What was day to day food in your childhood?

Pollycat

spinningsheep wrote: »

Fellow potter then Pollycat?

A tad north and a bit east.

M.E.

Granny was an excellent baker. Her mother ran a bakery before WW1. My mother was an excellent cook and I have followed suit. I am known to make a feast from next to nothing. My mother had to feed a family of 7 AND cook for 24 infant schoolchildren midday. Foraging and YS are my forte. My children's partners believe we have iron stomachs and eat anything.
We grew up in the late 40s and early 50s. We had a very large leg of lamb on a Sunday 17/6d from the butcher which did Sunday roast and shepherd's pie for Monday, plus cold meat and gravy for the schoolchildren. The shepherd's pie was eked out with baked beans as my brothers grew hollow legs in their teens. Brilliant yorkshire puddings.. Mum was a Yorkshire woman! Chocolate cake and custard for pudding. Always made in a huge tin, now known as a tray bake. Parkin too, especially round bonfire night. Steak and kidney stew in the pressure cooker but eaten the following day when the flavours had really mixed together.. excellent. Hardboiled egg with tomato mashed together with some salad cream for sandwiches. For some odd reason we had sugar sprinkled over lettuce ?? Celery sticks were a treat for Sunday tea time watching The Lone Ranger, in black&white. Potato pie, trifle, apple crumble, blackberry and apple pie. Fish fingers. Sausages and mash. We were not allowed into the fridge or cupboards but any "left-overs" were put in a tin and we could help ourselves to that, plus jam and bread/toast if we were hungry.
Never had rice or pasta until I studied abroad. Never had steak or roast beef only stewing steak. Tinned ham at Christmas. Turkey at Christmas. Never chicken, too expensive. Egg and chips were a treat. Pancakes with golden syrup also a treat.
I do not hark back to those times as I find the choice of food is so much wider now and I enjoy experimenting with unusual (usually YS) ingredients and flavours.

Nelski

MrsLurcherwalker wrote: »

With your help I've reached the conclusion that we'd be happier going back to simpler foods and dropping most of the 'exotics' that seem to be the norm, going back to almost a meat and veg based menu plan and certainly not 'pulling' anything or making it 'American', 'Mexican', Middle Eastern' or many other cuisines in flavour except perhaps taking some inspiration from Scandinavia and Eastern Europe where things seem to still be 'old fashioned' and flavours much to our liking.

Have to disagree with your conclusion. Food choices today are varied and exciting ....why anyone eats the same thing week after week, year after year when we literally could eat something different everyday if we chose too.
Pulled pork is a favourite of mine and the local mexican and indian restaurant are regularly frequented
Give that up to go back to gristly meat and tube filled liver .....no thanks

Dark_Star

My mum was a brilliant cook but it was proper "plain cooking"; she didn't do "foreign food" so no pasta except spag hoops out of a tin. Nothing with rice, no Chinese, no Indian, occasionally a very rare vesta curry packet thing for her & Dad. The odd sunday fry up for breakfast.
There was....stuffed marrow with mince (yuk) stuffed hearts with mince (yuk) any kind of Meat & Veg combo so pork chops/spuds/veg, lamb chops, oxtail stew (yuk), chicken casserole, roast dinner on a Sunday. Steak & chips but a cheapo cut of steak (stewing?) Fish fingers when we'd bought a freezer. Something disastrously rock hard out of a microwave when we bought one of those....
Turkey at Christmas & prawn cocktail to start in glass - very avant-garde...
She was very good at baking so made her own cakes/scones/fruitcake at Christmas complete with spiky rock hard icing ...very occasional treats out "chicken in a basket or scampi in a basket" or fish 'n' chips. Those were the days!

Frith

Pretty awful food, sad to say!

Bottlefed and saw additions to my siblings’ bottles including rusks, wheatabix and raw eggs (!) All put on solids within weeks.

Every cooked meal I ever ate until I left home involved potatoes. Never had rice, any form of pasta and I didn’t know cous cous, bulgar wheat etc existed!

Meals were brown meat (varying over cooked chops) with plain boiled potatoes and one boiled veg. Very occasionally we’d have plain white fish. For reasons unknown occasionally we’d have truly disgusting offal - liver, brains and tripe.

Made to eat everything on the plate whether we liked it or not. I was force fed on occasion but doing that to my sister made her sick so they stopped at that point. 2 of us have eating disorders now.

Puddings were stewed fruit with a ton of sugar and custard.

