What was day to day food in your childhood?

MandM90 · 26 November 2017 at 10:43PM

I grew up in the 90s, and my Irish Nanny (born 1930) cooked very 'plain' food - porridge for brekkie (or a boiled egg at weekends), ham sandwiches for lunch and stew/meat and two veg for dinner. I love her to bits but I found mealtimes quite bland. Since my grandfather died - who she says would eat nothing else - she eats very differently. She relishes our visits as she's fairly open minded about food but has no clue how to put together a spag bol or a curry. She struggles to cook, unfortunately, but seems to go straight for the pizza/spag bols/chillis when given the choice.

Dad owned a hotel/restaurant in the next county which meant he was away most of the week but he loved food, so when back would cook moules frites, les escargots, minute steak with chips and salad (with no salad cream to be seen!) or mum would make a roast on Sundays (quite often duck and plum. I don't eat meat now but still remember how lovely that was). Dad doesn't cook anymore - he's remarried and my stepmother is a bloody outstanding cook and will put on huge vegan spreads whenever we visit including homemade veganised baklava and ice cream!

Mum worked/commuted 12+ hours every day. She quite liked cooking - when she had the time- and had travelled extensively so liked all sorts of cuisines, however she was often absent/busy. My sister and I had au pairs and the usual fare was dire - oven chips, pizza, boiled tortellini with ready made sauces. I do remember one au pair giving me cold brussels sprout and ketchup sandwiches for school. My friends were horrified but I quite enjoyed it

I can't eat any oven 'convenience' food now. It actually makes me feel a bit queasy thinking about it!

When I was 13 my parents divorced and my mum sold her company to enable her to spend more time at home and buy my dad out of the family home - then ensued years of traipsing around ASD4 with a calculator trying to figure out if we could afford ketchup that week! Treats were all value brand and rationed (she hid crisps in the broken dishwasher). I can't really remember very much about what we ate at that time - lots of lentils!

Sorry - huge ramble, but thanks for the trip down memory lane! Interesting to see how times have changed!

queengoth · 26 November 2017 at 10:57PM

Sunday was a roast usually pork or beef
Monday bubble and squeak with cold meat
Tuesdays and Thursday were darts and dominoes nights (my parents ran a pub) so sandwiches and dripping bread (mucky fat) in summer, pie and mushy peas in winter.
Mum used to feed about 40 people with two Huge meat and potato pies
Wednesday fish and chips
Friday cottage pie or spaghetti Bol (she used to hide the garlic as my dad said for years he hated it but didn’t know it was in there)
Saturdays wrestling and the world of sport with tinned fish and salad in summer or a stew and dumplings in winter.
I loved mums chicken stew until one day when I was about 15, I looked into the casserole dish and realised chickens don’t have four legs !
Tinned fruit and tip top for pudding on Saturday and sometimes a frozen mousse pot (I could never wait 20 minutes till it defrosted)

And I remember stuffed marrow and beast heart uck !

charlies-aunt · 26 November 2017 at 11:05PM

I was born in the 50's and my Mum (another embittered and angry woman) was bloody awful cook too!
Meals were rough and ready - thick, heavy pastry pie crusts to thinly filled sweet and savoury pies, plain boiled potatoes, veggies boiled to b*ggery and gristly, fatty, grey meat. Block stork margarine for bread and Camp coffee, rendered fat from meat filled the chip pan and was also used for making pastry.
*shudder*

queengoth · 26 November 2017 at 11:06PM

Hard_Up_Hester wrote: »

I'm struggling to keep within my budget for food, everything is going up in price and I have very limited fridge and freezer space.
The meals I ate as a child were strange, my mum had little interest in the domestic side of things.
She would cook skate in black butter and stewing steak, apart from those two meals I would sometimes have half a thinly sliced marshal or half a tin of condensed milk as a meal.
Our meal plan for next week includes liver and bacon, smoked haddock and beef casserole.

What’s a thinly sliced marshal?

