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 Grandma had a terrible diet based on biscuits, sugary tea and pop from the milkman. She had to cook for my Grandad who worked nights and ate at odd times but it was always done begrudgingly.

Where is Bessarabia? (or was?)

Houses weren’t as warm in those days. Many people didn’t have fridges and instead had a cupboard open to the outside with wire in to allow air in to keep things cool.

My grandparents ate homemade food the vast majority of the time (with the exception being occasional portions of fish and chips at the seaside). It generally involved porridge, toast or bacon sandwiches for breakfast, all main meals were made up of some combination of meat/fish/vegetables/homemade gravy (essential in the North of England, where 50% of your blood is made up of gravy), plus a pudding every evening! Needless to say, I ate there quite a lot, and not just on Sundays, which involved the mandatory Sunday roast.

There were snacks- KitKats, bars of chocolates, mint imperials and sometimes bags of sweets like Liquorice Allsorts or Werther's Originals. Cakes were homemade until my grandmother no longer had time to make them, because she continues to have such a hectic social life. Oh, and because she hates ironing, she always has the iron in one hand and a bottle of Spitfire or whiskey in the other!

She'd take us foraging for wild blackberries, damsons and raspberries every year, and would then spend the afternoon cursing (she has always been part-deaf and didn't realise that we could hear her, so we learnt a selection of swear words from her) while making jam, which inevitably made a mess of the hob. She grows some of her own fruit bushes, tomatoes and even melons (in a porch; she's probably a witch because she does wonders with plants, e.g. sticking sprigs in milk bottles and they miraculously grow), but she is now almost 100 and struggles to get down to pick blackcurrants and things now. Despite having moved away, she still sends me boxes of gooseberries and other delights!

Apparently, my great-grandparents ate similar foods (though her father had an extensive allotment), as well as a piece of homemade cake every evening for supper. Even the dog got a slice to himself!

Corned beef, fritters, fray bentos pies, Benson and hedges and cans of Tennents lager. She died when she was 67 bless her

Breakfasts: boiled eggs. Full English. Porridge. Kippers.

Lunches: Sandwiches

Dinners: Roast dinner. Sausage & mash. Pie (sometimes steak and kidney) & chips. Chippy tea once a week

No snacks.

My grandparents died before I was born so I'm going with my mum and dad (both in their 80s now).

Lentil pie, corned beef hash, chicken curry (with random carrots and peas)

Also Fray Bentos pies and findus crispy pancakes as a treat 🤢

All dinners were served with two types of potatoes, meat and two vegetables. Always had a pudding and then a few chocolates.

Lunch was usually a salad with some thick cut ham or cold turkey or something like that from the delicatessen.

Breakfast was a full English at the weekends, and boiled eggs with toast and butter during the week. I dont think she even knew what a cereal was.

Always drinking tea with two sugars, and a bottle of wine a night. She was the tiniest woman you've ever seen, barely a size six and lived to 96. Didnt know the meaning of exercise. Honestly I dont know how she managed it.

I only really knew my maternal grandmother. She liked mainly homemade made food. I remember she came up 1 Sunday thought we were having a roast dinner. It was summer hot our mum banged a pizza and chips in the oven with salad. She wasn’t impressed.🤣🤣🤣

I also remember her having toast with sugar on. She used to get soda farls. We would have them with butter and lemon cheese on. They were the best I’ve not seen them for years. I’m sure there will be someone telling me they have them in Waitrose. Well we don’t have Waitrose up North.

My gran was an abysmal cook and everything was covered in cat hair. Most memorable meals were weetabix with butter and jam on top (like a slice of bread) and ice-cream with sugar sprinkled on top served in a yellow melamine bowl with a side order of cat fluff. She did make a very good Madeira cake though.

She would never eat ‘that foreign muck”. By which she meant pasta!

As they say, you can eat everything apart from the oink.

My DM made a great pig’s head brawn.

Totally agree with this. We now give kids meals they actually like. Even if they’re healthy meals they eat too much which is why even middle class kids are overweight.

When I was a kid most meals were plain and boring - mince in Oxo, lumpy mash, lentil soups.

