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

I was born in 1966 so my memories are from the 70s.

Things that were quite common included offal, my mum liked tripe, I think it is disgusting, liver and bacon which makes a fantastic gravy, rabbit and my grandmother could make pig's head brawn.

We seemed to have egg and chips quite a lot, or a slice of ham / tongue with chips.

I had three years of compulsory cookery at school and it seemed to be mostly mince.

Mined beef in a pastry pie, in a suet roll similar to a jam roly poly with meat instead of jam. Cottage pie, a weird thing with a pastry base, mash piped round the edge and then the mince went in the middle.

My mum and grandma also did 'sops' which wasn't a real meal, more a treat for the cook, when you have roasted beef or other meat and you need to drain the tin to make gravy you push a slice of bread into the meat juices and just eat it.

Pasta, well the nearest was in a tin and served on toast.

My mother was born in 1946 to very poor parents — they appear to have lived on bread and tea for two meals a day, and dinner would consist of potatoes, cabbage or carrots and a small amount of some form of meat, most of which was given to her father and older brothers. It was a diet very deficient in protein, and she’s now got significant health problems related to that.

There's a great bbc series about food through the decades, a family live the life of that decade and the house is decked up like it but the focus is the food and kitchen can't remember the name though

If we switch the central heating off for a couple of months this winter we might find we long for suet puds.

I like cooked liver and bacon but if there was any left over it would be available cold at tea time along with a cold chop, or anything else that was left over. I could happily eat cold cooked liver and bacon now.

In the 80s for economy we were buying brisket and ham hocks. Mackerel was also a cheap meal. I shall be having a ham hock tomorrow with vegetables. Then later in week the leftovers with beans soaked overnight.
I remember the cookery books coming out then and into the 90s that changed many attitudes.
Delia Smith, I still have the set of 3, later republished as one volume. Then Keith Floyd on France. To get me in the mood for cooking I read Elizabeth David. That world that she describes in France seems as far away as Hogwarts is to us..

Fridges weren't common until the 1950s and freezers not until the 1970s

People often had chickens, rabbits or a pig in the garden that they raised for food. And growing your own veg was way more common.
Also poaching 😂

White bread and dripping with tea with six spoons of sugar in it common for my grandparents. They also ate ravioli in a tin.

I think of them everytime someone makes those po-faced suggestions that one should only eat ‘what your grandparents would recognise as food’ .

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

My GM used Paxo. And IIRC lambs hearts rather than ox. They were delicious, as was all her cooking. Best decribed as 'good, plain' but none the worse for that and she did Yorkshires that were the best I've ever tasted.

Chicken wasn't a staple the way it has been the last couple of decades

It was a special occasion food in the early/mid 60s.

Chicken wasn't a staple the way it has been the last couple of decades
It was a special occasion food in the early/mid 60s.
Chickens not reared intensively then for food, they were larger older birds.
Kept in cages for eggs.

Bere bannocks and cheese
Locally caught fish
Locally caught crab with bread and salad cream
Mince and tatties
Roast beef
Boiled beef in the same pot as the tatties, onions and carrots
Fried liver
Bacon and eggs was an occasional treat
As pp, occasional roast chicken
Shop bought white bread with butter and homemade jam or bought marmalade
Salt fish
Smoked fish
Sausages
Spare ribs
Eggs
Home grown veg
Tinned ham with salad veg, tomatoes and tinned vegetable salad
Home made lentil soup and scotch broth
Home baking
Tinned fruit with carnation milk
Jelly and carnation milk
Home made rice pudding
Home made apple crumble and Eve's pudding
Mutton stew
Porridge cooked with water and salt, served with milk
Sweets and chocolate
Stewed rhubarb and home made custard

Not a lot of fresh fruit. Apples were sliced and shared.
Low UPF .
Less wheat and more meat.
Possibly too little fibre.

@PyongyangKipperbang bloody egg and chips! My mum was a demon for cooking that, it was almost her staple dish, made with the aid of a chip pan. I have never had it as an adult.

Just confirming, this book is amazing
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Englishmans-Food-Five-Centuries-English/dp/0712650253

My grandparents were farmers, their breakfast would have been bacon, egg and bread with butter. Dinner was meat this would have been beef/chicken/rabbit or version with potato's and veg. Dinner was bread and butter with ham/cheese/tongue. My gran would make fruit cakes and rice puddings.

A student landlady of mine in the late 60s in Yorkshire, told me her family had been very poor when she was growing up. They had evidently eaten a lot of offal, and she evidently still liked it. I once came home to find her eating fried bits of things - I asked what they were.
‘Chitterlings’. (Intestines). Still eaten a lot in France of course.

Another time she gave me some cold meat that looked a bit like tongue (which I didn’t much like anyway) but paler. But having been brung up to be polite, I ate it anyway.
‘Do you like that, love?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said politely. ‘What is it?’
‘Udder.’ 😱

@sashh ’Sops’ were known as that in Tudor times - pieces of bread used to soak up broths or similar.

My grandparents were farmers so they had their own veg, potatoes and eggs.

Evening meals were usually meat with veg in various forms. On a Monday they’d have the leftover Sunday roast meat with chips and peas.

Most women were homemakers so they had the time to prepare things like pies and stews from scratch as a weekday meal.

My DGM must have got bored with the same foods once her own kids left home as she would make curries, pasta, pizza etc. for the grandchildren which DM said they never had.

Just normal sage and onion stuffing in an ox heart. @BuffaloCauliflower

My nan used to cook sheep's head and tripe.
In the 80s,so not long ago,my mum used to cook lambs hearts and liver 🤢

Something I haven't seen mentioned in this thread is eating sweet macaroni pudding!

I never had savoury pasta until the 90's, only macaroni pudding, cooked in sweetened milk and a bit of butter until it had absorbed most of it.

Did anybody else have this?

My dad sailed with his family to South Africa and later New Zealand as a teenager in the 1950s, to live out there while Grandad was working. He also worked in NZ as by then he was seventeen.

Anyway, Dad was terribly seasick for weeks on the voyages. Grandad loved his sheep's brains, which were served on the ships back then, and delighted in offering some to his green-faced oldest son. 🤢 What a git. 😅

I bloody loved heart, liver and kidneys before I turned vegetarian, black pudding too. You can keep tripe and sheep's head, though.

My mother was brought up in a rural farming community abroad. LOTS of meat. She was born in 1949 for context. She would tell us about her mothers cooking;

breakfast was usually meat based- often fried mince and pea with bread or toast
lunch would be lamb chops and fried potatos
dinner again usually meat based and vegetables were mainly potatos peas etc.

her mother was Scottish and would make brawn and her father would shoot rabbits and she would make jugged hare.

My paternal grandmother was Jewish and from eastern europe so she made loads of Jewish / Eastern European food- borscht; schnitzel; bundt cake; pierogi; that srt of thing.

In the early 70s, as kids in a cash strapped family, my Mother did her best. Hard to believe these were snacks back then...

Beef dripping sandwich

Granulated sugar sandwich (just butter both slices, then sprinkle sugar on butter)

One thing I loved for breakfast back then was this. No idea what it's was called...

Break up several slices of bread, boil a saucepan of milk, pour hot milk over the bread, then sugar liberally. Loved it!

We had the Frey Bentos pies, haslet, tongue, blancmange etc.

Good basic British food. And, curiously, no one had multiple allergies...😗