To ask what did your granny eat?

I only knew one and she mostly ate Valium and whiskey from what I remember

Me too. I’ve enjoyed reading through this thread. Thanks for starting it OP and it didn’t end up in a bun fight 😆

The only school pudding I’d eat was macaroni baked with evaporated milk and sugar. Still make it now occasionally 🙂

Oh I miss her 😢 she ate not enough, she didn’t look after herself or make herself a priority, but did for everyone else. I wish I knew her now, and I would look after her.

My paternal grandmother was an absolutely awful
cook, and all I remember her cooking routinely was chips (in a proper chip pan which was encrusted black and never emptied) and fried eggs in lard. Lots of lard. It got poured into a cup after use then used again. She loved biscuits and had a Tupperware of chocolate in the larder and a glass jar of extra strong mints on the mantel.
My other grandma was an excellent cook, she trained in service having started as a housemaid at 14. But she was eternally on a diet, so had grapefruit for breakfast, soup for lunch, and lots of veg with some meat for dinner. Everyone else was fed lots of cake, puddings and access to the biscuit tin.
Weirdly, my mum was way more into weaving her own lentils and local, seasonal, make it from scratch food than either of them.

A little bit of Teisen Lap (welsh for plate cake). She'd stir up an egg a dop of marge, some flour and a spoon of sugar. No recipe. Whatever dried fruit and spice she had and cook it on a plate.
Other than that she leade to nearly 90 on lard and white bread I think! Roast dinners with yorkshire pudding, roast spuds a few veg and a bucket of gravy. Followed up with sponge, milk pudding or fruit pie and custard. Bacon and egg, home made chips, steak and chips, melted cheese on a plate with bread dipped in it. Bread and dripping. Stew and bread. The occasional canned soup or a small leaf of lettuce!!

My uncle used to eat "goody" before bed.
It was hot milk in a cup, with pieces of white bread broken up into it and white pepper, nutmeg sprinkled on top.
He was a sickly child and his mother gave it to him every night for supper before bed.
He loved it. Very comforting.🤢

Maternal GPs (Welsh borders) grew all their own vegetables and fruit apart from the occasional tin of tropical fruit salad. Shopped every couple of days at their local Spar. Eggs and milk from the farm up the road.

Very plain food and hard work to get it. Not sure that it really did them a lot of good. DGF died of bowel cancer, DGM developed dementia in her 70s.

DM made a lot of stews and casseroles. Served with floury boiled potatoes and frozen mixed veg. Baked every Saturday, heavy cakes like flapjack, ginger bread etc. Cakes which didn't go stale quickly. DM's cooking was all about economy. Didn't matter how it tasted.

I now can't face wet, savoury food and almost never bake.

We do have an allotment and grow a lot of fruit and vegetables but we are doing it for quality rather than quantity.

I think there is a lot of rose tinted hindsight about food in the past. There was an awful lot of bad food.

Lots of deep fat fried stuff. She’s 91 now so the constant fatty diet didn’t do her any harm

My grandma was a late diagnosis of type 1 diabetes. She ate the same thing every day for 25 years;
Breakfast: Porridge
lunch: pork chop and veg.
dinner: fish. Not sure what with.
arrowroot biscuits for snacks.

when she was admitted to hospital about 6 months before she died the nurses couldn’t believe it. We got her on to cornflakes for breakfast.
She had a very deferential attitude to doctors, and did exactly what they told her do to. I presume it would never have occurred to her to ask for a dietician referral as you would today. But her diabetes was well controlled though. So she must have done something right.

My nan made a brilliant beef stew! I miss it - she wasn't even a fantastic cook (didn't really enjoy it) but she did do a great stew! Oh and she could do a great roast dinner :) I remember her being addicted to cherry cake, too. But only shop bought ones. She loved fish and chips - I'd always go over to the local chip shop on a Monday lunch time as that was my day off and we'd split a fish and chip meal and serve it with pickled beetroot! Yum! Oh, I miss my nan. I lived with her from the age of 14 until I was 19.
I've just remembered her and my gramp buying a microwave in the early 1980s when they were a new thing and her attempting to make cakes in it - they came out like biscuits - the kind of biscuits you could break a tooth on!!

