What did you eat as a child?

[JudithOnHolidayAgain]

I've just been watching some of those shows looking back at food and shopping in the 70s and 80s and it made me think of the foods I ate as a child.
I'm late 50s and grew up in a home with my mum, dad and younger brother. Dad worked full time out of the home and mum ran a business attached to our home. My maternal grandparents lived with us too, although my grandfather died when I was 10.
My mum and gran both cooked, mum liked to try new recipes but my gran liked plain traditional food.....no garlic or chilli for her!!
I grew up eating pies, roast dinners, stews, ham and parsley sauce, egg and chips, fish pie. spaghetti bolognes, curry. Thick soups in winter and salads and cold meat in the summer. Pizza was homemade, my mum taught me how to make the dough.

Almost everything was homemade and snacking wasn't really a thing. We didn't have "kids food", we all ate pretty much the same.

I did pretty much the same with my kids, now 20 and 18 but they did have the occasional mcdonalds, chicken nugget and pizza. Generally we all ate the same.

What did you eat growing up and how old are you?

37 - I ate very well as a child, a mix of traditional Italian cooking, and 'health food' in my later childhood/teens (DM had cancer, she got a special diet prescribed from the dietician and we all followed it to a certain extent at home).
We did occasionally have 'oven food' as a special treat. I liked the cheese and tomato findus pancakes and cod in a crispy batter.

My nonnas were both great cooks as well. I'm an average cook but a good baker at least so I am hoping my DC will remember homemade birthday cakes and breakfast pancakes with the same fondness I remember pasta al forno, courgette flower fritters, and pepperonata.

I'm 54 and from what I remember, a lot of boiled potatoes, grey mushy boiled potatoes. And chops... Lamb chops, pork chops all with an inch circumference of meat in a lot of bone.

Salad leaves tended to be only Butterhead lettuce, and no dressing, just salad cream. I had iceberg lettuce when I left home. It was a revelation. 😅

Summer dessert was tinned peaches or tinned fruit cocktail with condensed milk or Dream Topping.

I remember the sadness of summer meaning no chips because it was the end of the season for "old potatoes".

The excitement of a "Vesta" curry or Chinese dish. Which basically was a bland dry soya version of something.

Frozen McVities cheese and tomato pizza discs that came stacked in a sort of bread bag, with 5 pieces of grated cheese on top.

I eat a completely different diet now.😂

Meat and lots of vegetables.

Country village life in the 60’s.

Offal, lambs hearts, tongues, liver, kidney etc. sometimes lambs brains. (Would turn my stomach now,)
Mum used to make brawn from half a pigs head.

We’ve all grown up healthy and strong. Mum is ancient but still alive.

I grew up in the 80s. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents and mostly ate with them. Breakfasts were things like (sugary) cereal, fried eggs on toast, bacon sarnies. Lots of sandwiches/cold meats for lunch. Dinner was very meat and potatoes and boiled veg. We’d occasionally get things like fresh clams or crabs to boil. Most of what I learned about cooking, I learned from my grandmother. She was actually an excellent cook despite how boring all the above sounds!

My mum was a rubbish cook. She rarely had to feed me (because my grandparents did), so when she did, we mostly ate out or got a takeaway. All my memories of food with her are eating out, because she was just that resistant to cooking. When my grandmother died, we started going out for Chinese for Christmas lunch because she couldn’t cook a roast. That tradition has oddly stuck because we have Chinese in our house for Christmas Eve. 😂

80s and 90s.

Coco-pops, rice crispies, or weetabix for breakfast. Maybe toast.

Cheese and pickle or tuna cucumber sandwiches for lunch.

Dinner was Bernard Matthew’s lamb joint thing, dalesteaks (whatever they were), mini kievs, potatoes and lots of peas or sweetcorn, carrots and broccoli. Shepherds pie and the occasional slow cooker chicken thigh thing. Saturday nights we often had ribs and jacket potatoes, always a roast in Sundays. I was fussy and didn’t eat pasta, pizza, egg, fish….

Dessert was fruit or yoghurt. On sundays it would’ve been an apple pie or lemon meringue pie made by DM.

We always had lots of Mr Kipling apple pies or penguin bars or walker’s crisps or cadburys mini rolls in our snack drawers.

I only really got into pizza and pasta as a late teen. Even then it would be margherita or pesto only! When I went to uni people cooked things like stir fries and it was genuinely quite new for me.

Egg and chips - all the time. As that was really cheap and a sack of potatoes and a large box of eggs lasts ages.

