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.

Granny lived to 96, ate her dinner at 1pm and a very small tea about 5.30pm. Lots of fresh fish, tinned peas, neeps and tatties, spam, any salad would have suger sprinkled on it. Local bakery cakes and butterys. She would go out most afternoons to the village shops- butcher, baker etc and chat to them all, they all knew each other and most were related. I went with her when I stayed with her as a child- a lovely feeling of community. They’re all shut now.

*sugar, butteries, I can spell, honestly

We didn’t have lashings of sugary drinks, sweets, crisps, deserts or processed foods in the 70s 80s or 90s. Vending machines certainly weren’t a thing at school in the 80s.

Are you kidding? My big comprehensive school had vending machines chock full of mars bars, canned pop, Ringos and Nik Naks - and a tuck shop that served nothing but chocolate bars. The hot dinners were chips and pizza. There was nothing BUT processed foods at school - you couldn’t even buy a sandwich in the canteen. Why on earth do you think they didn’t have vending machines? What kind of school did you go to?

Were you even THERE in the 70s-90s? The decades notorious for bad food? Have you ever looked at the sales figures for chocolate bars, sweets and snacks in the 70s and 80s? Been to a kids’ party in the 1980s? The local pop man? Soda Stream? Endless giant bags of crisps and chocolate biscuits from Kwik Save and Safeway? A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play? Kids’ school packed lunches of Um Bongo and jam sandwiches on white bread with a Penguin biscuit? Findus crispy pancakes? Pop Tarts? Capri-Sun? Most kids in the 80s were stuffed to the gills with E-numbers. Why on earth do you think they banned artificial additives from processed biscuits, sweets and drinks in the 90s?

Postwar Britain really was the time of terrible, terrible processed food, with the health outcomes to match. I can’t remotely think you remember the 70s-90s correctly if you think people didn’t eat sweets and crisps. The entire bloody telly was full of (famous) adverts for the things. The food in schools in particular is light years better than it was then.

All of the examples you have given of crap food were EXPENSIVE.

The cost of food, especially during the 70's and early 80's, was a lot higher compared to income now. Yes many boomers (of which my parents were two) managed to buy houses on one factory wage blah blah, but that came at the cost of convenience.

So while they could have afforded frozen crap or convenience crap, they wouldnt have been able to buy a house at the same time as buying it.

I remember loving going to my then best friends house as we got um Bongos and crispy pancakes etc. She hated coming to my house as she got shepherds pie and stew. But her parents paid rent on their council house (bigger, better built and a lot cheaper!) and my parents were paying a mortgage. So they had a bigger disposable income than my parents did.

For the aspirational working classes, desperate to break into the middle classes, junk food was not to be considered as that money could go into savings to pay off the mortgage. And of course.....what would the neighbours say?!

Well my big comprehensive school didn’t have any vending machines one the wastelands of the northwest between 1982 and 1988 I can assure you.
Meals at home for the majority were all home cooked as most couldn’t afford the alternative in our area.
Parties as kids were always home catered by parents and Hardly any processed food just through costs.
yes I was there through the 70-90 but please accept that we all have different realities

we had to share 1 packets of sweets between 3 siblings as a treat….

different folks different strokes 🤷🏼‍♀️

I was in the East Mids and it was the same!

We didnt have vending machines, although the caretaker did run a tuck shop which sold crap for a while. Lasted one school year as I recall! This was circa 1984.

Only one of my grandparents was still alive when I was born so I’ll base the answer on my grandad

Poor, Catholic and Irish born 1896

He really had nothing to his name so he grew all his food
He ate
Stirabout ( as my username in honour of the family ) for breakfast or mushrooms he found in the field
Cabbage, onions and potatoes
Raw garlic to snack
Goody very occasionally

Stirabout is like porridge called so because you had to stir it about a lot on the range
Goody is bread and milk. If you were lucky with a bit of molasses or sugar on top and my mum used to make this for us as kids aswell

He would buy meat or go out with the dogs to shoot a rabbit if he thought someone might come to visit but as he lived out of the way down a bog lane they rarely did. When we stayed he’d wait a few days then he’d / we’d eat it. It was usually pork in a pot cooked with cabbage and potatoes.

