What was day to day food in your childhood?

trailingspouse

I grew up in the 60s.

Regular meals included sausage and mash, mince and what my mother called doughballs (dumplings), fish cakes (homemade) with parsley sauce. We often had a cooked breakfast- scrambled egg, poached egg, porridge, bacon and egg on a Sunday morning. She also made a strange concoction called 'bacon gravy' which basically consisted of bacon rashers grilled with a tin of tomatoes. We always had it on a Saturday evening while Final Score was on. I detested it. Oh, and we had fish and chips from the chip shop - I remember being sent to get them, with a note to give to the woman on the counter - I had to reach up to hand it to her. Working it out, I would have been about 3 at the time!! The chip shop was literally just at the top of our road, but still...

Sunday lunch was often at my grandma's house - roast beef that resembled shoe leather, murdered sprouts, peas cooked until they lost their colour. And I was expected to say please and thank you and look like I was enjoying it!!

I think we always ate the main meal at lunchtime.

Tea would be cheese and tomato sandwiches, or a tin of soup, or potted meat sandwiches, or a salad (literally lettuce, cucumber, tomato and grated cheese).

Later (which may have been because I was a bit older, or because money wasn't so tight, or because it was the 70s by then and things were changing) we had things like quiche (homemade, and the first 'proper' thing she taught me to cook), Vesta packet meals. My parents had also started to get very interested in health foods, so we started having wholemeal bread, lentils, less tinned food and so on.

Currently watching 'Back in Time for Dinner' on catch up - fascinating and bringing back a lot of memories!!

Nelski

Tallyhoh I feel your pain my mum was and still is a deadful cook so school dinners were the saving grace for me.

She loved her pressure cooker so horrible stewing steak with the gristle visible was a norm, no flavour or anything added.
We used to have Yorkshire puddings and gravy with pickled beetroot for a starter which sounds lovely but trust me it wasnt

Shepards pie was equally awful with grey mince and lumpy mash on the top
When wimbledon was on (she was a tennis fanatic) we got lettuce cucumber and tomato every day
Liver was the type with white tubes in and tripe was there if you could stomach it (I never did )
The best days were Thursdays when she picked up a pasty and an apple turnover from Greggs (we had Greggs before the rest of the world did) This combo didn't change for 18 years :rotfl:
Friday was beans on toast which i loved as she couldnt ruin it lol

One thing the above did for me was create a passion for cooking but to save my life I couldn't use a pressure cooker

Now saying all of that she did a lovely 70s style cheesecake for guests and her christmas cake was lush and introduced me very early to the wonders of sherry :beer:\

karcher

We always had Sunday Dinner (ie in the Evening) this could be a roast or a meat stew/casserole (what is the difference btw?) either wayI hated it all and dreaded Sunday.

On a Sunday lunchtime we normally had soup, cheese on toast, beans on toast or tinned plum tomatoes on toast, all of which I loved.

During the week it was shepherds pie, spag bol, fried eggs and chips, chops (yuk), sausage in onions and gravy with mash, liver (yuk), toad in the hole.

We had an occasional take away of fish and chips or Chinese at the weekends.

We didn't have sweets, crisps, biscuits or cakes but always had a HM pudding of crumble/pie/sponge, all allegedly with fruit in but that was hard to find, with custard or one of those evaporated milk jelly things, oh and often a baked egg custard ....The pastry often resembled concrete though!

ETA: reading that makes it sound like we had no veg...we did and salad in the summer along with some fruit which was mainly apples.

PasturesNew

Sunday was a roast chicken, I have a strong memory of being with my parents in an early supermarket with dad and mum searching through the frozen chickens to find one that weighed exactly 1lb 15oz (0.8Kg).

Mum cooked a lot of stew/dumplings, with the pressure cooker. There was a casserole dish of rice/sausages she did that was a top favourite. Cheese/potato pie was commonplace.

Mum didn't "do" pastry, so I recall very few pies (I remember one rabbit pie when her brother turned up with a rabbit he'd just shot). In the main pastry was avoided.

Tiny/thin chops, potatoes and carrots in a watery gravy - which mum called "casserole".

Mushy peas.

Always lots of fresh veg as mum/dad grew that in the garden - so always a huge array of fresh veg from the garden. Green beans, broad beans, peas, carrots, potatoes, asparagus, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbages, calabrese, parsnip, swede.

Come the 70s we were "treated" to a few of the new products available in the shops, including Fray Bentos pies (1 serves 4), Vesta Beef Curry and Findus (fried) filled pancakes (chicken curry & apple/sultana). Also Toast Toppers on toast for supper as a big treat, otherwise a tin of oxtail soup and toast.

p00hsticks

JIL wrote: »

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.

When I was a child I wnet to a friends birthday party and she had a very posh cake which featured tiny little fondant animals pressed out of icing. I was so taken with these that I couldn't bear to eat the two that were on my piece of cake (I think a dog and a cat) so I saved them, brought them home and stored them in a matchbox in a draw in my dressing table. They were there for several years until one day when I opened the matchbox to find they had disappeared.

Decades later my younger brother confessed to having eaten them when he was feeling a bit peckish ! So I can sympathise...

t14cy_t

always roast pork on a sunday, cold pork and mash Tuesday, shepherds pie on a Wednesday, Thursday egg and chips, Friday macaroni cheese and Saturday stew made with mince. never ever was there 2 hot meals served in one day. always sandwiches for lunches and tea. occasionally bread and dripping with salt and pepper. most days there was a pudding or cake. angel delight and dream topping were a staple!!!

pollypenny

Roast dinner on Sunday - always beef and I would sit there chewing the inch square forced on me for ages.

Stew on Monday as it was washing day. Had to fish shreds of meat out!

Egg, beans and chips on Wednesday

That’s all I remember.

worn_out_mum

I'm an 80s child.
My mum was a lazy cook and terrible when she did try. We had lots of things like pizza, burgers, chicken nuggets and chips. Sometimes we'd have braising steak, mash and over cooked white cabbage and carrots. The occasional roasts, normally pork but occasionally beef. She eventually got a beef mince cookbook and we were treated to under cooked beef risotto and spag bol cooked in the oven. I remember she once tried sweet and sour pork but had picked up a bag frozen diced offal, I think it was the worst thing I had ever tasted. Angel delight was a staple as were those little frozen mousse things in a plastic dish with the cardboard lids.

My dad does most of the cooking now.
I tell my kids they should be great full grandma has never threatened to cook for them!

Pollycat

We had a full English breakfast on Sundays with black pudding and oatcakes in addition to the bacon, sausage, eggs, fried bread & mushrooms.
Full Sunday dinner with veg from my Grandad's allotment.
Usually followed by leftover Yorkshire puddings & jam.
However did we manage to eat all that? :eek:

We had pork chops a lot and always fresh fish from the mobile fishmonger on Fridays.
And shepherd's pie.
I can't remember much else.

I was one of the rare people who liked school dinners - at least the savoury bit, I wasn't a pudding fan.

trailingspouse

Oh, this has got me thinking.

Puddings - angel delight, stewed apple and custard, bread and butter pudding (with a ridiculous quantity of golden syrup drizzled on it), rice pudding.

I remember the first time my Mum bought yogurt - we didn't have a fridge, and she didn't realise it needed to be refrigerated anyway. By the time I ate it, it was slightly, erm, fizzy. But as I'd never had one before, I assumed that's what they were meant to be like. No harm done.