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).

Butter with sugar is the basis for cake - it’s essentially a sweet spread, so kind of makes sense.

Tripe

Everything fried in lard

Sweetie cigarettes

Pedigree chum mixer kibbles!

Actually a lot of these posts are making me feel nostalgic rather than squeamish. 😂

Golden syrup sandwiches.
Potted beef (god knows what went into it.)

Stuffed hearts urgg. Still have nightmares. Probably why I have been vegetarian for 36 years.

Evaporated milk in a sandwich

Melted cheese on a plate with a pickled onion. Bliss.

Nearly forgot powdered baby milk. It was delicious! Jars of baby food too.

Condensed milk !

Sandwich spread. It's vile.
Also any form of paste, it was so normal at the time.

Mollychop which is an oddly sweet horse food! Used to eat small bits of it around the age of five 🦄🤢

I was a fussy kid, so I point blank refused a lot of the horrors of 70s/80s everyday food. I wouldn’t touch kidneys or liver.

I had sugar sandwiches, though (my Granny’s favourite treat for us).

I loved tinned soups - Oxtail & Mulligatawny. I don’t think I could get either down me anymore 🤢

Liver sausage, onion and Mayo in a crusty roll... don't think you can buy it now

You definitely can. I often have it in my sandwiches...

https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-liver-sausage-slices-125g

A small corner of my Dad's newspapers. I loved ripping it and chewing it. My DM told me if I carried on I'd be shitting out toilet roll.

What younger members seem to be unaware of is that several decades ago there were no fast food deliveries or take outs apart from your local chippy. All shops closed around 5pm and never opened on Sundays. Sweet treats were just that, treats which in many homes were only given on birthdays or Xmas etc. No such thing as freezers full of ice lollies in the kitchen. No stocks of cakes or crisps and choccie bickies in the larder.

So the need for sugar would be met by sprinkling the stuff on stodgy white bread and margerine. Butter was considered good for you! So yes it was "a thing" and not seen as unhealthy.

No multi packs of cola or any other fizzy drinks but a lorry would drive around the streets and deliver large bottles of fizzy drinks lemonade and cherry pop and if mum could afford it that week it was so exciting. Hard to believe but that's how it was in the 60s.

Back to awful foods though and my grandfather ate boiled tripe every Saturday for tea. I can still smell it and when I see it displayed in the butcher's window I still pull a face 😫

I ate a lot of liver with mashed potatoes and gravy as a child but never buy it now.

Tinned beefburgers.

We had bacon and eggs every single morning for breakfast and chips (deep fat fried) every single evening with either meat or fish and some vegetables.

It's amazing that my arteries are still completely clear (according to my latest medical check up with ultrasound)

It’s very telling they many of us are more disgusted by offal, animal fat and butter than the UPF food we have in abundance today.

We have become so detached from real food! If you eat meat then it’s only right you should eat nose to tail. The issue is in the way it’s prepared. Don’t think many of our parents back in the day were serving up in a delicious way sadly.

Bone marrow! Used a small end of spoon to feed me .I think Dad was trying to "feed me up" Just oooh no .Imagine my surprise when in a trendy restaurant, it was served up with a steak as a sort of side ,My Son nearly fainted! We both left it!

Squirrel counts as vermin, not game, so it wouldn't count as poaching, I don't think.

I still eat faggots, black pudding, liver and steak & kidney on occasion. Never really liked tongue, but we always had one at Christmas because Dad loved it - boiled, outer skin removed, then pressed in a tin. I met up with a former housemate earlier this week, from when we shared in the mid-'90s and she said she always remembered me making rabbit stew. That was probably the last time I did make rabbit stew because I haven't been given rabbit since around then, and I don't know of a game butcher round here (not that I've looked - I'm sure one of the villages would have one, even if then doesn't.)

We never had tripe, because Mum hated it, but I remember having brawn (and not being delighted by it,) and we probably had sweetbreads, but don't remember them. Definitely had pheasant, often, which I don't like too well hung.

Sugar sandwiches weren't a thing in our house, but I remember we went to a college friend of Dad's, who was a bulb farmer in Norfolk and they had coloured sugar sprinkles from one of his work trips to NL - they insisted we try them on buttered bread. I felt ill after. But i didn't like syrup sandwiches, nor honeycomb on bread, which Mum loved. I never added sugar to cereal or fruit, either (yet I'm the one who's ended up with type 2 diabetes...)

I still reel at all the deep fried food we ate, I can't bear the smell of the fryer!

Weirder though, I used to love raw vegetables - this includes potatoes and Brussel sprouts. Much nicer raw! Mum told me I'd get worms from potatoes raw and wouldn't let me eat them.

And I used to volunteer at the stables and eat a handful of bran or pony nuts when I was mixing feeds 😨up until I was about 12. Yuck!

I used to drink the vinegar from the pickled onion jar.

@Illbefinejustbloodyfine - I used to drink the vinegar from pickled red cabbage. An absolute treat (even now)!

The only things I really regret eating are ultra processed foods - Bernard Matthews turkey burgers were a Saturday staple in our house. But many foods we ate I have a massive aversion to now - peas and carrots with every single meal. Cant abide either of them now. And plain boiled potatoes. No butter, no seasoning. Served with ‘gravy’ made from an Oxo cube. Bleurgh.

Mum was generally a smashing cook, so I never understood why we had such vile tasteless food on occasion. It’s only now I think probably money was tight, so she tucked a very plain meal into our diets every so often to save money.

I'm feeling nauseous now! 🤢

I used to eat a whole can of Nestlé sterilised cream. Bloody loved that stuff!

Oh and chocolate spread and chipstick sandwiches. That was a thing at Girls Brigade camp along with sugar sandwiches. Not officially, of course. Just what we cobbled together while on washing up duty. 🤫

Dog biscuits