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.

Nicotine and gin mostly.

My mother’s parents ate a fry for breakfast seven days a week. They had a sandwich for lunch and salad for tea. On Sunday they had a roast. They never, ever snacked. They owned a pharmacy and worked until they passed away. My grandmother died of cancer at 72 and my grandfather died of old age at 89.

My nana was born in 1898 . She was in her 70s when I was born and lived until she was 96

I think the crispbread/ryvita and pineapple cottage cheese must've been in every diet book in the 70s and 80s lol

Actually I loved ryvita as a kid Will have to look if you can still buy it

It's interesting how many times people have said their grandparents never snacked. Mine were champion snackers! It's almost like some people think snacking is a modern invention.

Mine had at least two biscuits with every cup of tea, and cake in the afternoon. They didn't call them snacks though. They had elevenses & fourses.

I remember her making black pudding from scratch which was delicious. Her lamb flank soup was the stuff of nightmares though. My mother was very anti-sugar and granny used to put 4 in her tea and have an endless supply of barley sugars, creamola foam, and chocolate digestives.

I was there. My whole school years were in the 70s and 80s.

In primary school we took packed lunches and there was a tuck shop that you could buy crisps or chocolate. It opened twice a week at breaking

Secondary had no vending machines. Tuck shop open every breaktime.

Dinners were cooked in school kitchens . Mainly nasty cabbage, meat mashed potatoes etc. No pizzas and chips only on Fridays ( no meat served Fri so was fish and chips)

Older kids who were allowed out at lunchtime used to go to the KFC across the road

I quite like sesame rivita, do they still make them? I can't face cottage cheese, too many bad memories of being put in a diet at age 8!

My Nan ate the pale ones that were like the texture of chipsticks. They weren't very filling so she always had to have a few more, but hey they were "healthy" right?!

I like crispbread. Can't eat ryvita but I love glutenfree crispbread with dairylea-style spreading cheese.

Ryvita are still going. I like them with a lot of butter and marmalade.

Our secondary school in the early 90s had canteen open every morning break with flapjack, biscuits, iced buns, instant soup and hot chocolate. Lunch was chips with either pizza, turkey drummers, sausage or cheese and onion pasty. Vegetable was baked beans. Every day.

There was either plain, chocolate or coconut sponge and custard every day, and there was no water provided but you could buy cans of Coke or Tango.
Vending machines in every house block had crisps, cans of pop, chocolate and Polos.

My grandparents were born at the beginning of the last century and they ate..... greens that were boiled to death, stodgy puddings with lashings of custard, big hams thickly sliced, shepherds pie, white bread only, jellies, brawn and tongue, thick salty gravy, big fat toast potatoes and Yorkshire puds, stewed fruit (lots of prunes) .... all very unhealthy and rather delightful!!

Both Grandparents
Both sides had allotments or grew veg, salad & fruit in their gardens
Home cooked food
No snacks in-between meals

All homemade with fresh veg
Homemade meat suet pudding
Roast meat with Yorkshire pudding
Meat Casserole with suet dumplings
Meat pie from leftovers
Fish
Rabbit
Dry marrow fat peas, soaked & cooked
Homemade cakes & biscuits
A pantry full of bottled vegetables & fruit
Homemade Christmas cake
Homemade Christmas pudding
Jelly & blancmange

All delicious

Lived until aged 80s & 90s

Honestly, I don't know much about my maternal grandmas cooking. She got leukemia when I was a fairly young child, and died when I was 9. We didn't see them very often anyway. I honestly don't remember any of her meals.

My paternal grandma was technically a housewife all her adult life, but according to my dad mostly cremated everything. She was far too busy to cook anything much, preferring to spend her time at her drama group, poetry group or "townswomens guild" (she thought the WI was "common"). She grew up in a succession of catholic boarding schools after her parents died young, and had zero concept of feeding a husband and two strapping boys. My dad mostly grew up on (in his words) "scrappy bits" and bread and butter.

But as for more what you're talking about... I was told, "if your great grandma wouldn't know what it was, then you shouldn't be eating it."

I have literally just remembered crazy bus choc ices.

