What were your family 'food traditions'?

[ButWhereDidTheWindComeFrom]

I am really interested in family food and recipes that are normal 'family cooking'.

I'd be interested what your family food traditions were when you were growing up, and if you follow any of them now with your own families.

For me (I am 50 years old). My mother was the main cook. She was a very good cook but hated it (when she and dad retired she said she will never cook again so my father cooks).

We used to have one course only. Always meat of some sort (steak, lamb chops, chicken scnitzels, chicken maryland) with three serves of veg, one always a green veg (usually peas or broad beans). Usually a potato of some sort, more often than not mashed. Plus carrots usually cooked with butter and honey.

For big occasions like birthdays the standard food was asparagus soup from a tin, then beef wellington with potato dauphinoise followed by a chocolate cheesecake with tinned mandarin or tinned cherries on the top (made into a jelly).

My dad always cooked on Sundays. He had an Italian Nonna and he always cooked Italian food, cannelloni, lasagne, polpete soup, semolina gnochi. He would often make cannoli as well. Or he would bbq a butterflied leg of lamb with rosemary and garlic. He would make his signature potato salad which had a mustard mayonnaise and chives base plus boiled eggs.

Christmases we would have seafood and salads (hot country). Usually lobsters and scallops.

For MY family, well i have a DC with autism and as a part of that he is severely food restricted. (Sensory issues around food). I try and have a simple vegetable starter daily as he will eat it (usually sliced cucumbers with a bit of vinegar and sugar); carrot salad with an olive oil and honey dressing, that sort of thing. Then I copy my mother's meat and three veg as much as possible (with rice a couple of times a week and pasta a couple of times a week- and tacos or nachos when all else fails) and occasionally (to get more cals into DS1 who is very slim..... ) will do a yoghurt ice cream pudding with real fruit juice jelly etc.

But I am quite fascinated by what real families eat, from a vairiety of backgrounds and cultures. So i would love to read about what other MNetters do as 'normal'.

I grew up in the 70's. My mum was not a natural cook but did try to vary things. We had fish and chips, liver and onions (hated both), corned beef stew, casseroles, pies etc, always with veg, bread and butter. As we grew up she ventured into spaghetti bolognaise, curries etc which were a real treat. Pudding was always tinned fruit and carnation, jellies, angel delight, bread and butter pudding etc.
Sunday teatimes were our favourite as we had sandwiches, crisps and cake off the tea trolley in front of the tv. Usually watching Bullseye.
Never had a takeaway, just couldn't afford it.

My MIL who never worked outside the home again after having her first DC and prided herself on her cooking, rotated the same seven meals all her DC lives. They never ever deviated from it. I can't get my head around that.
We all eat a varied diet in our house now with the occasional takeaway. The main difference being we rarely have a pudding, whereas growing up it was a given.

I was lucky, in that my mum, and both Grandmas were all really good cooks. So I'd never eaten tough meat or over cooked veg til I started eating over at friend's houses!
One grandma favoured meat and two veg, the other had a meal plan which didn't change. Pasta was foreign muck!

My mum took great pleasure in cooking foreign muck, and not sticking to a 7day plan!

She made a mix of traditional meals, pies and savoury suet puddings (my favourite was bacon), and 'newer' dishes such as Bolognese, pizza, chili and curry.

She baked lots, as did my dad when he ventured into the kitchen, so we never had shop bought cake.

Sunday wasn't always a roast but often was. We always ate our evening meal at the dining table.

When DH and I had DS, we realized we would need to make an effort to eat at the table if we wanted that to happen. So it's a 'treat' if we do eat in front of the telly.

Now the kids cook 2 meals each a week (13 & 17) so they often pick their favourites(Bolognese, roast, chilli), and I have to make the most of my cooking nights to make different stuff.

Christmas is a traditional roast but I think their favourite is Christmas Eve buffet, there was nearly a riot when I suggested doing something different this year!

When they were little, we had serve yourself at the table, to encourage them to only take what they wanted (though they had to try everything). Now it depends on the meal.

Thanks again, i have loved reading these posts. It has also made me think about what I want to pass on to y family- food issues permitting anyway.

