What was day to day food in your childhood?

eastcott5

I am a post ww2 bulge child - so still rationing. My dad dug up the garden of our council house and we had lots of veg soups. Cauliflower cheese was a favourite - still is, and macaroni cheese.
My grandparents lived down the road and gave us brown sugar and butter sandwiches for tea after school when my mum worked. Fortunately we moved by the time I was 7 - or I wouldn't have any teeth left. We lived by the sea and once a week my mum would go to the fish monger for the 'boat' rejects - lots of home made fish pies. Tried our own winkles once - not good.
Pressure cooker on almost permanently to tenderise scrag end of mutton etc. Bottled runner beans - always a strange grey colour. Also lots of stock from bones for soups.
My father was in Egypt and returned with a taste for rice and curries - that took some getting used to - especially the rice which was probably pudding rice.
Bread and butter pudding with dried fruit was a favourite.

Primrose

eastcott5 wrote: »

I am a post ww2 bulge child - so still rationing......
Pressure cooker on almost permanently to tenderise scrag end of mutton etc. Bottled runner beans - always a strange grey colour. Also lots of stock from bones for soups.
.

Gosh those bottled runner beans strike a memory chord. My parents had some huge ceramic Ali Baba type pots and grew lots of runner beans in the back garden. They were sliced and salted down in the pots - a layer of sliced beans then a layer of salt until the pots were full and the beans rested in a briny salt liquid from the.moisture emitted from the beans. bY this time they had turned into a grey mush and had to be soaked in several bowls of fresh water before eating to remove the salt. Ye gods I can still remember the unappetising mush on the plate all these years later but we weren’t allow to waste them “because the brave sailors in boats bringing food to England were being bombed and sunk”.

LameWolf

Primrose wrote: »

Gosh those bottled runner beans strike a memory chord. My parents had some huge ceramic Ali Baba type pots and grew lots of runner beans in the back garden. They were sliced and salted down in the pots - a layer of sliced beans then a layer of salt until the pots were full and the beans rested in a briny salt liquid from the.moisture emitted from the beans. bY this time they had turned into a grey mush and had to be soaked in several bowls of fresh water before eating to remove the salt. Ye gods I can still remember the unappetising mush on the plate all these years later but we weren’t allow to waste them “because the brave sailors in boats bringing food to England were being bombed and sunk”.

Ooh yes; my maternal grandmother had dozens of jars of salted beans in her larder; grandad used to grow rows and rows of the blighters at the bottom of the garden, and they'd be laboriously cut into slices - on a slant as I remember - and salted down precisely as Primrose describes.

THIRZAH

I remember salted runner beans. They always seemed to be so salty even if they were washed several times.

Does anyone remember Honeycomb mould-it came in a packet which you made up with milk. It used to set into three layers-I loved it. We didn't eat much packet or tinned food but my mother would buy that occasionally. She would also buy some lemonade crystals.I'm not sure what they were called. There was a picture of the Eiffel Tower on the box. They made a bright yellow lemonade.

The reason we didn't have much packet or tinned food was nothing to do with healthy eating. My Grandfather was in the trenches for most of WW1. He claimed to have lived on such food and refused to touch it when he came home so my Father wouldn't eat it either.Although these days he lives on ready meals-my stepmother is a terrible cook!

Hollyberry

Nan lived with us, and was chief cook as she used to run the police canteen, and could make lots from little. She also kept a big vegetable patch (including those runner beans) and a lot of soft fruit, all of which sat in jewelled kilner jars in the pantry. So in the 1960s our main meals included roasts (chicken or beef, and occasionally lamb), pie (normally stewing steak), shepherd's pie, liver casserole with tomatoes and crispy bacon on the top, stuffed marrow (with a bolognaise style stuffing), jacket potatoes with cheese, and bacon and tomatoes (literally those two things, with bread to bulk out the meal).

When my mum cooked, she would make things like a sausage plait, with sausagemeat, onions and tomatoes with a puff pastry crust or else a Vesta curry, which is still a taste of my childhood. That got served with mash as well as rice to bulk it out for us all. She was also mistress of the hotpot, which had sliced crispy potatoes on top.

My favourite meal of nan's was known as souper douper. It was basically a soup with stewing steak, carrots, onions, swede, potatoes, pearl barley, dumplings and a can of Heinz tomato soup to bulk it out. It was absolutely gorgeous and could be relied upon to stick your ribs thoroughly. I still make a version of it, using nan's old casserole dish.

nmlc

Morning everyone

We used to grow green beans too, and remember about the cutting them on the slant. My mum had a green bean slicer, that we used to clamp to the dining room table and feed the beans in and wind the handle and it cut the beans into slices - I think she does still have this but they don't have a veg garden anymore. I also remember the Corona pop man - it was big glass bottles of pop, lemonade etc used to be delivered and he would take the empty glass bottles back and you'd get some money back. Recycling at it's best even all those years ago.

Keep safe and well x

nmlc x

[Deleted User]

We had the 'CORONA MAN' too who called in his van on Sunday afternoons
to deliver and collect the empties. We also had milk delivered in glass bottles every day and on Sunday mornings he'd call for his money and a huge treat was that he had 1/4 pint bottles of the nicest orange juice I can remember having and on the odd occasion my brother and I were allowed to have one. I think he only had them on the float on Sundays and sometimes they were all gone before he reached our house. I remember too the baker coming in his van which you could climb up into and choose a cake, we had a mobile greengrocer too and sometimes a mobile grocery shop would park in the road but I don't remember them much after the mid 1960s when supermarkets came to the UK, shopping habits must have changed rapidly after that.

We also had a mobile fish and chip van which parked in the road a couple of days a week and he sold fresh fish too.

cuddlymarm

Hi guys
I’m loving this thread. It’s bringing back so many memories.
My Uncle had a small dairy farm which supplied milk ( in bottles ) every day. When I was about 8 I think milk had to start being pasteurised and I remember hating it at first because it didn’t taste right.
I hope everyone is keeping warm and well
Cuddles

Hard_Up_Hester

We have a mobile chippy, it comes on a Thursday.

Primrose

I remember all those Corona and other pop bottle which had refundable deposits on them. They were a good source of income for my brother when he was young in the school holiday as we lived near a big sales source of them. He would collect the bottles from the back yard crates where they were waiting for return to the depot and hand them to the cashiers inside who would give him the refund deposit. As the cashiers were usually temporary staff they never remembered who handed the stuff in and he would just go to a different till every time !