cat used to get very excited as there was always a parcel of heads & tails for him to crunch his way through. (Until the hunt got him.) Yet, we were actually technically penniless; vicars were presumed to have independent means - which Dad didn't - and just got a small stipend as well as somewhere to live. I think he worked very hard to feed the four of us.

After we moved into the city at Mum's insistence (better salary, better schools, more shops, library etc.) our diet became more like most people's as we only had a small veg patch & poultry-keeping was against the bye-laws. So, school dinners (yuk, the less said the better) and a "tea" of bread & jam when we got home; supper (sausage & mash, egg & chips, sometimes chops or tongue, sometimes curry & rice complete with raisins & bananas) at about 6.30 and bed not too long afterwards. Always a roast on Sunday; as there'd usually be extra mouths to feed at short notice, mostly there wasn't any left to recycle later & Dad could carve so thin you could see through the slices.

But Dad died when I was 11 and Mum was left with £27 in the bank to raise the two of us left at home. This was in the early 70s and she must have been quite desperate at times. Bless her, she worked so hard & then came home to cook tea, which was sometimes just cauliflower cheese & baked beans, or a boiled egg with curry sauce & a few lettuce leaves. She tried gardening but in her own words, "It's worse than cooking!" We did have the odd Vesta dried meal, but she knew they were completely unlike the real thing so didn't succumb very often. However, the advent of potted yoghurt was a lifesaver for her; at least she didn't have to cook pudding every night too!

Looking back, she did wonders with a pittance, despite having been brought up by her ambitious grandparents to believe that her staff would do it all for her! She's still completely baffled as to why I chose to stay mostly at home & cook from scratch; now times are easier for her, she just orders everything from Waitrose & reheats it quite happily, simply refusing to believe that "they" would ever allow anything harmful to be put in it.

So it wasn't all suet & potatos back then, or at least, not in our small corner of Devon. The smell of Patna rice still makes my taste buds tingle!

janb5

Like Bitter and Twisted I was born in 1954. My father was Czech and so we had `continental food` No tea and cakes for me and I seem to remember that we only had cakes at the weekend but more Wiener schnitzel et al. Melas always from scratch and we had dinner and not tea. I therefore coveted the tea and cakes that my friends enjoyed and loved to stay weekends with them.

Attended a Catholic convent school uin til I was 11 which was unusual as I was Jewish! Do remember being divided up for RE lessons into Catholics and non Catholics and the Nons were a motley crew. Mother and brother went to Quaker schools!

I have always felt it important to feed your children when with whatever you have and always cooked from scratch. I never liked school dinners for my kids for that very reason. I dont buy fast food or take aways.

I also remember a van calling every weekend with groceries and money back for pop bottles. Twopence back was not be sneezed at!

jkelly90

I was born in 1990.

Growing up my mum worked part time, then went back full time when I was about 10. My grandparents always looked after me when she was working (they're pretty much my second set of parents), so my diet was of two polar opposites.

My grandparents, who were born in 1922 and 1930, would make sure we ate proper home cooked meals like shepherd's pie, meat and two veg, potato cakes and vegetables, chicken and dumplings etc. Vegetables always featured heavily (I don't think my nan has ever cooked me a meal that didn't involve broccoli). They always tell me stories of when they lived through times of austerity and are never frivilous with their food.

My parents on the other hand both have strange relationships with food and are extremely frivilous (my dad less so now that they are divorced, my mum is even worse though and is always complaining about being broke...probably because she can easily spend £100 a time in Waitrose on nothing!).

My dad has always been on the large side since I was young, and is now morbidly obese, and is addicted to junk food, especially soda. My mum is tiny and has strange eating habits. She has no inclination to cook whatsoever, won't eat a proper meal all day, then will eat a whole block of cheese for dinner! When I was young she would usually cook pasta, jacket potatoes, frozen pizzas or processed food with chips and frozen peas. When she started working full time again that changed to ready meals, although every Sunday, to her credit, she would make a chicken casserole and roast potatoes, despite being a pescetarian herself.

I am a complete foodie, I LOVE to cook, I can spend forever watching cooking programs and pouring over cookery blogs, magazines and books, and my mum finds it very baffling and can't understand where I get it from! (in a good way of course, she loves it when I visit for a few days and make her cheese scones and salmon quiches) If I ever have children I would really want to teach them to cook from a young age, feed them lots of fresh fruit and vegetables and keep processed foods to an absolute minimum, as I really wish I had lived entirely on my grandparent's diet and not on my parent's diet growing up.

margaretclare

I was born in 1935, mum was a single mother, we lived with her parents and her sister. My aunt was a polio survivor who couldn't walk, she sat on the floor for most of her life and she did all the cooking from there. She'd learned to cook in a 'big house' starting as scullery-maid (think 'Downton Abbey'). She sat beside the fire which had an oven next to it - you can still see these if you ever watch any of the Catherine Cookson dramas - so, cooking was either done on the open fire or in the oven beside it. Mum was out doing domestic work in other women's houses. Grandad had retired from being a farm labourer. Granny died when I was 3.

