What was day to day food in your childhood?

Pollycat

Nelski wrote: »

oh yes no food was ever to be eaten unless sat at the table ..evening meal was served promptly at 5 when the tv had to go off and we spent time as a family.
We could not have a pudding if main hadnt been eaten and nobody could leave the table without permission

I didnt have meal on my lap till I left home :eek: cant find much fault with any of this though I reckon we have it wrong with tv dinners.

I think having dinner on your knees is wrong, unless of course you don't have a dining table.
We eat lunch and dinner at the table.

Pollycat

Jojo_the_Tightfisted wrote: »

No, because the idea was to sit down, wait in trepidation with a roast chicken sitting in front of us for your plate to be slammed on the table with your allocated watery, unseasoned veg and measure of gravy, then scarf it down as quickly as possible to make sure nobody else stole something off your plate or you ended up on the receiving end of her ire for something (as well as the initial fear of the carving knife, she always ate her dinner with an even sharper vegetable knife which, at such a small table, was within range, as was the back of her hand) and get the heck out of there so the second sitting could go in and you weren't within reach anymore.

I always scuttled straight back to my place - on the living room floor with the animals - with relief. Even if second helpings had been available (you got as much you were given and that was it), nothing could persuade me back into the kitchen.


The idea of eating slowly, with both knife and fork, having water, putting your knife and fork down between mouthfuls, sitting there with nothing to eat because you had to 'let your dinner go down before dessert' and talking filled me with horror. Unfortunately, once forced to do that by the ex because 'that's what families do', I found it to be exactly as unpleasant as I had feared - he grew up with the sitting nicely, bread on the table (that you couldn't touch because that meant you were greedy) asking to be excused, business - and used the time to provide criticism of what you ate, how much you ate, the way you ate, how real women didn't eat like that/that much/that quickly/etc.

As far as I'm concerned, leave me the hell alone, don't talk to me, don't remark upon anything about me, if possible, don't even look at me whilst I'm eating if you aren't my OH, who is aware of all of this history and therefore doesn't set me off. And he always gets me a second helping of roast and potatoes on Sundays, as he knows it's something I never had and won't do myself.


My opinion now is that, no matter what people say about it being important for families to eat together, it's only a good thing if mealtimes are not a microcosm of exactly how screwed up the inhabitants of the house are.

Lordy! :eek:

blackcatsx2

Really enjoying this thread. I had very similar meals to other posters - I loved egg and home made chips served with bread and butter. I hated a vile concoction of cubed spam dropped into a pan of baked beans served with mashed potatoes. We had chops most weeks, they weren’t my favourite but preferable to scotch broth. We had lovely puddings though - home made rice pudding, bananas and evap or tinned fruit and evap, a slice from an ice cream brick in either Neapolitan or raspberry ripple and those frozen mousses mentioned by other posters. A bag of crisps was my treat on a Saturday night walking back from the off licence with my dad who bought 2 bottles of Guinness and took back the empties from the previous week.

sillyvixen

I grew up I the 70's, both my parents worked full time Monday to Friday and I had a medical problem meaning I had to have a meat free diet in a meat eating family.
I was bottle fed and thrived untill weaning, my mum believed that pureeing food they ate was better than the jars in shops, I got quite ill and started looking weight at an alarming rate. So Dr suggested going back to formular for a few months and trying again, the same thing happened and mum tried me on jars of baby food thinking now that they were formulated for kids and maybe she was missing a trick. Things did not improve I was getting sicker, so the exclusion diets started and nothing seemed to help, my Iron and b12 levels were still falling no mater what was excluded .. offal was suggested to bring them up. My mum could not deal with that, so I'm grand mother was cooking it and between them I was force fed the stuff, I got sicker my blood tests were still getting lower. Mum decided to remove meat from my diet (against dr's advice 'Mrs sillyvixen senior, your child is seriously aneamic, you are risking her life by not feeding her meat, she is already ill'). Then I began to get better, no meat, sickness resolved iron levels improved, b 12 improved and within 6 months I was back to normal weight and blood results.

My eating was not typical, mum was country born and bread meals were meat based. We were middle class, meat free diets were for hippies and veggie food was full of ingredients we new nothing about and besides she worked full time and did not have time to find out what to do with a Mung bean!

So Sunday lunch was always beef or pork (mum started cooking roast potatoes in oil rather than lard) my meal would always be potatoes and veg (no gravy as always used meat juices). Monday was cold meat and chips, I would have chips and spaghetti hoops. Tuesday was meat and salad (ham if there was not enough meat left) I had cheese - salad was basic lettuce, cucumber and slices of tomato with salad cream ( salad was always more exotic if we went to my grand parents we had Chinese leaf, mayonnaise, radish as well as tomato and cucumber). Weds, thus, Fri would be beans on toast, cheese on toast, tomato soup and bread. (All tins were Heinz, you could not fool me with super market brands as I ate so much of the stuff I could tell the difference) my family ate the meat based foods that time allowed. Saturday was always curry night, my mum had a chicken curry recipe from an Indian member of staff she had worked with, she fried all her own spices and cooked with chicken or Turkey, potatoes and onion, she used to fry spices In a small pan and add water (instead of stock) potato, onion and frozen veg and cook for as long as the chicken Version took, served with yellow rice and home fried popadoms.. it was the only meal I felt I was part of rather th a an after thought.. I loved Saturdays! I still use that curry recipe today I have done it with chicken for others, and use it with veg and lentils but use a wider range of veg than mum used.