My nan would bring a box of vanilla chocolate ices back by bus in summer on an 8 mile journey. If you were unlucky and there on her return, you’d be offered a melting mess of hot vanilla slop and melting chocolate. If you were lucky she’d have had time to refreeze them and you’d be happy to eat a flat, icy, broken chocolate squished vanilla thing. The wrapping paper at some point would have decided it and the remnants of the choc ice were one, so you peeled off what you could and ate the rest 🤣

My grandmother was a TERRIBLE cook! She grew up in a household with a cook/maid, got married and went to India as an Army wife so had servants, then came back to England to be plunged into wartime rationing so never really had a chance to learn when she was young. I actually lived with her for nearly a year when my parents were abroad, but I can only remember a few things she cooked. (It was 45 years ago!)

Stew, made with liver, vegetables and pearl barley - it wasn't as bad as it sounds.
Tuna macaroni, made with tinned tuna, condensed tomato soup, macaroni and cheese on top. I love it and still make it now. I think she picked up the condensed soup thing when my grandfather was posted to North Carolina after the war.
Hard boiled eggs in yellow tinned curry sauce with spinach - which was AWFUL.
Really good coffee cake with chocolate filling - all made by hand as she had no mixer.

One Gran loved things like pea and ham soup, meat and potato pie, lemon meringue pie, rice pudding, egg on toast, real ham sandwiches. A bit of what she fancied.

Another ate the same thing week in week out:
Bran flakes
Sliced golden delicious apple
Lunch eg roast chicken, mash and veg or tail end of cod
Cup of tea and a small kitkat at 3pm,
Tea: Corned beef sandwich
Tinned pineapple or peaches.

Both lived to be 90.

Porridge with raisins
Shepherds pie
Roasts
Custard
Jelly with fruit set in it
Bakeless
Jam roll
Stew with dumplings
Gingerbread
Boysenberry ice cream

Tounge
stuffed hearts
tripe
Cockles
winkles
muscles

all minging

I don’t recognise the idea that no-one was snacking in the past, either. I used to be constantly dragged around to visit all my grandmothers’ friends and church choir meets and church social events, largely featuring elderly ladies in their 60s-80s at the time (70s, 80s and 90s).

They were constantly eating biscuits with tea, and/or cakes (jam tarts, Battenberg cakes, slices of Madeira cake); and every lady always had a bowl of boiled sweets that you were offered whatever time of day it was! (Particularly those fruit sweets with the chewy inside, lime chocolates, lemon sherbets, barley sugar, wine gums, etc.) Everywhere you went in the 70s and 80s you got offered a biscuit: after church, at school break, at Brownies, at a garden fete, at a church fete, at a school event, at any sort of local meeting, at work, etc. etc. (And if you were lucky you’d snag a pink wafer or a bourbon, before only the Rich Tea and the currant biscuits were left.) Honestly, postwar Britain could have been powered on biscuits.

To read some of this thread you’d think that everyone was eating home-grown cabbage and veg and never snacked at all, ever ever; but I remember literally watching adults munching through endless tea and biscuits at every opportunity. Is everyone just discounting all the biscuits and sweet tea? 🤷‍♀️

My grandmother (born in 1920) had a huge cardboard box of chocolate bars for snacking on when I was a child.

I agree about the "no snacking" being wrong.
Just watch Bridgerton - the whole afternoon is devoted to cake and sweets 😂

Vodka, Speed and Valium in large quantities.

My grandpa - her husband - would make lovely homemade soup and stew, meat and veg. Lots of butcher meat. Always pudding. Regular boxes of Farmfoods choc ices as snacks. Loads of biscuits and sweeties. And whisky/cigarettes.

Glasgow area, 1980s/1990s. Grandmother died of suicide at 58, grandfather died of lung cancer in his early 70s.

My mum used to complain that her mil ( my nan) used to put cow heel in the stew 🤢

Commercial white sliced bread with dripping.
Tinned fruit, in syrup as there was no other option.
Tinned vegetables, peas or carrots🤮
Fried things, bacon, spam etc.
Commercially produced cakes & biscuits, always had a bowl of boiled sweets on hand.

20 cigs a day and a “shandy” every night

It wasn’t exactly unprocessed or healthy!

That was only for a rich elite when sugar was so expensive it was a status symbol.