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

It was very much the same most weeks and very basic.My dad would cook pork chops or sausages mainly with chips/mash. The chips were always done in a chip pan are were amazing.

We also had a lot of frozen foods like crispy pancakes , chicken kievs etc. My mum could make a handful of meals from scratch , but again very basic. We always had a pudding, or 'afters' as we called it.

I forgot about pork chops and sausage and mash. Yummy.

Also always a chicken at christmas as turkey was more expensive.

1980s child. Meals when I was really little were kind of meat / potatoes / veg style meals. By the late 80s, my mum had returned to work and freezer food was king. Lots of Findus Crispy Pancakes, Bernard Matthew’s Mini Kievs and Alphabites. Pudding was often yogurt (French set were a particular favourite), Angel Delight, Birds Hot Crunch Pudding, bananas and custard (Birds Instant) or those frozen mousses that you got in an Iceland.
Lunchboxes for school contained a sandwich (Mighty White bread with cheese & pickle / fish paste 🤢 / jam or ham), a chocolate biscuit like a Club, Trio, Viscout or a Penguin, a packet of crisps, a Ski yogurt and - rarely - a banana.

Born early 80’s. Very little processed food. Roast dinners, pork chops, chilli and rice, bolognese, rarely fish and chips or Chinese takeaway. Not much snacking, crisps and biscuits were bought more when I was older in the 90’s and still not much. We ate well, more straightforward compared to now. We had meat from the local butcher, milkman who also brought eggs and a local fruit and veg shop. Supermarket shop wasn’t a think until I was older around the 90’s, probably when we started having more snacks.

I remember bananas and custard actually. Always birds custard which I much prefer now even though I m not a massive fan of custard.

My mum had travelled a fair bit and came from a well off family from another country. We were vegetarian in the 90s and had stuff like veggie lasagne, veggie fajitas etc. TBF I was still a fussy eater though and mainly loved off pasta and tomato sauce with cheese

DH was born in the 80s in NI and hadn't had or seen pizza, pasta, rice etc until he moved to London in the late 90s

I grew up in the 70s and 80s. Sunday to Thursday was some kind of meat or fish with potatoes (mash in Winter and new potatoes in Summer), carrots, peas and either cabbage or cauliflower. Sometimes the meat would be in a pie, either shepherds pie or steak pie. I don’t remember having chicken very often.

Sunday dinner was always beef which I hated because it was overcooked so I’d be taken to have dinner with my grandparents as they always had lamb.
Friday was fish and chips, homemade chips fried in the chip pan and the fish was often plaice. That was a quick dinner because my Mom would be preparing a stew for lunch on Saturday.

Apart from Friday’s fish and chips and Sunday dinner with my grandparents I don’t remember enjoying the food served up.

I remember when the first Chinese takeaway opened around here in the mid 70s and my Dad went to get us a takeaway. He came back with bamboo shoots, water chestnuts and chips. It’d be another 10 years or so after that, when I was in my teens, and had another Chinese takeaway and discovered that it was actually really tasty food 😂

Born mid-late 70s. Food was great growing up. Dad did most of the cooking / planning, though we’d all chip in for easy weekday meals (both parents working when we were a bit older). Recipe books were Delia, Elizabeth David, 60s/70’s veggie students recipes, family recipes. Dad would make pizza dough the night before and we’d make up pizzas. Chicken tikka, lasagne, veggie lasagne, slow cooked lamb things, big various salads, lovely fish pie, various apple puddings, rhubarb crumble, summer pudding, gooseberries, redcurrants and blackcurrants with sugar sprinkled over. Pasta was either spaghetti carbonara (proper with eggs etc) or spag bol. Baked potato was top fav with various toppings. We’d also have some easy school night things like shop quiche or pie, with veggies and potatoes (new or boiled peeled larger ones). They’d make chilli but my sister and I would have it without the kidney beans when we were little. Homemade soups and always proper gravy with various roasts. Kippers sometimes, lots of things on toast, pate, salad and homemade bread for lunches. Wider family meals were wonderful - we have loads of great cooks in the family. Homemade ice creams (plum, brown bread), game pie, loads of interesting roast veg things, dauphinoise potatoes, massive hams, Spanish egg type things, biryani rice dishes. Dad always made our own mince pies and I still can’t bear bought ones.

We also had those frozen mousses. Grandma would have French fancies and sometimes vienetta. We’d also have arctic roll and pour black cherry yoghurt over it - yogurt over ice cream is amazing.

Basically it all instilled a massive love of food that carries on!

Ooh yes. Big favourite. And rice pudding with jam blob.

