Food you had at your Granny's house

[bibbityisaporker]

My Nana was a wonderful woman who brought up three children during the war (well, actually, two of them were evacuated as she lived in London) and she had some weird and wonderful ways with food. She grew all her own vegetables, well into her 80s, and could be quite eccentrically creative with her recipes. Some of her staples that I have never eaten anywhere other than at her house were:

watercress sandwiches (always on brown bread).

tinned mackerel sandwiches (always on white).

stuffed marrow - it was stuffed with minced beef and vegetables and roasted.

sausagemeat and tomato tart - like a sort of working class quiche

strawberry jelly made with evaporated milk instead of water for a proper treat!

Lovely bottom oven cakes with tomato dip and crispy bacon freshly baked as we got up on a Sunday morning. What I wouldn't give for one more of those Sunday's!
Savoury duck stew in the microwave.
The most fantastic tasting boiled jersey potatoes, a flavour i just cannot replicate.

Angryfeet try it on toast with scrambled egg it's delicious.

Orange 'surprise' - I've no idea what this was! Made with tinned clementines, some sort of set (milk?) pudding. No surprise hidden in it

We used to loll about in dressing gowns over a leisurely breakfast of porridge with cream then endless tea and toast, and she would cut the toast into shapes like a house or a doll for me. My mum was so shocked when I told her this as granny had been very busy with her work (teaching then politics) and do she had never had time to do anything like this with my mum (her only child) :(

Welsh cakes, still warm

My Dad's mum hated cooking but liked to spoil us so would let us have all the crap that was banned at home . Crispy pancakes and waffles, followed by toffee custard and that stuff that pops and fizzes on your tongue sprinkled on top. Heaven when you're 8!

Grandma made great pastry - mince pies, apple pies - and brilliant suet dumplings. Always had a steak & kidney ready for us when we arrived to stay with her. Another one who made cream horns (and she left the tins to me in her will!) She did fish cakes, and chips in a chip pan (we always thought she'd burn her flat down). And always had a fag on the go (posh Dunhill superkings).

Omi, on the other hand, I don't remember cooking. She had lots of things prepared for her and delivered by the butcher and deli. We always ate well there but I can't recall her ever being in the kitchen! She did have a little mid-morning break every day (break from what?) when she sat down with a glass of TiaMaria with cream floated on the top (this was Germany in the 60s/70s)!

Lovely thread

Toast and dripping..... Mmmm

Freshly baked scones, warm from the oven
Honeycold mould
Raspberry jelly made with fresh raspberries and fresh raspberry juice
Mortar cake
Night cake

Mince, neeps and tatties. Mmmmmmm. She lived in Scotland so we only saw her once or twice a year but this was always ready for us when we arrived. I was mostly vegetarian for about 8 years between the ages of 8-16, but I always made an exception for this .

Oh, and there was always a massive tin of wrapped biscuits (blue riband, taxi, club etc) and glass bottles of Bon Accord fizzy pop (delivered to the door every week!) in the cupboard.

Both my grandmothers were superb cooks (and wonderful grandmothers I have to add), both Italian.
Grandmother1:
she made agnolotti (meat ravioli), tagliatelle, rich beef stews with polenta, lovely meat based tomato sauces for pasta, omelettes with mushrooms, etc etc.

Grandmother2:
meatballs in tomato sauce with peas, spaghetti with clams, brodetto di pesce (like a fish stew), passatelli (made with parmesan and egg, to be eaten in beef stock), french beans in hot tomato sauce (one of my fav).

My gran was an utterly rubbish cook and not what you'd call generous with food. If the family went round and she served salad it would be one wafer thin slice of corned beef, two lettuce leaves and some slices of tomato served with a teetering plateful of buttered sliced white. We used to joke that the tomato was sliced so thin, if we collected them all up and joined them together, there would be just the one tomato between us all.

semolina that was made so think it was set like jelly! It was cuboid in shape and she would cut a slice off the end and put it on a plate to serve. Never had anything like it since.

verysmellyeli My Nan used to do the butter the end of the loaf first and then slice it thinly too!

My other Nan would let us have banana pudding. It was chopped banana with evaporated milk, jam, mincemeat, hundreds and thousands, glace cherries.....basically anything we could find in her cupboards and fancied we could bung in

I don't recall ever havng a a proper meal at either of my grandparents' houses! We were dutifully trotted round on a Sunday afternoon once a month or so for 'tea', I think. Nanny Saucepans used to make butterfly cakes which were lovely, also ordinary fairy cakes with coffee icing. The only foodstuff I remember from Nanny Peggy's house was a box of Good Weekend candies.

