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

My dad said a big bowl of carrot and turnip was put on the table everynight and went with whatever else they had. Chicken and cabbage, boiled potatoes.
Liver and onion, pea and ham soup, bread and butter.
He recalls it only being carrot and turnip some nights as his dad had an accident and was off work.

Many, many soups.

My grandma made the most delicious braising steak in gravy. She'd go out first thing to the market and get big steaks, then it would go in the oven and cook all day so the steak just pulled apart with a fork and the gravy was thick and rich, served it with boiled new potatoes and carrots.

Breakfast was bacon and eggs
Lunch was a ham sandwich with sliced tomatoes, cucumber and lettuce on the side
Dinner was meat and veg
Friday evening was fish n chips from the chip van that would come round every week.

A child in the 60s:

Breakfast - cereal, porridge, French toast, cooked breakfast

Lunch - school dinners and later sandwiches such as tinned sardines in tomato sauce, tuna fish, salmon, egg mayonnaise, cheese and tomato, etc, with a packet of crisps and a Club biscuit or Penguin. Weekends - baked beans on toast, soup and bread, Scotch pie, Cornish pasty. Roast on a Sunday, which could include pheasant.

Dinners - lamb or beef stew, tripe (raw), pigs trotters, cow heel (I don’t remember what with), fish and chips, egg and chips, steak and chips, shepherds pie, homemade beef burgers, goulash, spaghetti bolognese, chicken curry with rice, chips and sliced bananas, pizza, macaroni cheese (possibly with tuna fish and tomatoes), homemade fish cakes, and tinned salmon, salad and bread and butter on a Sunday! My mother was adventurous for those days, and was cooking world cuisine, not just meat, potatoes and two veg!

Pudding - we nearly always had a cooked pudding like rice pudding, sago, junket, jam roll poly, spotted Dick, treacle tart, fruit pies, crumble, lemon meringue pie, ginger sponge, chocolate sponge, Bakewell tart, and little sponges with marmalade on top

In addition, my mother frequently made cakes such as scones, rock cakes, chocolate cake, coffee and walnut cake, fairy cakes, and various fancy gateaux.

I'm of the generation whose grandfathers fought in the war and parents were children during the war.

I remember food being very simple and basic.

Tripe and onions

Liver and onions
Saturdays was always tinned salmon followed by tinned pears with tinned Carnation evaporated milk

Being a fussy (who can blame me?) eater, I was having non of that. Tea for me was egg and chips (chip pan variety, fried in lard that had been in the pan for months), I would imagine the egg was fried in lard too.
and beans on toast
on rotation

We never had them but my local butcher sells them and in my old age I buy a couple every now and again. I suppose the recipes might vary.

"Slice of life" by Christina Hardyment is a great read.

Oh and she always had a tin of homemade rock cakes in the cupboard, I used to love standing on a stool 8n her teeny kitchen mixing up a batch of rock cakes and then eating one still warm out of the oven.

Bacon pudding cooked in a muslin

Bacon ribs and cabbage.

My nan grew her own tomatoes and they tasted completely different. I still love the smell of tomatoes in a green house. She grew cabbage too and potatoes.

Corn beef hash

My Gran made this; it’s basically like a quiche mixture, but with chopped onion as well as the bacon, eggs and milk. It has a pastry lid as well as the pastry case.

gosh I’d forgotten all about it, it was delicious, more moist than quiche. There was a sort of funnel, called a pie funnel which you put in the middle, under the lid. It helped to keep the pastry away from the wet filling and let steam out during cooking. She also made a pie with minced beef and onions and a pinch of nutmeg ( very medieval, that) .

My other Gran used to make me an individual egg custard in a fluted mould, which I think was poached, not baked. This was often served with apple purée.

this was in the late 1950’s. Essentially, this was pre war food, my mother was much more open to ‘foreign’ food (casseroles not hot pot, pate not meat paste).

My grandma would always use lard to cook grandads bacon, then pour the bacon-y fat from the pan into a jar that was kept in the fridge and would be spread on a slice of white bread for Grandads mid morning snack.

I'm not sure how far back you're going but apparently Heinz Ketchup was invented because most food was so unpleasant. Henry Heinz brought it to the market in glass jars because nobody else was using transparent containers, as most sellers wanted to disguise expired foods from customers. Nothing kept for long back then!

I watched a brilliant documentary series on the history of our most popular food brands on the discovery channel. Recommend!

Worse meals were Stuffed lambs heart, kidneys, liver , rabbit.
Roast chicken for 6 so the youngest got wings and stuffing, off cuts of cold meats from the deli counter, broken biscuits,

Memories from what other people have said:
My aunt spoke about onion and cucumber in vinegar and she used to mash up cream cheese and cucumber with salt and pepper and vinegar.

Dad's cousin would press an ox tongue at Christmas. We didn't, but Dad salted ham down when they'd killed a pig and we had really proper ham for breakfast on Christmas morning, obviously with mustard and vinegar mixed together on the side of the plate.

OP mentioned pre-war. When my Dad was growing up, working on a farm after school, he'd have fat bacon for breakfast.

I'm not a child of the 50s but as the eldest grandchild she cooked for me a lot, grew up with lots of milk puddings and home made damson jam dolloped in the middle, molded blamange or set custards, stuffed marrow, ratatouille with cold cuts left over from the roast, Monday morning before school breakfast was thick crusty bread and dripping from the roast beef joint on Sunday, lots of salt and pepper with a cup of tea.
Everything was cooked in animal fats and real butter, fruit crumbles or baked apples with mincemeat in the winter, she had a walnut tree we used to harvest as well and crack them open in front of the open fire from Autumn onwards.

Never went hungry at nans.

