typical weekly menus in 1960

trying-very-trying

sandieb wrote: »

So do I - don't know what happened to them!!!

My four kids pulled them out along with my pelvic floor muscles:rotfl: I haven't seen them since.

Horace

This has brought back some memories for me.

I can remember that we had a roast on Sundays (beef, lamb, pork or chicken) with all the trimmings followed by either a steamed syrup pudding, apple pie & custard or rice pudding (mum and I used to fight for the skin).

Monday was always left overs minced and made into a shepherds pie.

I don't really recall the other meals, I know we had stew, egg n chips, fish (usually plaice because at the time it was the only one I would eat because it had orange spots - cant stand fish of any kind now).

Cakes were always home made. I sometimes had jam sandwiches for tea.

Life was grand:D

fletch3163

Growing up in the East end of Glasgow I remember:

the man with the horse and cart selling fruit and veg. He had an artificial arm!
Curley's shop where they made your butter up with two wooden paddles
Tinned salmon with vinegar and saucers of cucumber, also with vinegar.
Home-made-soup made with boiling beef (minimal meat) and Swell which was some form of dried veg.
Salads of whole leaves, eggs, syboes (now spring onions?), chips, tinned potato salad and veg salad
Pudding being hot custard and cold strawberry jelly (a nice sunset still reminds me of that melting jelly:D )
Butter living in a bowl of water to stop from melting
The smell of tripe
Saturday brought Alpine ginger (pop), 1/4 of cola cubes and the Bunty

MrsE_2

emilyt wrote: »

My mum wasn't the greatest of cooks.I was born in 1968 so a child of the 70's.
Sunday- Chicken cooked in a pressure cooker. Yuk . Came out as white as it went in. Served with tinned peas and tinned carrots and very well cooked mashed potatoes. Tinned pears and angel delight for afters.
Monday- Cornedbeef mash and baked beans. Nice biscuits for afters.
Tuesday-Heart but we were told it was beef mashed potatoes and well cooked cabbage. Rice pudding for afters.
Wednesday- Ribs cooked in the pressure cooker with carrots and lentils served with mash potatoes. Afters was a slice of neapolitan ice cream with two wafers.
Thursday-Soup from left over ribs. Custard creams for afters.
Friday- Chip shop day. Had a fizzy drink of orangeade so didn't have an afters.
Saturday-Bacon,eggs tinned tomatoes beans and fried bread. Afters was a bag of sweets i.e dolly mixtures
So glad i now make my own meals.
Brilliant thread by the way.

I was born in Dec 67, so similar cooking.

My mum also wasn't a great cook, most of her veg came from a tin:eek:

We had a roast on Sunday & then the usual stuff through the week. Stuffed marrow, stuffed hearts, stuffed tomatoes, pork chops, lamb chops, egg & chips, sausages, fish fingers.
Didn't really have pudding, tinned fruit & tip top or brick icecream if we were.

Sunday was sometimes a cooked breakfast.

I also remember vesta curry & chinese food:eek:
Angel delight.
There used to be orange juice in a powder mix too:eek:
And a drink in a tin that went fizzy when you added water to it.

oystercatcher

Not noticed this thread before. Haven't read all of it but think I'm quite unusual. I was born in 61 and when I was about 6 my parents decided to go vegetarian so our diet which had been as people mentioned earlier turned into. Homemade lentil roast, nut roasts, macaroni cheese. Bread and cheese pudding, 'rissoles' (made from some mix from Heath and Heather, the precursers of Holland and Barret) cheese and mushroom rissotto was one of my favourites and also home made pizza.

Mum made all our bread and cakes, muslie even home made peanut butter! Dad kept bees at the end of the garden , until the neighbours complained and we had to move them to a farm!

My brother and I used to shudder whe we knew we were going to have lentil roast for tea, it seemed to be a big sloppy dish of lentils with a few mushrooms cooked in it. I loved mushrooms but my brother hated them so he'd pass them over to me. The lentil bit seemed very tastless though. I love lentils now ! Still don't eat much meat although am not a strict veggie at all these days.

Oystercatcher

Kiwisaver_2

OMG I shudder at the thought of what was on our weekly menu as a child growing up in the 60s and 70s, but funnily enough in some way or another some of those old things still remain.

My mother was a terrible cook, although it never stopped her trying, I guess she had no choice with three children and a hungry man to feed, she did her best. The single thing that sticks in my memory is the portion sizes, especially now when hubby and I tuck into a packet of biscuits or a cake between us and scoff the lot. Is it any wonder we were skinny children and I don't remember anyone being particularly overweight. I don't recall there ever being any leftovers.

A Mars bar would be cut into 5 slices and shared. :eek:
A packet of Club Biscuits - just one each :eek:
A tin of fruit and evap between the five of us. :eek:

Crisps and Pop were a very rare treat, for nights when we had a babysitter when Ma and Pa were out dancing on a Saturday night.

We children didn't always have a dinner at home, we would have school dinners and then come home to tea, which would be something on toast, sandwciches or soup, followed by a piece of Angel Cake or a biscuit of some sort. But a dinner was cooked for Mum and Dad. A special treat for Dad's dinner was a vesta curry, or chow mein which we used to look longingly upon. :rotfl:

As times changed we did see some variations coming along, Mum started working part-time and the pressure cooker came in to play, we started having dinners in the evenings. The pressure cooker was mother's lifesaver, and I guess we must have had every recipe from the book that came with it. Everything went in there and it was always hissing away on the stove. Horrid thing!!!

