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

50s/60s

Brown stew (stewing steak casseroled with onion and carrots) with mash
Bacon/egg/chips
Roast dinner
Sausage and mash
Gammon with mash and 'gravy'
Chops - lamb or pork with potatoes and veg
Salad - egg or tinned salmon
Cottage pie
Liver and bacon
Stuffed hearts
Fish, mash and parsley sauce
Smoked haddock
Lamb stew with carrots, onion, turnip, boiled potatoes and pearl barley. Loved it and never ever been able to make it successfully

No garlic, herbs or seasoning other than salt and pepper.
No pasta or rice

We had meat and simple veg type dinners in 60s and 70s.

Veg would be potato and either cabbage, greens, green beans or carrots. Occasionally cauliflower.

Meat might be a small chop, liver and bacon, lamb's heart, faggots, chicken, steak and kidney pie (Fray Bentos), or sausages.

Very rarely had pasta or rice. Sometimes would have a casserole.

Child in the 70s

Breakfast was Frosties. Sugar puffs or Weetabix with extra sugar. If we had toast it was done under the grill (no toaster til 1978 )
Or on the weekend milky coffee and a bread roll split with sugar and butter
Occasionally bacon sandwich.

If at my aunts it was porridge - with cream and sugar.
My mum was an unenthusiastic cook. We were fairly poor. Mum was a child in the war, dad a fair bit older.

Dinners were egg and chips, sausage and mash, mince and peas and mashed potatoes. Chops. Stew I think. Roast on a Sunday - usually small beef or lamb joint, cold meat on a Monday - all veg boiled to death. Onion sauce with lamb.

Boil in the bag cod in sauce was popular at lunchtime.

Made a curry once or twice - served with sliced banana, dessicated coconut and sultanas.

I dont remember pasta being served until we got adventurous in the 80s with Schwartz cooking spice mixes and i started cookery at school. Although mum did have a go at making a flour and water pancake and filling that with mince.

Salad (served every Saturday evening) was round lettuce leaves, tomato, radish, boiled beetroot. Then cheese or egg or ham or corned beef. Salad cream, sometimes a spring onion with salt to dip it in. A bag of crisps each! Bread and butter and cups of tea.

Not much in the way of herbs or spices. No takeaways at all.

I have a Bero cookbook from the 1930’s, my great gran passed it down. It actually has a recipe for lard sandwiches 😂

The scone recipe is amazing thoigh

There's a book on Dutch cooking that similarly wonders how they got stuck with such a beige cuisine, especially seeing the rich variety of flavours they'd been exposed to in their colonies. Turns out it actually used to be a lot more adventurous, and what spoiled it was the invention of home economics classes in the mid- to late 19th century.

My DM was born in 1948, and used to say my DGM (born 1909) was considered a very modern cook when DM was a child because she'd sometimes use curry powder - very exotic stuff!

The day began with porridge. That kept you full up all morning. Our main meat was bacon from our own pig. It was hung in a frame just below the kitchen ceiling and Mum cut pieces off it as required. No-one had a freezer or even a fridge. Until I was four we didn't even have electricity. The farmer my father worked for put electricity in his cowsheds long before his workers' cottages. We had a dog called Towser who killed rabbits as they dashed out of the fields of corn at harvesting so rabbit stew was an occasional treat. My brothers were experienced poachers so pheasant, trout and (very occasionally) deer made their way onto our table. Happy days!

My papa was born in 1892 and my nana, who died a few years before I was born, was born in 1895.
My papa didn't change the way he ate at all. So my mum made him tripe in milk with potatoes, liver, lambs heart, ox tongue which she pressed over night. Smoked fish poached in milk. Potted hough with bread and butter.
Breakfast every day was porridge made with water and salt. Lunch would be roasted cheese and a tomato, a sandwich or homemade soup and bread.
He only ate very plain veg like mashed swede, the odd carrot, cabbage and, in the summer salad or peas from the garden.
My nana was apparently a great baker and baked every day - scones, tattie scones, bins, teacake - so everyone filled up on those if they were hungry.

My other papa was Irish. He had porridge every morning, dinner at 12 was always something with potatoes -eggs, cold meat, liver, sausages and tea was at about 5 and was bread and butter, scones, maybe a boiled egg or a bit of cheese. And he always had a 15 cup tea kettle sitting on the hearth keeping warm.

My DG loved making brawn, by boiling a pigs head. And homemade broth with pig trotters.
Lifting the lid on a boiling pigs 🐷 is enough to turn you vegetarian!
I blame the Industrial Revolution for our food habits in most of the UK.

My grandparents were born in the first decade of the 20th century & were married before the war. I knew them as a retired couple.
Most days, their meals would be something along the lines of :
Breakfast - Bacon or sausages with fried egg, toast & marmalade with a pot of co-op 99 tea.

Lunch, which they called dinner, was their main meal. Typically on weekdays they would have beef stew with boiled potatoes & veggies, often tinned peas, cabbage & carrots, plus bread & butter and a pot of tea. Dessert was often rice pudding. On Sundays, they would have a roast chicken or braising steak.

Tea was a lighter meal, eaten around 6 pm, often bread & cheese or ham with tomatoes & pickles and, of course, a pot of tea.

Supper, at around 10pm was yet another pot of tea with plain biscuits.

My grandparents cooked absolutely everything from scratch. They did not eat a ready meal all their lives. They had herb flapjacks for breakfast with herbs from their garden and a few bacon rashers, and fried eggs most days. A few bourbons at exactly 11am, but no more than two were permitted. Casserole, soup made from leftovers, or curried lamb, or mince and mash, and a hot pudding also all cooked from scratch for lunch. They had a huge vegetable garden they cooked from. Then they had bread and tongue or pork pie for tea around 5pm, sometimes with cake if they had made some. A cake would last a week in an airtight container. Only one slice. Then one Weetabix or shredded wheat at 9pm. Lived until 93 and 101.

