Childhood & Sentimental memories

MoaningMyrtle

Ooh, where to begin, loads of memories from childhood here, we didn't do the bread and marge/butter thing, only with certain 'teas' eg fish and chips. My choice of delicacy from the chippie was cod roe and chips, we always used to ask for a bag of scratchings too (the fried bits of batter from the bottom of the fryer, these were free).

We had breakfast, dinner and tea, never any puds unless it was a special occasion, then it would be a trifle topped with dream topping. Occasionally a Carmelle pudding would be made - (I loved those).

We used to have Fray Bentos pies quite often, and Mum used to make a pie with a small amount of pastry on an enamel pie plate, topped with a rasher of bacon and an egg and cooked. Sort of like an early prototype quiche.

We used to have free school dinners, oh the shame we felt as the teachers weren't exactly subtle about it. Spam fritters, gypsy tart, chocolate cracknell with mint sacue, some of it was quite good.

We used to have cheese on toast every Saturday tea-time with one bag of crisps to share, followed by a Club or Yoyo biscuit.

vixtress

MRSMCAWBER wrote: »

Hi there gingham ribbon

now i see what you mean

Ok i have thought of some more ..

fish n chips...the crisp/snack ones

and what about the ones shaped like little pigs? they were hollow crisp things that tasted of smokey bacon:D

oooh and that toasted coconut that came in a "tabbacco pouch"...think it was called spanish gold:p

oohh and merrymaid sweets

hmmmmmmm there seems to be a theme with me...... im not really ruled by my stomach....honest:rotfl: :rotfl:

ooops nearly forgot..cheesy crisscross.. a bit like a savoury twix...lovely cheesy filling with crispy stuff wrapped around it

ooh cheesy criss crosses, i have mentioned these to loads of people and no one else seems able to remember them, the only place they were sold was the local swimming pool and they were fab!! oh and piglets, its amazing how they could get them so hollow! there was nothing to them, i remember biting off the little noses first.

what about wham bars? they were another swimming pool staple

MRSMCAWBER

Wham bars...

were they the ones that were so chewy they tried to pull your teeth out and had fizzy stuff in them?

Cheesy crisscross...they were lovely

I have remembered some more:j ..food related again:o

cabanas (sp)- they were a bit like a big bounty but had cherries in ..

nutty bars - it was a bar, wrapped in toffee and then rolled in peanuts and it had a see through amber wrapper

Space dust...we called it popping candy

chewing wood...my brother loved it..eughhh

chewing nuts...like hard caramel balls covered in chocolate

refreshers..not the packet things..those that were a chewy brick full of fizzy stuff - when you got it in your mouth it was impossible to chew... i saw them recently and im sure they have shrunk:p well either that or i now have a big mouth;)

filigree_2

My Nain (Welsh gran) used to make toast for breakfast over the open fire, so when we visited I was woken by the lovely smell.

My other gran had a huge frying pan full of fat that was reheated and reused endlessly. Her fryups were full of yummy black crunchy bits for extra flavour and texture For my brother and I she would cook chicken drumsticks, mash, baked beans and gravy. It would all turn to a lovely brown slop on the plate.

My mum had recipes that she produced year in, year out - some better than others :eek: She made corned beef dumplings in a tasty sauce which I suspect was made from Campbells condensed soup. She never gave me the recipe and it died with her She would always serve boiled bacon with parsley sauce (yuk) and sausages with onion sauce from a pack (yum). Now I'm a grown up and I can cook what I want, I have boiled bacon with onion sauce and hang the consequences! I'm such a rebel Nowadays I still make sausage casserole with a packet mix, nothing else tastes quite the same.

We had special foods that were served only at Christmas. The main meal was a traditional roast turkey or large chicken, but there were all the extras to eat during the day - a tub each of cheesy footballs and Twiglets, minty turkish delight in a tin, and a bottle of Asti Spumante wine. My gran would make a traditional fruit cake and ice it, then decorate it like a winter snow scene, with little figures on skis, a snowman, a fir tree and a weeny lake made out of tin foil. I never liked fruitcake but it was lovely to look at. There would be Snowball cocktails and my brother and I would be allowed a small glass. In the evening my mum would have a Cinzano and lemonade, and we were allowed to have the lemon slices when she was finished. Even now we still have prawn cocktail for starters. Nowadays it's trendy again!

I can remember that some snacks could only be bought in certain places - what is it about swimming pools? :rotfl: We used to get Bones and Fangs crisps from the vending machines. At the cinema I used to get that shredded coconut "tobacco" I think it was called monkey tobacco.

