What was food like when you were a child?

[Yourinmyspot]

I was cooking our tea the other day and did boiled potatoes I said to DD they were old potatoes as we both prefer them to new potatoes. She said something about old and new potatoes to her friends at school and they didn’t have a clue what she meant.

I was born in the early 70’s and we had old potatoes either boiled or mashed in the winter months and new potatoes (the small ones) in the summer months but couldn’t have them mashed. I always remember it was good when we could have mash again in the winter!

Fruit was seasonal too, we were allowed one portion a day as it would have been to expensive for us as a big family to have more than that. You only got strawberries for a short window in the summer there was no way we had then at any other time. We had oranges in winter usually around Christmas time. My Mum would buy a crate from the local greengrocer and keep it in the porch, they were great oranges.

I remember the first time we had lasagne it was so exotic! Never had pasta growing up. We always had a roast dinner on Sundays and had the leftover meat with chips on Mondays.

We often had mince and mash (or new potatoes) with tapioca for pudding as it cooked at the same time.

I loved it when we had bacon chops as we could dip our potatoes in the bacon fat so tasty had to fight my Dad for it!

At one point my Mum used to heat up a bag of ready salted crisps to go with a roast chicken dinner not sure why. It stopped as she got fed up of us arguing over who had the most.

For pudding we had things like blamange in a rabbit mould or a sponge that was hollow in the middle that my Mum put jelly mixed with fruit in.

Happy memories

Basic, and just enough. No second helpings. There weren't any.

Never ate ready meals and rarely ate out.

Didn't have garlic or any Asian food until I left home. Potatoes with every meal. Roast every Sunday. If we had salad, the only dressing available was Salad Cream! Mum was a great baker so lots of good cakes and fruit pies.

Christmas was extremely exciting because we would.have junk food and fizzy pop in the house.

My parents were very into fresh, whole foods - we never had ready meals, rarely had crisps or chocolate and definitely no takeaways. The first time I had a chippy, I was nine and staying at a friends'

I remember a lot of fruit and vegetables, baked fish and occasionally meat. Horrible packed lunches with wholemeal bread and soggy sandwiches, the same manky bruised apple and boxes of raisins. No crisps, no chocolate bars.

Honestly, it was all a bit miserable, and not to do with a lack of money.

My mum was very big on cooking from scratch and we had meat every day, steak and kidney casserole, toad in the hole, roast chicken, lamb chops etc. At one point in my childhood (no doubt inspired by The Good Life) my dad dug up the front garden and grew his own vegetables. We had tons of delicious, fresh produce, even the hamster had fresh peas every day!

Bit bland and cooked from scratch. Fresh bought daily as no fridge until mid 60s. Tinned fruit and evap common dessert. My aunt cooked more interesting meals than my mum so that always felt like a treat.
My first foray into "foreign" food was via Vesta ready meals I cooked myself as a teenager as my parents wouldn't consider eating anything like that.
Born mid 50s.

This, exactly. And you could tell when it was getting near Thursday (payday) by how skimpy meals were.

My favourite kind of thread!

I am Australian and live in the UK now and am 53. Both my parents were exceptionally good cooks. They were 21 when they had me so quite young.

So, stanfdrad fare until i was 10-ish or so.

My mother usually cooked then. She made mince and peas and mash; rissoles and mashed potatoes; chicken schnitzel with mash and home made apple sauce; roasts with trimmings (but never yorkshire puddings which my dad first made when i was in late teens). We never had puddings unless we had guests and then she would make a chocolate cheesecake with jellied mandarin slices on the top. We also lived next door to a greek family and she learned to make spanakopita which i hated at the time- always with silverbeet not spinach.

If we had guests her standard fare was asparagus rolls with homemade hollandaise sauce; beef wellington then a chocolate cheesecake.

