To miss the simple tasty Christmas food of my childhood.

[NotSoGloriousFood]

I'm old enough to remember Christmas family gatherings when mum didn't have the option of going to Iceland or M&S and everyone pitched in.
Simple but tasty spreads of homecooked meats, cheese, uncle Kens legendary pickled onions, Aunty's Gloria's beetroot chutney, Mary's green tomato chutney and pickled red cabbage, cheese (usually cheddar and Caerfilly) and homemade pasties and sausage rolls. Crisps were ready salted.
It was tasty, wholesome and real.
Desserts were all homemade. chocolate cakes, mince pies, trifle, Christmas cake.
Simple food shared together......no-one could forsee then what food would become.........ultra processed with long lists of ingredients.
I watch some of the Christmas food adverts with a heavy heart and wonder what we have done to food.

My Grandparents always got their turkey from M&S Xmas dinner at theirs and Boxing Day was at theirs with a buffet where everyone brought stuff with them, lots of homemade but also ready made stuff. I’ve always hated buffets so they’d cook me something before and I’d just have my own packet of crisps.

I wasn't trying to make it about gender.
I was pointing out that everyone wants to be the consumer but an awful lot of them cant be arsed themselves. its like the story of the Little Red hen.
But then im quite independent and feel good if i can do these things myself rather than just be waited on hand and foot.
We take it in turns alternating between, me, DH and my mum.

then you have an in law problem.

This is a ridiculous and offensive thread frankly. Also, you should pay more attention to some of these foods that are expensive via M&S etc - many are good quality. I personally prefer to do most of my own cooking from scratch, but this "woe is me, it's not like in my youth" bollocks annoys me intensely. you can choose to eat whatever you like and frankly, the convenience food of today is a million times better quality than the convenience food of yesterday.

Well with the snide responses you are getting OP it’s proof that the Xmas spirit hasn’t arrived yet. You are not allowed to indulge in a bit of nostalgia you know. I once observed that I thought it was sad more parents were missing out on being there for bedtimes etc due to ways of working these days and I got a lot of stick from people saying how did I expect them to feed their kids if they gave up work etc. Deliberate missing the point just to gleefully jump on someone.

Why are you complaining about what other people are eating? If the food from your childhood is what you want for Christmas then make that.
And if other people want to not have to spend days in the kitchen as an unpaid kitchen maid and like the ease of having pre-prepared food options then that's awesome too. No one is forcing you to go to M&S and Iceland - why do you give a damn if others go there???

Did you not read her weird complaint??? She is making snide comments about other people's food choices. That's not respectful of the christmas spirit is it?
Here's a clue: you can prepare whatever food options you wish. Other people can go to M&S and live it up with the preprepared snacks. Their choices don't impact you at all.

I also cook from scratch but would happily eat upfs forever rather than the food the OP has listed. I hate chutney and trifle. Maybe the in-laws serve that food on purpose as they know whatever they serve will be wrong and faced with judgement, so they don’t want to waste the good stuff on her.

@Caligirl80 She says she hates the food .. not the people serving it.

I ignore all the adverts, Xmas food magazines etc and make what I want. Whenever I have bought ready made finger food from M&S etc it’s mostly been wasted as my family prefer the home cooked things I make. I don’t make too much because I don’t like waste. It was and still is my mother who made all the effort at Xmas, although I don’t spend Xmas with my parents. I know that she still waits hand and foot on my dad and adult brother. The op was expressing her opinion and as usual on here people are telling her to mind her own business to shut down the discussion. Disappointing

Good grief🙄

My nana used to make turkey soup like that in the 70's - I can never quite replicate it, though I try every year. I think it's probably that I don't boil the carcass - not keen on the scum!

To be honest, I almost prefer the turkey leftovers to the main event! Last year, we did Christmas night sandwiches, Stephens Day pie, soup, fricassee and finally something exotic with pomegranate seeds and flatbreads!

M&S or Iceland, it’s all the same UPF shite and no one in my family would touch it, but for some nothing says Christmas like an Iceland Prawn Ring / M&S Bau Bun and that’s ok. People have different tastes.

Cook what you like. No one is making you do anything.

We both work full time and DH does 95% of the household shopping and cooking all year round, including Christmas - he loves it. I do the baking which I enjoy too.

The older DC's have their own families now and I want to make loads of different desserts but there's only 5 this year so it's an art to balance what you want to cook with how many there are to eat it!

I can't help thinking that Christmas food felt special in the 70's, 80's etc because cheese footballs, twiglets in tubs, tubes of smarties, fizzy drinks etc weren't in the house at the rest of the year!

