typical weekly menus in 1960

pigpen

My nanna used to do..

Monday (washing day) .. Rice pudding
Tuesday .. eggs .. dippy ones usually
Wednesday .. tinned corned beef/ham/egg .. whatever was inand cheap sandwiches
Thursday .. stew
Friday ... fish with chips
Saturday .. roast dinner
Sunday .. salad and meat from left over

Olliebeak

Those Vesta Meals!

I can remember getting Chop Suey one - where you had to heat up the frying pan and throw in these 'plastic looking strips' that magically twisted and turned into crispy noodles.

And their Spaghetti Bolognese was the first time I ever ate the stuff. Still don't like it now and the smell of parmesan .................. still always smells like v***t to me!

Lizzieanne

Tibbie's_mum wrote: »

Oh how I remember those glass bottles of pop from the milkman, heavenly!! But we never had a Soda Stream, although I desperately wanted one, you must have been a very posh family.

Not posh, it's just that I was an only child, so I suppose Mum and Dad had more disposable income!

SUESMITH_2

i never had steak until i lived with oh and we went out for meals, we had braising steak and onions

we still have a pop man who comes round on sunday evening

when i was young mum used to buy her parraffin, cleaning stuff and brushes of maurice alcock who came around in a van - he had a shop too that sold just about everything including ladies clothes upstairs!

i loved chef square shaped soup (there i've said it)

meanmarie

Hi all,

Just reading through the thread I am amazed at the difference in the things we ate in the fifties and sixties in a small village 12 miles from the centre of Dublin and what was eaten more or less generally in the UK.

Born in 1945, for eight years an only child, my father was a carpenter and my mother a stay at home mother, money wasn't exactly plentiful, we never had mince except when my mother minced at home the remains of the Sunday lunch meat to make what she called rissoles, stews were made with round steak ( not sure what you call that in UK) not shin beef, we never had sausages for dinner, or savoury pies and we never had bought cakes or buns. We almost always had a pudding, usually just a milk pudding with stewed apple or rhubarb or a spoonful of jam if there was nothing else.

Mother made brown soda bread, apple, gooseberry, rhubarb and jam tarts, jam and jelly. As a great treat a tin of biscuits was bought at Christmas, as were a couple of large bottles of fizzy drinks. Strangely , my mother never made soup, my earliest memories are of a little packet which I am almost sure was called Symingtons tomato soup

There were three very small shops in the village, each with a very limited range of goods, as I remember it, bacon was the only type of meat they sold. A butcher's van delivered once a week and whatever was bought was kept in a 'meat safe' a frame with mesh sides which allowed the air through the meat and butter to keep it cool...none of us ever got food poisoning so I suppose it worked. The fish man came on Friday and we would have whatever was bought from him for dinner that day...herring, whiting, mackerel or that awful dyed smoked cod...never remember having smoked mackerel available, only saw it as an adult I am sure.

Coffee was Camp or Irel, made on milk and I remember the advent of the tiny tins of Nescaf! instant coffee and how wonderful it seemed. I remember when Instant Whip became available, getting so sick because I ate too much that I haven't touched it since!

I think that it must have been 1965 or 66 that my parents got their first TV and I think that it was rented as the cost of buying one was huge, I think that a fridge was later and my mother was over 70 before she could be persuaded that a washing machine did wash clothes properly. While it was important to be warm and we were, due to fires of turf, coal and wood, central heating was a luxury that my father considered rotted houses and refused to have....it went into this house in the eight week interval between his death in October 1994 and my mother's in December 1994, so she only had its comfort as she lay here dying.

This thread is wonderful, I think that I must come back as there are probably so many things I have forgotten about a country child's life in Ireland of the 50s. I am enjoying the similarities and the differences between our two islands

Marie

sandy2_2

This thread has prompted talking about memories of our childhood with OH.
Saturday teatime my father always had a basin of winkles in their shells with bread and butter, I used to eat a few hooking them out with a hatpin , then proudly displaying the 'beauty spots'
Saturday Lunch was a steamed steak and kidney pudding prepared in a basin with a suet crust lining (to make the meat go further). basin was tied up in some sort of cloth , then everything was cooked in the dreaded pressure cooker, even tinned peas. I can sympathise with being able to eat veg thro a straw!!!
Only veg we ever had was peas, carrots, potatoes, cabbage, sprouts at Christmas.
Just remembered we always had a sandwich for supper, but on Saturday nights it was jacket potatoes with marg from a silver packet and Sunday night it was bread and dripping

Burlesque_Babe

Something I did hate was the sponge base with the fluted edge (flan casing?) which was then covered with a tin of fruit cocktail and then jelly poured over it and set. Served with Carnation milk. Yuck.

Olliebeak

For me in the late 50's/early 60's, breakfast in the summer was usually cornflakes/shredded wheat/puffed wheat, or sometimes that posh 'rare treat' half a grapefruit, and in the winter nearly always porridge (or sometimes cornflakes/shreddedwheat with hot milk).

I stayed school lunches (5/- a week) and we seemed to have mostly mince in all it's many and glorious forms, vegetables boiled to death and always fish on fridays. The only time we were ever offered a choice of anything was when a soup day was occasionally on the menu. Soup/salad/piece of fruit OR ordinary main course/pudding. No mix and match allowed - one meal or the other - though there was much swapping once we all got our meals to the tables.

'Supper' for me was three digestive biscuits and a glass of milk (providing it hadn't 'turned' during the day) in the summer or hot drinking chocolate and toast in the winter.

patchwork_cat

Olliebeak I went to school in Huyton before we moved to St Annes.

Icemaiden

Just remembered:D , at christmas we used to have tinned shrimps , don't know whether you can still get these.
I remember getting our first telly I was about 6yrs so around 1970, black & white thing with big knobs that you had to keep turning to get a decent picture!
My dads car was a Austin Woolsey(sp) and being the youngest was allowed to sit in the front, usually on my mums knee:eek:
I'm the youngest of four girls and in winter to keep warm we used to all sleep in mum & dads bed to keep warm while they slept in the singles.

Oh the memories..