To ask what did your granny eat?

[PassTheCordialCordelia]

I hear a lot of noise concerning how we ought to eat how our grandparent's/great grandparents did, or something of that description. We know that modern, ultra processed foods are crap, unhealthy and usually very cheap, although many foods from long ago were pretty awful too!

So just in a lighthearted frame of mind - what did yours scoff down on?

Mine were fond of home baking, scones, biscuits, etc. Most meals cooked from scratch, although grandmother was a full time housewife, with a space to grow some fruit/veg. I think the large supermarket chains were still extremely tiny when my GP's were alive, so I have no idea if they might have enjoyed more processed stuff if they had lived to see it.

My granny was a very good baker. My favourite thing that she made was a ginger sponge. She also made birthday cakes to order for her grandchildren. I was the youngest and never grew out of her chocolate birthday cake with vanilla butter icing and flakes and chocolate buttons to decorate.

She also made a restorative soft boiled egg and soldiers when we'd had a family trip to a&e (casualty) one Christmas Eve.

My mum says she remembers the scrambled egg sandwiches she made her when she was unwell as a little girl.

I really only remember the things she made for us to eat.

She died in 1985 and I miss her

My nana was born in 1910 in East London, right in the east end. Her favourite foods were jellied eels, rabbit and in later years condensed milk.

Another memory just popped up.....tinned Nestle cream.

I have sought it out just to recapture the feeling of sitting on their sofa with a stainless steel sundae dish with tinned fruit and tinned cream in it. I now own those dishes but it isnt the same somehow. No smell of cucumber and onion in vinegar (which I really didnt like but the smell....) no drowsy adults because the real fire was sucking the oxygen out of the room as the windows had to be kept closed "to keep the heat in", and no lovingly folded paper napkins (sorry, serviettes) in a special holder.

Bit teary. Miss them so much.

Nan was a home economics teacher so could cook anything. She was your stereotypical 50s housewife (apart from the fact that she worked!) and was always in a pinny in the kitchen. She baked rocks cakes and made my Granddad bacon and eggs every single day for breakfast. Dinner was the classic meat and potatoes affair.

She did, however, grow up in the war as did Grandad so they knew how to make the best of anything. Granddad probably more than Nan as his upbringing was very working class where as Nan was from a middle class family. But of course, Granddad never ever cooked.

She used to tell a story about meeting granddad's mother for the first time and her serving up pigs tails for dinner and my Nan forcing them down herself to be polite. She was sure she was being tested. Then it was "yellow jelly" for afters.

She had a friend who used to eat fish heads for lunch daily.

Honestly.... our food is better now.

My grandmother made at least two soda breads, fruit bread and an apple and rhubarb tart every day for visitors. Dinners were various stews, casseroles, boxty, colcannon and rissoles and meat, mash and veg dinners. Just beautiful traditional food.

Mince and dumplings and the most enormous Yorkshire puddings
A ‘special’ from the F plan diet. Ryvitas (bacon or cheese and onion flavoured) with cheese, an apple and sultanas from what I remember
rice pudding
glory days

Malt loaf mainly.

My Nan and Grandad both lived to 95 .No health issues at all.They had a cooked breakfast each day.Dinner mostly mince ,sausages Steak and kidney pies.Lots of fruit and veg from the garden too .Nan always had some Galaxy in the fridge and said "Its a food really"!

My grandparents were all born in the 20s, and had their families in the late forties and early fifties. They were working-class, so all had terrible teeth because of poor dental care before the NHS existed (my paternal grandmother had them all pulled and dentures fitted when she was pregnant in the forties - very popular at the time!)

Even in the early days of the NHS diet remained really poor, like wartime-level, for a while: my mum was given bottles of rosehip syrup, which was another anti-scurvy remedy, but gave even very young babies tooth decay. My grandmothers never breastfed as it was considered disgusting (my father and his siblings were fed on National Dried Milk mixed with sugar water!) There was a huge amount of old wives’ nonsense around about what children should eat. (My paternal grandmother was still trying to give me spoonfuls of malt and sulphurs as a child in the seventies.) They were all overweight, and all smoked a lot, something which put both my boomer parents off smoking completely.

I agree that as well as era and class, it was also a lot about location. I’m fairly sure that if my grandparents had grown up rurally in Kent, or Ireland, for example, there would have been more fresh local produce around. Instead, they grew up in industrial Northern cities with tenement housing or small council houses — more Helen Forrester than Cider With Rosie. Not either the climate or the space for growing much of their own veg, which was more of a middle-class pastime than a Northern working class one.

My Gran was born around 1880 of Anglo-Indian heritage so dhal and chapattis figured in our menu. She lived with us. But there was also the traditional meat and two veg dishes. Beef or lamb left over from the joint on Sunday was minced in the hand mincer attached to the table top to make cottage/shepherd’s pie or ‘patties’. She and my mum used to like tongue too. Yuk.
No car so everything was delivered. Baker and veg van called round, milk delivered and a grocery order was phoned in and delivered.
I often wondered how they managed in a very small kitchen with very few storage cupboards, when I have a pantry, kitchen cupboards and overflow shelves in our internal garage!

Not that uncommon.

When your only source of income was the grown man, it made sense that he had the best and most food as he needed to be well fed and healthy to bring in the money. In those days, if he couldnt work throught hunger or illness there was no food for anyone. If there was no welfare state or help at all, then where was the choice?