I had a lovely home economics teacher at school who lent me veggie cook books and encouraged me to learn veggie versions of the meals my mum cooked, I did however have to learn to cook one meat meal as it was likely to come up in the o level exam (and it did) I used mums chicken curry recipe.

Once I was learning to cook meals I could eat my mum learned a lot, I taught her to make a cheese sauce for pasta or cauliflower and she started making that and frying bacon seperatly for them, I made veggie lasagne and she decided she could do that with mince. Stir Frys could be made for all of us and meat could be fried seperatly and added once mine had bee removed.. once I started learning to cook at school we all started enjoying different foods.

With regards to pudding they were rare, usually a Mr Kipling Apple pie and evap or on a special occasion we would have a Sara Lee black forest. I still don't have pudding often but like to feel I have moved on I leaps and bounds since then.

On Sunday we went out for lunch, and I ordered the veggie Sunday meal (roast veggie tartin) and asked for no gravy ... the chef came out of the kitchen and asked if there was any reason I had asked for no gravy - as it was veggie - I explained I did not like gravy as could not eat meat and gravy was meat based when I was growing up so never grew up eating it and don't have a liking for it, same goes for meat substitutes.

Serendipitious

Pollycat wrote: »

Slightly off-topic but.......did anyone else have to ask to leave the table after eating?

Yes, all the time, even in hospital in 1961 having just had my tonsils out and having been made to sit at a communal table in the ward to eat something, even then my mother made me ask complete strangers for their permission to leave the table.

I agree that it's polite, and nice to have pleasant manners, but like most things in my upbringing, it was taken to extremes. I was only about 8 but I remember thinking at the time it was more a performance for her benefit. What other people might be thinking always seemed to be her priority.

Jojo_the_Tightfisted wrote: »

My opinion now is that, no matter what people say about it being important for families to eat together, it's only a good thing if mealtimes are not a microcosm of exactly how screwed up the inhabitants of the house are.

Exactly.

[Deleted User]

Most of my memories are from the rationing era and so food was always eaten whether you liked it or not :)and you always had to sit at the table and mind your manners and ask to be excused before you left the table .I still sit at the table to eat my food and would find it odd to have my dinner on my lap. But each to their own. Lots of puddings to help fill you up or a soup as a starter My late Mum always had either one or the other but never all three :)and I do as well, different era I suppose with different ideas

LameWolf

Sillyvixen I wonder if you and I have a similar type of metabolism when it comes to meat? Even the smell of it makes me absolutely heave, to this day._pale_

Pollycat wrote: »

I think having dinner on your knees is wrong, unless of course you don't have a dining table.
We eat lunch and dinner at the table.

We don't have a dining table; we live in a tiny bungalow, and there's no room for one.

Something else I recall from childhood was my father rapping me hard over the knuckles with the back of a tablespoon for putting my knife and fork in the "wrong" hands; I'm naturally left-handed, and he went to extraordinary lengths to try and beat that trait out of me.

Pollycat

LameWolf wrote: »

We don't have a dining table; we live in a tiny bungalow, and there's no room for one.

In that case, you'll find it challenging to eat at the table.

LameWolf wrote: »

Something else I recall from childhood was my father rapping me hard over the knuckles with the back of a tablespoon for putting my knife and fork in the "wrong" hands; I'm naturally left-handed, and he went to extraordinary lengths to try and beat that trait out of me.

I had a what I considered a fairly strict upbringing, compared to my friends, but nothing like you and some other posters have described.

charlie3090

What a trip down memory lane this thread is,
the frozen mousses were birds eye super mousses I think.

I was a 60s/70s child and dinners were plain usually ,roast on Sunday,stew on monday,sheperds pie wednesday all from the sunday joint.

I remember you could buy bacon bits and my mum would make a bacon and onion suet pudding.

as a footnote, does anybody remember the frozen birds eye florida orange in a little can?, that was my first taste of fresh orange,
chocolate was a rare treat but we did have lots of home made cakes.

dreaming

Mt childhood food memories are in 2 parts. Until I was 7 (1962) it was good, plain, home cooking. Beef on Sundays, cold meat on Mondays then a mix of stews, bacon and onion suet roll, liver and onions with fish and chips on Friday - all eaten around midday. Saturdays tended to be a fry-up "tea", and sandwiches ranged from jam, through bananas to cheese, with ham on Sundays. After my mum died, dinners became a mix of my auntie's meat and potato pies (with pastry hard enough to build a rockery with), or fish fingers/burgers/tinned mince with instant mash - which had just come out I think and was never really "mixed" so had dry powdery bits - and a selection from tinned peas, carrots or beans. We still had beef on Sundays with yorkshire pudding but that was the extent of my dad's cooking ability. We had no fridge until I was older so a lot was bought "on the day". In the summer milk was boiled up at night to stop it going off (it didn't!), and even now I can't stand the taste of yoghurt as it reminds me of those days. I still love banana sandwiches though.