Being elderly myself now, I'm privileged to have heard from both my grandmothers about what they ate as children and it was always meals cooked from scratch. From my paternal grandmother came a recipe my father loved (I always found it disgusting) called meat and potato pie. Popular in Yorkshire/Lancashire, I think. It's sounds quite nice, but - it's made in a pudding dish (like you'd make a rice pudding in). Diced beef and sliced potatoes are laid in the dish, water poured over (not even a stock cube!) and a pastry crust over the top. Bake in the oven until cooked. Absolutely tasteless! Yorkshire puddings was a Sunday staple - eaten with thick, meaty gravy and sliced raw onion, seasoned and a splash of malt vinegar, as a starter. "Them that eats most Yorkshire's gets most meat" means that you can feed quite a large family with a small joint of meat.

My maternal grandmother was one of 8 children, living in rural Wales. Their daily breakfast, they called it soak, was yesterday's bread broken into pieces and added to a bowl of hot, sweetened milky tea. Eaten with a spoon. She continued to eat this intermittently until she died. They also had an old Welsh dish called cawl (translates to soup, but it's much more like a chunky stew), which I love and often make myself. This is traditionally made with lamb neck and bacon, but anything will do. I even make a vegetarian version with a good veggie stock cube. Boil the meat until cooked, remove from saucepan and add vegetables - leeks and potatoes are traditional, but I use carrots, Swedish turnips, anything mouldering in the fridge (including lettuce!) and white cabbage if there are no leeks. Cabbage is best added about 20 minutes before eating. It is traditional to thicken the 'juice' with flour but I never do. I cut some very small pieces of potato and that does the job nicely. Serve with bread and cheese. After eating the juice, mash the vegetables with a fork and add a generous knob of butter. Yum! Any leftovers can be reheated (taste even better) or frozen (I always have some in the freezer).

Did we share the same Grandmother?? My Mum always used to have to ask the butcher for the trotters for her!

She was also very partial to home made french fries which were deep fried in oil and slathered in salt and maggi seasoning.

There was also lots of Eastern European style stews and broths.

On the other side, my other grandmother was a very traditional meat and two veg cook. Dry pork chops, plain boiled potates and runner beans. You might have got gravy if you went on a lucky day. She made the most amazing cakes and desserts though.

I swear 90% of my granny's diet was trifle with birds dream topping, victoria sponge and chips. Washed down with brandy, about half a bottle a day.

She'd have been 90 this year, but sadly - and unsurprisingly - she died of a stroke...

I'm mixed race so one side it would be cottage pie, fish pie, pork chops, typical meat and 2 veg type food. She drank tea but didn't have a sweet tooth so while she baked for everyone else would only maybe have a tiny sliver of cake or what not for herself.

On the other side rice, mainly veg curries but chicken and lamb a couple of times a week, lentils. She had a massive sweet tooth and loved cakes, biscuits, puddings etc but was also diabetic so was constantly being reigned in by my mum and aunts.

I have lost a stone the past year through reducing butter, wine, cheese, chocolate. Slow and steady.
Added lots of vegetables in olive oil, nut butters like cashew on sour dough.
Really reduced gluten too.
A PMR auto immune diagnosis a month ago and the link with sugar, the shit steroids have meant that I have dropped 10 lbs in weeks.

There is nothing like being told that the agony you are in could be helped by reducing sugar to make it toxic.

Now definitely my mood was shite as I detoxed as I gave up coffee too, which was as hard!

But my health and mobility are 100% my priority.
I am usually a very active person so that being taken from me has focused me like never before.

I am drinking Lions Mane mushroom coffee substitute and its going well.....this is a great drink for menopausal women who feel brain fog and lower energy levels, so I will stick with it.

Magnesium glycerate and vitamins D have helped my sleep and sugar cravings too.

