What did people actually eat in the past?

[BuffaloCauliflower]

Inspired by the finding of some crockery that belonged to my Granny (born 1917) and
conversations with my DM about feeding families, I’ve been wondering a lot about how and what people ate in the past on just normal days, not fancy dinner party stuff. My Granny was an older mum, 43 when she had my DM in 1960, and DM remembers mostly simple meat and two veg type dishes. Cottage pie, casseroles, roast dinners. What was a quick easy dinner, did such a thing exist before 1970?! Egg and chips? Memories of childhood reading conjures up bread and dripp

If you were around in the 50s/60s in the U.K., what did normal family meals look like? Or even earlier maybe, pre war. What sort of things were normal prior

Well that was an annoying one to click send on while editing! Let’s keep trying.

What sort of things were normal for breakfast, lunch and dinner before convenience food and the influence

Or other world cuisines started filtering in? I’d love any insight you might have!

and it should have said bread and dripping above, was that a thing?!

(sorry this is so badly written, I can’t use a phone today)

My gran used to cook bacon and chips.
Lamb chops in tomato gravy.
Roast beef and Yorkshires.
Fish and chips - grandad worked on fish docks.
Sausages, probably with chips and mash.
She used to get cheap cuts of meat such as a sheep’s head (the joke was ‘ask the butcher to keep the eyes in, it’ll see us through the week’), lamb hearts and pigs’ trotters.
Tripe and onions with bread and butter or mash.
Bacon and egg pie.
Rice pudding.

Those are what I remember my dad talking about through the 30s, 40s and 50s.

Thanks! How do you cook a sheep’s head?!

All off to find a recipe for bacon and egg pie!

Sliced tongue

More offal than we generally have these days.

I remember my Grandad (I'm 50) serving tripe and onions boiled in milk, with potatoes. And I often helped stuff and then sew together before roasting, a huge ox heart from the butchers.

The first was disgusting, but the second was delicious!

Bread and dripping was certainly a thing - I used to have it, sprinkled with salt, in the 1980s!

I’ve remembered a few more - a pan of stew with suet dumplings, pan haggerty and stuffed marrow.

Breakfast was toast done on a fork in front of the fire, maybe a boiled egg. I think my dad had Weetabix, too. Every meal was washed down with tea and there was always a plate of bread and butter on the table.

Dad used to talk about having a bag of winkles, or cockles and mussels, or a fresh boiled crab, with a ton of bread and butter.

1960s we ate:
Roast lamb, beef or pork on a Sunday (I don't remember having chicken!)
Cold meat & chips on Monday.
Spag bol (very progressive)
Lamb chops or pork chops
Casserole
Sausages
Fish in parsley sauce
Salad when Wimbledon was on!
Goulash, stroganoff (mum went to cookery classes!)
Curry made from left over roast meat with raisins
Liver & bacon
I'm sure there were other things too.

I think it was a case of boiling it and then getting all the meat off.

Mutton was popular then, too. We don’t tend to eat it now.

I can remember we had a plate of bread and butter with everything, even tinned fruit. This was in the early to mid 60s

Bacon & egg pie was what my mum called quiche.

@DrMadelineMaxwell what do you stuff an ox heart with?!

God this is making memories flood back.

Brains. Believe it or not, my dad used to talk about eating sheep’s brains.

He said they were sweet 🤢

Stews, roasts or chops with 2 veggies, one green, one yellow, and spuds, spagetti & meat balls, meat loaf. Cabbage rolls. Liver, onions & bacon. My mother did buy one frozen food, beef meat pies. Smoked cod or pork chops, in mushroom soup. Salmon loaf with dill sauce.

My mum was born early 1950s. Lived rurally and they grew most of their own food/reared animals.

She said breakfast was porridge with water. Lunch was custard and dinner was potatoes and cabbage/carrots with either chicken or mackerel/herring.

Bread was homemade in a frying pan apparently.

My mum liked tripe, it was absolutely vile, we also had liver once a week in thick gravy

@Cookerhood your mum was definitely more progressive than my granny. My mum doesn’t remember ever having pasta at home, and definitely no curry.

I love bacon and egg pie for Boxing Day lunch.

Fry your bacon and chop it up.

Circle of pastry on a plate. Add bacon, beat about four eggs and pour it on, grind of pepper, circle of pastry on top. Snip an air hole in the pastry lid, brush with beaten egg, bake according to the ingredients on the pastry box 😳

Eat a massive wedge with pickled onions, gherkins and another massive wedge.

Oh if you can ever find this programme to view (it might be on youtube?) it's absolutely fantastic, brilliant TV. All these series are great and they get repeated every so often.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05nc5tv

One gran cooked lots of greens, cabbage, carrots, neck of lamb stew, tripe, cockles, potatoes, bread and eggs., liver and onion, with mash. Kidney suet pudding thing. They would also eat salted tomatoes but werent big on salads. They had chese or jam sandwices for lunch.

My other gran cooked ham, chops and roasting joint, potatoes and seasonal vegetables, stew with dumplings. or salads, sandwiches and flans, eggs for breakfast with toast.

Neither were really into recipes. It was more a cut of meat they could afford, cooked in the way that made the most of it.

Some kind of breadcrumb, egg, sage and onion concoction, probably.

Liver and bacon was a thing. And liver and onions. Steak and kidney puddings. Neck of lamb.

All the cheap cuts, basically.

And smoked haddock poached in milk.

@Forgottenmypasswordagain I’m wracking my brain for yellow vegetables?! Yellow courgettes? And yellow peppers, but that seems unlikely!

@Dacadactyl custard for lunch! Sounds marvellous!

i recall reading a Susan Cooper book, so written in the what - 60s? And the children in Cornwall being fed mackerel salad for lunch. With bread and butter and cake for mid afternoon high tea.
always conjured up such delicious visions.

Meat was rationed until the mid-1950s.

My mum talks about soup being made twice a week from bones, and a plate of soup being eaten every evening. Chicken wasn't a staple the way it has been the last couple of decades.