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

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

My parents gave it to us, when we were ill. They called it “pobs”!

My relatives had an allotment & gardens after the WW2

They grew vegetables & fruit
So they ate food in season & some was pickled in jars & stored in a cold pantry
Meat, eggs, fish bought from the butcher & fish monger

Items on the menu, all homemade with seasonal veg

Shepherds pie
Meat casserole with suet dumplings
Steamed suet meat pudding
Minced meat pie in pastry
Roast meat, veg & yorkshire pudding
Fish with potatoes
Risroles (fried meat)
Meat soup from bones
Pheasant at Xmas
Rabbit

Fruit crumble
Steamed suet sponge pudding
Rice pudding cooked in the oven with nutmeg
Steamed sweet pudding

Homemade biscuits, cakes, buns

Homemade sponge birthday cakes

Homemade fruit Christmas cake (made in September)

Homemade Christmas puddings, we would eat the previous years

Jelly, blamange

There were no snacks in between meals

There were no fizzy drinks

No convenience foods apart from some things in tins like Fray Bentos Meat pie, beans

Bread was however bought, not homemade

Never ever saw

Lasagne
Chilli
Pizza
Indian
Garlic bread
Pasta

Also marrow fat dried peas that were soaked over night & cooked

1950s - my mother used to bottle pears , make pickled onions, walnuts and piccalilli and lots of jam all from our own garden produce. She made preserved eggs too. We had a lot of fruit and veg from the garden - but no freezers then, so we ate what was in season.
Baking day we made cakes and jam tarts, sausage rolls etc to last the week.
She would also make brawn, junket, veal and bacon pie, fish cakes, cauliflower cheese as well as most of the things mentioned above (except tripe! No-one liked it.)

Oh yes, my DM was still making it occasionally in her 80s. I loved it (I'm in NZ by the way).

I'm not a massive fan of pasta with sauces, but now and again I will cook some and smother it in ice cream. Yum, yum.

I was around in the 60's and remember what my mother and grandmothers cooked me.
Breakfast was toast and a cup of tea (cereal used extra milk) Weekends we got bacon egg and toast.
Lunch was school dinner or in the holidays small sandwich with cheese or ham and a shared bag of crisps pieces of fruit and more tea. Squash if it was hot. Sometimes shared chocolate.
Dinners were things like cottage pie or pork chop or Liver and Onions, or Lambs hearts, or Cod in a sauce, or Cold Ham or Cold meat left from the Sunday roast and boiled potatoes, and whatever veg was seasonal. Peas, carrots, cabbage, parsnips, can't think what else. We got lots of celery, tomatoes and Cucumber from the garden, they would be on the table at tea time too.
We got Lobscouse in winter (my favourite)
We rarely got puddings.
Summer Sunday tea time was always salad. ham, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, radishes, grated carrots, beetroot, and bread and butter.
Plates were not as full of food as they are now.
I forgot to add, the boy next door used to shoot rabbits so he's gut and skin one for my Mum in the early 70's and we'd have that quite often too, used to charge her 50p for it.

Kugel!

My GM made it.

https://toriavey.com/sweet-lokshen-kugel/

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

^^

This is mentioned in Angela's ashes. Frank called it ' bread and goody'

Poor little beggars

Possibly too little fibre

I remember in the 1970s magazines being full of adverts for constipation remedies...

My Mum made that when I was a child. She called it goody

Goody for my mother, too. (I hated it, though. Too soggy and mushy.)

I've spoken to an elderly relative

After rationing ended, they remember having their first banana. (How we take bananas for granted now !)

They also spoke about horse & whale meat being available during WW2

Spam, liver and kidneys with bacon and onions, tinned potatoes with corned beef, blancmange with tinned fruit, suet puddings with kidney gravy, jam roly poly...that's what we ate in the 70's.

Also sugar sandwiches

Oh and rice pudding every Sunday and faggots every week.

Steak, spuds and a veg (carrots, cabbage, peas—whatever was in season). Lamb chops with similar sides, or fish (cod or plaice). Minced beef. Ham. Steak and kidney pie. Shepherd’s pie. For dessert, often nasty tinned fruit which was sugary and tasted of very little.

