What was day to day food in your childhood?

ScarletRibbons

I was born in 1948, so grew up in the fifties.
We too always had a joint on Sundays, which reappeared on subsequent days - as someone previously said, the mincer was clamped to the table, and my mother made meat patties with the mince and left over mash. Sometimes she would make it into a stew with sliced potatoes, onions and gravy.
Meals were based on mince, stewing steak, rabbit, and sausages. My mother was a good plain cook, and made feather light Yorkshire puddings, and she always made a sponge cake for Sunday tea, again feather light.
Sunday teas consisted of bread and butter, tinned pineapple chunks or mandarin oranges with tinned cream, and the sponge cake, (I still prefer tinned cream to any other!)

atolaas

I grew up in the 80's. My Mum was a Home Economics teacher at a local primary school. She was (and still is!) an amazing cook. As with many others, we had roast dinners on a Sunday and leftovers on Monday when my Mum made bubble & squeak. All the leftovers were heated through and then we had a fried egg on the top....yummy!!!

tori.k

Like the others it was always a Sunday roast Monday was always bubble and squeak using the leftovers, some sort of casserole or stew then usually soup made from leftover stew and half a sandwich, egg and chips and mother's pasty once a week I remember the odd jacket Spud with cheese and beans, baking was done on a Sunday for the week, cheese straws. Biscuits and butterfly buns or jam tarts were the usual offerings.
It was nothing exciting just simple carb heavy meals, meat was only purchased for Sunday usually some sort of game as it was free or very cheap or a bit of beef, chicken didn't feature a lot so it must of been expensive in the 70's.
I still pretty much cook the same way, I have more of a free hand with herbs and spices then my mother did, but we've stepped back towards more seasonal produce and simple meals that's healthier not only on the purse, but have to be more mindful of my portion sizes as cost isn't the only reason bills have risen.

[Deleted User]

Wow, thanks so much for all these replies, it's a nostalgia fest! I was born in 1948 and grew up with the Sunday Roast every week and using up the cold meat in various ways, we had stews and pies and occasionally fish but more often we would have something with bacon or corned beef from a tin as my Mother hated cooking (was a dreadful cook) and like yours JoJo seemed to be always full of anger at what life had dealt her and permanently at war with my Dad a situation which dominated life and only ended when she walked away when I was 19.

I'd love to be able to buy the joint and use it up in meals but the size of joint I can actually afford these days is miniscule and would give us one decent meal and scraps for part of another so isn't viable. I don't care for mince and he Who Knows doesn't do 'birds' of any kind or lamb so it's beef or pork in some form, he eats some fish and will eat eggs, cheese and pulses and isn't averse to vegetarian and vegan foods but in limited amounts.

It's ideas I'd appreciate that would give us sustaining main meals 'old fashioned cuisine' is fine, we would like to find a simpler way of circumventing an ever more complex food system that seems to be so 'in your face' and constantly changing what flavours and ingredients are currently fashionable and available. I'd like roast pork but find 'pulled pork' more often. I'm a bit of a dinosaur me, old fashioned is fine.....pulled anything less so ! xxx.

I've a collection Wartime recipe books which are full of ways of making things 'go a bit further' but lots of them are very bland to the modern palate and we find adding in things to make them less so isn't always successful. Ideas using 'old fashioned' ingredients would be extremely useful.

tori.k

A second hand Kenwood slicer was the best kitchen kit I ever invested in turn a £3 kg pork joint into sliced meat that would have cost £12 to buy the package equivalent, paid for itself many times over.

Cappella

Sorry, my reply was in the other thread.

The meals I ate in my childhood in the 1950s and 60s were very meat, potatoes and veg orientated. We had a big veg garden, an old orchard and grew all our own soft fruit, bought fruit was a real luxury and mainly bought at Christmas. Main meals were always:
Roast beef or pork (chicken and lamb were considered too expensive) on Sunday ( game or rabbit in season, dad was a notorious poacher) Yorkshire pudding, potatoes, vegetables. Fruit pie and custard or rice pudding.
Monday was either cold meat with fried potatoes and vegetables and pickles of which mum made many different kinds.
Mid week meals were either sausage and mash, split pea soup and dumplings, breast of lamb, liver and onions, stew, fish pie, cottage pie, corned beef hash (not fried, mum made it with potatoes, carrots and onions like a stew) 1001 steak and potato pie (it was 1001 to 1 against you finding any steak in your portion ) cheese and onion pie, pigs fry (oddly this wasn’t fried, it was belly pork, pigs kidney and liver braised with onions) , mince and onion pie, game pie, mince beef popovers (small Yorkhires with a walnut size spoonful of mince and onions cooked in the fat for a short time before you add the batter) toad in the hole and meat and potato pie. Main meals were always accompanied by at least two vegetables or with beetroot and picklesd cabbage. Mum made her own winter salad (think coleslaw without a dressing) and we ate it with cold boiled shoulder bacon or egg and bacon pie and chips. Egg and chips were a Saturday treat, dad had a bit of steak with his but mum said it was ‘ too rich for children’. Very rarely we had boiled cod with white sauce (yeuch) or macaroni cheese.
I didn’t eat rice apart from pudding rice until I met MrC when I was 19 and anything ‘pulled’ was unheard of as were tacos, enchilladas, and burritos. It sounds a horribly stodgy diet but mum was a good plain cook, and we are an awful lot of vegetables and really very little meat. I still cook a lot of the dishes now, but I cook a lot of other things as well. I still remember how adventurous I felt serving spag bol and chilli for the first time.
Sorry MrsLW - this has turned into rather a nostalgia wallow.

