To ask what did your granny eat?

She would never eat ‘that foreign muck”. By which she meant pasta!

My gran was an abysmal cook and everything was covered in cat hair. Most memorable meals were weetabix with butter and jam on top (like a slice of bread) and ice-cream with sugar sprinkled on top served in a yellow melamine bowl with a side order of cat fluff. She did make a very good Madeira cake though.

I only really knew my maternal grandmother. She liked mainly homemade made food. I remember she came up 1 Sunday thought we were having a roast dinner. It was summer hot our mum banged a pizza and chips in the oven with salad. She wasn’t impressed.🤣🤣🤣

I also remember her having toast with sugar on. She used to get soda farls. We would have them with butter and lemon cheese on. They were the best I’ve not seen them for years. I’m sure there will be someone telling me they have them in Waitrose. Well we don’t have Waitrose up North.

All dinners were served with two types of potatoes, meat and two vegetables. Always had a pudding and then a few chocolates.

Lunch was usually a salad with some thick cut ham or cold turkey or something like that from the delicatessen.

Breakfast was a full English at the weekends, and boiled eggs with toast and butter during the week. I dont think she even knew what a cereal was.

Always drinking tea with two sugars, and a bottle of wine a night. She was the tiniest woman you've ever seen, barely a size six and lived to 96. Didnt know the meaning of exercise. Honestly I dont know how she managed it.

My grandparents died before I was born so I'm going with my mum and dad (both in their 80s now).

Lentil pie, corned beef hash, chicken curry (with random carrots and peas)

Also Fray Bentos pies and findus crispy pancakes as a treat 🤢

Breakfasts: boiled eggs. Full English. Porridge. Kippers.

Lunches: Sandwiches

Dinners: Roast dinner. Sausage & mash. Pie (sometimes steak and kidney) & chips. Chippy tea once a week

No snacks.

Corned beef, fritters, fray bentos pies, Benson and hedges and cans of Tennents lager. She died when she was 67 bless her

My grandparents ate homemade food the vast majority of the time (with the exception being occasional portions of fish and chips at the seaside). It generally involved porridge, toast or bacon sandwiches for breakfast, all main meals were made up of some combination of meat/fish/vegetables/homemade gravy (essential in the North of England, where 50% of your blood is made up of gravy), plus a pudding every evening! Needless to say, I ate there quite a lot, and not just on Sundays, which involved the mandatory Sunday roast.

There were snacks- KitKats, bars of chocolates, mint imperials and sometimes bags of sweets like Liquorice Allsorts or Werther's Originals. Cakes were homemade until my grandmother no longer had time to make them, because she continues to have such a hectic social life. Oh, and because she hates ironing, she always has the iron in one hand and a bottle of Spitfire or whiskey in the other!

She'd take us foraging for wild blackberries, damsons and raspberries every year, and would then spend the afternoon cursing (she has always been part-deaf and didn't realise that we could hear her, so we learnt a selection of swear words from her) while making jam, which inevitably made a mess of the hob. She grows some of her own fruit bushes, tomatoes and even melons (in a porch; she's probably a witch because she does wonders with plants, e.g. sticking sprigs in milk bottles and they miraculously grow), but she is now almost 100 and struggles to get down to pick blackcurrants and things now. Despite having moved away, she still sends me boxes of gooseberries and other delights!

Apparently, my great-grandparents ate similar foods (though her father had an extensive allotment), as well as a piece of homemade cake every evening for supper. Even the dog got a slice to himself!

Houses weren’t as warm in those days. Many people didn’t have fridges and instead had a cupboard open to the outside with wire in to allow air in to keep things cool.

Where is Bessarabia? (or was?)

My Grandma had a terrible diet based on biscuits, sugary tea and pop from the milkman. She had to cook for my Grandad who worked nights and ate at odd times but it was always done begrudgingly.

I lived with mine when I was little (late 70s) . She was born in 1910. I struggle to remember, but the things that stick out are that we had mince and carrots and mash - because i used to mush it up into a 'pie', potato fritters (so deep fried potatoes but cut into slices not chips) but I don't know what with. Chicken in a tin (the stuff in white sauce) with rice. She liked the milk with the cream at the top of the bottle (which made me retch) and Yorkshire puds for pudding with golden syrup.

I remember my paternal grandparents insisting that if we had to eat fast food it could only be Wimpy, because there were knives and forks!

When my Granny made pancakes (pancake day only - don't remember any other time that she'd eat a pancake) she always put a handful of currants or raisins in the batter.
Question....is this a Welsh thing? Granny was Welsh. I have only ever met one other person who did the same thing. He was also Welsh 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

@Theunamedcat

Dripping on toast was bloody lovely. Especially if the toast was done on a proper fire. Leftover Christmas turkey sandwiches with dripping instead of butter is the best.

My gran made the most wonderful blackcurrant tart from blackcurrants grown in her garden. Blimey, the fruit was sharp, but her pastry was thin and perfect. We would mix ice cream (bought in a small block from the corner shop - no freezer) with the fruit to sweeten it up.

Lots of homemade cakes, particularly bake stones (Welsh cakes). Cakes were smaller than the ones often made today. We would toast bread for tea on the fire, or have cheese on a plate - literally sliced cheese melted on a plate. With a home-grown, extra strong pickled onion. Delicious.