Eating at the table more often will be a start. DH will just have to sort out his timing. I also rather fancy fish and chips or similar on Fridays. That can be in front of a family film or something.

(I just tend to feel I am getting parenting wrong alot of the time!).

Similar age. Growing up only mum cooked until I was 11 and I started cooking some nights. Traditional English fare of meat potatoes and veg, shepherds pies and stews through the colder months with salad's replacing the stews in summer often with quiche. Spaghetti came onto the scene when I was around 10 but it was a big thing with recipe book and for special occasions.

I cook far more diversely with foods from around the world. I have an autistic dd which made meals challenging but I persevered and she now eats healthily most of the time (she decided to be vegetarian but at least now eats vegetables!)!

We grew up on plain food. Mince and tatties, stew, scotch broth, tattie soup, boiled beef or ham, occasionally a pork chop, but a roast most Sundays.

Absolutely no “foreign muck”! After I got married I invited my family over for dinner and made pasta, I can still see the look on my dads face, he could barely choke it down.

No takeaways, maybe a bag of chips once a year.

No going out to restaurants.

No birthday parties/special foods/birthday cake. I’ll be 59 this year and can count how many birthday cakes I’ve had with my fingers.

My granny was a great baker and made fresh scones and pancakes every day. She made fruit cakes and loaves and a brilliant Clootie Dumpling.

As children we were never asked what we wanted to eat, it was cooked, dished up, and the choice was take it or leave it. God forbid you tried to leave it!

Pickiness was not tolerated, you just weren’t allowed to not like something. My brother hated porridge but it was still dished up to him, right up until the day he vomited the whole bowl straight back up. He got cornflakes instead after that.

Most weeks followed the same format, didn't dine out much.

There was a chippy tea once a week (fish & chips). Sunday was always a roast, lamb or beef. Sausage & mash also featured once a week, as did pie & chips.

I never follow a same day routine or eat so much 'British' food as we did back then. Usually it's rice or pasta dishes instead, or salad. Thinking about it every day involved potatoes cooked some way growing up

Growing up in the seventies, my parents were both good old-fashioned cooks but my mother did the every day workaday meals and my father cooked Sunday lunch.

My mother is Irish so we were brought up on lamb strew with pearl barley, shepherd's pie, gammon ham with onion gravy, pea and ham soup, lentil and bacon soup etc. Puddings were "fruit from the basket" but occasionally we would have steamed puddings, spotted duck, jam roly poly, rice pudding, bread and butter pudding. And we had a proper traditional roast at weekends. Every meal was eaten at the kitchen table except Sunday lunch was eaten in the dining room with a table cloth.

Snacks were: fruit, home made beef dripping on toast, Victoria sponge, jam tarts, all home made.

Latterly my mother learned to drive and every Thursday went to this ground-breaking shop called a "supermarket" and came back with strange delights such as: fish fingers, boil in the bag lasagne and crispy filled pancakes, fish fingers and fruit salad in a tin.

My father had more "international" tastes and discovered Elizabeth David books and he used to stop off at a newly opened Italian "deli" and come home with parmesan cheese, olives, olive oii, spaghetti and garlic. I used to go with him occasionally and remember they would sit me on the counter and feed me amaretti biscuits

He spent hours at the weekends making stock which he then used to make fantastic risottos and tomato sauce for pasta sauces etc. I remember eating spaghetti for the first time ever when I was about twelve!

We eat nothing like my parents (we live abroad for a start) and eat food from all sorts of different food cultures but I have definitely inherited my father's love of good stock!

My parents believed in eating locally, seasonally, grow your own and in minimising food waste waaay before it was fashionable.Much of this scarred me for life as neither was a great cook, and we'd be eating marrows for what seemed like months, then celeriac and minimising food waste started at source so there was an awful lot of offal to be eaten.
Similar to many in the 70's it was a very predictable week - big roast on a Sunday (beef, lamb, pork as dad didn't like killing out chickens), then jacket potato and leftover cold meat Monday, something like curry using leftover meat Tuesday, rissoles or something with minced meat from, you guessed it, Sunday leftover. There wasn't much time weekdays as mum would be hurtling in from work just before dad got back and then there was a lot of smallholding jobs to do, but never anything more processed than tinned tomatos

every birthday we had two cakes. Mum bought fruity cake that she liked to eat, and dad bough chocolate cake that he liked. I loved double cake

Bland, overcooked and unseasoned shite everyday, from what I remember of it. With bland, overcooked and unseasoned Turkey at Christmas and Easter, it being a special occasion and all.

