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

Yes I remember those being very exciting. I remember when ski yoghurt came in the shops too.

Food at home was great. Always freshly made each day. School food wasn't great though generally speaking.

Potatoes with every meal, bar the occasional spaghetti bolognaise or oven chips.

Roasts on Sundays. Dessert only on Sundays…sometimes crumble but often tinned fruit with evaporated milk.

meals were mainly cooked from scratch, though we had the occasional convenience meal eg fish fingers, crispy pancakes (who remembers them?) My dad and maternal grandparents were Irish but we grew up in London so it was all very British or Irish food eg shepherd’s pie, chops, boiled bacon (well for my parents and maybe one or two of us kids, i for one hated it and still do), bangers and mash etc.

We had a takeaway rarely, usually KFC (my dad loved KFC) or a chippy tea or a Wimpy. Eating out was even rarer! Going to a Wimpy Bar was a real treat eg for a birthday.

We didnt eat spicy food, my dad didn’t like it. Spaghetti bolognaise was as adventurous as it got in our house! We didn’t go on holidays abroad, only to Ireland so weren’t introduced to Greek, Spanish, Italian food etc. Vesta curry was adventurous but we didn’t have that. I never had a curry in an Indian till i was working and earning my own money!!!

While there was usually alcohol in the house it was mainly for visitors or special occasions like Christmas. My parents weren’t big drinkers at home but my dad would go to the pub or the social club attached to the church at weekends and have a few pints. We usually drank water, squash or tea with our meals. Sometimes milk. We didn’t really have fizzy drinks at home, just sometimes at weekends.

Breakfasts were mainly cereals. Weetabix or Shredded Wheat with hot or cold milk according to the time of year or cornflakes in spring and summer.

Oh yes fruit juice as a starter in a restaurant !
I remember late 70s the Alpine pop man delivering green cream soda and dandelion and burdock. I loved them.

90s baby here
weekday dinners were oven meals mostly with mash, boiled pots or rice, no dessert but if we went to the park afterschool on Friday we’d have a screwball from the ice cream Van

sundays were roast meat with roast pots and vienetta for pudding.
saturdays at my dads was pasta bake followed by choc ice and if I was at my nans it was beans on toast followed by vanilla scoop

We had three meals a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. There was no point asking what was going to be served, there were two choices, eat, or stay hungry.

Born in the 80s.

Breakfast was eggs on toast or weetabix.

School lunch was a roll with a carton of juice and a wagon wheel.

Usually a sandwich after school. Cheese/tuna/banana.

Dinner was roast, usually at least twice a week. Corn beef hash, homemade chips, pie and potatoes, cheesy mash. I think literally everything was served with potatoes. We did have curries and chilli con carni.

Puddings were things like frozen mouse, broken biscuits, cake from a tin, trifle.

I’m 53. Never a sniff of any foreign food at home. No spices or sauces , definitely no garlic. Braising steak, liver, shepherds pie. Never had rice, unless for a rice pudding , never had pasta in the house , I’d have spaghetti hoops but I mean pasta you boil.

that continues to this day, neither of them to my knowledge have ever eaten anything like a Chinese or Indian meal.

Cant recall having a Sunday roast either but my dad went to the pub at lunchtime Saturday and Sunday until it shut at three. So we’d have I suppose what you’d call brunch of a fry up.

my parents did start going for italian meals well to Italian restaurants but the main course would always be meat, they would have canneloni for a starter but would not dream of pasta for a main course.

Sunday roast every week without fail.
Dinner during the week would be things like, bolognese, chilli, steak and salad, fish, currys , stews etc. The odd day would be something easy like fish in sauce with mash and broccoli.
My mum cooked mainly from scratch and was a brilliant cook.

Really good. Mostly made from scratch with lots of variety.
I’m glad boiled old potatoes are a thing of the past though, so bland. I used to mash them up on my plate with loads of butter.

DH didn’t eat pasta, chilli con carne, curry, brie, Stilton or any kind of condiments except black pepper or ketchup (they weren’t even allowed salt) until he met me.