1970s. Meat and two veg, roasts,stews, chops,meat pies ( homemade) stewed fruit and custard, fruit tarts, steamed puddings with custard, homemade cakes, loads of homegrown veg in season, basic salads with cold meats or tinned salmon. Very healthy diet. The only takeaway we ever had was fish and chips about once a month.

I'm 30 and I grew up similar to your Dc

Everything was homemade, lots of roasts, stews, pastas, traybakes, fish, curries. A wide range of different dinners tbh, lots of fruit and veg. Mum made homemade bread and baking was all homemade. Very little processed or 'kids food'. Dad had an allotment and grew lots of homemade veg

Occasionally mcdonalds or a bought pizza on holiday, and we would sometimes have oven chips or fish fingers. Our diet was really good and I'm greatful for that, and the skills that watching/helping my parents gave me

Egg and chips was a staple at my best friends house, crispy chips homemade

chicken roast dinner sometimes, but not every week

remember sometimes having pork or lamb chops. When visiting grandparents we had more pie and vegetables type meals and one grandma always made suet pudding in place of Yorkshire with the toady 😋 and a spare fir pudding with treacle

lasagna in the early 80s mostly Friday night with a salad

cheese and onion toasties at the weekend, big cheese fluffy omelettes finished of under the grill

i have some of my mums cook books from back then

Toady should be roast

spaghetti bolognaise
sausage and mash - often toad in the hole - a favourite
fish pie
roast chicken
ham and parsley sauce with boiled potatoes
giant sausage roll
shepherds pie
risotto
never pizza,
freezer foods in my teens were findus pancakes
never separate meals,
one biscuit was a snack, not chocolate biscuits
snacks were in other people's houses

Snacking wasn’t a thing in the 70s as it would “spoil” your appetite for the next meal

Early 50s. Dad mostly did the cooking apart from weekends as he worked nights part time and mum worked days full time.
Weekends - Sat usually salad and baked potatoes or French bread as we called it then, boiled eggs, beetroot. Sunday usually a roast dinner, alternating chicken, beef, pork, lamb, sometimes homemade meat pie, or casserole.
Weekdays - tinned chicken curry and rice, mixed grill, bacon burgers, shepherds pie, tinned soup, spag bol, sausage and chips, fish fingers and chips, pasty and chips, toad in the hole, tinned meatballs and rice, liver and bacon, steak and kidney pudding, stew and dumplings…

@MikeRafone or the 90s really, we had a set after school snack but not really any other snacks. I remember I used to always be really hungry before lunch in the summer (just got in from playing outside) and my mum saying "It's just half an hour to lunch", if I whinged then she'd say "fine have an apple" but the apple would just make me hungrier!

Mid 40s. Lots of meat, potatoes and veg style dishes. Occasionally chicken breast in a jar of home pride with rice. Spag bol with carrot slices in. Parents were paid monthly and had a chest freezer. The end of the month was always some beige freezer surprise.

Puddings were ice cream or custard cream biscuits.

Lunches were always paste sandwiches 🤢 a packet of no frills crisps, and a penguin bar. Maybe an apple occasionally.

It wasn't until I left home that both my parents learned to cook properly and they both do amazing meals now. Shame I missed out as a kid!

Lots of processed and fried stuff. I can remember eating those giant fish sticks a lot. I also ate a lot tinned soup. We had Bernard Matthew’s turkey roll on Sundays. I don’t remember enjoying food very much.

My Mother was a good cook, everything was "cooked from scratch" as it is so quaintly called nowadays. We didn't have a freezer, so no frozen foods, there were no take-aways, though once a year we had fish and chips when on holiday.

Meals we had regularly were steak and kidney pie, mince and dumplings, steak and chips, lamb or pork chops, stews, soups, roast dinners with Yorkshire pudding, chicken supreme with rice, a variety of fish such as skate with black butter sauce, haddock and plaice.

When my Father made a trip to Soho, we would have exotic things like spaghetti (in a long blue wrapper), courgettes which we had as a first course coated in breadcrumbs and shallow fried, tomatoes stuffed with shrimps with mayonnaise.

I ate similarly to you and am in my 50s. My parents did buy pizzas to have with salad, but that was more late 80s

I come from a working class family and mu
parents made a huge effort to feed us quality meat and vegetables. They had both grown up in poverty.

They were quite adventurous for white Scottish people in the 70s and into the 80s. I remember mum making various curries, chili etc. I remember the cover of her ‘Chinese cookery’ book!

We were not allowed McDonalds or KFC etc. They were deemed too expensive: in fact as I’ve been vegetarian since I was a teenager at 49 I’ve never eaten KFC or a chicken nugget of any kind.