It was said that the M&S ready meal was the best thing that ever happened to her diet. She had a reputation for making food inedible with excessive salt or burning things like boiled potatoes. I was in my 20s when she died (b early 1910s) but I never ate anything at her house.
She lived to early 90s, but I only ever remember her (so from early 70s) as a shrunken, little old woman which with hindsight would be poor muscle mass and bone density. She seemed to live a long life based on being in energy conservation mode. Genes probably were on her side; her siblings all made it to their 90s too.

Granddad (other side of the family) was a basic cook- meat, potato 2-veg type. Liked his pints of bitter. Smoker. Lived to 85 when he was taken out quite efficiently by a stroke. He had a fairly active old age until the final week pottering around the shops/ pub daily. It was a shorter old age, but better quality of life.

Meat, boiled potatoes and two veg, meat being things like chops and braised cheaper cuts of meat. Fish on Fridays every week. Plate salad in summer with boiled eggs and beetroot with salad cream. Or ploughman's lunch for dinner on a hot day.
Ham egg and chips. Stews and soups. Sometimes a home made corned beef or cheese pie. Corned beef hash. Roast dinner most Sundays with leftovers the next day made into cottage or shepherds pie. Mince and mashed potatoes.
Instant whip or tinned fruit and evaporated milk for pudding.
Home made fruit cake and scones.
Never ever ate rice or pasta. Or yogurt. Never ate snacks like crisps but had a biscuit barrell which would come out along side a big pot of tea. Biscuits were always plain ones like nice biscuits or malted milk.
Breakfast was always cornflakes in summer and porridge in winter with eggs and bacon on weekends.

Road kill, I kid you not, if they saw a pheasant that was Sunday lunch.

She put milk in her mashed potato, liked rich tea biscuits, and drank sherry every day. Can't remember much else.

The other one was a terrible cook who overcooked everything. She served shop bought cakes and malt loaf for tea.

I only just lost my beautiful grandma this year, in her 90s. I don't know what she ate as a child, but as an older lady she was rather fond of m&s ready meals and pre-mixed g&t/Margherita etc in a can ❤️

Definitely remember tongue sandwiches 🤢 Plus all bran, lots of vitamins, and lots of tea!

I think the difference is what they put in food these days. The ingredients would have been much purer back then. There's nothing wrong with fat or sugar. And as people have said, they rarely snacked unless on fruit, which was seen as a treat.

Plus, lifestyles were much more active, which balanced things out too.

My granny always tells me how she had to do her washing in the tub and hang it out etc, much more effort needed than these days.

Oh, and she still keeps dripping in the fridge!

Up until she left home, she drank raw milk straight from the cows or the goat, as she grew up on a small farm.

and lived for thirty years after that just grazing on Mr Kipling cakes and sweet tea.

I can see me skirting horribly close to this

Humour aside, excellent post.

My dad's mom (b. 1925) raised a large family on lots of white bread, white sugar, packaged foods, cheap quality meat. That's what she could afford.

Her last kid was born in 1964 and her cupboards were crammed with packaged instant-mash type foods in the 1970s.

My mom's mom was born 1903 and probably ate a lot more by cooking from scratch, although her cookie jar was full of only store bought cookies in the 1970s.

Maternal side: very traditional. Meat, potatoes, veg. Meat, potatoes, pickled beetroot in summer. Shepherds pies, homemade chips, stews, roast on a Sunday. Loved cheap sliced bread, I guess the convenience trumped taste (the same way she was aghast that I would willingly use cloth nappies!).

Paternal side: all traditional but would also try lots of new things. She made chocolate mousse, served tacos in the early 1990s when they were very unusual and was the first person to give me Pringles when they started selling them here! She wasn't adverse to trying new foods and loved cooking new recipes.

They both ate breakfast, lunch and dinner though and neither were against snacks of crisps or chocolate bars. Both sets of grandparents were born in the 1920s and I think the rationing had a lasting effect. They bothweee sensible with portions and leftovers and would never eat to excess but enjoyed sweet things (one bought bananas every week) possibly because they remember foods not being freely available.