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.

Tripe
Pig’s trotters
Faggots
Scrag end of lamb
Stuffed lamb’s breasts
Sausages
Beef Stew
Brawn
Rice pudding
Apple tart
Stewed plums
Bread pudding
Pick and mix from Woolworths once a week.

I always laugh when people say this, remembering my lovely step-grandmother (born in the 1920s). I once ate a delicious cherry pie she’d made and asked for the recipie. It started ‘take one can cherry pie mix’. She and DGP also drank a never ending volume of fizzy drinks.

On the other side the favoured snack was a big bowl of cornflakes with a large spoon of sugar on it before the milk was added.

My great granny (born 1891) regularly had a yorkshire pudding with gravy as a starter.

Cup.of tea and a boiled egg for breakfast, main meal at 12pm, meat pie with vegetables or stew and dumplings, often with a saucer of mushy peas as a side dish.

Never ate chips, only with fish from the chippy.
At home, fish was pan fried with a coating of flour with potatoes.
Veg was cabbage, cauliflower, carrots, potatoes. Broccoli, squash, sweet potatoes were unheard of.

DH’s Irish granny was shocked at her DIL eating potatoes with the skin on and bread with seeds in it because that’s what her Scottish mother made (DH’s Scottish granny lived to 101).

Meat and two veg (in season or preserved- they had an allotment)
A suet pudding or fruit pie
Rabbits (grandparents kept them for food during WW2).
A pint of best bitter for grandad and a port and lemon for gran.

I remember grandad visiting us and calling lasagne sheets lino.

My granny always had Canada dry

How did people prepare and eat pig trotters?
Boiled?
And served with what?

She enjoyed porridge, boiled eggs and toast and the dinners were mainly meat and two veg including potatoes. Never drank or smoked. Also soda bread and boxty (giving nationality away here). She used to make her Dad (my great-grandfather) custard at night with the Bird's powder. Fairly plain diet, I don't remember a lot of fruit or salad but really very little processed food or eating out. Lived to 90, only Covid took her out.

Home grown everything - fruit, veg, dairy products all processed on the farm, meat slaughtered and butchered on the farm, honey from hives, jam from blackberries and blackcurrant, fish from a traveling fishmonger, usually salter herring, and eggs and fowl from the farm too. They got tea in huge chests, and bought sugar in large containers too, and salt.

Other granny had been in India and made curries as best she could, sending away for spices from Harrods. But basically a very unprocessed diet too, as she also lived in rural Ireland.

Oh and also a bottle of stout every day!
'It looks good,
It tastes good,
And by golly it does you good!'

Oh and my grandpa had beer he brewed at every meal... Gawd it was the cloudiest stuff you'd ever seen. Meals like spaghetti Bolognese, can't think what else. Lived until 91, obv

Well Boxty looks delicious!

My gran wax naturally slim and always said ‘you can’t fatten a thoroughbred!’ She was always putting my tubby little grandpa on a diet and he never lost any weight lol.

breakfast was ‘flakes’ which were crunchy nut cornflakes.
mid morning was something like a roll with mashed banana or cold meat.
Dinner at 3pm (?) was protein, potatoes and veg
supper was toast or homemade soup (she made the best soup.
she ate chocolate everyday.

Oh, and my other granny's favourites were instant coffee, Kimberly biscuits, lucozade and Woodbine cigarettes. Lived to 96 😆

I once ate a delicious cherry pie she’d made and asked for the recipie. It started ‘take one can cherry pie mix’.

Morton’s cherry pie mix was the best - but you still made your own pastry.

Let's be fair though, a lot of people die of illness and accidents that are not food related.
Two of my grandparent's deaths were accidental, sadly. I have no idea how long they might have lived otherwise.

Mine would put so much butter on sandwiches it looked like cheese

BetteDavisChin, we had Yorkshire pudding for pudding! Grandma (and Mum) always cooked a couple with raisins, and we'd eat them with golden syrup. My DDad also loved a Yorkshire pud sandwich with a couple of roast spuds and a bit of the roast.