My dad got into cooking in the 80s and he adored 'foreign' food. So he would make gnocchi from scratch. He particularly loved making pumpkin gnocchi with a creamy sage sauce.. He loved making curries as well always with banana and lemon and coconut. He loved Italian food generally so would make polpete soup which he still makes and my Dcs were brought up on. Weekends he would make pumpkin soup or french onion soup. Again- never ever puddings. He tried his hand at croissants and other bakery products and he loved making sour dough bread and bagels.

I was a sixties child and my Mum was quite ahead of the time with food. Spaghetti bolognaise,curry,always Sunday Roast etc was a regular meal,seasonal fruit, crisps once a week homemade baked cakes and puddings..

We had over boiled old potatoes every day with a slab of meat and veg.

Took me decades to even be able to eat mash.

At one point I lived of vegetables and chocolate biscuit bars.

I remember being obsessed with prawn cocktail crisps, then prawns. A prawn sandwich from Safeway's was the ultimate luxury!

Or prawn biryani from the Indian. This was not a frequent occurrence which I guess added to the allure.

Other than that I remember school dinners being fucking muck. Thankfully I wasn't forced to eat them, but I ended up subsisting on grated carrot and grated cheese, and treacle sponge for pudding. If we were lucky.

Sometimes it was semolina which was absolutely criminally repulsive!

Boring and bland!

Sooo much 1970s cheap convenience food. Plus casseroles, roasts sometimes but Mum was a Rosemary Conley fan, so zero fat on roast potatoes etc. Veg were boiled to death and over salted.

The most exciting it got was sweet and sour sausages (!) with rice. Loved that. Worst was tough beef stew, faggots, liver.

Pasta was an occasional replacement for potatoes - in that you had a small amount of plain, boiled pasta next to your fish fingers instead of new potatoes. Gross! If we had mash, it was a v small amount and just potatoes with a tiny splash of skimmed milk.

Cheap pizza with jacket potato and salad was a Saturday staple quite often. If the oven was on for jacket potatoes, we had rice pudding. Tons of stewed fruit for desserts, or those little frozen mousses from Iceland. Angel Delight was wildly exciting and we had jelly and blancmange sometimes too.

Fish and chips once in a blue moon and a Chinese takeaway was a massive treat as I got older. Never had garlic, Indian, (other) Asian or even Italian food until I left home. Uni was a revelation as my housemates showed me how to cook spag bol, chilli, curry and so on! We were all thin and my parents, who still eat like this, still are.

I'm fat now. 🤣 Hate cooking but like interesting food nonetheless.

stew and dumplings, shepherds pie, meat and 2 veg, pork strips, liver & bacon, toad in the hole. smoked haddock, mash & peas. Washed down with bread & butter pudding, suet puddings, bread pudding, milk pudding… and lots of home made cakes. Heavy, stodgy, hearty meals. A lot of people in my family are overweight. I guess I was fortunate and grew tall (to 6ft) rather than outwards!

80's/90's. Mum mostly cooked from scratch probably 5 days a week, nothing fancy or adventurous but always good. Roast on Sundays, chilli, spag bol, shepherd's pie, curry, coq au vin... Then we'd have a takeaway and a freezer meal like pizza or chicken nuggets about once a week each. Salad was always iceberg lettuce, cucumbers tomatoes and salad cream.

We had dessert a couple of times a week which could be a homemade bread pudding or apple pie, a shop bought cheesecake or fruit with custard or ice-cream.

Breakfast was always cereal, lunch was a sandwich or Heinz soup.

Predictable. Similar meals each week - mostly some sort of meat with boiled potatoes and vegetables. Money was tight and I think buying the same things every time meant fewer surprises at the checkout.

Roast dinner on a Sunday. Chops, stews, liver, fish on a Friday. Very few puddings and limited to seasonal fruit in small portions - a tub of grapes would last several days, a small punnet of strawberries would be split across 5 of us.

No pasta, pizza, takeaways, rice or ready meals. Everything was home cooked.

