To ask what did your granny eat?

Well they didn’t have freezers, or microwaves!

My nan used to have breakfast, dinner, tea then supper before bed.

They worked manual jobs, factories, cleaning, shops so on their feet all day so needed the calories.

Brawn and pigs trotters, piccalilli. Lots of cups of tea.

Home cooked from scratch. Cheap cuts of meat; brain, heart, kidney, liver, tripe etc. Vegetables grown by my grandfather in their tiny back garden so seasonal veg eaten with cheap meats, stews and casseroles. I remember pea soup with bacon bones being the family favourite. Cakes baked a couple of times a week. Grandma's go to pudding when we were visiting was baked custard tart. Sunday 'tea' was sandwiches with leftover meat from Sunday lunch, Swiss roll, jelly, custard and a couple of biscuits. Sterilised milk was the downer when served with a cup of tea. I can taste it now! Awful stuff. Grandma thought my Mum was mad buying sausages, those dried oriental meals and fry bentos pies in a tin, blamanche sachets and that awful powdered orange juice. This was the late 60's/early 70's. My favourite though was my Grandma's toast, thickly cut bread with lashings of butter. I remember my Grandma stabbing the toast with the handle end of the knife before putting the butter on. Delicious!

Spam, chips, tinned veg, egg and chips with tinned tomatoes, meringues, trifle, apple crumble. And so on in the same vein. Born in the 1920s.

Great gran, born 1900, ate a lot of sandwiches, cold meat, baked beans, pickled onions, potatoes, cakes. Meals on Wheels, for a few years before she died in 1998.

'Heaven. BUT..nan kept the rest of the sausages on a plate in the cupboard for the next couple of days until they were all gone. I ate them but I would never do that now lol'

You'd probably be safer now with the amount of preservatives in sausages!

DMum used to keep the remains of the Sunday dinner ON TOP of the fridge, rather than in it...........

Loads of UPF biscuits and cakes, loads of ready meals like Aunt Bessies, lived until her mid 90s, of course.

Mine lived in Belgium, lots of fresh fruit, seafood, meats, steak, veggies and fresh cream cakes! She also loved beer and lived to 100.

Main meal in the middle of the day, always meat and two veg followed by custard/rice pudding/semolina. Homemade soda bread every day, eggs from the hens, a Snowball at Christmas. Homemade blackcurrant or gooseberry jam.

Mine was born in 1896 and worked as a cook. My earliest memory is standing on a chair next to her while she made suet pastry. Absolutely everything was home made and very plain.

Loads of bacon and cabbage 🥬
Bread and marmalade
Salads with ham and hard boiled eggs
All spud dinners with meat had lashings of proper butter.
She lived until she was 91 with next to no medications.

Meat, veg and gravy lots of it in various forms most days but small portions of meat (eg one lamb cutlet).
Lobby (I still love a bit of lobby)
Tripe
Fish on Friday
Cheese, onion and milk cooked in a tin pan and served with toast (not sure if this was regional but my husband’s granny did the same
Brains faggots was their occasional ready meal with mash veg and onion gravy
Staffordshire oatcakes with bacon, cheese and tinned tomato for Saturday lunch
Sandwiches - usually plain ham or tinned salmon
Cheese on toast with a lot of pickled red cabbage

Breakfast
Tea and toast sometimes with boiled egg

Snacks
Ski orange yoghurts
Club biscuits
fig biscuits
custard creams
dates
Saturday night supper - bag of plain walkers crisps with two rounds of bread with proper butter

Fruit and nuts (grandma loved her fruit bowl)
satsumas
grapes
apples
plums
nectarines
walnuts
whole almonds

Treats
doughnuts and pastries and sausage rolls from the pastry shop in town

my nan always had fresh soda farls and potato farls on the go. She made the best gravy ever and always had lots left so I would mop it up with some fresh soda bread slathered in real butter. OMG now I want some. Her one thing, that now that I am almost 60 (so survived it!) that I now find disturbing was that on a saturday morning she used to fry up a big batch of breakfast sausage links. I would sit up in my granda's bed with him and have some with soft boiled eggs and a blob of butter in the egg. Heaven. BUT..nan kept the rest of the sausages on a plate in the cupboard for the next couple of days until they were all gone. I ate them but I would never do that now lol

Broccoli, squash, sweet potatoes were unheard of.

