To ask what did your granny eat?

When did they eat the cakes, shortbread and fruitcake if it wasn’t a snack?

Breakfast
Tin of Guinness around 11am.

No lunch

Tea
Ham egg and chips and jelly for "afters"
Or roast dinner at her son's or my mum.

Supper
Bottle of gold label.

I adored my Nan

@mathanxiety wouldn't cakes, shortbread and fruitcake be considered snacks?
A piece of shortbread with a cup of tea that's not at a specific mealtime - is a snack.
(I really fancy some fruitcake now and it's one o'clock in the morning 😂)

what I remember her eating from my childhood:
porridge for breakfast
soup (scotch broth or ham & lentil) for lunch
teas were mince and tatties, stovies, fish and potatoes, meat and veg, Sunday roas

she loved to bake and there was always some type of cake on the go! My favourite was her banana loaf.
endless amounts of tea and biscuits in the afternoon and always had a whisky & lemonade on a Saturday night!

Maybe it depends on when amd where the grandparents lived.

Mine were born at the end of the 19th century and first five years of the twentieth. They lived as children through the privation of WWI, the Irish war of independence and civil war, and then the trade war with Britain, the Depression and WW2. In my case, one set of grandparents wouldn't have had anything to eat at all if they hadn't grown it or raised it themselves. The other set also lived in rural ireland and simply didn't have much by way of snacks to buy. They baked cakes, shortbread, and fruitcake. None of them ever snacked even when the Irish economy grew and shop bought biscuits and whatnot became available.

My grandmother also did not drink tea or coffee, she used to drink hot water with a little milk in it. She would place a sugar cube in her mouth, sip the hot drink and suck on the sugar cube until it dissolved, she'd then pop in another.

Proper cooked dinners - meat, veg, gravy.
Stew/panacalty.
Tongue sandwiches.
Corned beef and pickle sandwiches.
Jam and bread.
Coronation chicken sandwiches.
Teacakes with best butter catapulted on.

Remember so well Tried it! You couldn’t pay me enough

I don't think my gma on mum's side ate loads but meat, veg, potatoes. Eggs. She had her own apple trees in the garden.

My own granny seemed to survive on rich tea biscuits.
My husband’s granny grew her own fruit and veg well into her 90s, was up at 5 each morning to buy fresh rolls from the bakery (in southern Germany), baked cakes for 11 with coffee, cooked all of her meals from scratch. Made her own fresh spätzle, Germknödel. etc. most days, all washed down with the local red wine.

Tripe boiled in milk 🤮🤢
My other Gran, rock cakes, tablet, Victoria sponge,short bread😋😋

That was only for a rich elite when sugar was so expensive it was a status symbol.

Commercial white sliced bread with dripping.
Tinned fruit, in syrup as there was no other option.
Tinned vegetables, peas or carrots🤮
Fried things, bacon, spam etc.
Commercially produced cakes & biscuits, always had a bowl of boiled sweets on hand.

20 cigs a day and a “shandy” every night

It wasn’t exactly unprocessed or healthy!

My mum used to complain that her mil ( my nan) used to put cow heel in the stew 🤢

Vodka, Speed and Valium in large quantities.

My grandpa - her husband - would make lovely homemade soup and stew, meat and veg. Lots of butcher meat. Always pudding. Regular boxes of Farmfoods choc ices as snacks. Loads of biscuits and sweeties. And whisky/cigarettes.

Glasgow area, 1980s/1990s. Grandmother died of suicide at 58, grandfather died of lung cancer in his early 70s.

I agree about the "no snacking" being wrong.
Just watch Bridgerton - the whole afternoon is devoted to cake and sweets 😂

My grandmother (born in 1920) had a huge cardboard box of chocolate bars for snacking on when I was a child.

I don’t recognise the idea that no-one was snacking in the past, either. I used to be constantly dragged around to visit all my grandmothers’ friends and church choir meets and church social events, largely featuring elderly ladies in their 60s-80s at the time (70s, 80s and 90s).