Later when we got a freezer we had things like frozen mousse tubs, crispy pancakes, oven chips, arctic roll and Vienetta but these were treats and definitely not every day foods.

Oh we had sweet and sour sausages with rice too! And raisons in it and occasionally pineapple. I loved that dish. I made it for DH when we first got together- he became a vegetarian after that. Doubt it was related...

Oh yes I don’t think I had ever had a Vesta meal till uni when my friend introduced them to me!
We had a lot of casseroles - probably because they could be cooked ahead if needed. My mum made this exotic tuna and sweetcorn puff pastry pie which was a real treat! Roast dinners every Sunday. Sweet and sour chicken and rice wasvery fancy! I never thought meals were bland - must have been lucky reading these.

On school nights I thought findus crispy pancakes were a huge treat!

Ours was largely from a box frozen from Iceland

Oh yes those frozen mousse tubs! I love those - can you still get them ? Angel delight and blancmange were also afters - lucks to another thread recently !

1970s, so as for everyone else.....
Overcooked veg
Overcooked meat on Sunday, and leftovers served with chips and gravy on Monday (yuck!)
No snacks
Nothing "foreign"
No puddings, except apple crumble or similar on Sunday
Arctic Roll or Vienetta (at Grandma's) was a treat
Salad was lettuce, tomato and cucumber. With maybe a couple of small pickled onions
Never ate out - except maybe once a year, once early teens, and then it was prawn cocktail etc.

Loved the frozen mouse tubs, artic rolls and vienetta! I think those came in my teens, along with personal size (cheap) pizzas and fish in breadcrumbs..

Best day of the week for food had to be Sunday. Dad would go to the local corner shop buy his papers and each of us a 10p mix (paper bag with 10 penny sweets in). We were allowed to eat them before going off to church with mum. We would then come home to dad's full roast. He made the best yorkshire pud. Those were the days😊!

Yes! I liked mash but didn't enjoy boiled potatoes. I didn't like summer food!

Dinner was almost always meat, potatoes and veg. Mum was considered a frugal housekeeper and could make the housekeeping stretch, but now a big slab (chops, steaks or roast) of meat with every meal feels very extravagant to me!

I grew up very rural. I remember veg in the 70s being neep (swede), tatties, carrots, onions, cabbage, sprouts, and really not a lot else. Sweetcorn and peas from a tin. Fresh peas in June.

My dh spent those years in London. He ate not a lot differently to how he does now, but his parents were always big foodies. We had spaghetti bolognese which was about the limit for experimentation, but even if they'd wanted to, my parents couldn't have bought anything much exotic.

I was brought up in the 60s and because on both sides we were a bit forrin (Russian/German/Jewish) and my parents and grandparents had travelled a bit, there were some dishes that were different (Lokshen, gefilter fish, smoked eel, salt beef, borscht, schnitzel, etc) and some were embraced due to travelling/having foreign friends (bolgnaise, ravioli, boeuf bourgignon, coq au vin, curries, etc). I had pizza in Italy as a child but my first in the UK was aged 15! A Wimpy was a weekend treat.

I also remember the pleasure of veg coming into season: strawberries, raspberries, peaches, plyms, apples, pears, blackberries, new potatoes, tomatoes, (we never had fresh tomatoes in winter - or salad for that matter), peas, runner beans, asparagus, brocoli, sprouts, spring greens. Late winter was ruled by root veg and cabbage. It's a joy we have forgotten.

Cereal was all bran or cornflakes, sometimes porridge. Yoghurt was vile. There was a meat pie once a week and a fruit pie once a week and plenty of rice pudding, jelly, custard and blancmange. Also tinned fruit during the week, sometimes with Carnation condensed milk.

Milk came in bottles with cream on top.

I recall travelling up to Soho with my mother to buy thing like pasta, fresh ravioli and garlic. Things like that weren't readily available in the sticks.