Things you cannot believe you ate as a child

[NovemberAutumn]

One of my mother's favourite sandwich fillings- deep fried crumbed lambs brains with iceberg lettuce and salad cream in white bread.

I did eat it a few times until I properly realised what it was- but- [shudder]. Just why?

DH used to love and adore his mother's pureed (pickled!) beetroot in white sauce. Just pureed pink slop surely (I made it for him once).

I also remember sugar sandwiches - on sliced white with heaps of butter. Sometimes we would have jam sandwich fritters for pudding (cubes of jam sandwich deep fried in batter). My worst was those cubed frozen mixed vegetables. I only remember having either those or tinned peas and tinned carrots - I hated veg as a child!

My Grandad loved them and my cousin would eat them with him. I would refuse as my Mum told me what they were.

Vesta curry with those deep fried pieces on top. I used to love watching those curl up in the oil.

Angel Delight

Steak and Kidney pie - we used to fight over the kidneys as kids

Liver and bacon was a staple

I loved toasted sugar sandwiches as a child. I made them myself. Would never have given them to my own children!

Oh I hated that sandwich filling 🤮

Marcus Wareing cooked them on a recent episode of Masterchef the Professionals. They look grim, especially raw, we were all gagging.

I would just like to thank you all for successfully turning my stomach this morning 🤢🤮

😅

Mine aren't too that 'out there' compared to some.

In my lunch, my mum would occasionally give me cubes of packet jelly as a snack.

Sometimes she gave me sandwiches made with black treacle or golden syrup.

My dad worked in Hammersmith and would come home with sun-dried sticky bananas in block form, which you could peel one off one at a time. So tasty!

Sugar sandwiches here too. I think it was fairly normal in the Seventies as my friends had them too. Also at parties, hundreds and thousands' sandwiches.

When my mum went back to work after looking after us 4 kids for years, my dad had to take over the cooking as he was home earlier. He had never cooked before so the first few months where he was learning to cook were pretty ropey. A staple of his was pilchards and beans, where he would heat up a tin of pilchards and a tin of beans together and stir in bits of bread. When he'd serve us bowls of random slop he'd tell us they were grandads army dinner recipes, so we'd eat these thinking it was very exciting 🤣

Liver, kidneys, rabbit and very stinky pheasants (think they were being hung too long). Also faggots which I hated and DM now says she never cooked for us - she did and more than once I have very clear memories. I hated the lot but had to "eat everything on my plate".

At a schoolfriend's house her Polish mum served me homemade chicken soup with a heart bobbing around in it. Apparently it was deemed polite to give the guest the heart. She took one look at my face and whisked it away! I remember it looking pretty raw/uncooked.

I remember as a child, frequently sneaking into my nans fridge to eat raw bacon! Surprised I didn’t get some awful disease!!

I used to sneak bacon out of the fridge and eat it raw too!

I loved sugar sandwiches

Apparently the jelly was good for strong nails??

Potted meat
Spam
Findus crispy pancakes

Oh I love a bit of chicken heart soup; it was a common enough Christmas eve dinner in my household, growing up, and we'd always have loads of hearts in it.

Many things described here were quite common not too long ago. Offal is much more nutritious than the muscle meat we eat now, so I still serve it as often as I can.

In answer to the question, we lived on those packaged, dehydrated spiced sauce mixtures a lot of the week and people would marvel at my mother's cooking. Don't get me wrong, they were great starting out before I learned how to cook properly, but the salt and MSG content in them was horrendously high.

My mum cooked from scratch so liver and onions was common. Faggots (in tin foil) and steak and kidney pie.

I remember my mum made the pastry and all the bits .

However I really don't like the thought of these things which I think is illogical if we eat chicken breast and mince etc like most people.

It's presumably better environmentally and health wise to eat all the animal!?

(Semi veggie now anyway..)

Oh I used to love black pudding!!!

Until I found out what it was!

Although we didn’t have sugar sandwiches, I was made a supper of cubes of white bread in warm milk with sugar on top.

I also used to coat my weetabix with about three dessert spoons of sugar. And ladled golden syrup onto toast.

I still have a sweet tooth (and, remarkably, all my teeth).

I was addicted to Dairylea cheese triangles too.

Mum used to make lambs liver and onions in gravy. I loved it until I realised the role of the liver in the body
No more , sadly!

Lamb's liver with onion gravy is delicious. I'm not sure what would be off-putting about the liver's physiological role(s).

I'm also not sure why people consider sweetbreads (thymus and pancreas) particularly gross. I've never had a chance to try them but their anatomical origin wouldn't concern me.

Boil in the bag cod with tinned potatoes 🤮 Not nice! And also sugar on toast, although that was a special treat to be fair.

We had honey sandwiches which would crystallise during the morning and be slightly crunchy by lunch.
If we didn't have honey in, golden syrup would be used.
Offal every week. I can still remember the little tubes in the calves liver. Always served with a onion and sliced potato concoction.
Mc Brains faggots- which i absolutely love and still cook.
And every morning for breakfast a single slice of white bread fried in dripping. My mum had a brown dripping jar (no lid) and added the fat from every roast she made and then used it for frying anything/ roasting potatoes etc. Went to school on just that every morning.
1970s.... what a decade!

@freesolo76 😆 at grandad’s atmy dinner recipes

Sugar sandwiches? What is wrong with you people? The sugar had to be on toast, not in a sandwich! We also used to mix sugar with butter and spread it on apples.

Paste sandwiches.

Anyone else's mum used to keep the fat to recook things in? I remember a frying pan full of cold hard dried fat that lived on our cooker. Full of flavour, don't you know?!

Raw bacon rinds
Chicken bones in the curry
Fried mince, with all sorts thrown in it like baked beans, rice, veg.
Cockles, Whelks, winkles.

Pilchards in tomato sauce, mixed with raw onion, on toast. Actually had a craving for this a few months ago, as you can see. It was as grim as I remembered.