I remember my grandfather telling me that he desperately wanted to go to university, which as a working class kid would have been very unusual. His father supported him. But then his father suddenly died young (30's) and Grandfather had no choice but to go out to work at 14 to support his mother and siblings. So he started getting the best meals as the main earner in the household. Him being him, he tried to share it with his younger siblings. His mother went mad. She said they and she were going without so he had enough to do his job.

Its how it was because that was how it had to be. Hard to understand with modern eyes but survival really was hard in times not really very long ago.

Spam, tinned salmon with vinegar, buttered bread with the crusts cut off, tinned ham, blancmange, clementine pieces in orange jelly, trifle, custard and cream, pecan tart, Bakewell tarts, prunes

Nothing. She was anorexic and survived on cigarettes and whiskey. Died in her 50s.

I don't model myself on her.

But never ever McDonalds or KFC or Nando's etc

Oh I've just remembered my other grandmother (Nana) often used to have a bowl of corn flakes before bedtime. In her satin nightdress, dressing gown and heeled mule slippers.

Loads of meat, especially pork. Spam fritters 🤦‍♀️ plenty of cake. Lived to 96 😂

A lot of stodgy heavy food and desserts with custard. Also a lot of stuff from cans and rarely any fresh vegetables. Not what I would call healthy, she never got past the WW2 rationing mentality.

Ooh good question! My grandparents are long gone but I think it was a lot of meat and two veg type meals with roast beef or chicken. A lot of homemade soups, possibly some casseroles/stews. Fish in breadcrumbs. Processed canned meat like spam and corned beef. Lots of white bread. I suspect not a a lot of fruit. Stuff like pasta, curries, pizza I suspect were unheard of or very rare. My maternal Grandpa liked mussels and whelks 🤢

My grandparents lived in a council house in Glasgow (with a large garden!). Grandpa grew a lot of veg himself, although it was stuff like potatoes, cabbage, greens, turnip and leeks. Later, Grandpa had a greenhouse so would produce lettuce and tomatoes.

Gran cooked everything from scratch.
Breakfast would be porridge (made with oatmeal) or toast (homemade bread with homemade marmalade).

Main meal was at 12, and normally meat and two veg. She served bread and jam straight after, as there wasn't a lot of meat to go round.

Tea would be something like a boiled egg and salad, or soda bread with scrambled egg.

Gran baked a lot too, so the only snack they had would be a small slice of cake with their afternoon cup of tea.

They both enjoyed reasonably good health throughout their lives. Neither of them drove, and Grandpa walked 4 miles to work and back. Didn't drink or smoke.
Despite that, Grandpa died very suddenly with a heart attack when he was 74, then Gran died of an E-Coli outbreak when she was 82.

Paternal grandmother -

sterilised milk

Mutton with onion sauce
~

That's all that I can remember!

Maternal grandmother -

Real Irish Potato Bread - yummy

Soda Bread - very good.

Apple pies, second only to my Mum's apple pies.

Strong Tea

Weetabix soaked in strong tea and sugar

Whiskey
~

That's all that I can remember!

I'm going back to the second half of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s - so long ago, but so many memories... ❤️

Porridge for breakfast
Meat, potatoes and vegetables in the middle of the day, followed by a home made pudding often with custard.
Tea at about 5.30. This was usually salad or maybe just ham and tomatoes, but always with bread.
She baked all her own bread - wheatens, sodas and pancakes - and made apple and rhubarb tarts regularly.
No snacks.
Horlicks or similar at bedtime.
My other granny was much less healthy in her diet - happily lived mostly on toast, bread, oranges, apple tart and biscuits.

Corned beef hash (tattie hash), roasts, sausage and mash. Meat was expensive so people added things like bread and butter and Yorkshire puddings to fill up. People were more active due to there being less public transport and machines. Treats were occasional.

Dads side - My grandma was quite frail so my grandad did all the cooking. I don’t really recall them doing lunch. Breakfast was always tea and buttered toast. On Sundays it was always a roast dinner served around 3pm so it served as late lunch / early dinner in one. He always used to make cabbage and would pour the cabbage water into mugs to drink with the meal which consisted of beef, cabbage, carrots, boiled potatoes, and gravy.

I remember him making rabbit stew which I wouldn’t eat because ‘thumper’!

I remember always seeing spam in the cupboards but never saw it eaten.

Black Forest Gateau was always served on special occassions.

I remember always being offered celery sticks sprinkled with table salt as a snack.

They always had boxes of chocolates out and on the go, Black Magic & Milk Tray. Biscuit tin full of Fig rolls & Club and Penguin Biscuits were also readily available.

I remember Tripe & Liver with Onions being something my mum mentioned her dad eating. My mum still eats liver and onions and weirdly is something my teenage son quite likes, I can’t think of anything worse!

Well my experience was completely different.
Certainly no gourmet cooking that we know now, but not did the majority! We didn’t have lashings of sugary drinks, sweets, crisps, deserts or processed foods in the 70s 80s or 90s.

The thread was about what our grandparents ate, but same applies.

Vending machines certainly weren’t a thing at school in the 80s

My granny kept eels in a bucket under her kitchen table. I don't know if this was common behaviour in the 70's in the Midlands.