Smetana - it's a type of sour cream. She was born in Bessarabia in the early years of the last century.

Tripe, tongue, a lot of fat! And piccalilli

Anything they grew, slaughtered or caught (probably illegally). She raised 12 kids the eldest born in 1929. My mum is the youngest at 84 (only 2 left now). She tells me her mum could make a meal for 14 out of nothing - lots of rationing all supplemented by scrumping and poaching 🤣They had chickens and grew all the veg.

Oh....mutton hotpot....always remember chewing on that thing that looked like a filter tip (I think it's a tendon lol lol)

My granny ate like that too. She had dementia and it was endemic in her family.

Lots of the above. Porridge with bran flakes sprinkled on top for breakfast. Instant coffee with Coffee Mate and sugar. She made mince “cake” - mince with puff pastry. I’ve no idea why it was a cake not a pie. She was an excellent baker and made angel cakes and scones. When we went on day trips she’d make sandwiches with a tin of corned beef chopped together with a half pack of butter. They were delicious! For a bedtime snack we’d make toast on sticks in front of the coal fire.
Lived to be almost 100. Hardly drank alcohol. No snacking (sometimes a mint imperial or Wethers original). She was kind and lovely to be around.

The thing about eating like your grandparents is total bollocks. A few rationing years notwithstanding, diet was stunningly bad for most working people in postwar Britain - full of very processed food, tinned/canned stuff, cheap ingredients. A few people might have cooked nice food from scratch, but in their working-class community my grandparents, like most others, ate cheap food that was just as bad or worse than any UPF foods today. Spongy white bread with the cheapest meat paste on it, cheap jam, processed cakes (Mr Kipling and so on), builders’ tea nonstop with four sugars a cup, Fray Bentos pies, crab sticks, deep fried chips, processed hamburgers, Spam, Club and Penguin biscuits. A vegetable or fruit was rarely in evidence apart from a very rare banana, tinned peaches, and the odd glass of Vimto or Ribena (Ribena was originally a wartime supplement designed to stop British children getting scurvy).

Neither of my grandmothers were good cooks. Boiled potatoes (the cheap waxy kind with eyes) and a canned suet pie were their staples. One of my grandmothers simply gave up cooking at all in her sixties, and lived for thirty years after that just grazing on Mr Kipling cakes and sweet tea.

Processed foods made out of industrial food waste are much older than most people think. Why do you think Margaret Thatcher was busy using her chemistry degree working on soft serve ice cream? Cheap meat paste was made from connective tissue meat slurry long before Turkey Twizzlers were invented. Spam and other canned meat products were chock full of processed animal fats. Margarine and lard were staples for baking and for just about everything else.

Cooking decent food from scratch was something that was much more an interest of my parents’ boomer era. If you were middle class or lived in the country between the forties and the nineties then maybe you ate a decent diet. Most postwar working class people really didn’t — same problems as today, in which it was far cheaper to get spongy white bread, tinned food and eat chips, fried egg and marg, than to be eating fresh seasonal produce (plus, before the mid to late 80s/early 90s, air freighted or hydroponic-grown food was quite rare: it wasn’t yet the era of strawberries and grapes all year round).

If you’re wondering why they were less fat than today, it was largely portion size. And in postwar Britain everyone smoked like chimneys. Remember the days when leftovers were the norm? In my childhood it was rare to eat something you liked every day — you ate what was there or what needed using up, not what you fancied.

Today, we not only can access a huge variety of foods, but expect to eat things we feel like eating at every meal, as well as multiple helpings of it. It’s nicer, we don’t smoke so much, we have abundant food, we eat too much as a result. I for one certainly wouldn’t eat as much as I do, if what was on offer was the diced tinned swede, lumpy boiled spuds and grey flat hamburgers with thick Bisto that my maternal grandmother used to produce; or the gristly meat paste sandwiches on cheap Kwik Save bread that my paternal grandmother used to dish up. (Even with a Blue Riband biscuit or a Mr Kipling fruit pie with Elmlea for afters.)

We lived about 100 miles away so stayed over about 1 weekend per month. As we were hosted guests, food was always bacon rolls, proper Sunday roast with homemade 'English' puddings like rice pudding or strawberries and cream, other meals were buffet finger food with homemade sausagerolls and cream horns etc. Everything made from scratch apart from bread that was a proper bakers loaf, never supermarket bread. All the veg, salad and strawberries were straight from the garden. The fruit bowl was always overflowing as well.

My Grandma died when I was 12 but she's left me with amazing memories of her brilliant cooking.

Dad’s mum - 20 cigs a day, no breakfast, sandwich for lunch, soup and sandwich for dinner. She did live into her 90s, but she did die of lung cancer. She was always very very thin.

Mum’s mum - 99 years old, still alive. Turns 100 in October - eats whatever she wants. She has always eaten a very varied diet, but she definitely eats a lot of vegetables. These days my brother and his wife live with her, and she eats a lot of soup and stew. When I was younger she used to cook all the time. Lived on a farm most of her life so always knew about what’s in season. She also smoked from 14-60 and still has very occasional one.