PollyWollyDoodle

Ooh this has reawakened some memories! Grew up in the 1960s. Roast on Sunday, and yes the mincer clamped to the table and the meat made into pasties or pies. Shepherds Pie, macaroni cheese, cauliflower cheese (as a main dish) egg and chips and a dish I loathed, hard-boiled egg hidden in a mound of mashed potato with croutons of fried bread on top - the croutons were ok but the mash was always lumpy. My mother was an amazing cook, but probably too rushed to mash it thoroughly - my brother still won't eat it to this day! Stew, neck of lamb, stuffed marrow, stuffed heart (I had something else on those days!) - as said above, chicken was a rare treat as it was expensive. Soup, which would have something new added each day so it was slightly different.

We always had home made puddings, pies, sponge, upside-down pineapple pudding, with custard. At weekends tea (after cooked lunchtime meal) would be spaghetti on toast, scrambled egg on toast.

In my teens if dad was away overnight my mum and I would have a special treat, yes a Vesta curry or Chinese! Neither of us had ever been to an Indian or Chinese restaurant (not sure I'd ever been to a restaurant at all!) so we thought it was great. After they had a retirement trip to Greece, mum cooked delicious Greek food for about three months but dad really liked meat-and-two-veg.

This has made me feel really nostalgic. And hungry!

Owain_Moneysaver

Frith wrote: »

truly disgusting offal - liver, brains and tripe.

Not sure about liver (okay in small quantities), don't ever remember brains, but I used to like tripe, done with milk and onions in the slow cooker.

It was my father that cooked that, of course. Mother could do good plain baking but wasn't a great cook.

Teenage years were saved from mother's cooking by Crispy Pancakes and Findus Flakey Bakes (although something wrong with the oven meant they were often still frozen inside).

CapricornLass

I was born in the 1950s. I am lucky, my mum is a good cook as were both grandmothers, one of my great-grandmothers was a professional cook, my sister cooks for a living, I'm fairly good, and one of my sons is a brilliant cook provided you don't want anything sweet.

Even so, money were very tight for my parents when I was young, as my dad was unemployed for almost 2 years when he gave up the sea. Mail meals often revolved around mince, even on Sundays - Scotch mince, mince casseroled with diced veg in season and padded out with pulses - lentils, butter beans and yellow split peas, cottage pie and mince pies, interspersed with things like sausage and egg bake, egg flan and porkies - a form of pork burger. Fridays was baking day, when she would make cakes for the weekend, jam tarts and apple turnovers, fruit loaf and sponge cakes and scones, scotch pancakes. I remember standing on a chair by the stove turning over the pancakes in the pan - I would have been about five or six then. There was no chicken - that was the special treat for Christmas day, which was the only time we ate it ( up to seven of us!) There was also plenty of soup, homemade and packet, veg was boiled or mashed potato and at least two veg, and there was always a pudding, crumbles, fruit pies and Eve's puddings. Portions were smaller then - a pint of custard (Birds) was split between 2 adults and 3 small children. But food was fresh and seasonal - partly because mum didn't have a fridge until I was about four. I don't remember very many tins or packets being used.

One thing I do remember is being sent out to the ice-cream van with a bowl to buy ice-cream for pudding

Later on, during the seventies, money was more plentiful. I remember beef casseroles, pork chops, curries (which I hated because it was made with an apple base) and sunday joints of beef, pork, lamb and chicken, but I was in my teens by then, and I made things like pizza (from scratch!), beef and mince casseroles and made cakes for everyone at the weekend. We still had puddings, but these included things like cheesecakes and mousses and something known as RumByGum in our house - chocolate swiss roll cut in slices and laced with rum-flavoured essence, topped with chocolate Angel Delights and decorated with whorls of whipped cream and grated chocolate. Mum was on gluten-free diet by then when it was almost unheard of, and the range of products were much more restricted than they were today, and I remember how proud I was when I managed to achieve a reasonably edible hot-cross bun for her!

PollyWollyDoodle

Oh and I forgot the salads - lettuce, beetroot, tomato and cucumber with tinned ham, or corned beef. Salad cream was the only adornment, although my mum made a dressing with vinegar and sugar. Like GQ above, olive oil was for medicinal use and we'd never seen a pepper.

I've just remembered my favourite pudding, too - home made 'rice pudding' but made with pearl barley instead of rice. Yum.

Silvertabby

I was born in the 1950s, when chicken and lean meat was far too expensive for most people.

My mum, bless her, was a terrible cook - she just didn't have the patience. If a recipe said 'low for 2 hours' it was lucky to get an hour on high - like it or go hungry.

I remember her 'favourite recipe' - it was the cheapest, gristliest, fattiest meat cut into chunks and boiled to a mush with potatoes, onions and carrots. The finishing flourish was an oxo cube. Even the cheapest cuts of meat were outside our budget, so another 'favourite' meal was 'poor man's burgers' - slices of potato and onions dipped in batter and deep fried.

Tea on Thursday nights (dad didn't get paid until Friday) was almost always jam butties - but my sister and I were told to count our blessings, as some children only had bread and dripping.