Mum bottled fruit and tomatoes from the allotment. Delicious fresh veg in season. Jars of chutney, piccalilli, spiced pumpkin pickle. Red cabbage. Runner beans. Pickled onions.. All to use up a glut. Not bland at all.
Stuffed veg, roast on a Sunday. Sausage casserole. Quiche. Shepherds pie. Spam fritters (though these WERE vile). Corned beef hash. Leeks in cheese sauce. Cauli cheese with triangles of fried bread. Eggs florentine. Liver and bacon, (delicious with calves liver, IMO horrid with ox) the best mash ever, not a nasty wet gluey puree but an amazing fluffy nutmeg and white pepper spiced fluffy cloud.
Lots of toast for supper... toast and homemade pate, sardines, Welsh rarebit.
Her dad poached on his holidays to Norfolk : pheasant, pigeon, rabbits all hanging up in the back bedroom. We had the birds with game chips and the rabbit in a pie usually.
I think there's always good and bad cooks in every generation. My mum was able to make the simplest stuff delicious, and foraged long before it was fashionable. She made sorrel soup and used nettles every spring for example, despite growing up in London. Her mum was sent away as a girl to finishing school in Belgium, and learnt real patisserie and viennoiserie, skills we had the benefit of every Sunday after Mass.

My mum was born in 1911, she learned to cook when she went into service in about 1925. Her employer was a shoe proprietor who was very frugal. Nothing was wasted, if they had kippers for lunch any left overs were saved off the plates and served next morning in a Kedgeree. any cold cuts from a roast reappeared in a salad or sandwiches. The rest was minced up and made into rissoles. If the roast was a ham the bones were boiled for stock to make veg soup. She carried on like this when she married my dad.
Cheap cuts of meat made stews and casseroles, veg was from their own gardens, they had eggs from the pet chickens.
We had pies, soups, stews, liver and onions, delicious if done right, steak and kidney pie. She made a version of Christmas pudding from six ingredients, flour, eggs, margarine, any dried fruit she could get, cinnamon and a spoonful of black treacle and if flour was in short supply she bulked it out with bread crumbs. Mixed it all together and put it into a muslin cloth then steamed it. It was far nicer than any other Christmas pudding.
I miss her veg soup, egg and chips, Yorkshire puddings, roast dinners, her jacket spuds…baked in the oven, scooped out, mixed with cheese, piled back into the skins more cheeses added on top then popped back into the oven to melt the cheese. Welsh Rarebit, Quiches, Lemon meringue pie, apple pies, cakes, orange sponge cake, home made bread.
Breakfast was porridge or a boiled egg with toast, Sugar Puffs for a treat.

If the roast was a ham the bones were boiled for stock to make veg soup.

I did this with a chicken carcass at the weekend. I remember being quite shocked that a friend's mum just binned the bones instead of making stock.

Yes lemon meringue pie, apple and blackberry crumble with custard, angel delight, boiled ham, home made ice cream with a kind of coffee flavoured syrup, ice magic...

Born in the late 50’s, I don’t ever remember having anything remotely exotic, rice was in puddings only. I’d never had pasta or curry until I was in my 20’s ! Always a roast on Sunday, which was then cold with chips on Monday. Mince and potatoes with maybe peas or carrots. Big pans of beef stew which lasted 2 days. Chicken or Ham broth with much boiling of bones or carcass. Liver and onions, egg and chips, pasty or pie and chips. Always bread and butter on the table, Salad for Sunday tea and tinned fruit with carnation milk for pudding.

It certainly looked like that, but it didn't have cottage or cream cheese in it, it was made with milk. It had nutmeg on the top. I'm drooling at the thought of it.

I was a teenager in the 1970s, and ate lots of fibre.

Absolutely loving this thread ☕🌅

I am 75,same meals every week,Sunday Roast Lamb,Monday Shepherds Pie,Tuesday,Beef Casserole,Wednesday Macaroni Cheese,Thursday Lamb Chops,(lamb was cheap then!),Friday home made chips with fish from the fish shop,Saturday was usually mushrooms on toast.

I went to live in London when I was 18,I came home on days off,my Mum had bought me some of that “foreign muck!”,it was garlic sausage and Brie cheese!

I also remember my flat mate cooking a casserole with a green pepper in,I had no idea what it was!