How do you remember food being ‘different’ when you were young?

[Geekster1963]

I remember that between October to March time we had mashed potatoes and April until September it was always boiled new potatoes we never had mash in summer or new in winter.

My Mum used to buy a big crate of oranges around December time and keep them in the porch, they were the nicest oranges ever. We never had them in the spring/ summer.

I remember the first time we had lasagne when I was about 18 we felt very exotic.

I never had anything like curry until I left home at 21 in the early 90’s.

And remember having warmed tinned Victoria plums with custard for pudding on a Sunday. And over cooked watery cabbage with every single meal

Christmas time Dad would order orangeade and cherryade, brought off the milkman.

Saturday night tea was always scrambled or poached eggs & baked beans on toast whilst watching Worzel Gummidge. Oh the memories

I was raised in a northern town, not a lot of money around. There were 6 of us at home and meals were usually a one pot stew, usually either broth with mix bought from the market or corned beef hash. The only herbs used was a sprig of thyme in the broth.

Breakfast was either cornflakes or weetabix with sterilised milk.

Fruit was either an apple or an orange.

Packed lunch was two slices of bread with a thin layer of either pink or brown paste, a bag of quiksave crisps and a biscuit.

50s child.Grew up in rural Norfolk, wages very really low and so everyone had a vegetable patch. My DF was a builder's labourer and was often out of work, the long bitter winter of 1963 saw him out of work from December until April. Mum did a lot of make do meals but luckily my uncle was head gardener at the local stately home and grew and gave us asparagus and so this had never seemed 'exotic' to me - although mum cooked it to death and it was served limp and slimey.
We had fresh raspberries and strawberries, basic lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers.
Agree our meals were seasonal, always with home made bread (we'd plead for white, no goodness, sliced stuff!). Mum always made her own pastry ... boy was it heavy and hard to eat! But I remember her spending hours making her own ruff puff and flakes pastry.
In the winter swede was mixed in with the mash or as a vegetable in its own right.
Rice puddings, tapioca and semolina were staple puddings, with the occasional steamed jam suet pudding. Lots of crumbles in the autumn with fallen apples and hedgerow blackberries. Rarely had oranges or bananas..
Uncle kept a pig, hens and rabbits, so never short of eggs or meat.
Oddly although we had potatoes with most meals, we never had jacket potatoes - never had these until I moved to EastMids.

No snacking between meals, milk or water to drink. Milo at bedtime.
'Camp' coffee

Sunday tea at gran's
Basic salad - bowl with large wet lettuce leaves, sliced tomatoes (usually over ripe)
Cucumber and cooking onion in vinegar
Her green tomato chutney, huge slabs of bread and marge.
Cheese and for the grownups, either tinned crab or tinned salmon - both had bones in them.
Afters, a shared tin of sliced peaches, carnation milk and a piece of homemade fruit cake.

Anything with meat in tasted of oxo cubes

I occasionally use half an oxo cube (low salt) and it does add a nice flavor but I don’t want my food tasting of it

And everything was very salty

Tinned salmon 🤢

The jersey new potatoes were delicious we would only have them for a few weeks

And dinner was at 1 no one had a big dinner in the evening even roast every Sunday was at 1 apart from Christmas Day that was at 2 so we would be having pudding while watching the queens speach

Drinks tea, milk or water

And curry not nice curries like you have in restaurants some were many very greasy with chewy roti

Rice was always delicious there is an art to making perfect rice

Talking of Saturday evening tea has just triggered the memory of toast toppers! How I loved them! There was a pizza flavoured one which was my favourite but I wasn't that fussy.

A few years ago I spotted some in the supermarket and bought a couple, salivating at the memory. They were vile. How sad.

There was also a short lived frozen version called grillers that came in a thin, bread sized slice which you put on your toast and then under the grill. I remember there was a gorilla in the advert.

We had spam fritters occasionally. For growing teenagers it was a tasty filler, if greasy, but there wasn't the aversion to greasy stuff that there is now and the grease might be tasty animal fat rather than bland oil.

AlmaGeddon

Agree about the animal fat, we often had toast, smothered in beef dripping, toasted on the open fire with a toasting fork.

This food is my strongest memory of the Abervan disaster - coming in to my mum crying and saying such a terrible thing had happened and then eating toast and dripping.

Almageddon what a memory triggered by food. It is amazing how that happens. Every time I eat popcorn I remember my late dad popping it for us to eat with apples and cheese watching ‘the world about us’ Sunday evenings on our old wooden 3 channel b and w monster of a tv. It’s too was warped from the ice cube tray us kids would put on top to try to cool it when we had been watching when we weren’t allowed (like when skipping school occasionally and using it latch key) popcorn Takes me right back immediately.

