To ask what did your granny eat?

Not that uncommon.

When your only source of income was the grown man, it made sense that he had the best and most food as he needed to be well fed and healthy to bring in the money. In those days, if he couldnt work throught hunger or illness there was no food for anyone. If there was no welfare state or help at all, then where was the choice?

I remember my grandfather telling me that he desperately wanted to go to university, which as a working class kid would have been very unusual. His father supported him. But then his father suddenly died young (30's) and Grandfather had no choice but to go out to work at 14 to support his mother and siblings. So he started getting the best meals as the main earner in the household. Him being him, he tried to share it with his younger siblings. His mother went mad. She said they and she were going without so he had enough to do his job.

Its how it was because that was how it had to be. Hard to understand with modern eyes but survival really was hard in times not really very long ago.

My Gran was born around 1880 of Anglo-Indian heritage so dhal and chapattis figured in our menu. She lived with us. But there was also the traditional meat and two veg dishes. Beef or lamb left over from the joint on Sunday was minced in the hand mincer attached to the table top to make cottage/shepherd’s pie or ‘patties’. She and my mum used to like tongue too. Yuk.
No car so everything was delivered. Baker and veg van called round, milk delivered and a grocery order was phoned in and delivered.
I often wondered how they managed in a very small kitchen with very few storage cupboards, when I have a pantry, kitchen cupboards and overflow shelves in our internal garage!

My grandparents were all born in the 20s, and had their families in the late forties and early fifties. They were working-class, so all had terrible teeth because of poor dental care before the NHS existed (my paternal grandmother had them all pulled and dentures fitted when she was pregnant in the forties - very popular at the time!)

Even in the early days of the NHS diet remained really poor, like wartime-level, for a while: my mum was given bottles of rosehip syrup, which was another anti-scurvy remedy, but gave even very young babies tooth decay. My grandmothers never breastfed as it was considered disgusting (my father and his siblings were fed on National Dried Milk mixed with sugar water!) There was a huge amount of old wives’ nonsense around about what children should eat. (My paternal grandmother was still trying to give me spoonfuls of malt and sulphurs as a child in the seventies.) They were all overweight, and all smoked a lot, something which put both my boomer parents off smoking completely.

I agree that as well as era and class, it was also a lot about location. I’m fairly sure that if my grandparents had grown up rurally in Kent, or Ireland, for example, there would have been more fresh local produce around. Instead, they grew up in industrial Northern cities with tenement housing or small council houses — more Helen Forrester than Cider With Rosie. Not either the climate or the space for growing much of their own veg, which was more of a middle-class pastime than a Northern working class one.

My Nan and Grandad both lived to 95 .No health issues at all.They had a cooked breakfast each day.Dinner mostly mince ,sausages Steak and kidney pies.Lots of fruit and veg from the garden too .Nan always had some Galaxy in the fridge and said "Its a food really"!

Malt loaf mainly.

Mince and dumplings and the most enormous Yorkshire puddings
A ‘special’ from the F plan diet. Ryvitas (bacon or cheese and onion flavoured) with cheese, an apple and sultanas from what I remember
rice pudding
glory days

My grandmother made at least two soda breads, fruit bread and an apple and rhubarb tart every day for visitors. Dinners were various stews, casseroles, boxty, colcannon and rissoles and meat, mash and veg dinners. Just beautiful traditional food.

Nan was a home economics teacher so could cook anything. She was your stereotypical 50s housewife (apart from the fact that she worked!) and was always in a pinny in the kitchen. She baked rocks cakes and made my Granddad bacon and eggs every single day for breakfast. Dinner was the classic meat and potatoes affair.

She did, however, grow up in the war as did Grandad so they knew how to make the best of anything. Granddad probably more than Nan as his upbringing was very working class where as Nan was from a middle class family. But of course, Granddad never ever cooked.

She used to tell a story about meeting granddad's mother for the first time and her serving up pigs tails for dinner and my Nan forcing them down herself to be polite. She was sure she was being tested. Then it was "yellow jelly" for afters.

She had a friend who used to eat fish heads for lunch daily.

Honestly.... our food is better now.

Another memory just popped up.....tinned Nestle cream.

I have sought it out just to recapture the feeling of sitting on their sofa with a stainless steel sundae dish with tinned fruit and tinned cream in it. I now own those dishes but it isnt the same somehow. No smell of cucumber and onion in vinegar (which I really didnt like but the smell....) no drowsy adults because the real fire was sucking the oxygen out of the room as the windows had to be kept closed "to keep the heat in", and no lovingly folded paper napkins (sorry, serviettes) in a special holder.

Bit teary. Miss them so much.

My nana was born in 1910 in East London, right in the east end. Her favourite foods were jellied eels, rabbit and in later years condensed milk.

My granny was a very good baker. My favourite thing that she made was a ginger sponge. She also made birthday cakes to order for her grandchildren. I was the youngest and never grew out of her chocolate birthday cake with vanilla butter icing and flakes and chocolate buttons to decorate.

She also made a restorative soft boiled egg and soldiers when we'd had a family trip to a&e (casualty) one Christmas Eve.

My mum says she remembers the scrambled egg sandwiches she made her when she was unwell as a little girl.