Maternal GM, meat, fish, seasonal U.K. veg, so potatoes and lots of cabbage and carrots, probably turnips too, salad and runner beans from the garden in summer, homemade puddings with e.g. rhubarb/plums/gooseberries from the garden (she had a big garden), bottled plums and pies from stored garden apples in winter.

Everything cooked from scratch, and if fried, probably in lard!

She was never overweight and lived well into her 80s.

Paternal GM, similar, except no big garden for fruit and veg. But also not overweight and died at IIRC 89.

Paternal GM just old enough to remember the death of Queen Victoria. She was six, and when she heard the church bells tolling and her father saying, ‘ The Queen is dead!’ she thought the world was coming to an end!

This is my aim too. I always feel clearer headed when I’m avoiding processed sugar , which I have a tendency to binge on.

I keep telling myself I have to avoid these foods for my long term health and my figure. I do eat a healthy range of foods , greek yogurt berries nuts instead of that high sugar fix,

I need to lose weight , again , but don’t qualify for GLP1’s , probably for the best . I’m surrounded by many on it and they are all doing really well.

I keep reminding myself of the risk of having excess sugar and I have saved your comments to reread if I am thinking of a binge.

I’m determined to get this weight off and keep it off this last time. I also think portion size is everything. We now eat much smaller portions and don’t automatically have a carb potato or pasta or rice with our meal , mostly it’s mixed salads or vegetables.

From reading this fascinating thread , most of our grandparents did eat smaller portions and didn’t snack !!

Am away at the moment in the Uk and there are a lot of overweight people here , myself included !!

Wondering which one of my cousins you are 😆

My american medical friend told me 15 years ago that dementia was being called diabetes 3 by a lot of medics, such was the perceived damage it did to the brain.
She ate protein, veg, low glycemix carbs like sweet potatoes, was obsessed with fermented foods and ate hard cheese and red wine.
In her 60's now she is a picture of health and so fit.

I have in the last year dramatically reduced my sugar because of the link to inflammation and autoimmune issues and I can feel the benefit.

One grandmother lived an extremely basic and quite rural existence and grew all her own vegetables in her garden, and the food she made herself was very simple (potato soup, fresh fish, bread and butter). Nothing preserved, almost nothing purchased, everything made from scratch. My other grandmother was very well travelled and had lived in Africa and Asia for parts of her life - she made authentic curries, as well as the most amazing chicken soup. Again, everything from scratch and she insisted that fruit was never refrigerated - and particularly tomatoes! She had the same chicken salad sandwich for lunch every day her entire life. Neither one was overweight, both very healthy.

Traditional English. They were farmers, so everything very fresh and home cooked. Lots of game. They loved very fatty meat, huge portions. Three proper meals a day. GF died in his eighties, I was a baby, from a heart attack, GM died at 103. She was small, stout, lived alone, and still rode her bicycle to the shops. Amazing.

Yes, my mum's standard 1980s cake was a Victoria sandwich, with homemade strawberry jam in the middle and icing sugar sprinkled on top. No buttercream. I still remember going to a friend's house and being served a tall slice of passion cake with cream cheese icing on the top, middle AND sides, and crushed almonds coating the sides to boot! It rocked my world, but that sort of indulgent cake was very much the exception in those days. Now, I think there'd be a riot of I were to present my DC with a cake that didn't have icing. And going to my local garden centre always makes me feel like I'm Alice in Wonderland after she's imbibed from the "drink me" bottle. The scones, brownies and cake slices are enormous - so much taller and longer than anything I'd make at home. Their cake tins must resemble hub caps. So yes, a slice of cake today is very different to what my granny or even my mum would have enjoyed at my age.

Traditional English food in 50s and 60s cooked from scratch
chicken rarely as expensive always turkey at Christmas
Mostly meat or fish with potatoes and vegetables.
I do remember loving what she gave me if I went to stay- bacon and fried bread for breakfast maybe cooked in lard and Cadburys chocolate fingers!