In the late 1980s, as a young teenager from a northern county, I went on an orchestra course in Oxford. Up until then I’d been leading what my parents constantly reminded me was a very privileged existence - private school, riding, ballet and music lessons. There were a lot of girls on my course from Oxford and London who spoke like Princess Anne and dressed very fashionably (until then I’d been taught that caring about make-up and clothes was NOCD - not our class darling). What made them seem beyond sophisticated though, in my country bumpkin eyes, was how adept they were at ordering pizza delivery on the phone.

Winter was mornings of a huge pan of oats on the stove for breakfast. Honemade pies mum cooked on a flat plate in the oven. Casseroles also in the oven for hours in a big round tin

Tubes in meat 🤮

How scary was the Pressure Cooker?
Hissing steam malevolently on the cooker and occasionally blasting it's safety valve into the ether.

And curry not nice curries like you have in restaurants some were many very greasy with chewy roti

I don't remember Roti, but I remember the sauce being really thin and soaking into the rice. No cream. I did like those curries though and they sustained me as a student.

It was homemade curry made by Asian side of the family

Not all expertly homemade curry is delicious far from it but some is depends on the cook

My english nanny’s curry was revolting had chopped apple in

My english nanny’s curry was revolting had chopped apple in

Wot? No sultanas and desiccated coconut?

I used to buy mine from a tiny shop near the university. They had chicken, beef, lamb and vegetable. All tasted the same and they were scooped out of big soup pots.

I couldn't resist posting again on this thread.

Porridge my gran used to line a drawer in her kitchen dresser with parchment paper and fill it with cooked porridge. When it set solid, she'd carve out slices and send you out to play.

Pressure cooker I remember ours exploding when the valve shot up into the ceiling. Lentil soup followed it. The kitchen was sprayed with the soup. We all took refuge under the kitchen table. Mum never used it again. This was in the early 70's.

Porridge my gran used to line a drawer in her kitchen dresser with parchment paper and fill it with cooked porridge. When it set solid, she'd carve out slices and send you out to play

That's just brilliant, what a lovely memory

I remember when I was very young being so jealous of kids who had chips when they got home from school. We hadn't much money then and the main meal was during the day where we lived. So, as I had a hot meal in school, it was only bread and jam when I arrived home. I was so jealous of kids talking about having chips and the like. Seems very silly now but I was quite put out. I did complain out loud once or twice but was put in my place very quickly!

I remember being amazed when a friend said her parents had gone out for a meal. We never ate at restaurants so the concept blew my pre-teen mind. Parents would never spend the money eating out when there were other things that we needed.

Loved the sponge puddings that came in a tin. Not seen them recently.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s, fancy food and spending a lot of time making something unusual wasn't a thing then in the way it seems to be now. Everything was very plain in our house - boiled veg, boiled chicken, no sauce/condiments. A lot of people's houses I went to served kids frozen everything- pizza/chips/nuggets etc with a lot of ketchup. We never had a takeaway when I was a kid as far as I remember. My grandma's food is a very fond memory for me - chips she and my grandad cooked in a chip pan with beef dripping, salad and rotisserie chicken. They liked mayonnaise a lot. Bread with margarine and drinking tea with every meal. I wish I could eat those chips again, they were the best I've ever tasted! We weren't allowed snacks at home, but I remember all the kids crisps/sweets being very brightly coloured, probably full of chemicals! The chocolate like dairy milk/milky bar/creme eggs today taste nothing like I remember, I wish they hadn't changed the recipes!

I think we ate much more healthily than now in the early 70s. All homemade stews, homemade meat pies, roasts, baked fish all with loads of veg, mostly homegrown. Always had puddings but again homemade, baked rice pud on saturdays, steamed pudding and custard on sundays, Mum would put a couple of grated carrots in the steamed pudding and reduce the sugar. That was a hangover from wartime and rationing. Other pudding were stewed fruit and custard/ cream.
There was always a homemade cake in the tin but only allowed one slice at a time.
Very rarely had fizzy drinks, weak orange barley water, plain water or tea were our main drinks. Never allowed sugar in tea.
We were always slim and healthy with good teeth.
There was an advantage to having a mum who was an adult during wartime and was very short of money.

Remember the porridge drawer well. My granddad used to sprinkle currants in it and sometimes peanuts (after halloween) so basically cereal bars!

Birds trifle or jelly and ice cream on a Sunday.
Mam did her grocery shop Friday night's so we'd get a can of coke and pack of crisps as a treat