To ask what did your granny eat?

Grandma 1

a rigid menu by the day, I remember
Wednesday was toad in the hole
thursday was quiche (homemade)
Friday fish and chips
saturday ham and egg salad
sunday roast

lots of homemade cakes & bread, my grandpa got sausage sandwiches for breakfast no one else did.

grandma 2

all I remember is rum butter!

This thread has me remembering dripping on toast (white sliced, Formica table, grand stand in the tv) so so clearly

I wonder if it is due a revival. Tastier than bone broth!

I wonder about diet and end results a lot. My Nana was slim and cooked a lot from scratch but enjoyed sweet foods, although home made. She died with Dementia at 94.

I’m reading a lot about sugar being a cause of diabetes and dementia. I am trying to reduce my sugar intake as much as possible as I’m scared of getting dementia. Sorry this happened to your grandparents.

Mince with incredibly salty gravy.
boiled bacon slices.
bread and lard.
lard-based pastry.

and she lived into her 90s!

My Nanna always had a pot of beef dripping in the larder. I remember our Saturday visits, where, if you were hungry, she'd spread some on the end of a loaf, then slice it off, big thick slices of homemade bread. My Dad (her son) loved it, and never refused. Granda grew all sorts of different veg in the back garden, they had an apple tree and blackberry bushes and she was a great pie maker. She also worked full time in the hospital laundry until her sixties!

Your gran sounds fun!

My lovely gran used to make us sausage with melted cheese served with Tizer. And Walls Vienetta. She liked to spoil her GC!
But normal food would be offal, or mince, or rabbit, served with plain boiled potatoes, carrots/ broad beans/ peas/ runners/pickled cabbage/ etc. IE small amount of cheap meat with homegrown veg. Also omelet, egg salad, herring in oatmeal. Adding butter to the boiled veg was insanely decadent - a bit like adding gold flakes to your Tuesday night pasta - you'd just not even think about doing it!
Steamed sponge with treacle or marmalade or jam at the bottom. Dried peas, lentils, beans, etc. Soups or stock from the ends of veg, the leaves of cauliflower or leeks, peel of carrots or potatoes.

It was very "wanted not want not", plain, simple, but also high Fibre, low chemicals, no insta-stress.

My gran was a passionate cook, just about everything she ate up until maybe her last year of life was cooked by herself. Usually some form of meat, bread and veg, she was french, so not much potato, occasionally rice. Glass of red wine each day every day with her supper. However she ate too much, didn’t exercise much ( her disposition, plus she broke a leg in her 20s and it was badly re set). She was overweight, got diabetes and died of a stroke. I loved her.

Excellent cook but loved an onion sandwich from her garden.
She had the constitution of an Ox and lived 20 years plus after aggressive lung cancer and chemo in the 70's.

Mine ate mars bar and apple sandwiches.

My grannie ate meat and two veg, at the weekend a roast with meals made from it during the week and when that ran out she'd have mince, sometimes with an egg in it. She tended to cook the veg to death, and was the only person I know to heat baked beans in the oven. She made the best chicken soup, and the worst tinned soup as she would mix and match the tins so you got oxtail and minestrone in the same pan. She made fabulous pastry and jams and her apple pies were the best, and also very nice egg custard. For breakfast she ate all bran with warm tea poured over it, a half grapefruit, and a pot of tea. When she made a high tea we had lovely cakes including one made by a blind lady in the village who must have had muscles like Popeye as they were the lightest sponge cakes I have ever tasted. I never saw her snack, except on a barley sugar sneaked from the deep recesses of her handbag.

My other grandma was 20 years younger and quite the opposite and lived off concentrated tinned soup which she did not dilute, deli ham and crispbreads and shop bought cakes. When Marks and Spencer did ready meals she was in heaven and loved anything over processed and full of salt.

I do not think anyone would advise you to follow grandma's eating habits.

Lots of variations on meat, potatoes and veg. She didn't like chicken though. Cod, haddock, plaice, salmon. Prawns with bread and butter.

Tinned meat and fish. Meat paste in tiny jars.

Excellent macaroni cheese (only time pasta featured that I recall).

Rice pudding (only time rice featured, definitely).

Rhubarb that grandad grew.

Scottish things: neeps and tatties, Scotch broth.

Blancmange made in a huge stone mould. Home made cakes (Victoria sponge, Madeira, Dundee cake). Sponge puddings with evaporated milk poured over. But also lots of bought biscuits and Mr Kipling type cakes. Home made fruit pies and crumbles. What she called Poor Man's Trifle: bought trifle sponges with jam spread on, bananas and Bird's custard and nothing else bar the evap or pouring cream (my favourite). Bought crumpets with lots of butter for supper. Kitkats and Club biscuits. Way too much Scotch.

Endless tea. Didn't drink water.

Halved grapefruit for breakfast, now and then. Otherwise, All Bran.

Braised steak. Lots of things cooked in her beloved pressure cooker.

Tongue sandwiches.

Salad that was a lettuce leaf, half a tomato, a few slices of cucumber and a blob of salad cream.

Still like it all except the salad. Oh, and the tinned fruit cocktail.