There were some real horrors too. My mum used to try and sneak food into us that we didn't like. I think she had a theory that one day we would eat it by accident then she could say "see, you do like it!" but she was foiled every time. I once found a poached egg hiding under a pile of mashed potato, and she tried to get me to eat gooseberries by telling me they were cooked grapes. I wasn't that stupid and her scheme always failed :rotfl:

Alikay

We had tea in front of the TV on Saturdays, usually watching stuff like Follyfoot or Black Beauty. My mum used to wheel in the tea trolley with sandwiches (jam, primula & cress, cheese & marmite, sardine paste), tea or Camp coffee and either a Yoyo or slice of swiss roll.

If they were going out at night, their friends kids would come over while all the adults went out together (whoever heard of babysitters!!:eek:) and we'd watch the Thriller (saturday night horror film) and eat KP Wigwams washed down with Cresta "its frothy, man" if we were lucky!

pounds_and_pensive

One of the things I remember most about growing up was that even though we were among the poorer families in the neighbourhood (in terms of money at any rate), we seemed to be one of the happiest, and our house was like a magnet to a lot of the other kids, who were often better off than we were. My mum was the one with the full-time job (working shifts) so my dad did all the cooking and shopping etc. He was an ex-army cook, used to cooking hearty meals for the masses, and fed us all accordingly - it's a wonder the plates could bear the weight.

Pretty much everything he cooked was wonderful, apart from his omelettes, which were so full of salt for some reason that eating them was how I'd imagine sliding face-first down the side of a salt mine with my tongue out to be. He also had a particularly yukky way of serving pork pies - warmed in a pan of baked beans, so that you'd be given a lump of pork swimming in beans and coated in soggy pastry. On the rare occasions that he dished up something awful, we could often tell he'd had doubts about our reaction because he'd approach the table with the plates and say in his broad northern accent 'Now, this is LUVVLY!'

His stew and dumplings were out of this world, so much so that we even managed to see the bottom of the seemingly army-sized saucepans - no leftovers there Oh, and the Sunday dinners... yum. Thoughts of our childhood dining table always make me smile too. It had a pale blue formica top, which for years had the outline of a reindeer's antler carved into it with a Stanley knife, the result of a mistake my mum made when she was making a poster for the residents of the old people's home where she was working one Christmas. "Oh... *bleep*!"

Of all the many wonders that came from the kitchen, the best had to be my dad's home brewed beer - eighty pints a week, and often more (I often suspect that this stuff was one of the reasons our family always had so many friends!). It was very cheap to produce once you'd got all the equipment, but it was a huge problem keeping it warm enough to ferment during the winter (we had a coal fire in the front room and that was it. On the coldest nights, me and my sisters would argue over whose turn it was to have my dad's overcoat on top of our beds). There was beer nearly everywhere - buckets in the airing cupboard, dozens of bottles of it in the kitchen under the worktop, as many bottles again tucked to one side in the downstairs spare room... my mum still has the exercise book in which my sister was asked at school to draw a plan of her house, which ended up including lots of random shapes all over the place labelled 'beer'!

Before we lived in that house, the five of us lived in a one-bedroomed flat for three years, where as usual, we were almost always happy. My dad had his work cut out though trying to keep us all quiet on rainy days when my mum was asleep after doing a night shift. There were quite a few times when he lost it after hearing us muffling our giggles as we made our way back from the kitchen at the end of the long landing, and he'd yell at us "Will you creep QUIETLY!"

I think we must have got through a lot of apples too, due to my dad's belief that his daughters should be sheltered from the wicked ways of the world at all costs (and probably until we were in our eighties ) At the slightest hint of anything he thought dodgy about to happen on TV (even something as minor as Jill and Adam looking like they were about to kiss on 'Crossroads'), he'd get up and fetch the fruit bowl, stand in front of the TV and say casually 'Anybody want an apple?'. Even now when something steamy comes on telly, me and my sisters will say to each other 'Anybody want an orchard?!'