Sometimes we had thick slices of bacon from the butcher and they were cooked and we had potatoes and greens with them and we had the fat from the bacon on the veg instead of brown gravy. - bacon and dip dinner. Yummo. Not so good for the thighs or even possibly the tum in the long term. Sigh.

I remember when I first started low carbing about 9 years ago. Ma was fascinated about what I ate and when I told her (say.....roast gammon with green veg and cauli cheese) she would keep saying "But what do you have WITH it?!" The idea of a meal not containing a large portion of some sort of carb has completely passed her by! It wasnt until I lost 7 stone, my BIL started doing it and lost about the same and my sister did it and lost 3 that she was finally convinced that you can in fact low carb and not drop dead from starvation. She is still a very traditional eater though. She will eat a low carb meal but to her there needs to be pasta, rice, potatoes or bread in a dinner otherwise it isnt a dinner. She was born in 1950 and my Grandmother got married in 1939, coming from a working class family. So all she knew how to cook was food to fill you up and that was carbs, obviously that became ingrained during the war. It stuck with Ma and she struggled her whole life with her weight as she thought that filling up on carbs and eating low fat food was far better for weight loss. She wasnt fat but the 70's in our locality seemed to contain not a single woman who wasnt "slimming". The doctors said to eat low fat and high carb, and she is one who will believe a doctor if they tell her that the sky is purple with green polka dots.

Oddly enough though, she was considered very exotic in both her and Pa's family when they got married as she would cook spag bol, curry, risotto, quiche etc. But she still insists on at least two "gravy dinners" as she calls them, a week!

Ours was....

Mince and boiled potatoes (LOATHE it to this day)
Sausage and mash
Spag bol
Ham hock and cauliflower cheese
Egg and chips
Chops (pork or lamb) veg and gravy (chop and chips was common apparently!)

I think my father took over the cooking when he retired partly out of boredom but partly out of desperation as they started having lots of exotic things she loves but admits that she couldnt be bothered to cook.

OMG stuffed marrow!

I inadvertantly started a massive row at my parents not that long ago.

When I was kid (40+ years ago!) my sister and I were given meatballs (recipe below). My Parents had the same thing but stuffed into marrow. I mentioned stuffed marrow in a "oh I havent had X for ages" type conversation. It came onto that and I asked why DSis and I never had it. Ma said she didnt think we would like it and then said "Well to be honest I didnt really like it either". Pa said "Neither did I so why did we have it?"
"To use up the marrow"
"But we didnt grow marrow, so why did you buy it"
"because it was cheap"
"Would have been even cheaper if you hadnt bought the sodding marrow!"
She then got the hump and yelled that she had been doing her best on low housekeeping and that she might have been able to afford better food if he had given her more housekeeping.
He then got the hump and said she was more than happy that he had paid off the mortgage on the house we were sitting in.
She said that it was funny how he could always find money for fags but sometimes she had to go short on housekeeping (fair point)
And then I left.

Dont know what happened after that, they were both fine with me but didnt speak to each other properly for days, which for them means it was a MASSIVE bust up! All over fucking stuffed marrow!

(pork sausage meat, mixed with made up sage and onion [slightly dryer than you would if you were doing it for a roast] stuffing. Make into balls. Fried off until sealed and then braised in chicken gravy.....tastes lovely! Or you can do them in the oven in which case make the stuffing mix a bit wetter as they dry out. Do make sure to fry them off though, I didnt the first time I made them and got the thickest meatiest gravy ever....tasty though!)

I'm of British / French heritage (57) and I remember my mother making lots of dishes in aspic (a kind of jelly) for dinner parties when I was a child.

I think it was quite fashionable in the 1950s. You rarely see anything served in it today. I remember salmon and asparagus in aspic.

Both of my grandmother's had a baking day every week. Cake, buns, scones, rock cakes. Both had large families and one was feeding agricultural workers so stuff probably didn't hang about long.
A lot of meals were what we called brown dish cooking - stews and casseroles - slow cooking for cheap cuts.
My mother had a cookbook called something like 101 ways with mince in the 70's.

God this food sounds awful to the modern sensibilities!!

mince. Fried fish , fish poached in milk, soups pies from butcher, chops

Kippers for breakfast from a local smokehouse wrapped in newspaper. This was the norm.
Puro milk
Steak and Kidney pie
Clouty dumpling
Leeks and bacon
Cabbage, Leeks, cauliflower, carrots, onions, potatoes, pulses used a lot
Stargazy pie
Faggots
Fried Cheese with bread
Stew and dumplings
Oxtail soup
Scotch broth
potato fritters cooked on a griddle
Spanish Omelette
Rice pudding, apple pie, chocolate pudding, ginger pudding and sweet white sauce. Semolina, Tapioca. Rosehip syrup. Lemon Meringue pie. Custard was used a lot.
A lot of dried fruit like prunes and dates
A lot of pickled beetroot with everything. A lot of pickles generally
Baking - scones, fruit cake, biscuits, pasties, pies
Everything home made, even the pork pies and Scotch pies
Salads in the summer. Everything was eaten in season.

Lots of herbs and spices, especially in winter cooking and baking.

Those are very similar to my mother's memories. She's 88 now so was a child during the war, being 10; years old when it ended. She's honestly like a living history book, and she loves that role. 😃

She very much remembers rationing, which for some things went on for quite some time after the war.

They ate a fair bit of simple meat and two veg meals with gravy, and a lot more offal than we have today. It was cheap.

A number of their meals did involve use of eggs even though those were rationed too. They got round that because my grandmother (maternal) and her mother (my great grandmother) both managed to acquire hens, which they kept in their back yards so that they could have regular eggs.

People did what they could with what they had, and sometimes had to be inventive with it.

I was born in 1966, so I grew up during the seventies and early eighties. I'd say our diet was still very much influenced by what my mother had been used to in her own childhood, minus the rationing.