I'm from Australia but my father was English and the cook in our house so Sunday roasts every week even in the middle of summer! Also toad in a hole which I hated I just picked out the sausages and always pudding after tea which was good

My mother hated cooking and wasn't particularly good at it, but my dad was in the Navy, so she kind of had to get on with it (we LIVED for when my dad was at home, as he, on the other hand, was a brilliant cook).

I remember there being a lot of mince, corned beef and soup in my childhood with the occasional freezer dinner (Findus Crispy Pancakes or similar) on a Saturday. Weirdly, we weren't allowed Smash (I don't know why).

Every now and again, though, she'd find out something new and that's all we'd eat for about six weeks. There was a strange dessert thing made of jelly and condensed milk, and a pasta bake made with Campbell's Condensed Soup.

My sister and joke that we learned to cook out of self-defence - we are both excellent, adventurous and fairly skilled cooks who really enjoy it - but it's only a half-joke, if we're being honest...

(I am being a wee bit unfair to my mum - in fairness, she was/is an excellent baker, something which I absolutely cannot get my head around at all.)

@Nightwithhertrainofstars I am clearly slightly older but other than that my mum’s food sounds identical to your mum’s. She actually mentioned’ “pappy” bread only recently! All bran seemed to make it into so many dishes …crumble (sweet or savoury) but most of flour replaced with all bran, cakes, biscuits etc

I can't really remember much about what we ate! I do remember spaghetti bolognese, 'fry-ups', and 'salads' in the summer which included ham, grated cheese, hard boiled eggs, pork pies- and would be eaten in the garden. I don't really remember my Dad cooking anything other than flapjack, although I think he must have cooked meals too.

We also only used the dining room table on Christmas Day. Anything else was eaten on our laps on the sofa. I find that really odd now!

My DM is a great cook and her mother was, there was a strong family tradition of cooking. Big Sunday roast lunches, and any family special get together was always either a buffet salad in hot weather or a roast. Sunday afternoons when I was a child was afternoon tea, the main part of which was my DMs fantastic cakes. She varied it every week, but it included things like crumpets, scones, hot toast and marmite or mackerel pate, tiffin, all kinds of cakes, bread pudding, biscuits.... she still makes all this for the GC!

Family dinners on weekdays could be all sorts of things from spaghetti to casseroles to liver and bacon, shepherds pie, bean casseroles, roasted chicken thighs and always veg. I was trained to be able to put one of those together to go on the table by the time I was twelve or thirteen, more useful than anything I learned in home ec! Saturday lunches or picnics were always things like crusty bread, cheese and a flask of soup. We were very hard up as a family for quite a lot of my early childhood and she also made a lot of jam, and used things like baked beans to bulk up casseroles or soups to make them go further.

I love making cakes and scones although have had to learn to cook dairy free due to allergies.

@Artichokeleaves

she also made a lot of jam

You've just reminded me of another of my mum's 'adventures in cooking' - one day, we were all packed into the car to go to own of those 'pick your own' soft fruit farms, where we gathered a metric shit tonne of strawberries.

Mum tried to make jam, but she didn't know that you need to add pectin to make strawberries set, so we then had six months of eating strawberry soup on toast. It tasted nice, but you had to be careful to keep your toast at a very level angle when lifting it from plate to mouth...

[quote AffIt]@Artichokeleaves

she also made a lot of jam

You've just reminded me of another of my mum's 'adventures in cooking' - one day, we were all packed into the car to go to own of those 'pick your own' soft fruit farms, where we gathered a metric shit tonne of strawberries.

Mum tried to make jam, but she didn't know that you need to add pectin to make strawberries set, so we then had six months of eating strawberry soup on toast. It tasted nice, but you had to be careful to keep your toast at a very level angle when lifting it from plate to mouth... [/quote]

That sounds fun!