Like others on this thread, I miss my dad like crazy. It's been fifteen years since he died though, and these days I mostly think how very lucky I am, to have known him at all, and to be able to call him my dad

jcr16

i can remember was i really little about 5 ( i know i had to be this age cause we still lived in the cottage and my parents sold that when i was about 6) i would sneak into the lounge with the big fruit bowl from the table and sit infront of the fire eating all the pears and banana's while my mum wasn't looking. my mum made the most gorgeous pickled onions and the were just delish. i'd eat loads. i can remember her letting me put my dolly clothes in the washing machne and then waiting for them to washso i could hang them on my own child size whirly gig washing line which was in the dinning room. and i remember one saturday we were gonna go for a picnic but it was a really hevay thunder and rain storm so we laid the picnic on my bedroom floor. and my mum made loads of sandwichs and cakes.

and when we had moved to the new huse we had a coal fuel aga and one night there was a hurricane and we went down stairs and lifted the lid and the plate of the aga was white hot . mum and dad couldn't control it. but it was so nice and warm it was lovely. i used to cook toast on the aga using the tennis racket thing. , i can remember going to help my dad pick the grapes from the vineyard and it being so cold a workmate of his had put a jacket spud in foil inside the bonfire.

my mum's homemade lentil soup is so thick u can stan a spoon up in it. it the one meal i always ask for when were invited for tea. it is gorgeous. i don't really like any other soup apart from that. served with chunky bread.

and on sundays cronicals of narnia used to be on and i would watch it just before we headed of to westridge swimming pool. where i'd meet up with my cousins and have a splash about for an hour or so.

and i think i must of been about 10 when we rented a cottage in middle of nowhere and my grandma came with us( not my real grandma but known her since being born and she like a nan to me , i called her marmite for years as couldn't say her name) anyway she made a meal tuna and leak. i was beggin mum not to make me eat it, but mum told me just to try it and boy it was gorgeous i had seconds.then every year when we wnet away we had tuna and leak as the first meal. and last meal of week was liver and onions. no one could cook it as nice as my marmite.

Boomdocker

<p>Pretty much everything he cooked was wonderful, apart from his omelettes, which were so full of salt for some reason that eating them was how I'd imagine sliding face-first down the side of a salt mine with my tongue out to be. </p>

I nearly choked on my tea, that was so funny I really laughed out loud! :rotfl:

Boomdocker

Strangely I remember the sweets most and crisps too!

Somebody already mentioned Piglets, loved them and Puffs (similar to the pigs just a light puff that just melted on the tongue) Original Space Raiders (mmmm, pickled onion). Salt 'n Shake. Fish 'n Chips.
Pacers (like minty opal fruits)
Opal Fruits
Spangles (but not the toffee one, always seemed to get 2 in every pack, yuk!)
White chocolate skulls that when you bit them had pink/red stuff in the middle
Swizzlers Dipping Sherbet with the licourice
Mo-Jo's
Black Jacks & fruit Salad
Sweet Peanuts
Chocolate Limes
Cola Cubes
Pips
Blackcurrant & Licourice
Dib-Dabs
Midget Gems
Wine Gums
Licourice Comforts
White Chocolate Mice, Fish and Chips
Pink Shrimps
Foam Bananas
Foam Mushrooms

Lara

Oh what memories this thread has brought back to me.

I remember going to a friends house, just a few doors away, and we always had brown sauce sandwiches for tea or dinner whenever I went. All the families around us lived in council houses and no-one was very well off.

I remember my Dad making us sugar sandwiches - yummy! Also banana sandwiches but he would insist on putting sugar on them too and I hated it *yuk*!

The Corona man came to us and I loved the cream soda. The milk man would also deliver a bottle of orange every Saturday with our milk. Always tasted different from him.

We had food made from scratch with stew on Mondays which I hated but love now. Brussels were put on my plate but I used to put them outside the window when Mum went out of the room and after our meal would quickly go and get them and put into the dustbin! Love the things now though :rolleyes: .

We didn't get any pocket money but I got a paper round at 13, worked in a hairdressers on a Saturday from 14 and also got another job taking round some sort of pools coupon. So three jobs on the go. I bought my own clothes from the age of 13 as parents couldn't afford very much and I was always the one with the clean, ironed clothes but never modern. Mum made all my clothes which I hated as she always made them so they would last :rolleyes:, hence they were far too big.

When I was about 7-8 my Dad used to take me and my baby brother to a sweet shop which was the front room of a very old house. Every Sunday we would be dressed up in our Sunday clothes (all in white) and go for a walk there whilst Mum cooked the lunch. I always had a small bag of sweets and a drink as a treat and loved those Sunday mornings.

We never ate in between meals and for all meals we had to sit down at the table in the dining room. None of this food on trays lark watching the TV .

Memories......................happy ones although half the kids now wouldn't have a clue how hard life could be but the one thing we were taught were manners. A pity a lot kids are taught the same values in life :mad: .

Thanks for this thread. This will keep me going all day. I only popped in to see what was what. I'm supposed to be doing the housework .