We used to have a grocery man come once a week to take orders, then the groceries would be delivered. Auntie used to order 6 pounds of plain flour a week and from that she made the week's bread. Baking day was on Thursday. So, always home-made bread. Teacakes, pies, scones, and a cake for Sundays.

On Saturday evening the butcher would call. And we mostly had a piece of brisket for Sunday dinner - it's one of the cheaper cuts but very tasty. This meat had to last for several days. One way of making the meat last longer in poor families was - Yorkshire puddings. Not an 'extra', as now. We ate Yorkshire puddings as the first course with gravy, and then, meat, veg and potatoes on the same plates that had been used for the Yorkshire puddings. I've been told - that way if you ate more YP you ate less meat. Veg would be whatever was seasonal. My grandad still grew veg and potatoes - most cottages (and early council houses) had big gardens so that poor people could feed themselves by growing their own veg. There was also rationing - 3 ounces of sweets a week.

Breakfast - I remember porridge. On this I had a 2-mile walk to the next village to school. School dinners. Walk 2 miles home for my tea. Home-made bread, scones, teacakes, jam. We used to get butter from the local farm and they used to mix this with margarine to make it go further. Skimmed milk from the local farm.

Nowadays I eat a lot less carbs than I grew up with. I can still make pastry, scones and all those things, but I don't. I don't eat potatoes. I eat very little sugar. Going without sweets is no hardship to me, remembering those 3 ounces of sweets a week and a 2-mile walk to get them! We were very active in those days so we burned up the carbs. However, I still dislike the idea of Yorkshire puddings being put on to the plate along with everything else. To me, they're the first course, if you're going to have them at all.

This is all different from where my DH grew up. He had access to things like fish and chips, but we never saw them out in the countryside. A lot of things were healthy because they were home-grown. Many of the men then thought it was a waste of land to grow flowers.

I never, ever, saw my aunt's fingers be still. If she wasn't cooking and baking she'd be sewing, knitting, mending, you name it. My mum would be given clothes from the women she worked for and, as the material was still good, my aunt would make clothes for me. I remember she made a pinafore dress from a good-quality tweed skirt that someone had got tired of. With a hand-knitted jumper I was warm. 'Bairns had to be warm, clean and fed' - that was her philosophy.

gingin_2

I was born late 70's but consider myself a child of the '80's. My mum was and still is a good cook. I think a lot of our food must have been quite modern and forward thinking as I never think of it as being dated. I cook for my family a lot of what I ate as a child and have a recipe book my mum wrote out for me with all my favourite childhood recipes.

We would eat curries, pasta, roasts a lot of foreign dishes, she was excellent at making desserts but they were never really my thing, even as a child but I can remember them as always being very elaborate and very rich, she would make them on weekdays, too which I never understood, I think she felt she had to prove herself somehow to everyone by going over the top with food. Mealtimes were actually very strained with the expectation and formality.

We were lucky however, that we had good, nutritious home cooked food every day. A lot of the recipes were Delia or Mary Berry, or the big Good House Keeping cookbook. Food was at times a very sociable thing, we had a big extended family then, my Grandmother was a brilliant cook and my Grandad made the best bread that I still crave. I can remember all my aunts laying on big spreads at gatherings and my grandparents had a plot of land where they would grow loads of produce and I can remember sitting picking peas with my lovely grandmother and eating them all rather than putting them in the bowl!

Tiglath

I was born in the 60s. Food was very plain - every meal was meat of some kind with potatoes and other veg grown on the allotment (endless stringy runner beans, boiled greens). A roast every Sunday but no leftovers were used; I presume they went in the bin as Dad always took cheese sandwiches to work. A shepherds pie or steak and kidney pud was considered adventurous. Friday night treat was something from the seafood van by the local pub. Salads were a slice of ham, a lettuce leaf, a tomato, maybe a few slices of cucumber, and salad cream (we weren't posh or adventurous enough to have mayonnaise). No herbs or spices of any kind - only salt and occasionally pepper. No pasta apart from sweet macaroni pud, no rice except rice pud, no pizzas. Once we got a freezer in the 70s the parents discovered Bejams, so it was boil in the bag sliced beef, frozen individual mousses, arctic roll etc. Dad always had a cooked breakfast (egg, bacon, fried bread, or bacon cooked in tinned tomatoes), we tended to have cereal. We always had a pudding - apple pie/crumble, milk-based or tinned fruit with evaporated milk/sterilised cream; we used to fight over the cherries in fruit cocktail. Tea was always made in the pot from leaves, with a woolly cosy added and brought in on a tray - it was Dad's special 8pm ritual. Christmas treats were a box of dates and some mixed nuts + raisins.

