So many of the posts here sound glorious, but more like grandparents who learned to cook pre-war, or people who were either middle class or lived in the country. It’s more golden-tinged nostalgia than the actual diet of most of Britain between 1950-1990, when the country was absolutely famous worldwide for terrible, terrible food. It really was a food desert in the 50s- early 80s, unless you were farmers or lived rurally, were well off, or unusually good at cooking.
I honestly am thinking back to the late 70s and 80s, and simply can’t reconcile the lovely memories of home cooked food in most posts above, with the reality of British working-class food of the time (or indeed, British postwar food culture more widely). Think of restaurant and pub food in the 70s, when a glass of rehydrated orange juice was a starter; gammon and pineapple was unbearably exotic; and the only lunches pubs did (if you were lucky), was a Ploughman with a chunk of greasy Red Leicester, a giant pickled onion, some limp lettuce, two slices of processed bread and a pack of Golden Wonder! Soup was a packet of Florida Spring Vegetable in a powder; or a can of thick greasy Oxtail. A block of processed ice cream made of hydrogenated animal fats with two wafers stuck either side was considered a gourmet dessert.
Both adults and children were constantly eating cheap biscuits, sugary squash, fizzy pop, crisps, chocolate bars and sweets. Even in my primary school, you brought a 2p piece every day for a fig roll and a rich tea biscuit to have with your warm school milk carton. Vegetables were tinned (or in the 80s and 90s, frozen). Primary school hot dinners in the 1980s were boiled potatoes, boiled cabbage, mystery meat, and squashed fly pie (currant tart) with lumpy custard with skin on. Secondary school lunches were fried pizzas and chips with Angel Delight as a pudding. There was no veg at all, but plenty of Mars bars and cola cans in the vending machine. Everything was made out of animal fats or artificial fats, with food colourings to literally make your hair stand on end. Nobody had as much heard of a cappuccino in my Northern town until about 1995.
I’d love to think of the past as home cooked chops with fresh garden produce and apple pies with cream, like an Enid Blyton book; but the reality where I grew up was completely, utterly different. Less Elizabeth David or Mary Berry; more Coronation Street.