To ask what did your granny eat?

The first time we took my Granny to McDonald’s she asked for a knife and fork!

Her fabulous meat & potato pie
Amazing chips cooked in dripping
Fruit cake

It was all delicious and I really liked her.

Ok so I think the question may be what DIDNT my grandparents eat....pigs ears, trotters, cow lips, wipe a bit of bread around the dried lard in the frying pan..... that's just a few grim ones in my memory.... my mum is a bit similar... the apple evidently didn't fall far! 😂

Southeast U.S., Chicken and rice, green beans boiled with a piece of ham for flavour, lots of gravy, nothing foreign. Everything was homemade and delicious. She always made a pound cake for the week in case she had any visitors. This was back when friends just dropped by to see you.

Things from tins that reminded her of her childhood during the war, she loves instant mash and tinned peaches with condensed milk. Every main meal with a glass of white wine. Smoked from the age of 12 to her late 70's. Still going strong in her 90's now. Very partial to a custard donut.

Potatoes and butter
Champ a Northern Irish dish of mashed potatoes and spring onion
Bacon egg and chips
Chips
Sausage and chips
roast dinner
Ulster fry
coffee
tea
whisky
vodka
ice cream
jelly
raspberry ruffles

Roast dinners with home made gravy. Tea with a single biscuit in the afternoon. Porridge for breakfast. Grew their own vegetables and had lovely salads. They had a strawberry patch and would grow the best strawberries.
They didn't own a microwave so everything was cooked on a little freestanding oven/hob.

Grew vegetables in the back garden , also had two allotments . Had chickens for meat and eggs . Traded those for rabbits to eat from a friend .
Deep friend chips ( made in a chip pan ) with lard .
Kept the fat from the Sunday roast ( dripping ) It would solidify to fat and jelly underneath . They'd have that on toast .
Lino down on the floor with rugs , open fire but paraffin heaters for hall / kitchen in winter .

My granny took me for dinner once at a Little Chef. We had fish fingers and chips and beans, and she called it caravan food.

At home it was white bread sliced very thin (my dad has her bread knife and board still), roast potatoes, and rice pudding. Not all together of course but those were the things I remember.

She was in service from 14 or so, and ended up a housekeeper.

Paternal grandmother - very little in terms of portion size, unless it was a dessert after a restaurant meal, in which case a whole new stomach seemed to come into play. Was small her entire life, petite in stature.

Maternal grandmother - also petite in stature but had a harder life in terms of work. Lots of shift work as a trained nurse and later a carer. Sugary tea and sweet treats a go to. Still going at almost 87 though.

Not being greedy was a big thing for both, and for my grandfather too.

Their go to meals were meat/two veg generally speaking. Balanced, healthy. My maternal grandparents were both slightly more adventurous with their food choices in their middle age, I think.

Three of my four grandparents were born the year before WW2, the older was 8 at the time war broke out, so for all their formative years were lived under rationing. I’m sure this influenced their dietary habits as adults.

My DH’s granny was like that too - fond memories of her saying very loudly ‘where’s ma fork n knife’ in a strong Fife accent at her 90th birthday party. I strongly suspect her parrot had picked up its more fruity language from her.

Maternal Granny: raised twelve kids, through both war years, they were hard up, but never went hungry, lots of homemade bread, dripping, suet dumplings , grew her own veg, kept chickens. Had gooseberry and blackberry bushes in garden, made jam, amazing resilient woman and mother and grandmother, her roast dinners and stews were the best.
Paternal Granny: better off financially, I remember tinned ham with jelly round the edge, salad consisting of tomato, lettuce and cucumber, bought sliced bread with marge. Pudding would be tinned fruit with dream topping type thing. Lots of sugar, sweets etc.

20 B&H a DAY, snowballs and endless packets of Fisherman’s Friends. Would not recommend

Potatoes with kefir

My very wonderful nan genuinely ate mars bar sandwiches

Oh, I've remembered. When I stayed the night, which I often did, warm milk, with a teaspoon of sugar and a grating of nutmeg.

I remember grating nutmeg on the top of the rice pudding and popping on little pieces of butter. And stirring bread pudding.

My grandparents' diet would be almost indistinguishable from modern food in my country.

Sourdough bread, olive oil on everything, lots of tomato based sauce, olives, more fish than meat, salad with EVERY. SINGLE. MEAL

Lunch was always heavier than dinner, unless they were entertaining or celebrating something.

During the war there was apparently a lot of rabbit eaten. Freshly caught by my Great-Grandad.
They still ate it when my dad was a child (I assume once Great-Grandad passed away the rabbit supply stopped).
My dad was the fussiest eater in the world (ARFID way before there was a name for it) but apparently he liked the rabbit.
We mostly went to my granny's for tea so I associate her with bread and butter, salad, ham and cake.
She always had "proper" bread the type you had to slice yourself. She sliced it in that weird way of standing it on its end, holding close to her chest and sawing away with the bread knife.
She used proper butter (no marge). I could eat slices and slices of that bread and butter.
The salad was all grown in the garden by my Grampy. If you wanted another tomato he'd just go and get one straight out the greenhouse.
The ham was always big thick slices of a giant ham piece. I don't like ham so I never had any but it always looked impressive.
I basically ate slices and slices of bread and butter followed by cake for tea at Granny's.
All very Enid Blyton 😋🍞🍰

My grandmother started cooking in the 1920s when she got married - she didn't know how to cook anything to start with! Must've been fun! Anyway by the time I arrived decades later she had mastered all the essentials - roast beef, lamb, pork and chicken. Various pies, casseroles (using the pressure cooker quite often). Many types of cake, biscuit and dessert. Everything cooked from scratch. I learned how to cook by watching and helping her. Nothing between meals, apart from 'afternoon tea' which would be small cakes, and everything was washed down with a cuppa. My grandmother lived with us so we ate well! But no-one was overweight, I suspect because no snacking and no processed foods.

Jellied eel - no thank you!

Grandma 1: basically nothing. Was very thin and proud of it and lived off thin air and cups of tea. Would occasionally eat half of an M and S ready meal

grandma 2: normal food for her generation. Sausage and mash, fish and chips, chicken, the odd curry that my mum would make (my mum spent some time in Africa). Very few and “traditional” British veg only.

I'm remembering my Irish grandparents now! My grandad ate a full fry up every day, he lived to the age of 92. It was touch and go at one point though as he fell asleep one morning and his frying pan caught fire. My dad was not impressed when he got a call from the fire brigade in Belfast 😱😂

I had one a bit like that - seemed to exist solely on whisky and lemonade, Thornton’s vanilla truffles and Benson and Hedges black. Only the gods know how she made it to 86!

My grandparents grew every edible thing it was possible to grow in this country so every meal was full of fresh fruit and veg. But there was always a block of lard being used for something and more sugar than I’ve ever seen in my life being poured into the homemade jam! Most meals had gravy too and lots of salt so on balance, I don’t think it was particularly healthy.

Meat, fish and root vegetables including fruit and berries in the summer