We didn’t even have salad cream. Salad was completely undressed in our house. Potatoes at every main meal too. We used to go through sacks of potatoes.
As far as DM was concerned rice=rice pudding and pasta = tinned spaghetti.

I remember there always being a Sunday roast which i hated. Other than that I remember my mum calling out what we can have for dinner beans on toast, egg on toast, spaghetti on toast. On a Saturday it would be burger and chips , mini pizza, chicken nuggets or simlar

Born mid 50s. Meals were very basic but cooked from scratch, meat potatoes, veg, the meat changed but not the rest. Pasta was regarded as foreign muck and anything I cooked, once married, chilli, spaghetti Bol etc was described by my mum
as a ‘dogs dinner’. My dad never cooked as much as a piece of toast.

We used to have a 56lb sack of tatties by the back door - for a family of 4! But we had plain boiled ones every single day. I can't stomach them nowadays.

Our salads consisted of a few lettuce leaves from the garden, cucumber with the rind removed as apparently that stopped you burping, tomato and bloody hard boiled egg on top. We had salad cream but never mayonnaise as that was foreign.

Pretty bland tbh. We had a roast on Sunday and the rest of the meat was eked out over Monday (cold meat with potatoes and salad or veg) and Tuesday - something like rissoles/cottage pie. Fish pie twice a week as cod was very cheap as were potatoes. We did have pasta - sometimes Tuesday would be spag bog if we'd had beef on Sunday, macaroni cheese made frequent appearances. We had a big garden and grew a lot of produce - even now I can't face runner beans we ate so many of them in summer. We had several fruit trees so crumbles featured frequently. DM had a large chest freezer so every now and then we'd go to a farm and buy half a sheep or pig and it woudl go in the freezer.
When I was about 8 DM started to get more into convenience and we started seeing Angel Delight or jelly and fruit on the menu (so much nicer than rice pudding) and Smash potato. By the time I was at secondary school she had gone full on packet mixes - pizza base, lemon meringue pie, cheese cake etc. I always laugh now when she says that she always cooked from scratch and it was all home grown etc as it so wasn't after the early years.

Mum's food was good, lots of potatoes, macaroni cheese. Granny's food was GREAT! I salivate thinking about granny's lamb shanks. But when mum worked evenings and dad had to cook every time he would cook minced beef and mash it with peas it was awful and I distinctly remember him being clumsy in the kitchen and intimidated by cooking and kitchen utensils like something out of a skit. I even remember I tried to cook for myself at about 6 wobbling on a stool over the hob because his cooking was so unappealing. He would be satisfied eating cold beans out of the tin. We never had pudding and the only takeaway we were allowed fish and chips and that was very rare. My parents became obsessed with health food at one point, no crisps or chocolate and only organic stuff and it backfired because my sister and I do puddings and takeaways

Born 1968.
I was thin as a rake and always hungry.
We rarely had snacks inbetween meals.
My dad worked late, so we had to wait ages from lunchtime to dinner time.
Just ate what would be considered comfort food now, sausage and mash, fish and chips, meat two veg. Never had dessert. Ready brek for breakfast, orange squash, no fizzy drinks.
I remember my Mum knocking on neighbours door asking for money to get something from butcher's as she'd ran out of money, they would also do same to us.

My granny was a good plain cook so when I ate at hers it was cawl (with scrag end of lamb - can't seem to get it any more), pasties, rissoles, pies. From scratch. Never any afters.

At home it was macaroni cheese (no other pasta available), chips (cooked in lard) with everything, and Sunday roast.

Like the OP's experience, potatoes were seasonal. Salad was lettuce, cucumber and tomato, with salad cream. No mayo. Strawberries were an absolute treat, and only in summer.

Until I went to University, I'd never heard of quiche or cheesecake.

Vesta meals and boil in the bag stuff was a staple too, as was beef flavoured rice (with mince out of a tin).

Brought up in the 60s
Potatoes with everything ,always had a roast dinner on.a sunday and was the only time we had a pudding ,always the heinz sponge pudding I remember my mum boiling the can !
Vesta beef curry
Marrofat peas
Breast of lamb as was cheap back then
Do remember getting cresta pop on special occasions
Used to buy chips with scraps with my pocket money
No snacks and we ate what we were given back then .