1950's and 60's.
Roast beef on a Sunday (Argentinian). Lamb was from New Zealand. Chicken twice a year (luxury). Roast pork with crackling.
Monday was egg and chips or cold leftover meat with bubble and squeak.
Tuesday was minced beef with 2 veg.
Pigs liver and bacon casserole, rissoles, fish on a Friday. Dinner was eaten at lunch time.
Tea was sandwiches, shiphams paste with cucumber, banana sandwich.
Everything was seasonal, so strawberries in the summer, marrow early autumn, Cox's and russet apples September. Jacket potatoes in the winter and new potatoes late Spring. Tea was loose and made in a pot. Chips were shallow fried in lard. Everything fried in lard.

My grandma born 1913 cooked cheese and onion pie and also meat and potato pie. they were delicious!

Lard (from the fat of our own pig) spread on bread and sprinkled with salt. Yum yum! Now in my 80s but still grow own fruit and veg and make loads of jam. But I now have to buy eggs as a fox has killed all my chickens

I was born in the 50’s. Breakfast was cereal or porridge, lunch was homemade soup and bread or a sandwich. Dinner was usually meat( all of the above mentioned) and 2 veg. Always either boiled or mashed potatoes with every dinner. Friday was no meat day . So homemade fish and chips or egg and chips.

My favourite dinner was a mince pie made on a dinner plate. My Mum made short crust pastry, applied a layer to a chunky dinner plate, filled it with cooked mince and diced carrot then topped with more short crust pastry and cooked in the oven till the pastry was golden. Delicious 😋

Chips or boiled potatoes with everything. Even salad. Liver and onions with fried potatoes. Pork chops and chips. Birds Eye burgers with chips. We never ever had rice. I've just remembered home made Potato fritters. Birds Eye mousse or angel delight for pudding. Semolina with raisins in it for pudding. Curry in our house was a Vesta boil in the bag but only for grown ups. Fry up every day for breakfast (how was I so skinny?).

I was born 1966, my mum's cooking when I was a kid was

Sunday roast dinner
Monday cold meat & chips
Tuesday stew or trip & onions
Wednesday fish fingers or burgers & chips
Thursday pork or lamb chops, mashed potatoes, veg & gravy or Meat & potato pie
Friday we were allowed to choose, I had Vesta Beef curry or later on a pizza,
Saturday chippy fish & chips at dinnertime & sandwiches for tea.

This was repeated every week from me being old enough to remember to leaving home, I hated Sunday, Tuesday & Thursay as I hated meals like stew or Sunday dinners.

Roast on Sunday. Beef or pork or lamb, pheasant in the shooting season. Eating up cold meat or turning it into a stew -tatie hash, - for a day or two. Fried tates sometimes! Butcher called again on Wednesday so liver and bacon, steak and kidney, sausages, chops, any of those, and cold meat for tea. Saturday - meat and chips for the men, if there was some meat left, which there would be, and egg and chips for the women.
People might have been slim because they didn't have central heating and one of mine worked hard physically so worked it off.
Sometimes kippers or smoked haddock for a tea, or cauliflower cheese from the cauli left over from a dinner.
Puds? Well, no yogurt! Fruit pies, treacle sponge, egg custard warm or cold, any kind of steamed pud. Custard made with milk, sugar and Birds, same as i would now.
Dad's mother didn't cook tripe although she was a good cook. He had it 'on the boat going overseas' and liked it. Mum made it once and he said it was not bad but not as good as the army chef on the troopship made.

I was born in the 60s

I recall my grandmother eating pigs trotters and various offal dishes. We used to visit for our tea on Sunday and there was sliced cucumber and onion in vinegar alongside our sandwiches .

At home, the only time I recall eating pasta was when mum made spaghetti bolognaise by mincing up lamb from the Sunday roast and heating with tinned tomatoes and dried herbs. It wasn't nice. I think we also had macaroni cheese. After I left home in mid 1980s we all made pasta bakes using Campbells condensed soup as pasta sauce . I don't think my parents ever ate curry .

The Back in Time series on the BBC was quite accurate. It jogged more than a few memories for me.

My grandmother, born in 1900, cooked meat with boiled potatoes and veg pretty much every single day from 1918 until she went into a home in the late 80s.
The main meal was always served at lunchtime.
Tea was bread and butter, possibly ham or cheese, a small piece of cake.

Faggots! My grandmother would try and get us to eat them but we wouldn’t touch them…😆

We didn't have a fridge till 1961 so shopping most days. Meat was cheaper then. More mutton eaten, beef joints were larger. The animals were older before slaughter. All beef was over 2 years old often 30 months, cows that had been milking might be 12 or 14 yrs. More taste. Stews.

Half a pigs head for the brawn and the jowl.
Rabbit pie, inc kidney and heart.
A pudding most days. Yorkshire pudding with jam or Golden Syrup, Rice pudding or tapioca or semolina, suet pudding, fruit tart with custard.

We wanted sweet things, nearly everyone had 2 sugars in their tea 3 not unusual.

I haven't read every single post but I know someone explained how to make egg and bacon pie. My family would do the bottom pastry on an enamel plate with a bit of a step on it, then put in bits of bacon, raw or a wee bit cooked. Then we made little hollows in the bacon and put the eggs in whole rather than beating them, before putting the top pastry on. If you put 4 in, equally spaced around the circle, and cut it carefully, 8 people get half an egg each. Our men would put brown sauce on it. So would I. It's years since I've made one. Oh, what shall I make tomorrow??