What was day to day food in your childhood?

System

Egg, chips and peas, glush (neck of lamb stew), oh and tin meat (luncheon meat) with sauce (tomato). We had these a lot. I hated glush.
Always a roast on Sunday.

monnagran

We always had our roast dinner on Saturdays and it was usually roast beef with veg from the garden and Yorkshires. Pudding would be the left over Yorkshires with golden syrup.
Sundays were supposed to be a day of Rest, but not for my parents who were the mainstays of the church, so we had cold meat and salad followed by a fruit pie or pudding that Mum had made the day before and warmed up.
Monday's was washing day and it was something quick and easy like bacon and eggs.
Tuesday the rest of the roast meat was either minced up for cottage pie or diced up and made into a stew.
Wednesdays and Thursdays it depended on what Mum could get on the rations. Either sausages, liver, corned beef or something cheesey.
Friday was shopping day so it was usually fish and chips.

We were fortunate in that we grew all our own fruit and vegetables and bottled a lot for winter use. We also kept hens so eggs could fill in for protein if the rations wouldn't stretch far enough.
And everyday there was a pudding. A fruit pie or crumble, sponge puddings, treacle or jam tart, stewed fruit or prunes, milk puddings, rice or semolina with a spoonful of jam,and always lovely custard.

How my mother kept us so well fed during the war and afterwards, I simply cannot imagine. Of course our main meal was at lunchtime. School was only a couple of roads away so we came home. After the war my father worked in the town and it took him 20 minutes to cycle home, 20 minutes to eat his lunch and 20 minutes to cycle back to work. He usually arrived home just as we were going back to school.

Mum was an inspired cook and was the only one I knew during the 40s to use herbs and spices. I don't think I tasted a bought cake or pudding until I left home. Oh, except doughnuts. The baker used to call mid-morning and occasionally, if funds would stretch to it, mum would treat us to a doughnut with our mid-morning cuppa.

Spendless

Until I went to Secondary school, I didn't stop at school at lunchtime, apart from occasionally when my parents shifts clashed. Most of the time I went home because school dinners were too expensive. My LA didn't allow packed lunches to be brought from home until around the time I was leaving.

At lunchtime the meal would be things like soup, something on toast; scrambled/poached egg, baked beans, spaghetti hoops.

Crisps and fizzy drinks were for parties

ouraggie

We always always had the Sunday dinner , the full works with huge Yorkshire pudding. Any left over Yorkshire's (rare) were scoffed with jam on Monday. We also had Sunday tea every week, with the table set in the parlour and food usually consisted of meat/fish paste sandwiches, egg and potato salad, pork pie, and the centrepiece was always a trifle.
My mother always made her own bread till I was about 20. Most nights you couldn't get near the fire as she would have various loaves and cobs (rolls) rising on the hearth!
On midweek nights we might have sausage meat pie, my mum's infamous stew with unidentifiable "bits" in it (my sister used to actually pay me to eat her portion!), big chips fried in the chip pan which always sat on the shelf full of fat, liver and bacon and the best of all....spam fritters!
In summer my dad sent one of us to the corner shop for a long block of neapolitan ice cream which was ceremoniously cut into oblongs and served between 2 wafers.
They were the days!

System

My treats were cardboard tasting bread that was meant to help me lose weight. Vile they were.

My brother had kit kats.

JIL

My mother used to buy a packet of biscuits each week, there were always six in a pack, breakaway, United's, blue ribbon, that sort of thing. We were to have one each, my brother would always have the extra. He would risk a snack as long as he got the extra.

One year a relative came to stay and she left us both two beautiful Easter eggs, mine was an egg, with sweets inside and an ornament rabbit. I think it was a Whimsey? It was kept on the shelf for Easter Sunday. I was so looking forward to it. When Easter Sunday came I soon discovered that someone had eaten the back of the egg and all the sweets, I was left with half an egg, the only bit visible at the front of the box. I couldn't even eat his, he had been up at the crack of dawn and eaten his already. Fifty years later and I still remember how much I hated him that morning.

This thread is stirring up old memories:rotfl:

Jojo_the_Tightfisted

A Chicken on Sundays, Turkey at Easter and Christmas. Both came with roasties that were made just by throwing them into a tin from raw, so they were usually very burned. Mashed potato made with milk and Stork margarine. Usually tinned marrowfats and tinned carrots and thin Bisto. Paxo with the turkey. No salt permitted. One 'pudding' a week, which was usually strawberry angel delight or one single spoonful of Neapolitan ice cream.