Rabbit, and that could be freshly caught by my grandad or roadkill (not joking). A lot of bakery rolls, homemade soup, bridies or scotch pies, tea and biscuits and scones, mince and tatties, stews and lots of crumbles and custard, rice pudding, carnation milk, swiss roll, sugar sandwiches.... Not light and healthy that's for sure.

Sausage, borscht, pierogis, sauerkraut.

A good strong drink, but never too much, she was a very proper lady.

My grandparents had a cooked breakfast or porridge for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, and meat or fish and two veg for dinner, always a pudding after dinner. Lots of cups of tea, sometimes a cordial in the summer, sometimes a home brew fruit wine.

The main differences between their meals and mine:

Everything they ate was fresh, nothing processed or with additives and preservatives. Meat from the local butcher, fish that my grandfathers fished, vegetables from the garden (they didn’t grow loads, just enough to eat), bread from the local baker, puddings freshly baked.

They had fat and sugar in their diet but it was natural fat and pure sugar - butter, full fat milk, sugar. Again, no additives, artificial flavours, etc.

Nothing was bought in, prepared on or with, cooked in or with, or kept afterwards in plastic, so they had no microplastics.

They didn’t snack at all, only ate at meal times.

In general, they ate less and more simply, and were satisfied with it.

I remember my grandma eating absolutely teeny portions of everything when I was a child.
I’m not sure if it’s normal for her generation and my perception is now really skewed on portion sizes etc but it does seem very extreme; or if she may have had disordered eating of some sort which I think is more likely and seemingly happened in her later life when she started to put weight on post menopause.

I know she was only petite but she wasn't at all abnormally slim, I would say a very healthy normal weight for her short frame.

Particular foods/meals that she would eat that stick in my mind:

half a tuna sandwich (no mayo or butter) for lunch, but the bread was cut so unbelievably thin that it was almost see-through,
half a digestive or rich tea biscuit,
slither of cake (homemade) but almost impossible to cut that thin,
half a banana,
one small soft boiled egg with half a slice of buttered bread for breakfast,
half a very small jacket potato for dinner etc

but then she would also cook proper meat and veg type meals for the family that she would eat too, and I would say ate very little/virtually no upf foods.

Broccoli, squash, sweet potatoes were unheard of.

In the late 1980s, our next door neighbour was a retired greengrocer and his son would bring him a box of mixed veg every week. He had no idea what to do with ‘fancy veg’ so he’d give them to us - peppers, chillies, avocados, aubergines …

my nan always had fresh soda farls and potato farls on the go. She made the best gravy ever and always had lots left so I would mop it up with some fresh soda bread slathered in real butter. OMG now I want some. Her one thing, that now that I am almost 60 (so survived it!) that I now find disturbing was that on a saturday morning she used to fry up a big batch of breakfast sausage links. I would sit up in my granda's bed with him and have some with soft boiled eggs and a blob of butter in the egg. Heaven. BUT..nan kept the rest of the sausages on a plate in the cupboard for the next couple of days until they were all gone. I ate them but I would never do that now lol

Meat, veg and gravy lots of it in various forms most days but small portions of meat (eg one lamb cutlet).
Lobby (I still love a bit of lobby)
Tripe
Fish on Friday
Cheese, onion and milk cooked in a tin pan and served with toast (not sure if this was regional but my husband’s granny did the same
Brains faggots was their occasional ready meal with mash veg and onion gravy
Staffordshire oatcakes with bacon, cheese and tinned tomato for Saturday lunch
Sandwiches - usually plain ham or tinned salmon
Cheese on toast with a lot of pickled red cabbage

Breakfast
Tea and toast sometimes with boiled egg

Snacks
Ski orange yoghurts
Club biscuits
fig biscuits
custard creams
dates
Saturday night supper - bag of plain walkers crisps with two rounds of bread with proper butter

Fruit and nuts (grandma loved her fruit bowl)
satsumas
grapes
apples
plums
nectarines
walnuts
whole almonds

Treats
doughnuts and pastries and sausage rolls from the pastry shop in town