Dad grew veggies, so we always had lots of salad from the garden and new potatoes.

Fridays was market day, usually fish (smoked haddock and mash) followed with madeira cake and bananas.
Saturdays - jacket potatoes (baked in he oven all day) and sausages.
Sundays always a roast and yorkshire pudding with soggy veg. Followed by a block of icecream from the icecream van and tinned fruit.
Midweek - usually a casserole, liver and bacon, shepherds pie or fishfingers.
Angel Delight and Birds Trifles were our other staple desserts.

Wow, then along came the 70s and boy things started to change; potatoes were on ration, father took charge of dinner a few nights a week. Along came Spag Bol, Chile con Carne and Curries. (Thanks Dad!) We even ventured as far as a Chinese takeaway on special occasions.

The biggest revelation in our house was Madhur Jaffrey and father got really taken with indian cooking and it certainly changed our eating habits forever more.

foreign_correspondent

is my memory failing or did vesta curry used to be nice???

I remember it as being boil in the bag, but I bought one a while ago and it was dehydrated stuff in sachets - even after cooking the beef was powdery! yuk!

SunnyGirl

I've only just come across this thread too it's great and what a trip down memory lane! I was born in 1966 but remember many of the foods talked about. My mum & dad were quite adventurous really. They joined a curry club when we lived in Nottingham and potato & mushroom curry was a favourite. We also had the usual roast on a Sunday, eggs, bacon & tinned toms on Mondays. We didn't have set meals on set days apart from these two. I remember eating stew with mash & yorkies, savoury mince, spag bol, chille, egg & chips, potatoe surprise (hard boiled eggs in a dish, baked beans on top then mash & cheese and under the grill) stuffed baked potatoes, ratatouille with rice & an egg broken in the middle of it, covered with cheese & put in the oven until the egg was set & cheese melted - I still love this! My mum had The Paupers Cookbook and lots of our meals came from this. I used to love the bacon & onion hotpot from it.

I was talking to mum yesterday about this thread & she was saying that there wasn't any spare money for convenience foods etc so everything was cooked from scratch. Wise advice that I still follow today! Treats were hot puddings & custard, ice cream, tinned fruit & dream topping, custard creams, nice biscuits & very ocassionally club biscuits which were eaten as a pudding! The only cereal we had was HM museli, shredded wheat or cornflakes and I drank kia-ora orange, water, tea & milk. If I was ill when we went to the chemist to get the prescription mum would buy me a bottle of ribena to have hot - that was a treat!

Talking to dh about food & his mum wasn't a cook & ran a pub full time so their meals were very different. Lots of M&S ready meals - I'd have been so jealous as a kid - although his mum still makes a revolting concoction called cheese & milk. It's literally slices of cheese covered with steralised milk & grilled - yuk yuk yuk!!!

Great, happy memories. BTW I have bought myself a copy of The Paupers Cookbook it's really good. I now feature quite a few recipes from it on my menus.

shopndrop

Ashropshirelady wrote: »

Tea was usually tinned fruit with evap milk and bread and butter.......shudder. There was me thinking I was the only one who had to suffer that.

I remember having tinned fruit with evap and bread and butter too. When I first had tea with my in laws and we had fruit and evap for pudding, I asked for some b&b. My then BF was absolutely horrified at my request but we still laugh about now over 30 years later:D

EssexHebridean

Fantastic thread - thanks to everyone for some memories!

I was born in the early 70's so some of this is before my time, but there is a lot that rings bells. Always a roast on a Sunday followed up by cold meat and chips on a Monday - chicken was a rare treat, the roast was usually lamb or pork as others have said. I remember not really liking lamb then - I'd class it as my favourite roast now! Other than that it was usually fish & chips from the chip shop on a Friday night - Dad would stop at the chippie on his way home from work to get it. With the way the cost of chip-shop f&c's has escalated now I bet not so many families can afford that treat on a weekly basis now. Fray bentos pies were a definite favourite - in fact a fray bentos pie tin is always used for mixing polyfilla in this household - my Dad always reckoned it was the right size and shape and if it's good enough for him.....! :rotfl: Always sandwiches for tea at the weekend - tuna and tomato or ham and tomato. Then the Breville sarnie-maker came along and things got more exotic but Sunday nights always featured a careful tooth-clean to avoid scrubbing the burnt bits of your mouth! I also remember not being allowed to play out in the street on a Sunday - we weren't religious but it was still expected to be a quiet day - it was quiet alright - Mum & Dad putting on the F1 race and then falling asleep in front of it - as an only child I can remember Sunday afternoons being boring beyond measure! Puddings - oh yes I remember those frozen mousse things - anyone remember the peach melba ones? They were lush - but I dread to think of the additives etc in them! Fruit and evap milk too - cream was a treat that only really came along at christmas!

Both my Nans had outside loos - they always seemed to be full of spiders regardless of the time of year - and I hated going out there at night, ugh! Used to love making toast over the fire with my Uncle though - that's a really happy memory and I remember being so upset when they got their posh new fire and had the open one taken out. The comment about watching the spinner in case it walked across the floor made me howl with laughter - I'd forgotten that! My Nan used to do her washing in the sink then everything got loaded into the spinner! We had a top-loading washing machine I recall - I thought friends Mum's front loaders were really posh!

Finally on the food front - a real "Ugh!" - those faggots that came in a foil tray in a sort of thick gravy - anyone else remember those? I loathed them with a passion but they were cheap so I remember we had them fairly regularly for a while when Dad was out of work.