I'm 35 and I think I ate well as a child. My mum could cook really well and we had a mix of stuff, but Indian and Italian food quite a lot - she was big into Madhur Jeffrey and Marcella Hazan's cookbooks. I don't remember my mum ever boiling a vegetable, they were always steamed or roasted and seasoned nicely. She made her own pasta sometimes with a pasta machine, I used to help her make stuff like naan or even tortillas before you could buy them in the shops.

I went through a period of being a bit fussy so I didn't always appreciate her food when I was quite young, but I was eating most of it by the time I was 10. She never minded making me a basic separate meal which I appreciated so much, it wasn't much faff for her and saved so many tears over being forced to eat food I hated. Me and brother used to help her cook as well sometimes.

When my mum's job was really stressful in my teens we did go through a phase of having the same few dinners like chicken with tomato and caper sauce, broccoli pasta etc. But I think I'm quite lucky, reading what some people used to eat as children. Me and my brother love cooking just as much as she does as adults, so it's a nice family thing we can bond over.

Mid 1970s to early to mid 1980s here - a mixture of basic meals and convenience food, though my dad did go to the trouble of going to a nice indoor market for fresh fruit, veg and meat. Salad on a Saturday teatime then a Mr Kipling's cake, individual meat pie after dance class at lunch time from the indoor market. Roast or casserole on a Sunday. Meat always very well cooked and veg stewed to bits, I thought I didn't like beef much until I tried steak medium rare in France in my 20s.

In the week, things like mixed grill, cod in parsley sauce, Vesta curry, Bird's Eye burgers, mini pizzas, potato waffles, baked beans. I didn't drink tap water until I was in my late teens or away at university- probably hangovers kicked it off 😆Always had (instant) coffee or tea, cola, squash etc.

So pretty basic really but it seemed that my friends all ate the same kinds of things. School dinners weren't bad and I loved the fruit crumbles and puddings. Or we had a ham sandwich, crisps, a Penguin or club biscuit and squash for packed lunch. With a matching Care Bears lunch box and drink container.

It was only when we moved to a more middle class area when I was 11 or so (about 1986) that I had things like home made spag bol at a friend's house and discovered a whole new world of delicious food. I can remember going to an Italian restaurant for the first time and having garlic bread and proper pizza and thought I'd died and gone to heaven.

My dad's reaction to this news was much like Peter Kay's dad. "Garlic???...on bread???" 😂

My mum would try any food though apart from shellfish, my dad was the fussy one. I started experimenting with stir fries, pasta dishes and curries in my teens and my mum had what I was having!

37 this is pretty much what I had then and what I cook for my kids now. We do have a few too many takeaways and meals out tho which I never had as a child.

80s kid, loads of salads with a slice of pizza and chips or cold tomato pasta. Cottage pie, various frozen things with frozen chips. Roast dinner every Sunday without fail.

I grew up in the eighties and nineties. My mum wasn’t much of a cook and my dad didn’t cook at all! Sunday dinners were always similar- some kind of red meat with potatoes, veg and gravy or a casserole. I hated Sunday dinners at the time, but back then you ate what was put in front of you, no short order cooking, no making 2/3 dinners, which I appreciate now that I’m older and wonder what my parents secret was! Though the week it was mainly frozen dinners like pizza or fish fingers, chips, and my mum usually tried to serve some kind of vegetable with it. Lunches were soup and/or sandwiches. I don’t have the best diet now but im not fussy and will try most things. like others have said, snacking was definitely not as much of a thing. We always had fruit available and there were always biscuits in the kitchen (for kids it was custard creams, jammie dodgers, Jaffa cakes; only the adults were allowed biscuits with paper on!) but we never just helped ourselves or were allowed loads. We had a drink and biscuit when we came in from school and some kind of treat after dinner (a yoghurt or a wee mousse or icecream) but there were never piles of sweets and crisps in our house. We absolutely never had takeaways until I was in my teens then it would be the occasional Chinese or chippy).

My parents had the same idea as most on this thread. We were lucky to have a big garden and my dad grew lots of fruit and veg, which we ate all year round. We had a pretty limited diet though and my mum would have a rota of meals. We always had a roast on Sunday, with boiled cabbage done in the pressure cooker for the same time as the roast potatoes. Most meals were meat, potatoes and vegetables, occasionally things like rice, but my dad didn’t like anything spicy so it was always bland.
I remember a family that lived over the road and they were vegetarian and once they invited me for dinner. They had pasta, which I have thought was so exotic!
I was born in the early 70s!