Nargleblast · 26 November 2017 at 11:31PM

Ah, the memories are drifting back.....the chip pan with years of crusted, burnt black fat on the outside, mum eating bread and dripping (vile stuff), olive oil in tiny bottles from the chemist, only used for treating hardened ear wax. Vesta meals - very exotic! Loved their beef risotto and their Chinese Chow Mein with crispy noodles. Cheese and wine parties in the 1970s, where you ate your own weight in French bread and salted peanuts and had the runs the next day.....spam fritters from the chip shop. Boiled veg with bicarbonate of soda added to preserve the green colour. I once tried to be a show off in domestic science class by asking the teacher if she put bicarbonate in the cabbage. “Never!” She squawked. “It KILLS the vitamin C!!!” That told me!

esmy · 26 November 2017 at 11:33PM

Grew up in the 60s and 70s.

My brother and I always had school dinners so tea during the week was more of snack type meal - egg on toast, sausage sandwiches or similar, Mum worked at school so she also had a school dinner and ate the same as we did. She would still cook a dinner for Dad though!

Saturdays were fish and chips or my very favourite, braising steak and chips. Sometimes we'd have Sunday dinner on Saturday as my parents went rambling on Sundays. Most meals (except Sunday dinner) were served with bread and butter and my brother and I would fight for the crust. Mum always baked - after she died my daughter, then 7 years old, said Grandma's house didn't smell the same any more. Shop bought cakes were rare and seen as a treat. There was always cake or a pudding of some kind. Tinned fruit with evaporated milk often featured - I don't think I've eaten either as an adult! The only convenience food I recall eating was fish fingers, I think we only had a fridge with a tiny freezer box. Until I left home at 18 I thought curry was the dried Vesta curry that I occasionally bought and cooked myself, much to Mum's amusement. We drank milk and diluted squash, fizzy pop almost never. Sweets were bought out of our own pocket money and never as part of the weekly food shop.

Mum did most of her shopping in the market and knew the stall holders. I think this helped keep the cost of fresh meat fish and veg down. We were occasionally dispatched to the local shops for something - I still remember her co-op share number. She kept a notebook and wrote down all her household spending and I know she sometimes diverted a bit of the housekeeping for other things! She fed us well on a tight budget.

PollyWollyDoodle · 26 November 2017 at 11:53PM

Jelly with evaporated milk (stirred into the jelly and set, not poured over).
And yes, 'evap' and tinned fruit.
Broken biscuits, you used to be able to buy cheaply bags of broken biscuits and I loved these bcause you'd find bits with icing on.
'Eggy bread' for breakfast, bread dipped in beaten egg and fried.
And bread and dripping, delicious!

Pollycat · 27 November 2017 at 12:10AM

Nelski wrote: »

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

But nowadays there is also so much readily available food that is not nutritionally good.
Ready meals and takeaways at the end of a phone.

Not so many obese people when I was growing up as there are today.

So many people given a couple of potatoes, onion, carrot & some mince wouldn't know where to start with making a meal but will happily gorge on a lamb kebab and chips.

GreyQueen · 27 November 2017 at 9:13AM

Home made rice pud was a regular thing, the milk eked out a bit by water. And semolina for a wintertime treat, with a spoonful of jam dolloped in the middle. How we loved to swirl it into the semolina to make patterns before eating it.

Even today, I eat a lot of things which my parents won't entertain (earlier efforts to expand their culinary horizons when living at home resulted in comments such as; that was all right but we won't have that again.

That was me told, all right.:rotfl:

[Deleted User] · 27 November 2017 at 9:16AM

Sorry if you think I'm presumptuous enough to speak for everyone, the WE I mean when I say I'll go back to simpler meals is only He Who Knows and myself, I wouldn't presume to make decisions for anyone else, certainly NOT for folks who can make their own decisions and can carry on eating in ANY way they want to!

PLEASE READ BEFORE POSTING

What was day to day food in your childhood?

Comments

Categories

Get our FREE Weekly email full of deals & guides - and it’s spam-free