New BBC2 Back in time for dinner

JIL

Redlady..... wrote: »

Would love to be able to buy the crispy noodles that you used to get in Vesta Chow Mein, loved them.

its been a while since i bought some but they were available in Morrisons, near the fry your own prawn crackers. I think it was blue dragon.

like these

http://stage.bluedragon.spinnaker.g-sale.co.uk/products/noodles/crispy-noodles.aspx

[Deleted User]

Farway wrote: »

Sounds like you lot missed trick or two Jackie, we used to crawl into the pub back garden, take the empty beer bottles, trot round to same pub off licence and get the cash back, recycling before the word was invented

And the cinema, did you never send one in for 6d, then he would open the fire door and the rest of you would get in for nothing? {no alarms on doors in those far off days]

Maybe we were a bit more canny in Middlesex

No we did the same and also at the saturday morning cinema how many times did you 'have a birthday ' usually around every 6-8 weeks or so.They all the 'birthday kids went on the stage before the film and all the other kids sang 'happy birthday' and the manager gave you an ice cream tub with a wooden spoon :):):) I think I had around 5 or 6 10th birthdays :):)

Saturday afternoons saw tribes of noisy kids in the basement at Chiesmans where the new-fangled t.vs were all turned on, and we would all sit along the front of the displays gazing at these foggy pictures on display.By around 5 pm the salesmaen would come along turning them all off and there would be cries of
"Please Mister let us watch Billy Bunter " the younger chaps would but the older salemen would chase us all off :)Not many of my friends parents had t.v.s, and they were huge great cabinets things with doors that closed in front of the screen when switched off.The screens were like portholes and very small although the rest of the tv cabinet was enormous
gingervamp my first job was in the chemist opposite Earlsfield railway station in 1957-8 and I earned £4.10.00.I had a bike that I used to cycle from Sydenham to Earlsfield every day and back again at night as I couldn't afford to get a bus to Crystal Palace then a train to clapham and then change and get another train to Earlsfield.I was moved around the company for awhile and went to various different branches as a 'floating cover' for holidays etc.In those days if you were under age you wern't allowed to sell condoms over the counter (not that I was very sure what they were in those days )but one afternoon a week I had to sit in the stockroom wrapping these little packets in brown paper then they were stacked under the counter by the managers till and chaps would always ask to speak to the manager to buy them
I remember being there one day when a little boy running across the road by the crossing after his Mum was knocked down and lost his legs by a lorry and my manager rushed outside to see what the comotion was and came back inside the shop looking like a ghost.I had to make HIM a strong sweet tea as he was in shock as this little boy kept saying let me get up I want to see my Mum My manager Mr Anderson said this child didn't seem to realise his legs were mangled under the wheels of this lorry:(
There was a tea shop near to the chemists that was also a penny library and you could loan a book by the week for a penny.Mind you all that cycling kept me skinny :rotfl:
I watched the programme tonight on catch-up and boy does that woman whinge for england or what She never seems to stop moaning about her lot

I too was suprised to hear she was a teacher.Its interesting to see how food has changed but a lot of the programme seems to be spent sneering at how we lived in those days I certainly never had that amount of orange in my house as its one colour that I have never been keen on.and as for the tin opener I am sure she's not the full shilling the way she acts as though she'ds never seen one in her life My Dds are 45 & 47 and they both know how to use one if pushed, I don't think she's much younger if that than them.
With two almost grown up Dds she wouldn't have been that overworked . Both of my Dds work full time and my youngest has a alrge family yet she still manages to dish up a cooked meal every night and her family don't eat junk food they have meat and two or three veg every nigh for dinner as a rule.
A chip pan isn't that hard to figure out Has she never been in a chip shop.I have a feeling her OH does most of the cooking in their house as she doesn't seem to have a clue about what to do.
I had an all electric house back in the 1970s and when the lights went out I would nip down to my friend Junes house and finish dinner off on her gas stove She is still my oldest friend and I see her at least once a fortnight.I also had a 'hay box' HM out of an old wooden box and thick blankets which I would bring a casserole up to boil then pack into the hay box for hours to cook in its own heat, lots of women did the same .

happy35

Hi everyone, have really enjoyed reading the thread and am enjoying the programme but cant believe what a whinge the mother is. I think it would have been nice to see the difference in how rich and poor lived in each decade .

I was born in 1974 and we definitely never had fondue or convenience food and we were working class - although my dad worked long hours so we were ok. I dont think the food in my house or that of my friends changed much since the 50s as it was stil chips or veg with some kind of meat.


I really enjoyed seeing things I remembered from my childhood, we had an orange kitchen that had to be repainted as id made my dad feel sick and had forgotten about those leather horse shoe things everyone had on their walls.

I cant believe how hopeless the mother is in the kitchen, she isnt that young so must have lived through a time when you actually had to cook. I havent got a chip pan or deep fat fryer but I would definitely know how to use one, and I can also use a tin opener !!! I think egg beans and chips seemed to be quite a standard meal of the time

We were talking about this at work, I am not sure if convenience food was more of a middle class thing? Those at work who had parents who were teachers etc seemed to remember eating frozen food and things out of tins and packets one also mentioned tinned ravioli and I definitely never had that. The only tins I can remember were peas, beans, corned beef, stewed steak, red salmon at Christamas and soup

I am looking forward to the 80s next week as that is the real memories of my childhood. Am expecting plenty of fizzy pop and sweets such as wham bars.