That was it tbh. I never saw him eat anything else and it’s what my mum said they always had.

I was at school mid-80s to early 90s in the northwest, and we basically lived out of the school vending machines, which served up 80s favourites like Skips, Monster Munch, Chipsticks and Fish’n’chips alongside the Ringos and Nik Naks. They even sold cans of shandy (with negligible alcohol, but you can’t imagine that today). The tuck shop was wall to wall chocolate bars, and there was a very well-patronised ice cream van outside the school at the end of the day.

Then as now, processed food was cheaper than decent quality food. The shopping options available where we lived were Kwik Save, Safeway and the corner shop. There just wasn’t good basic food available in lots of places in poorer cities in the north. My paternal grandparents lived on a massive council estate where the food shop options were a corner shop, or getting on the bus to another Kwik Save. (Kwik Save certainly did not sell lovely good quality fresh local produce.) There was a pop man who came round their estate, starting in the sixties, to deliver bottles of fizzy drinks; but there were no lovely local butchers or greengrocers, and certainly no Tesco.

My parents started driving to the nearest Sainsbury’s (considered very posh!) in the 80s, but had to go back to shopping at Asda in the 90s recession.

If only everyone could have had good local shops selling basic produce. That often just wasn’t the case! When my grandmother did cook from scratch once in a blue moon it was a watery Irish stew with very gristly meat. Kwik Save’s finest, I suppose! 😆

What about the stirabout 😁

Why is my mind reading all these replies in a northern voice?

Both my grannies were on farms. They grew ALL the fruit and vegetables that the family ate. They had chickens, so loads of eggs, killers-both sheep and beef cattle. The hottest part of the summer was spent "bottling" peaches, plums, nectarines, and making jams, pickles and preserves. Because everyone worked hard, the cake tins were filled every Friday with home-made biscuits and cakes. They ate a LOT of sugar. Breakfast was always grapefruit from the orchard, or preserved fruit, porridge with cream straight from the cowshed (no pasteurisation), toast and home-grown, home-made marmalade or jam. Maybe scrambled egg with loads of cream. They ate a LOT of fat. Dinner was homekill, roast hogget or beef, heaps of vegetables, roasted potatoes and Yorkshire pudding, with pudding being a steamed concoction with jam and icecream, cream on the side. Or maybe creamy rice pudding baked for hours. They ate a LOT of carbs. Most lived into their nineties back then. Oh, they did eat a LOT of vegetables.

One granny grew up in India, she mostly ate curry and god it was good. (I have to put the colonialism out of my mind when I think about it, it was her ‘house boy’ who taught her to cook).

other granny grew up on a farm, married a farmer. Pretty much everything was grown on the farm and it was all delicious too.

Stovies!

Toast and marmalade, boiled potatoes, meat and 2 veg, fried food, boiled eggs, lots of puddings with custard, sweets, biscuits, cake, tinned fruit.

@Saz12 People weren't overweight because food wasn't available everywhere and all the time, plus it wasn't so over processed. (UPFs might make you want to eat far more but that definitely doesn't mean it's 'nice'.)

The grandmother I remember eating with was an awful cook born in the 1930s she would talk about how her parents grew veg and had a fantastic diet. She favoured highly processed meat, pies, anything beige, grey boiled potatoes and tinned vegetables.for dessert you got a chocolate mousse or choc ice. Can't remember any fruit even being in the house lol.
On the other hand my mum is a fantastic cook, mostly fresh and hearty.

@summertimeinLondon Postwar Britain was the 50s to 60s, not the 70s to 90s. In the 50s there was very little convenience food. The rubbish - stuff like Instant Whip and Smash and Pop Tarts came in later on. I had my first Vesta curry when I was about 15 (1970).