Tripe for granddad about once a month because he liked it. She never touched it. She grew up very poor (he didn't) and to her it was poverty food. I never tried it. Looked gross.

She and granddad were both quite rotund almost all their adult lives (only got thin towards the very end when their appetites went) and very healthy (and mentally sharp) into their late nineties.

I can remember my older grandma cooking beef stew and making bechamel sauce for another dish. She was a capable cook, but also ate a lot of junk food especially very sugary shop-bought cakes. She lived to 95 nevertheless.

My younger grandma also ate meat but I can't remember what she cooked. She often ate bread and cheese and she loved cakes and biscuits. She also liked tinned fruit (which we never had at home). When I think of eating at Grandma's house, I think of tinned pears. What was slightly unusual about my younger grandma was that she got up and went to bed very early. She liked to have lunch at 11.30, but would grudgingly have it at 12 when we visited.

You do know that that isnt causal, right?

My Grandparents did the same, almost all of their veg were homegrown. She had dementia and was felled by a massive stroke. He got lung and heart disease as a result of his job. Neither were overweight, smokers or big drinkers, a couple on a Saturday night at best.

Sorry to pull this up but your post sounded very smug, like the fact they didnt suffer as my grandparents did was somehow due to their superior diet.

Thanks 🙂

Haven’t rtft but my grandparents live (d) in rural Scotland and had a very strict routine.
breakfast - toast/porridge
fly cup - cuppa and a cake/biscuit
lunch - soup and sandwich/oatcakes
tea - meat and two veg
Supper - cheese and biscuit

roast on a Sunday.

never ate out other than occasional fish and chips on camping trips

One set were teetotal, very simple food cooked on a weekly rota e.g. fish on Fridays. Mostly very healthy, meat and 2 veg. Lots of potato rather than pasta or rice (though they had rice pudding). One vegetarian dinner a week. Homemade cakes that probably weren't hugely sugary e.g. rock cakes and coconut buns. Grandad made a lovely steamed pudding with custard.

Other side were American, a bit more adventurous and partial to a sherry. Grandma made chocolate brownies before they were everywhere. She also did a lovely chowder and made a side dish with roast dinners called home baked swede that was so yummy - my aunt gave me the recipe for a thanksgiving dinner and it has loads of syrup in! I cut the quantities drastically when I made it.

Bessarabia is another name for White Russia. It's on the shores of the Black Sea. Lots of borders have moved in the area. I believe it's Romania now.

Surely this massively depends on how old you are? My daughters granny was cooking in 1950-1990, so post war, but born and grew up with rationing. She saw rise of supermarkets but also the big shift in English cooking to “foreign” influences through people like Elizabeth David. She certainly used some connivence foods as they appeared like fish fingers, mince in a tin, ready made pastry etc. but she was also a very adventurous cook who would cook mostly from scratch. It certainly wasn’t plain cooking. Even though she worked full time from when I was 5

whereas my granny was born in 1917, went into service at age 14 and became cook and eventually house keeper . Everything was cooked from scratch. And very plain British cooking. She and my grandad, once married, kept a very productive garden so always fresh veg and fruit in summer, and often through winter as she’d freeze some, but bottle and preserve loads. Her pantry used to heave. She’d use lard, dripping, butter(marg was for rationing times only!). She’d use rabbitveither grown in the hutch in garden or “acquired” form my grandad by dubious means. They lived by a farm so weren’t adverse to sneaking a few cabbages or winter greens form the fields!

I spent last winter creating our family recipe book from my grans and mums recipes books for Xmas presents. I’d been asked by family members and it was lovely thing to do and gift.

did they eat more healthily? Yep..but it was balanced, even for me as a child Sunday tea was often dripping on toast! But there simply weren’t huge amounts of highly processed foods that are hard to avoid now.

A lot of salt!! Even breakfast was porridge with salt. She did a lot of baking and made meals from scratch but they also fried a lot of food using the same fat that was in the pan for ages.

vegetable broth
irish stew
apple tart

My Nana was an excellent plain cook. She would have a grapefruit or cornflakes for breakfast .

Grandad came home from work lunchtime and they had their main meal then, usually bacon egg beans, meat and vegetable or stews.

Nana had a sweet tooth , lots of cups of tea with sweetex, they had a beautiful dish which always had some chocolate in it. I have this bowl now. They would have a plain Nice or Digestive biscuit with a cup of tea.

Tea would be a sandwich. I remember they had golden delicious apples. Nana would bake cakes , rice puddings , crumbles and Welsh cakes. None were eaten to excess. She maintained trim figure all her life. She died with Dementia at 94. Was that the sugar I wonder.

I miss her.

Great thread!

Scottish plain bread- makes the BEST toast
Wrapped choc biscuits in a special tin
Tinned salmon sandwiches
Dairylea

Oh, and in her old age she mainly ate (drank) Complan...

I absolutely love this thread, my granny used to love fried bacon with a can of Heinz beans in it on plain scotch bread and butter, she also loved fried trout (my grandparents went fishing for trout most nights in the summer time) pancakes with butter and raspberry or blackcurrant jam, load of cups of tea, they never drank coffee, my granny enjoyed a chips and curry sauce from the Chinese but grandad thought it was “too foreign” they were both born in the 30’s