Rainy-Days

Does anybody else think Rochelle seems to have a permanent snear across her mouth?

I know she can't help it but when they were sat in the Indian restaurant she could hardly raise a smile and had this odd expression across her mouth!

maman

Rainy-Days wrote: »

Does anybody else think Rochelle seems to have a permanent snear across her mouth?

I know she can't help it but when they were sat in the Indian restaurant she could hardly raise a smile and had this odd expression across her mouth!

I think if I was her I'd be ashamed to face my friends after appearing on TV looking so incompetent. Maybe it's a bit of inverted snobbery as her DH does all the cooking in RL so perhaps she feels it's beneath her and/or clever not to be able to do it.


I'm more or less a self taught cook. Although cookery was taught in my school I did very little due to my options. The kitchen at home was my mother's domain. So basically I've just followed recipes in cookery books and magazines and now online. Cookery is hardly rocket science but you have to want to try and stop feeling so hard done by.

moneyistooshorttomention

Well...if she's doing a bit of inverted snobbery she's going about it a funny way (ie that lack of table manners all round)....

I think a lot of us came up not knowing how to cook (me for one....), despite pretty useless cookery lessons at school. I know I can safely say I couldn't be relied on to make as much as a sandwich or eggs on toast when I started out on my own...but you buy cookbooks/pick other peoples brains/etc and get on and teach yourself imo. Its certainly embarrassing moments 'r us to start with I would say....certainly my guesses as to quantities to buy were WAY out to start with:(....but you might as well make a challenge/game out of getting on and trying I think.

So I tend to think expressing nerves at having to try cooking for the first time, followed by "Yay...I managed this (if not that) pretty well":D would feel more appropriate to me.

Callie22

Mojisola wrote: »

We had our first freezer from Bejams - they used to sell off the shop ones when they reached a certain age. It was as tough as they come and lasted for years.

My mum still has a Bejams freezer She bought a couple of second-hand ones for storage for her shop and the Bejams one is still going strong.

Lizling

I think you're all being very harsh on her cooking. If I had a camera crew crammed into my kitchen, filming everything I did, making me cook unfamiliar foods and editing it right down to just the 'entertaining' bits, I'd look pretty incompetent too!

meritaten

Cookery isn't rocket science! as others have pointed out. This woman is supposed to be a teacher and she cant understand a recipe?
many people didn't learn how to cook as children and have since bought recipe books and by following the instructions have turned out good meals. This woman seems determined to hate everything about cooking, the decades, womens roles. She puts me off watching the programme tbh - she is sooooooooooo negative.

thriftwizard

I have a foot in both camps here - I love cooking, and as I'm self-employed & work mainly from home I can make the time to do it. I taught myself how from my time as a student in the late 70s onwards, tending towards the health-food knit-your-own-yogurt school of cookery, but not vegetarian. But my mother, 19 when WW2 ended & she married a penniless vicar, hates cooking with a passion, and still views tin-openers with grave distrust; she's happiest with a wall-mounted electric version, but happier still with frozen meals-on-wheels she can just bung in the microwave!

She's absolutely baffled by my addiction to cooking stuff from scratch when I could surely just go out to work, earn more money and pay someone else to do "the boring bits" for me? Preferably a professional, but that nice W8rose does some perfectly acceptable food, surely? Her second marriage, 17 years after widowhood, wasn't quite so penniless...

Watching the series has given me a much better appreciation of her viewpoint & where it came from. She had no choices back in the 40s & 50s; she'd been training as an opera singer when she met Dad, but was told, "Professional wives DO NOT work, dear" and you either sang or married. Doing both was not an option. So she went from aspiring stardom to the kitchen sink & unpaid half of a vicarage team. Then in the early 70s she was widowed, with two children still at home (7 & 11) and next to nothing in the bank. So she found herself a job & went to work, but had no choice but to do all the cooking & cleaning except what little we were capable of helping her with. Ready meals, even Pot Noodles, were like manna from Heaven for her... I think she'd sympathise with Rochelle completely!

I too loved the freedom of the 70s, and the sense that anything was possible. I do remember the power cuts; we sat around a candle-lit table and latch-hooked giant Readicut rugs whilst sinking rather more exotic red wine (Bull's Blood, anyone?!) than teenagers ought to be allowed! I remember being taken to a Hungarian restaurant in North London, with live music, eating Stroganoff for the first time, and the fiddler serenading me - I must have gone puce with embarrassment & delight! I remember sitting round in seedy folk clubs listening to cutting-edge music, which was probably pretty dire but seemed like the most sophisticated thing anyone could ever do, and evening spent with guitars and harmonicas on the beach around campfires, cooking fish we'd just caught. And nights spent sleeping out under the stars in the most impossible thin sleeping bags - but somehow we never froze. And there was NO hanky-panky...

So when my 9 y.o. nephew announced this evening that he couldn't imagine how boring life must have been before X-boxes were invented, I just laughed...