Very similar here. We were properly poor but Mum was clever. As an aside, the old 'cheap cuts' are really expensive now! I blame trendy artisanal cuisine. My classmates took the piss out of my peanut butter on home-baked wholemeal with salad: I pined for Dairylea slices and crisps 😂

A family favourite, believe it or not, was 'hasty pudding', just flour cooked with sugar and milk. I recently revived one of Mum's sweet treats: buttered bread, sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, baked until crispy. It's still great, and really quick in the air fryer! We also loved those chocolate cornflake cakes - I was astonished to see you can now buy them ready-made. They're so easy to do that a 4-year-old can make them (which is why we had so many!)

The kind of cooking my mother did - nothing ready made or pre-washed, tons of different components to every meal - is really time-consuming. People wax lyrical about the wrong things, imo. Me, I can get lyrical about the fabulous variety of frozen, pre-cut veggies in the supermarkets now. Summer and autumn brought weekend fruit-picking and mushroom-gathering trips. I hated the mushroom trips: cold, damp, and too much traipsing.

We had snacks. Fruit, crisps (home-made), sandwiches, cakes and biscuits. As children, we ate four meals a day: kids had 'tea' on returning from school, with sandwiches and a pudding, then family dinner in the evening. All meals were eaten properly at the table. No, we weren't fat.

My mum was a good adventurous cook but didn't do baking much; she didn't use much sugar. We didn't have McDonald's etc and ready meals. We didn't have a microwave but got a freezer later. Or take aways much. There weren't many burgers or supermarket pizzas.

We ate out quite a lot - Chinese or Indian locally or restaurants in Soho if on a trip to London. There were no chain coffee shops really. Old style tea shops aplenty serving plates of little cakes to choose from. Shopping trips in shopping centre we'd go to pizza land or fish & chips in Littlewoods!

Pubs did ploughman's and sandwiches but not much else. Local did hot sausages.

I remember when M&S Food Hall came in and exotic ready made sandwiches like avocado and prawn 😀 Then there was the excitement of Spud U Like and Upper Crust baguettes at big stations!

I was born in 1968 if not obvious 😄

I grew up in the 90's and early noughties DM was very into home cooking and healthy eating . Lots of wholemeal sandwiches and lusting after other kids' junky packed lunches. Still obsessed with crisps to this day.. PP reminded me of loving getting the cream at the top of the milk! I used to put it on my Weetabix or occasional Rice Krispies. They homogenise all milk nowadays so you don't get that 😥 Food was fairly traditional although interspersed with pasta and stir fries and curries as was pretty typical of the time. I really wasn't keen on the British stuff generally, mince was awful and so many bland boiled potatoes 🤢 I became a vegetarian in my teens and my favourite sort of food now is South East Asian. I used to buy penny sweets with my pocket money from the farm shop.
Oh and my mum did lots of baking, often using wholemeal flour, oats or All Bran!

I was born 1957. When I was about 10 my mum went to Continental Cookery night classes. She had to take the ingredients with her and came home with the cooked dishes. Revelation! We had goulash, bolognese, strogonoff, French onion soup, Florentines, Black Forest Gateau. I remember it all very clearly! No one had ever heard of these before. The rest of the time, at home, it was all lovely home made food. Shepherd's Pie, Rollmop Herrings, a roast. She once (only once!) went away for a weekend with her sister and my dad gave us Vesta Chow Mein, Smash potatoes and Angel Delight. Equally exotic, tbh.

Early 80s and most things already mentioned in previous posts but regular dinners were roasts, liver and bacon, boil in the bag cod in parsley sauce, cheese & potato pie, spag bol, beef stew.

Puddings were tinned fruit cocktail or mandarins with carnation milk, those frozen mousses a few people have mentioned, frozen apple or berry strudels with cream, sometimes Neapolitan ice cream.

Fish paste and iceberg lettuce sandwiches and tinned sardines on toast also featured.

60's/70's. We didn’t have much money but always ate well, though our diet wouldn’t be described as ultra-healthy by today’s standards: too much pastry, sugar and puddings. We were all overweight and I’ve always struggled with my weight (including being too thin in later life as an over-reaction, though not any more!).

However - Mum was a good if plain cook and a lot of our meals were things like shepherds' pie, rissoles, bubble & squeak, mince and kidneys, meat and potato pie, always a Sunday roast, salads with cold meat (Saturday was always a cold 'tea'). She always baked and I absorbed that (I remember her 'Bero' book from when I was very small) and went on to be very keen on baking myself.

