Old-fashioned foods which should make a comeback

[BarbaraVineFan]

I am just making a cheese and potato pie for lunch, which I last ate circa 1988. It's basically mashed potatoes mixed with an egg and a fuck load of cheese, more cheese on top and then baked in the oven. Bloody lovely, relatively cheap and filling.

Which other old-fashioned foods do you make /have you made recently which you think should make a comeback?

I know those crisps as Deltas! At least that’s what M&S called them.

And they were the best crisps ever.

Yes, the milk/cream has to be cold.
It is easy.

Yes! Much nicer than blancmange. Maple & Walnut was the best flavour.

Examples:

Strawberry blancmange recipe | delicious. magazine

Blancmange recipe | Good Food

We always called this gypsy tart, and you are right, it absolutely needs a comeback!

Yes! Yes! I’m always saying this.
We ate home cooked and not highly processed food. Three meals a day, few snacks and no fast food.
Probably smaller portions too.

Old fashioned mixed grills, available in many pubs and cafés. Some variant on lamb chop, sausage, back rasher, tomato, peas and lots of chips. Very sustaining. I have been known to make this at home - I also make 'breakfast for dinner', similar but no chop or peas, and possibly mushrooms, black and white pudding and even an egg.

My mother used to make apple meringue which I have concluded after experiments was apple (often windfall eating apples) peeled and chopped and mixed with sugar and the beaten yolk of an egg, topped with the whisked egg white meringue, and baked. Served with cream - or top of the milk in the olden days.

She was very anti 'evap' having grown up on a farm, but was prepared to use tinned cream - does anyone else remember that? Little tins of heat treated cream. Very useful - part of the problem nowadays is so many things are so BIG.

I don't think 'oh it's the car culture' either, although it doesn't help. The highest rates of obesity tend to be among people in poorer communities who are less likely to be able to afford to drive. And also, not coincidentally, the people who rely more on cheap UPFs. I know politicians etc always get flamed when they talk about teaching people to cook from scratch again, but it's not a bad point to make.

As PP have said, UPFs are a big problem. They are often highly calorific but don't satiate you in the same way, so you're hungry half an hour later.

But eat something 'unhealthy' like plough pudding and that stuff will stick to your ribs and give you a cosy internal glow for hours on the coldest of days.

Plough pudding: suet pastry in a pudding basin, lined with sausage meat, filled with onions, bacon and gravy, flavoured with stock, sage and pepper, lid of more sausage meat and pastry, steamed and then served with more gravy and carrots, turnips and potatoes. Designed for blokes out, well, ploughing all winter.

I'm in NZ and all the recipes on local sites had no gelatin. My DM used to make it when I was a child.

We have cheese and potato pie every few weeks. It's as yummy as ever. To the poster who mentioned faggots - Tescos and ALDIs (and other good supermarkets I guess) sell them for £1.19 (last week when I bought a packet of 6) - of course they were smaller than I recall.

Same. About the only remotely processed foods we ever had were tinned peas (before frozen were a thing) and baked beans. Very few snacks. For break at school I used to take a Marmite sandwich. Other kids with less frugal/skint parents did have e.g. crisps, though. Sweets only at weekends.

Re portions, I’ve noticed in a GH cook book dated 1971, that quantities for e.g. cakes and puddings seem relatively small. E.g. all the faff of making a lemon meringue pie just wouldn’t seem worth it for the titchy one you’d end up with! I always make double.

Just the other day I had a Homity Pie for lunch at the Crypt Cafe of St Martin In The Fields, Trafalgar Square! Cafe was v busy, as always when I’ve been. I hope they do well out of it since St Martin’s do a great deal for homeless people.

On a trip to Prague 25 years ago, an American tourist told me she couldn’t believe how slim people were, despite the food - which at the time largely consisted of meat, potatoes and dumplings, very little in the way of veg or salad.

Answer, no fast food, or at least we didn’t see any, and a lot fewer cars so people walked a lot.

No fast food, very little fruit juice, not much in the way of other sweetened drinks, and limited use of fructose. It isn't just about the food.

Sustaining dinners, not much snacking.

Does anyone know anything about the 'meat patty' my friend's mum and grandma used to make (in 1960s Norfolk)? Rectangular tin. Pastry top and I think bottom, mince in some sort of gravy inside, served with spuds. Heaven on a plate, but I've never seen a recipe.

I was going to mentiom these. Especially maple and walnut. Te company was bought by Dr Oetker who reduced the range to strawberry and then stopped it. They are also responsible for the disappearance of candied angelica. I don't know why companies do this. Buy someone out and destroy their best products. I don't by any Dr Oetker stuff.

Symingtons table creams included gelatine.

yup, table creams were more like panna cotta.

I def think part of the problem is the Greggs culture ( other brands available) - picking up pasty's/sausage rolls etc as 'a snack' - also coffee shops sell very little that's healthy and people get into the habit of cake /muffins/cookies with coffee and not just Asa rare treat. A lot of people are packing in 700 calories a day just as a snack - plus meals on top. The idea though that people had little sugar in the 60s and 70s I don't think is true- we had 3 bottles of lurid looking 'pop' a week from the 'pop man' who drive round, plus sweets in paper bags many days a week - and we were not poor - definitely far less snacks though -

I don't remember Table Creams, but I stumbled upon a packet of Creme Carmelle the other day.

Growing up, I don't think we visited a supermarket (and then it was a Coop) until the early 70's. We went to the greengrocer, butcher and a small grocers to whom we sent a weekly list. I was 8 before I tried pasta (at a friend's house).

That row of shops is now a bikeshop, 2 hairdressers, a newsagent and a chinese restaurant/takeaway.

The closest we got to "ethnic food" growing up in my house were the dehydrated Vesta ready meals!

Honeycomb Mould. In the fifties it was my job to make this for Sunday lunch in summer. Crystals from a packet, heated milk and a beaten egg, poured into a mould, from which it emerged in two layers, a cloudy jelly with a set frothy layer. Long gone and I can't blame Dr Oetker.
Regularly have Greens Carmelle, a favourite of my Dad's, perhaps because Green's factory was down the bottom of his road in Brighton before it moved Up North somewhere.

I used to love going into the Whitakers shop in Skipton, we would treat ourselves to something ruinously expensive but also buy a couple of bags of 'imperfects', we once bought a bag of those chocolate squares made with hotel names, company logos etc on the outside and we found a few in there from the Royal Yacht! Sadly it's not there any longer.

I use them for Yorkshire Parkin every year, lovely and sticky. The Christmas pudding recipe is also the best I've ever made.

True but I also think that we lived different lives when we were children. We had three meals a day and between those there may have been an occasional biscuit, piece of fruit, not the constant snacking. When I read that parents were taking a 'snack' for their child to eat after school I was amazed, the child was probably travelling by car and having something to eat when they got home, they should be no more exhausted at the end of a school day than we were!