I remember having coq au vin at a friend's in the 70s - it was a taste explosion. So many things I didn't have till uni - coffee, yoghurts, tuna, mushrooms, brown bread ... the smell I most remember from home was Dad's homemade wine in the airing cupboard (which never got drunk - I think he used to give it away at work) and homemade marmalade. Overall it was simple but fairly healthy, I think. It left me with a lifelong love of liver, and my go-to meal is still meat, spuds and peas.

jannyannie

Interesting read, the other thing I will also say is we had one packet of cheese and onion crisps (Golden Wonder) a week and a real treat was bread and butter pudding which we had if the bread had gone stale. Sometimes Mum would make fairy cakes, that was rare though. We always had a lot of veg, Mum would buy from one of the local farmers who would go around with his van. I ate all veg. Dad grew some stuff as well. Mum would bake the bread crusts up in the oven to make melba toast, lovely with butter. We had ready brek every day for breakfast with sugar and cream from the top of the milk. Saturday lunch was Heinz tomatoe soup, HM crusty bread, with butter and cheese. Sometimes we'd have a cheese and onion pasty from the baker.

Feel really happy thinking about my Mum's dinners.

Cheapskate

I was born late 60s, my parents were born late 30s/early 40s. Dad was Scottish and grew up partly in a fishing village, life for both parents fairly tough and money was very scarce. They had different, and not wonderful, memories of their mums' cooking - very traditional, overcooked veg, dreadful meat. However, both my parents were fantastic cooks - both had experience of different countries/cuisines, loved to experiment etc.

Mum never cooked a joint of meat in her life, except whole chickens, hated the stuff! Main meals were really varied - roast chicken and loads of veg, never had Yorks pud until I was almost grown up, lots of what mum calls peasant food (based on pulses/eggs/cheese etc), brilliant home made soup and bread, curries, chilli, everything made from scratch. She did try some convenience foods when they came out, but we all hated them, once was enough for tinned spaghetti and angel delight! She always baked (her parents had been bakers) - buns, biscuits, puds, made jam, etc. For several years she grew veg in an allotment or our garden. Thinking about it, we had mostly vegetarian food, partly for financial reasons, partly as that's what we all preferred. Even now, I can't eat a lot of meat at a sitting. Even when we had a simple tea of sandwiches, there was a main plate piled high with different fillings, big bowl of salad, pot of tea to share, fruit salad for afters - on days when she had no time to cook, or was ill. It was still good, and there are times I really miss being a child, as I loved that simple time and lovely food - guess we've been very fortunate like that.

The only things I couldn't eat were black pudding and liver, yuck, although mum's braised liver I could manage. Not her cooking, I just couldn't stand the stuff. Occasional treats were fish and chips Saturday lunchtime (then she didn't have to cook tea!), bar of chocolate after church Sunday, picking blackberries that she cooked that teatime into a pud.

I cook mostly from scratch, only ready-made things are oven chips, baked beans, sometimes fish fingers/sausages. After a sort of break, I'm getting back into baking and trying new recipes, still like mostly veggie food, hate creamy savoury sauces, love fruit and veg, pasta and rice.

A xo

thriftwizard

Thinking about Tiglath's stringy runner beans - they're actually called string beans in some "foreign parts" as anywhere east or north of Exeter was called, where I grew up - did anyone else's mother approach the cabbage family with as much suspicion as my mother did? They were generally soaked for at least half a day in a Milton solution, then rinsed, chopped roughly & put in a saucepan full of water with a pinch of bicarb, where they'd be boiled for at least half an hour to make sure they were dead, and quite possibly for another 20 minutes or so just to be on the safe side. Carrots & parsnips didn't fare much better, and she's the only person I know who regularly manages to burn boiled potatoes. She prefers salad, preferably pre-prepared & safely bagged by someone else. No wonder I viewed vegetarians with something approaching incredulity when I went to uni - most of the vegetables I saw in my teens resembled something akin to coloured mashed cardboard!