. I can remember the shift system we did on Sundays, as there were only four seats at the table and up to seven of us, so you had to have your dinner and get out of the kitchen immediately (you were banned from it for the rest of the day, both before and after in case you were going to try and help yourself to something else to eat - in her mind, the only reason anybody went into the kitchen or looked in a cupboard/the larder would be to steal food - she had a point there, as we all seemed to be permanently hungry). There were absolute rules for who got what bit of the chicken - she got breastmeat, a thigh and a drumstick, my two eldest brothers got breast meat, the rest was shared out between everybody else and I got a wing- we all sat with our hands under our bottoms until we had permission to move them because the penalty for reaching out and taking a scrap of chicken was to be walloped across the fingers with the back of the bread knife. One day, she forgot she was using a different knife, one with tiny teeth on the top for cutting frozen things - as we all found out when the 2nd youngest went for a piece of chicken skin.


Very occasionally (when somebody had been out being quite naughty), there would be rabbit stew or a pheasant.

I was hungry lots, but I really didn't like much food available at home - I disliked meat, fish, pastry, processed meats, sweet things and takeaways (not that we got them more than once in a blue moon until one of my brothers started bringing home fish & chips on a Saturday after work - I had the chips). I would eat cockles and winkles, pickled onions, all vegetables (genuinely all - there wasn't one I was given that I didn't like), peanut butter sandwiches with no margarine, cheese and salad sandwiches, Marmite on toast, boiled eggs, fried eggs, scrambled eggs and cheese omelettes and potatoes - so many potatoes; boiled, old, new, baked, fried or mashed, I'd eat them. And summer was great because I would get lots of salads - lettuce, tomato, cucumber, celery with Dairylea, cheese, a pickled onion and salad cream - or, best of all in September, there would be corn on the cob - two entire cobs just for me, nothing else offered, just the cobs. Corn on the cob was better than Pickled Onion Monster Munch in my eyes.

I suspect some of the problem with eating was she wasn't a particularly great cook, didn't want to spend money on food for a 'faddy eater' and was so angry about her lot in life that mealtimes were the one time I was forced to get up off the living room floor, come in from the back garden where I was investigating the bugs and beasties or put down a book, move away from the nice animals and have to interact with all the older humans being mean to one another. If I could stuff down enough of what was tolerable and get back to the animals, it was a good day.



I was pathetically thin until I was nine, then I put on a little bit of weight over the summer because she'd bought a Sodastream and worked out that it was cheaper to have three bottles of fizz a day than let me have milk to drink. I spent the following years being told I was fat.


These days, during the week, the most I'll have is a piece of toast in the morning with my black coffee, some sort of salad/pasta/rice thing if the OH makes it and shoves it in a box for me for lunch and tea is whatever was reduced in the supermarket - often it's veggie or vegan. Friday or Saturday night may mean a cheap takeaway once a month - usually Chinese, normally salt and pepper squid and half the prawn balls for me, he normally has something with noodles - and Sunday is still a roast dinner day, as I need it to get through the coming week.




Getting the OH to appreciate that vegetables are important and you don't have to buy the packaged 'main meal' because it's reduced to clear was the greatest influence on saving money. It means that yellow stickered bags of veggies turn up in the kitchen regularly and get turned into soups (adding a cooked potato in place of any fat or dairy). We also grow a lot of herbs and some leafy veg in the garden, plus fruit, some of which gets eaten fresh, some preserved - the only jam I eat, as I make sure it's got some sharpness to it as well - some frozen, and some left for the wildlife.

I think for you, rather than looking at particular areas for ideas, look at things you actually like - what meat do you like, what veg do you like, what herbs do you like, what starchy/carby things do you like? What textures, lightness/heaviness/richness/flavourings do you like? Once you've got those, it's easier to work out cheap things to do with them. Or it is for me, anyway.

TravellingAbuela

I was fortunate in that I grew up in a time long long ago when a large joint of beef was a more reasonable price than now! We always had the same joint (corner cut of inlift with a piece of fat to plonk on top when roasting!) This was for Sunday dinner with mash and an assortment of veg. My grandad lived next door and grew a lot himself.

Sunday teatime was a sandwich of the cold beef. Then the remaining beef went in the mincer and we had shepherd's pie on Monday and rissoles on Tuesday. Wednesday we had hash from stewing meat. I can't remember Thursday but Friday was always fish and chips from the fish shop. The menu never varied from week to week but at Christmas we had chicken! The only time in the year we had chicken as it was so expensive at the time.

camelot1001

Always a roast on Sundays, remember my mum being in the kitchen all morning.

Various types of offal during the week, heart (complete with tubes), liver and kidneys - all foods that now turn my stomach and couldn't eat if you paid me!

Plenty of fresh veggies as my Dad grew his own and always something for desert, apple pies, creamed rice, some sort of fruit and custard and my very worst - ground rice pudding with prunes!

Although I didn't like much of it I always ate it as there was nothing else, we just got on with it.

Vates

I grew up on cottage pies, lasagne, roast dinners (never lamb as my Dad doesn't like it), beef stroganoff, lemon chicken, spaghetti bolagnese, aubergine bake and curries. Everything was made from scratch. My Mum also baked with us a lot. My favourites were walnut shortbread, lemon drizzle cake and rhubarb crumbles. I was very fortunate as Mum and Dad were both good cooks.