They were constantly eating biscuits with tea, and/or cakes (jam tarts, Battenberg cakes, slices of Madeira cake); and every lady always had a bowl of boiled sweets that you were offered whatever time of day it was! (Particularly those fruit sweets with the chewy inside, lime chocolates, lemon sherbets, barley sugar, wine gums, etc.) Everywhere you went in the 70s and 80s you got offered a biscuit: after church, at school break, at Brownies, at a garden fete, at a church fete, at a school event, at any sort of local meeting, at work, etc. etc. (And if you were lucky you’d snag a pink wafer or a bourbon, before only the Rich Tea and the currant biscuits were left.) Honestly, postwar Britain could have been powered on biscuits.

To read some of this thread you’d think that everyone was eating home-grown cabbage and veg and never snacked at all, ever ever; but I remember literally watching adults munching through endless tea and biscuits at every opportunity. Is everyone just discounting all the biscuits and sweet tea? 🤷‍♀️

Tounge
stuffed hearts
tripe
Cockles
winkles
muscles

all minging

Porridge with raisins
Shepherds pie
Roasts
Custard
Jelly with fruit set in it
Bakeless
Jam roll
Stew with dumplings
Gingerbread
Boysenberry ice cream

One Gran loved things like pea and ham soup, meat and potato pie, lemon meringue pie, rice pudding, egg on toast, real ham sandwiches. A bit of what she fancied.

Another ate the same thing week in week out:
Bran flakes
Sliced golden delicious apple
Lunch eg roast chicken, mash and veg or tail end of cod
Cup of tea and a small kitkat at 3pm,
Tea: Corned beef sandwich
Tinned pineapple or peaches.

Both lived to be 90.

My grandmother was a TERRIBLE cook! She grew up in a household with a cook/maid, got married and went to India as an Army wife so had servants, then came back to England to be plunged into wartime rationing so never really had a chance to learn when she was young. I actually lived with her for nearly a year when my parents were abroad, but I can only remember a few things she cooked. (It was 45 years ago!)

Stew, made with liver, vegetables and pearl barley - it wasn't as bad as it sounds.
Tuna macaroni, made with tinned tuna, condensed tomato soup, macaroni and cheese on top. I love it and still make it now. I think she picked up the condensed soup thing when my grandfather was posted to North Carolina after the war.
Hard boiled eggs in yellow tinned curry sauce with spinach - which was AWFUL.
Really good coffee cake with chocolate filling - all made by hand as she had no mixer.

I have literally just remembered crazy bus choc ices.

My nan would bring a box of vanilla chocolate ices back by bus in summer on an 8 mile journey. If you were unlucky and there on her return, you’d be offered a melting mess of hot vanilla slop and melting chocolate. If you were lucky she’d have had time to refreeze them and you’d be happy to eat a flat, icy, broken chocolate squished vanilla thing. The wrapping paper at some point would have decided it and the remnants of the choc ice were one, so you peeled off what you could and ate the rest 🤣

Honestly, I don't know much about my maternal grandmas cooking. She got leukemia when I was a fairly young child, and died when I was 9. We didn't see them very often anyway. I honestly don't remember any of her meals.

My paternal grandma was technically a housewife all her adult life, but according to my dad mostly cremated everything. She was far too busy to cook anything much, preferring to spend her time at her drama group, poetry group or "townswomens guild" (she thought the WI was "common"). She grew up in a succession of catholic boarding schools after her parents died young, and had zero concept of feeding a husband and two strapping boys. My dad mostly grew up on (in his words) "scrappy bits" and bread and butter.

But as for more what you're talking about... I was told, "if your great grandma wouldn't know what it was, then you shouldn't be eating it."

Both Grandparents
Both sides had allotments or grew veg, salad & fruit in their gardens
Home cooked food
No snacks in-between meals

All homemade with fresh veg
Homemade meat suet pudding
Roast meat with Yorkshire pudding
Meat Casserole with suet dumplings
Meat pie from leftovers
Fish
Rabbit
Dry marrow fat peas, soaked & cooked
Homemade cakes & biscuits
A pantry full of bottled vegetables & fruit
Homemade Christmas cake
Homemade Christmas pudding
Jelly & blancmange

All delicious

Lived until aged 80s & 90s