All the 50s to 2000 is known as postwar Britain. Lots more convenience food existed than you think, especially in the immediate postwar: canned food was ubiquitous, powdered egg, orange juice and milk (including National Dried milk); evaporated milk, bottled juices and syrups, beef teas, Camp coffee, Ovaltine style drinks, soft serve ice cream, white processed bread and cakes, meat pastes, potted meats, corned beef, Spam and so on - these are all convenience foods and lots had high levels of preservatives or were not made from the best ingredients but were by-products of the meat industry, for example.

There’s a really strong sense of rosy-tinged nostalgia about many of these posts. People’s diets in that period overall weren’t quite as lovely as everyone fondly suggests. The processed food industry has also been going for a lot longer than people tend to think.

@summertimeinLondon I agree and well remember condensed milk, Camp coffee etc. My point was that on the whole, people didn't live on convenience foods in the 50s and 60s - they mainly had to cook from scratch. And it wasn't the norm to constantly snack. Diets were much more restricted then. There wasn't the obesity crisis we have now but I'm not saying everything was wonderful.

Looking back on my paternal grandmother, born at the turn of the century, I realise she had a very disturbed attitude to food. Probably due to an impoverished, undernourished childhood and wartime rationing.
She was tiny, bones and veins visible through her skin. In later life she had a dowager’s hump and a tremor, but lived on nervous energy, tea and toast.

She was a hoarder of tinned food like salmon, corned beef, condensed milk, rice pudding, peaches and grapefruit segments. She made marmalade and jam in huge stone jars and baked every family a Christmas cake and pudding in October (stir-up Sunday). Wedding cakes were made and sent out for Victoria icing. I was one of the last recipients when she was 96.

GF was a grocer so staples like flour, sugar, bacon came at trade price. They had a greenhouse and an abundant vegetable and flower garden. Nearly all their family photos were taken on their tiny strip of lawn with the Nissen hut tool shed at the bottom.
She would make huge celebration meals for 15 people on Royal Doulton china but eat nothing herself, watching and revelling in the gluttony. She adored “bonny” babies and fell in love with DM for her blonde, buttery good looks.

Cooking on a daily basis was not heavy on meat but lots of veg from the garden. A lot of stodgy food, so bread was bought but cakes, buns and biscuits were made. Steamed puddings and egg custard. She cooked for 3 males and picked at her own food.

Her greatest bitterness and shame was that she gave my uncle unscalded milk as a small child. He was in a TB sanatorium for 3 years, pulled through and eventually studied Physics at Cambridge.
Enough to give anyone a disturbed relationship with food.

Breakfast was probably toast and dripping or egg. Maybe jam

Lunch: ham sandwich or bread and butter. Maybe some slices of tomato. Perhaps an apple or something. "Cheap" old fashioned fruit not blueberries and kiwis!!

dinner: meat, potatoes and two veg

no snacks. Any Salad was likely a few leaves and usual cucumbers tomatoes not a million different leaves and ingredients.
pudding was not every day and was stuff like rice pudding, condensed milk and tin of peaches, sponge and custard...

Soups, stews, bacon and cabbage, shepherds pie, good quality meat but not much of it, eggs, sausages, lots of vegetables, salads, cold meats, occasionally chips, homemade bread, homemade tarts/pies (my grandfather was a baker), custard, rice pudding.

This is in Ireland. Pretty good stuff all in all. Plainer cooking than we would be used to now and more limited variety, but the quality of everything was excellent.

My grandma was a great cook. We all made some of her biscuit recipes for her wake. No Chinese or pasta, it was meat and veg. Pork chops, corned beef, she made a great chicken liver pate, sponge cakes.

My grandma ate nothing on Wednesday and Thursday as they had run out of money and she had to feed the kids first.
All her children said she made Sunday roast dinners to die for with small amount of meat but perfect often home grown veggies.

Are you from Bedfordshire? I've never seen it away from there and we used to buy it especially for my aunt when she visited. She loved it and lived in Surrey but they didn't have it.