I remember my DM making Christmas cake - she made all the cakes and puddings properly months in advance - and it went horribly wrong, it sank in the middle. So I can remember running around the garden eating warm, soggy Christmas cake since she cut it up and fed it to us to get rid of it.... and it being absolutely fantastic. Much better than the proper version.

Great thread!

My mum was (and still is) not especially keen on cooking but very conscientious so she cooked everything from scratch and loved to add peppers, courgettes and onions to everything. I still love all those.

My granny hated cooking with a passion but loved to bake and I learnt a lot from her. She taught me to make pastry and cakes and how to know if the texture was right and to measure ingredients by eye.

Our cooking is different from both but generally driven by what we’re doing, how much time we have and what we can persuade the kids to eat. We always have something special on a Sunday, and usually I make a pudding too.

I cook nothing like my DM.

Growing up, it was always meat + potatoes (mashed/ roast/ boiled/ chips fried In lard). Occasionally white fish in cheese sauce (with boiled potatoes). Peas were the only vegetable.

Pasta or rice? Only ever as Macaroni or pudding rice in a milk pudding baked for a couple of hours and designed to fill you up. But plain - nutmeg or a blob of jam was unheard of. Sponge pudding and custard. Sometimes tinned fruit and 'cream' which was evaporated milk.

Cakes were always home made as shop-bought were too expensive.

But we had very little spare money so there was no such thing as a choice, or being allowed not to finish a meal.

I'd never had spaghetti unless out of a tin until I was a student.

We only ever have one course during the week, dessert only on a Sunday.... not sure why.... during the week our dessert is essentially snacks like biscuits or chocolate but it’s your choice.... Sunday’s we make more of an effort with like a pie or cake or pudding...
we used to do roasts every Sunday but stopped about 5 years ago..
Now we on.y have them every 3-4 weeks.
Kids are the only ones that have breakfast lunch and dinner.... during half term they only have breakfast and dinner and about 100 snacks in between 😂
We have the rule, once you’ve eaten all your dinner you can eat what you want after. Lucky my kids ain’t all that fussy and I don’t usually have problems. Then don’t really stuff thier faces after... maybe a sweet or too here or there but not going nuts with it.

I’m nearly 40 and both parents cooked growing up and they both worked shifts. We always had a roast on Sundays followed by a pudding with custard or sometimes Vienetta. My mum still insists on cooking a roast on a Sunday even if no one is visiting and it’s just her and dad. We laugh saying she can’t help it, it must be an illness she has. Always forcing a roast dinner on someone. Supper on a Sunday would be cheese and tomato on toast ate whilst watching Heartbeat in the living room!
We always ate at the table and always ate together as a family. Staple meals through the week would be things like lamb chops with mash and veg, chicken curry with rice (with sultanas in!), spaghetti bolognaise, tuna pasta bake etc. These are meals I like to cook for my family now.
On Saturday we would eat at GPs house and it would be a ‘big spread’ of cold meat, salad, homemade coleslaw, chips and crusty bread and butter. Huge bowls of grated carrot and sliced boiled eggs too. Happy days.

We had lots of puddings. Apple pie, apple
Upside down cake, apple
Crumble, baked apple all with birds custard. Oo and rice pudding. I hardly ever cook a pudding. My kids are obsessed with ‘pudding’ though, but sadly for them it’s just yoghurt or tinned fruit mostly.

I'm 59. My mum was an amazing cook and loved doing it. My dad could just about boil an egg.
We had sit down all at the table meals, breakfast too at weekends (no sleeping in)! Dinner was usually one course, and I remember a chicken would feed all five of us plus have pickings! Dessert was fruit or yogurt. If entertaining children were expected to eat too and my mum made lovely yet simple starters (home made soups, prawn cocktail) followed by many an interesting dish. Her bests were: chicken curry, served with freshly grated coconut, sliced onions and bananas; roasts of any kind - particularly Christmas dinner and lamb at Easter; tarragon chicken; coronation chicken; a kedgeree to die for that we often had for supper; a fish thing with a white sauce with grapes in it; any number of simple yet delicious meals. She was also queen of pastry and her apple and blackberry tarts, apple pie, treacle tarts were divine. Constance Spry cookbook was well used!
We were three girls so took turns with the washing up - I remember having a dishwasher you had to pull over from adjoining area and attach the hoses to the sink...