My mum, though, used to make jelly chopped up with evaporated milk. I loved that...

White fizz. The only time we ever had any fizzy drinks was at my Nana's flat.

Neither of my grans were great cooks but my godmother was amazing. She lived in this huge old farmhouse complete with range and pantry which smelled amazing and we always had high tea which we called knipton tea after the place she lived. There would be wonderful cakes and homemade cherry pie and custard which we would fight to get the skin from!
Raspberries from the garden covered in sugar and cream and little sandwiches.
If I ever have grandchildren I will do exactly the same it was amazing!
After tea we went out to play in an old pigsty which we had made into a little house. Ah memories, I loved that place!

Braised beef with gravy out of a packet
Crinkle cut chips
Home made ginger beer

And when we stayed there the night - tea in bed in the morning, in a cup and saucer with a rich tea biscuit! This was when we were around 5 - 10 yrs old and no parent in their right mind would have let us drink tea in bed, let alone in a cup with a saucer, but she was my lovely Nanny and she loved spoiling us, even though she wasn't well off. When two of us stayed she let us have her big bed and she went into the spare bedroom.
Aw Nan, miss you.

At my granny's the treats were as follows:

• baked apples covered in pastry with raisins in the core (we called them 'apple bombs'). Always served with pouring cream from a real silver jug.

• Jasmine tea served in the most delicate bone china tea cups with pink roses on. I loved those tea cups so much & never knew who in the family got to inherit them. Ah well.

• Doll's tea party in the garden - she used to make miniature fairy cakes and meringues for me and the dolls. Of course I had to 'help' the dolls eat all the cake..sometimes with help from the little girl next door.

We also used to get epic afternoon tea at my great aunt's in South Wales - there would always be a big fruit salad or trifle in a bowl, and buttered bara brith or Welsh cakes, but the things my brother and I always made a beeline for were the Tuc biscuits!

Summer pudding.

Gooseberry fool.

Roast pheasant.

Cheese souffle.

Fish pie.

Kedgeree.

My grandmother was an awesome cook and I learned a huge amount of my basic cooking skills from her, not my mum.

My granny had a grocer's shop that was next to a sweetshop We'd sit in the back stuffing whatever was past its sell by date or broken and then go next door to spend our pocket money

I remembered more, we used to get villa pop that got delivered by a man in a van, and she would make ice cream floats for us.

And lovely pies made with tinned stewed steak. (Might get some and try to resurect that pie).

Kit kats from a big biscuit barrell seem to come to mind alot.

She died when I was nine but my lovely grandad always had the best choice of biscuits for us and if he had to cook we got sausages and beans and bread and butter.

table creams.

shealso always made extra yorkshires and then gaves them after pudding drizzled with golden syrup.

Didn't have a granny. But when I met DH his gran made caramel shortbread which was heaven.
She used to send me a slab of it every few months. She used to ore tend it was for ds1 but we both knew the truth.
She was a top woman. I miss her.

Spam sandwiches on Warburtons Wholemeal bread
Tunnocks Caramel Wafers
Cod Liver Oil tablets - which we were forced to have and I had to learn to chew as all we were ever given to swallow them with was milky coffee and the smell of coffee makes me sick.

liberty my nanna is Irish and I still get all them things when I visit. She also has chickens! Also double decker sandwiches which was 3 slices of bread and 2 different fillings! Breakfast would be a huge pan of porridge on the cooker and tea and toast.

My other nanna was English and she would make the best banana bread that she would coat in butter. Mum still follows the exact same recipe now even though nanna died 11 year ago. Also had egg and soldiers and we would shout nanna cut humptys head off! For some reason we loved it.

At Christmas you couldn't get through the front door without first being offered a Turkey sandwich. She found it very confusing that I was vegetarian. I had cheese and salad cream with lashing of butter.

"Best butter", (Lurpak) which was easily spread, they didn't have a fridge until a couple of years before they died, they had a pantry and no central heating.

Trifle had to have hundreds and thousands on it.

Liquorice Allsorts, loads of them. My Nannan worked for Bassets when I was little.

I had a Great Aunt who used to give us very strong, very sweet tea in shallow plastic cups. Sweet tea always reminds me of her.

From my Grandma I've got a handwritten recipe book with loads of things you can make on rations.
There's a lot of lard and powdered egg.