When Vesta meals and Findus crispy pancakes came in that was very exciting, as up until then most things had to be prepared from scratch and tbh poor Mum welcomed anything that was a bit time-saving. As a pp said, puddings were often tinned fruit with evaporated milk or tinned cream. We also had a ' Bel' machine with a handle that you pumped up and down to transform melted butter and milk into cream - always a job us kids loved to do.
We never had anything particularly exotic - when the first supermarket in our (small) village opened, mum bought an avocado and we thought it was horrible. I realise now of course that it wasn’t anywhere near ripe, but we had absolutely no idea how it was supposed to taste 🫤 None of us had travelled abroad or eaten anything like that - plus, my dad had incredibly timid tastes in food (he didn’t like mushrooms, for example, and garlic was unknown in our kitchen) so most of our food was pretty unadventurous. We did very occasionally go for a meal at a local Chinese restaurant though.

Yes rice pudding with jam I forgot that one

Also smoked haddock and kippers as the fish dish sometimes. We sometimes had fish and chips from the fish shop but that was a big event. Dad would sometimes have a chinese, that was not for us kids, we never got any apart from the odd prawn ball.

Never had indian but this was south london so I find this odd. Perhaps my parents just werent keen.

remember greens and savoy cabbage by the bucket full or so it seemed mince was often serviced with potatoes wasn't made into anything just mince boiled suspect it was cheap
Paste sandwiches were often in my lunch and a wagon wheel which seemed huge then
We were only allowed fried food once a week ie homemade chips and the like or you would get spots!!
Gravy was always very thin and watery
salad was literally lettuce cucumber tomatoes and one slice of ham with salad cream never filled me up!!

What a very nice post, OP. New potatoes when they came, not all year. Sometimes when we had leftover boiled new potatoes Mum would cut them into chips and deep fry them - lovely.
Nice old-fashioned bacon rashers and potatoes and cabbage with the dip from the bacon spooned on to the potatoes and cabbage.
Egg custard, large, pastry lined dish. Jam/currant/syrup sponge and custard. Fruit pies and custard. No, there weren't yogurts falling off supermarket shelves. There weren't supermarkets really. There was the local grocer and he came and took the order one day and delivered two days later.
Sunday roast with stuff that came out of the meat and got on to the potatoes round the meat, and tasted such as you don't get now. The meat was probably fattier and that was probably something to do with the way it was fed as well as bred.

Now and again I still open a jar of paste. Paste sandwiches, Sunday school parties in the 1950s. 😀

I remember food being very bland and definitely not abundant.

I think I use way more butter and oil and more varied seasonings than was on my food growing up.

I didn’t have pasta, garlic, asparagus, aubergine, chillis… until I was an adult. My mum still doesn’t eat anything as she calls it ‘complicated’ and prefers a chewy lamb chop and some anaemic mash, bless her.

1980's 1990's it was whatever was cheapest.

Corned beef
Braising steak
Beef mince

Made into:

• Stew
• Bolognase
• Chilli
• Corned beef curry (loved this)
• Very occasionally chicken Tikka masala (chicken breast was expensive)

• Then jacket potatoes cheese and beans
• Tuna mayo and sweetcorn pasta
• Cheese and tomato/ham sandwiches

My dad used to work in catering and bring home packet sandwiches that were out of date on that day and they'd get frozen and given to me as a packed lunch. Frozen tuna mayo and cucumber is disgusting, but I ate it as had nothing else.

Oh the comment about the semolina made me laugh! I say the same re: our school custard. It was a hideous liquid or wall paper paste!

I was born in the early 1960s. My Mum was a good cook by the standards of the day - her father had been a pork butcher and I've since learned that butchers are often pretty good cooks. Plus they had a bit of money (her Dad had an American Packard car in the 1930s, very fancy).

I remember my Mum discovering Delia in her late 40s and loving her books. (Delia is still great for British food, it's just that her recipes for anything spicy are rubbish!)

We would have a roast on Sunday and Mum would always make extra gravy. Because of her background this was always 100% from scratch and never, ever from Bisto etc. On Monday we would have the leftovers of the roast, finely chopped up, as a sort of hearty soup with the gravy in front of the TV. It's still one of my favourite childhood memories.

School dinners were shite, though. Probably because I had the taste of nicely seasoned food from home, and also I was a bit of a picky eater. In primary school I somehow forced it down, but I still have a visceral horror of bananas in cold custard. In secondary school I ate lunch for the first couple of years, then just skipped it. My mid-day sustenance for five years from 13 to 18 was a packet of roast chicken flavour Walkers crisps and a cup of Pepsi, from the school tuck shop. Apparently it didn't do me any great harm.

Basic and scarce.