[Deleted User]

Nice trip back in time Capella M'dear! nothing wrong with nostalgia either.

Sorry there are two of these running concurrently I managed to hit the button twice (nit that I am) and hopefully the board guides will be able to remove the one with the least replies!

Prinzessilein

Born in the early 60s

Sunday was the day for MEAT!!!...sometimes beef, not roast, but cooked as a goulash...often it was a chicken....and often as not no more meat would be bought until next weekend.

A chicken would feed the family for a good few meals...roast chicken on a Sunday...leftovers on Monday...a favourite thick soup for Tuesday (all the giblets cooked up with the carcass to make a delicious broth in which rice was cooked to thicken it all)...and possibly a curry too.....and this was for a family of 5!....portions of meat were certainly smaller!

If the pennies allowed then there might be sausages midweek, or maybe some mince.

A Saturday favourite, if there was mince, was mince, onions and potatoes cooked up into a soupy-stew with LOADS of black pepper and served with huge chunks of bread.

Non-meat meals were often on the table...thick pea soup ( cooked with a ham bone if Mum could get it)...potatoes, spinach (or nettles cooked as spinach) and a fried egg (runny yolk to run over the spinach)...eggy bread....some days it was just mashed potato with milk and egg mixed in...oh and potato could be used to top just about any mix of scraps and be called a pie!...and there was usually a loaf of home-baked bread and a jar of peanut butter to fill-up any corners!

Cabbage Parcels (cabbage leaves stuffed with savoury mince mix)...Kale cooked with oats and sausage....Nasi Goreng (fried rice with bits of chicken, maybe a bit of bacon, lots of veggies and shredded omelette....and a REAL treat was a prawn or two!)...Curry (with chunks of meat...and NO raisins!)....Spag Bol...red cabbage cooked with apple and belly pork.....Liver and semolina dumplings...cabbage and mince in a white sauce....Rabbit cooked with mustard (often when a friend turned up with a couple of rabbits that 'just hopped in front of the car'!...looking back there were times when it seemed that there must've been a whole warren full of suicidal bunnies because a fair number threw themselves under his car!!!....he also seemed to attract a few pheasants with a death wish too...same car, they just flew into his windscreen!!!!)....Mum came from Germany, both birth-dad and later step-dad were in the Forces, so we moved around (26 times in 20 years!) and Mum loved learning to cook the meals of the different countries to which we were posted....although getting the right ingredients when back in England was almost impossible back then.

Puddings were only for a Sunday. But Mum would bake a cake midweek.

School Dinners were cooked fresh on-site and were compulsory....so everyone had a hot meal.

Sundays would often include an afternoon walk, that meant foraging! Big baskets were taken and Mum would then spend hours making jar after jar of apple and blackberry jam, fruit pies, crumbles et.c ...we had no freezer, so preserving in jars was more usual....and birth-dad, at least, was never overly-generous with the house-keeping, so the foraging helped Mum keep the shelves well-stocked...one day on the walk she saw a sign outside a large house...windfall apples, help yourself....so she sent the boys back home to get their bikes and more bags, whilst we all sat and kept guard over the precious stack of apples!

GreyQueen

Hmm, trip dowm memory lane. Mid-sixties vintage so growing up in the 1970s it was Sunday roast (usually beef, sometimes chicken) which re-appeared as cold cuts on Monday and as sandwiches.

Other meals were stew, toad-in-the-hole, pork chops, bacon & eggs, the occasional novelty of frozen meat pies (discontinued after seeming to be a trigger for epileptic seizures in kid bruv) and rare sightings of findus crispy pancakes towards the end of the seventies.

Family are small c conservatives and don't like exotics like rice or pasta or curry to this day (I indulge). Pudding was always a piece of fresh fruit; apple, pear, banana. Some of the veg was home grown. Spuds with every hot meal and a couple of other veggies, too.

Occasional baking episodes involving pie, buns, victoria sandwich (Mum was out at work and wouldn't have been a keen cook even if she was a SAHM). There might be a bake-a-thon one week then nothing for several weeks.

Treats were things like a mars bar halved between two of us kids, a club biscuit (ate one last month, they've shrunk the beggars, is nothing sacred) and a few biscuits. Crisps were rare; we weren't very well off and there was little to spare for junk food. Bread was baker's wholemeal and we could have as much of that as we liked.

Like just about everyone, we were slim and active and went everywhere on pushbikes or walked for miles.

ETA; Oh, the memories are coming back; block of ice-cream in a carboard wrapper, which would just-about keep for 24 hrs in the icebox compartment of the fridge but was always a bit soft, served with tinned fruit. Or Artic Roll or occasionally Angel Deligh, or home-made jellie from Rowntree's jelly blocks. Such exotica!

tallyhoh

My mother was a dreadful cook although she would never admit it but avoided it instead. I remember a handful of "meals" she cooked, rock hard liver shoved in the oven for a few hours & harder to eat than stiff leather (nothing else, just liver).

Split pea soup, that was okay.

My dad was a Polish refugee (WW2) and did the majority of the food. Saturday was always stew with scrag end of lamb. Sunday was chicken & rice from a recipe left over from a Caribbean visitor we had.

Braised steak & smashed spuds was a regular (dad was the first to invent smashed spuds). The meat was never tender & described by my nephew as "sharp" as in hard & burnt.

On rare occasions we had a jar of stuffed cabbage from the Polish club, easy to get now but harder to find then.

A Fray Bentos pie between 5 of us or tin Goblin beefburgers with smashed spuds.

He did his best with what little money we had & the family still recall his stews with awe.