In the late 1980s, our next door neighbour was a retired greengrocer and his son would bring him a box of mixed veg every week. He had no idea what to do with ‘fancy veg’ so he’d give them to us - peppers, chillies, avocados, aubergines …

I remember my grandma eating absolutely teeny portions of everything when I was a child.
I’m not sure if it’s normal for her generation and my perception is now really skewed on portion sizes etc but it does seem very extreme; or if she may have had disordered eating of some sort which I think is more likely and seemingly happened in her later life when she started to put weight on post menopause.

I know she was only petite but she wasn't at all abnormally slim, I would say a very healthy normal weight for her short frame.

Particular foods/meals that she would eat that stick in my mind:

half a tuna sandwich (no mayo or butter) for lunch, but the bread was cut so unbelievably thin that it was almost see-through,
half a digestive or rich tea biscuit,
slither of cake (homemade) but almost impossible to cut that thin,
half a banana,
one small soft boiled egg with half a slice of buttered bread for breakfast,
half a very small jacket potato for dinner etc

but then she would also cook proper meat and veg type meals for the family that she would eat too, and I would say ate very little/virtually no upf foods.

My grandparents had a cooked breakfast or porridge for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, and meat or fish and two veg for dinner, always a pudding after dinner. Lots of cups of tea, sometimes a cordial in the summer, sometimes a home brew fruit wine.

The main differences between their meals and mine:

Everything they ate was fresh, nothing processed or with additives and preservatives. Meat from the local butcher, fish that my grandfathers fished, vegetables from the garden (they didn’t grow loads, just enough to eat), bread from the local baker, puddings freshly baked.

They had fat and sugar in their diet but it was natural fat and pure sugar - butter, full fat milk, sugar. Again, no additives, artificial flavours, etc.

Nothing was bought in, prepared on or with, cooked in or with, or kept afterwards in plastic, so they had no microplastics.

They didn’t snack at all, only ate at meal times.

In general, they ate less and more simply, and were satisfied with it.

Sausage, borscht, pierogis, sauerkraut.

A good strong drink, but never too much, she was a very proper lady.

Rabbit, and that could be freshly caught by my grandad or roadkill (not joking). A lot of bakery rolls, homemade soup, bridies or scotch pies, tea and biscuits and scones, mince and tatties, stews and lots of crumbles and custard, rice pudding, carnation milk, swiss roll, sugar sandwiches.... Not light and healthy that's for sure.

BetteDavisChin, we had Yorkshire pudding for pudding! Grandma (and Mum) always cooked a couple with raisins, and we'd eat them with golden syrup. My DDad also loved a Yorkshire pud sandwich with a couple of roast spuds and a bit of the roast.

Mine would put so much butter on sandwiches it looked like cheese

I once ate a delicious cherry pie she’d made and asked for the recipie. It started ‘take one can cherry pie mix’.

Morton’s cherry pie mix was the best - but you still made your own pastry.

Oh, and my other granny's favourites were instant coffee, Kimberly biscuits, lucozade and Woodbine cigarettes. Lived to 96 😆

My gran wax naturally slim and always said ‘you can’t fatten a thoroughbred!’ She was always putting my tubby little grandpa on a diet and he never lost any weight lol.

breakfast was ‘flakes’ which were crunchy nut cornflakes.
mid morning was something like a roll with mashed banana or cold meat.
Dinner at 3pm (?) was protein, potatoes and veg
supper was toast or homemade soup (she made the best soup.
she ate chocolate everyday.