At home with my mother in the 1960's we had plain meat and 2 veg, sausages and mash, occasional puddings but hardly ever and we'd make a cake now and then. We didn't have big portions like today, we ate very little and never snacked between meals. We didn't tend to have sauces other than mustard or horseradish. We couldn't really afford it as she was a single mother.
Everyone was generally very slim and always active.
We didn't eat anything like crisps and I had a curly wurly small chocolate bar and a childrens comic every Saturday.
Staying with my grandmother in the countryside was very different, she was french and a cordon bleu cook.
I remember eating things like calves brains on toast, offal, big roasts on Sunday, snails, occasional frogs legs, I wasn't fussy as a child.
Puddings were all homemade, blancmange, milk puddings, fruit crumble, cakes and pies all cooked on an aga.
All produce was completely fresh and my grandfather grew all the fruit and vegetables. I loved the artichokes he grew dipped in butter. A meat van and a fish van came round once a week, there was no freezer, and we had food in season.
I'd go home after a holiday with them quite fat and my mother would go ballistic and have me on small rations until I was thin again. She had no time for fat people. I didn't realise this was abnormal until she got serious osteoporosis later on in life from all of her diets. In the 60's if you didn't look like Twiggy you were a reject. It was all a bit heroin chic.

Cooked from scratch and a lot more seasonal. The old and new potatoes definitely was a thing. 1,000 ways to use mince. A large box of apples to have for school lunches or snacks. Any “treats” were home baked, apart from the 1 pack of biscuits DPs for for Sunday morning coffee and newspapers after mass (we might get 1 on a good week). My DPs had lived abroad for a while and went to the big city at the weekend for food shopping and the library, so we were the exotic ones with curries (either mild or hot Schwartz mix) and rice and puppodums, or pasta/lasagna as part of the menu planning, rather than 20 days of stew in winter months. But everything stretched really far.

No ready meals or takeaways (nearest chipper was 10 miles away). No boxed cake mixes or packet sauces (that was a cost and quality thing). Water or milk with every meal. Only coffee was instant, except for when DPs entertained and bought ground coffee for the percolator.

Yes!!! I remember sliced banana on top of curry 😂

Fairly bland and boring. We also ate lots of potatoes but we just called them potatoes and New Potatoes never heard of them referred to as old potatoes.

Things like chops, potatoes and veg, no sauces, marinades or seasonings. Gamon and chips. Sausages mash and gravy. Chicken Caserole or Beef Stew and dumplings, both served with mash. Bolognaise. Macaroni cheese. Home made pies. No ready meals until I was in my teens in the 90's and even then probably just the odd lasagne. My Mum had a Croc Pot so lots of tasteless mush made of chicken thighs, veg and pearl barley. Quiche and Salad. Roast chicken and salad. Egg Salad. Liver and Bacon. I think a lot of the time as a younger child I just had a hot school lunch then something like beans on toast for tea. We didn't ever had snacks. I was always hungry and always thirsty and can remember being sent out to play and drinking from next doors outdoor tap.

Maybe I should make this my new meal plan, I reckon I could lose a couple of stone as it's all so unappealing.

Does anyone remember:
Tinned risotto? It was a yellow colour if I recall and quite expensive
Chocolate Viennas? Pink triangle shaped wafer biscuits covered in cholcoate

Born in the 90s.

We had a mix of Sunday Dinners, sausage and mash, jackets with fish and beans, quiche and salad, fry up, beans on toast, stew, pork chops, and pasta bake/spag bol as I got older. No Asian food at all. Lunch was always a dry brown bread sandwich with ham or cheese, a pack of crisps, and some fruit. No fizzy drinks or etc. I was allowed a mini pizza, chips, and beans on a Friday as I got older.

My mum's veg was all steamed and it was rancid to me. I only started eating veg in my mid 20's, once I discovered roasting it was a thing!

We didn't really do puddings often, but if we did it would be something like Vienetta and Strawberries, or home made crumble.

We didn't have many sauces, even ketchup! Though we'd have mint sauce if we had lamb, and horseradish for beef. The only salad dressing was salad cream lol.