I really only remember the things she made for us to eat.

She died in 1985 and I miss her

My '80's childhood featured:
Fried breakfast every morning- egg, wee willie winkies (skinless, very processed sausages), grilled tomato, and a rasher of belly pork.
Findus crispy pancakes for lunch in school holidays. So many different fillings back then! School lunch would be mince & potatoes or similar.
tinned fruit salad
Gammon with pineapple (ie processed round of smoked bacon with tinned pineapple on top).
stuffed cabbage (utterly revolting - cabbage inside leaves scooped out, chopped finely with onion, large, porridge oats, beef oxo cube, put into the outside cabbage leaves and baked in the oven).
Offal, rabbit, stewed beef, neck of lamb, beef olives, belly pork masquerading as bacon (with hairs and the branding still in the rind).
Veg was carrots, or boiled onion, or cabbage, from the freezer.
Lettuce wasnt iceberg or little gem or mixed leaves. It was that floppy sad thing you hardly ever see now. Peppers were only ever green.
Drinks were tea, water, milk or orange squash. (No other flavors existed. No idea why!).

Broccoli, courgette, red pepper, iceberg lettuce... none existed! But Cremola foam and iron Bru floats were definitely a thing.

People weren't as overweight because food wasn't as nice.

my maltese grandfather had chicken or pork chops veg or stew type thing most evenings for his dinner whilst my father and his 5 brothers and sisters had bread and dripping or jam sandwiches and they all watched him tuck in. my dads parents were very poor but somehow my grandfather always had the best meal of all.
i think it’s wrong but apparently that’s the way it was, he was head of the household.

I don’t really know what my Granny ate, but I seem to remember toast and marmalade featured at breakfast time. She didn’t eat potatoes (because they were too fattening), and as far as I know she never ate an apple whole, but always peeled it with a knife, cut it up and ate it with cheese at the end of a meal. She drank sherry sometimes, but not very much - all her food and drink portions were small. She lived to 101.

Beef dripping on toast 🤢, everything cooked from scratch but also fried bread, homemade fried chips, tongue/corned beef sandwiches. Probably much less snacking though!

Irish farmers.
Meat, potatoes, home produced veg, milk, cheese, butter.
Home baked bread.
Brandy.
Brown Trout and salmon.

Mum lived to 88 despite smoking heavily, her mum was 98, great grannie 106. No sign of any dementia.

Sausage rolls, Rington's tea, biscuits and brandy. Lived to 105 😆

Granny 1: standard overcooked veg, but also lots of nice Yorkshire treats like parkin. She always made us treacle toffee for bonfire night. Guinness for when you were peaky and loved a sherry too.

Granny 2 and Grandad: toast with proper butter and marmalade. Nice roast dinners. Fancy tea and cake on a fancy tea set when visitors came (and possibly on their own, who knows?!) Campari.

G. Aunt was a famous confectioner who made the most astonishing cakes for NYE at the Masonic Hall. Had a secret drawer of chocolate that she would give us kids behind my proto-crunchy mum's back. G. Uncle, I never saw him eat a vegetable in his life, he shuddered at the thought. Loved them all dearly!

Both excellent home cooks but I remember gran’s fried bread . Fried in the left over bacon fat .
I allow myself to have it once a year !
Other gran put me off porridge for life by giving it to me with salt on !

My parents were born in the early 1930s. They ate seasonal food that was locally grown - there was really no other choice. I ate the same as a kid. So we had cabbage, turnip, carrots, onions and potatoes a lot. tomatoes and lettuce in the summer also strawberries - my mother would freeze the strawberries for winter desserts.

She bought her meat from a butcher and bought the best quality she could. We ate a fair bit of offal though - kidneys/liver/etc.

They ate breakfast, dinner and tea - main meal was dinner in the middle of the day. It always had a soup to start and a dessert of some sort. My dd did a semester in spain a while ago and stayed with a family. they ate the same way - three course lunch and a light meal in the evening.

My dad gained his adult weight at 18 and didn't lose or gain a pound after that. He went to a dietician at the age of 70 and she told him not to change a thing.

The spiciest tasting thing in our house was ketchup and YR sauce. And eventually my mother grew garlic so that added something to the mix!

It's most definitely related to era.

I'm old enough to be a MNers's grandma, so I agree with your post if it's been written by a younger person.

My gran was born in 1901, my dad in 1932, so her diet was very different to the one you describe.

@PyongyangKipperbang

Not snug at all - I just think that they were healthy and active and seem to have followed a “blue zones” trend. Have you seen thah documentary? It’s really interesting.

Meat and two or more veg. They had a long garden and grandad grew all their potatoes and vegetables. Lots of fruit pies and custard. I don’t remember cakes and biscuits but I do remember nanny loved ice cream, we had raspberry ripple ice cream from a block of ice cream with tinned loganberries (never see them now).

Lunches were rashers of green back bacon in crusty bread from an uncut loaf.

grandad didn’t have milk in his tea he had condensed milk (urgh, the can was always crusty, yuk).

Meat potatoes and veg every night in some form, casseroles, chops, roasts but nothing spicy (actually grandad liked curry from army days but not nanna!) no rice or pasta (except rice pudding)

Mine seemed to live off anything in a tin