Devilled eggs & off meat rather than pickled things probably, but the pickled things certainly had that horror movie quality about them.

But yeah, many of us who grew up in families where you were forced to eat everything on your plate, and ‘homemade’ was certainly not synonymous with ‘healthy’ or ‘wholesome’, find packaged food the lesser of many evils.

And I’m afraid, as a result, I’m always a bit wary of other people’s cooking (particularly baking, having survived many rancid buttercreams in my day) and can think of few things worse than a festive feast where everyone brings a dish and you’ll hurt someone’s feelings if you don’t eat it!

(Shout out to any other adult children of compulsively frugal postwar rationing food hoarders, who find Christmas a lot more relaxing without the mental extended family and frightening cooking)

Alternatively: 'I started a thread that would obviously make working parents feel attacked and guilty and was astonished that they didn't like it'.

OP's thread, similarly, very clearly wasn't designed to make everyone feel all warm and Christmassy, it was designed to criticise others. So it isn't surprising that she didn't get warm Christmas vibes in return.

Well not really since I was one myself ….

Other than Christmas dinner and selection boxes as presents on Christmas day, we didn't really have 'Christmas food' in my childhood home. There was no buying of cheese, pate, stollen etc. We ate normal food before and after Christmas Day, other than the selection boxes getting passed round in the evenings, which would normally last us till the New Year. This was 1970s/80s.

As an adult, some years I've bought a bit of Christmas food - cheese, posh biscuits, marzipan things - but I've never done the thing of making the whole of December a time for food treats. I'm not buying anything special this year other than Christmas dinner.

Aunty Gloria's beetroot pie, Mary's chutney, me oh my!
How we scoffed such simple fare, gorged as much as we could dare!
The poor burnt bird was black as sin, (we scraped it straight into the bin),
The Christmas joint, not quite so seared, but stringy as old Santa's beard,
Was chewed a bit and chewed a lot, then dumped into the puppy's pot.
But no-one moaned about this muck, no-one cried or gave a fuck,
As all this food was freely gifted (from the supermarket lifted).

I’ve had way too many things brought round over the years that were off/revolting -or let’s take round half an onion and a half eaten tin of peaches as didn’t want them to go to waste etc - to get all nostalgic about all home cooking. To be frank I’ve had nicer things from farm shops

My Nan remarked how nice "my " sausage rolls were. I owned up that they were actually from Mr Sainsburys. She smiled and said how she wished she could have some nice ones like that, instead of making everything from scratch!

I know exactly how you feel @EverardDeTroyes .

Another poster said you can buy it in M&S so I might have a look. Won't be the same as mum's though.

We love to cook and almost everything is homemade. I'm lucky as I seem to be unusual on here in that I adore my in-laws, but by God, their food is horrific. My DH has zero memories of anything delicious from his childhood. Plain, overcooked and under seasoned into inedibility is their food motto. And he's another one with memories of at least one year of food poisoning for the whole extended family from an improperly cooked turkey.

They're lovely open-hearted hosts and adore having everyone but dread the food to the extent that we pretty much rejoice when we're at theirs and they decide to go with UPF-laden packets - with the exception of Minute Rice, which seems to be her go-to. WTF is that stuff?

This is why DH is an excellent cook! Half the people I know who are serious cooks are that way because of appalling food in childhood.

My best friend’s husband, a very good cook, puts it down to boarding school slop from the age of six, but my friend says his parents’ idea of food is putting a joint or a pheasant in the Aga and then taking it out and leaving it sitting around in the kitchen for long periods, often several days, then serving it with potatoes or between slices of bread, regardless of its state of decay or whether or not one of the dogs got at it.

Everyone drooled over my absolutely delicious pork packed sausage rolls with a bit of chutney in them , which came actually from the very nice farm shop - they were so enormous I chopped each into 3 , warmed up and kept Schtum about them not being home made - because they really did taste like it - I guess they were- just not my kitchen!

My mother did Christmas dinner from scratch, dessert was a homemade Christmas pudding from my great-grandmother and later we had Christmas cake that she'd also made for us beautifully decorated.

We were under strict instructions to return the plastic decorations and jazzy ribbon along with the tin so that the following week we could have more cake, the normal weekly fruit one she send up to us via my grandfather.

I make Christmas dinner from scratch, my dd does the dessert usually a cheesecake, I supply the ingredients. Aga does the ham on Christmas Eve, it cooks the turkey overnight and the beef on Christmas Day so I can make proper gravy.