All this fancy stuff you eat and drink nowadays, were you brought up on it?

[charliecat]

Or is it a sainsburys/waitrose/millenium thing?

God no! My dad was the typical meat with every meal Irish man - steak was his invariable choice if we went out for a meal. He could never understand how he managed to end up with two vegetarian daughters {grin} (Suspect the boiled bacon and watery cabbage that we regularly were forced to eat had a lot to do with it!)

My mum was extremely healthy eating when we were kids in the '70s. She has an absolute horror of sugar and we never had it. She used to make cakes with no sugar in ! Brown flour too. Also she used to me her own plain yogurt which we had for 'pudding' even though it was so tart it made your eyes water .

I was 60s/70s too

My mum cooked everything from scratch(though we did have Angel Delight I remember!)

We had a massive veggie patch in the garden and I can remember her spending hours blanching/peeling/slicing and freezing everything.

We used to buy vast quantities of peas from the pea farm (!), we got our eggs from the egg farm, meat was often a whole lamb for eg which arrived chopped up and was frozen.

We had a lot of typically 70s things like fondue. We used to eat a lot of pomegranites and other "exotic" fruit.

My dad loved cooking curries and making bread too

oh and my mum baked and made puddings for England!

Ah and our flour was always in pillowcases from the Tichborne Dole \link{http://www.strangebritain.co.uk/traditions/tichborne.html\here} (second one down}

I don't know exactly when it was but my Grandfather (a Devon farmer) believed the panorama April fool which claimed that spaghetti grew on trees...Why shouldn't he, he'd never had it! Mind you I've never had tripe and onions and I intend to keep it that way.

Oooh Marthamoo you could be me - we used to get OJ from the milkman but it was just for my Dad too. We also got fizzy pop delivered by the lowcocks van and you couold return the empties for 10p.

My mum is not a great cook, and she thinks pasta and sauce is fancy food so we never had pasta! She did a lot of roast dinners, and mince or sausages with mash, or corned beef with new potatoes dripping in butter. And again, always a plate of white bread and butter. For pud it was either a chocolate biscuit (a club or a wagon wheel), a tin of fruit and ice cream or arctic roll. Vienetta cam out at christmas and we thought it was well posh!!

CD - we had a huge vegetable garden (bigger than my whole garden now) and one of my abiding memories is of her in the kitchen, peeling, chopping, blanching - seemingly until really late at night. she didn;'t let a single thing go to waste. The fact that you blanch veg before freezing and freeze on trays and then repack in bags is a peice of domestic knowledge I quite pride myself on as I assume most people wouldn;t know it!

her? my mum, of course

LOL thwomanswhothought- sounds like my Mum! We only had a council house, but ti had a good garden (corner house) and I remmeber picking whatever was there and making sauces from it, fairly self reliant at certain times of the year. rarely got ill.

we had things like pasta and curry, (70's baby) but we also did the stew thing, and Angel delight. i think we were quite lucky- friends ahd a rota of weekly meals, and DH's dad insisted on a three day roast-bacon and chips- stew rotation.

I dod remember an awful lot of salads that were really jussdst chopped veg in bowls, and they always came with crisps- ??. And Dad would write a list of what was in freezer, take it round and you'd tick what you wanted (Mum didnt like it)- mind you he still does that..... tea tehre can easily comprise one potato waffle, one chickena nd mushroom pie, one crispy pancake. bizarre.

We never had salt though, or butter. Or puddings.

hehehe you're joking aren't you? when i went to university i hadn't even tasted garlic bread, let alone curry (other than my mum's version, which consists of a mince and veg concoction with a bit of curry powder, apple chunks and a few sultanas thrown in). i'd eaten an olive in france once, thinking it was a grape (now, there's a shock for an 8 yo) but in general my culinary experiences until then had consisted of faggots, baked potatoes, only-ever-cheddar-no-other-cheese, etc etc.

now you can't see into my fridge past all the buffalo mozzarella, cured hams, hoummus, parmesan, and other expensice deli items from twatrose...

oh yes, and salads were only ever iceberg (or webb's if iceberg was too expensive that week) lettuce with cucumber and tomato, drenched with salad cream...

To my mind this is the most fascinating thread on mumsnet for a long time. I think it's really interesting to see how others have been fed as they grew up. Then I love looking in other peoples shopping trolleys and of course shopping lists

The only puddings we had were rhubarb or apple crumble with custard, or chocolate cake with ice cream. I still loathe fruit crumble with custard (the bits! the skin!) but chocolate cake and ice cream still one of my favourites.

Oh god just had a flashback, we also had bananas with cream and sugar!? WTF was that about?

We had wholemeal spaghetti, (still can't bear spaghetti), moussaka which was scary and slimy, stuffed marrow (stuffed with some pink meat - retch) horrible stews with great lumps of onion and scary brown meat in, cheesy stuffed pancakes dripping with grease [nausea]. Roast dinners were bloody lovely though, and avocado stuffed with prawns and mayonnaise - that was posh, that was.

anyone else have yorkshire puddings with golden syrup???

hasten to add that we were marched to the tootbrushes as soon as we'd finished eating. yum.

&0's girl here - we had a mix. My mum was quite adventurous as a cook making her own curries/pasta and things - but also basics of meat and veg and lots of strange meat products as she used a proper butcher, who she still uses !! But also angel delight, arctic roll. She used to food shop in Marks so we used to have exotic quiches and coleslaw and stuff from Marks and ski yoghurts.

That is supposed to say 70's girl!

I never ever saw my mother cook a meal. My father travelled a lot and I remember staying in a hotel for several months (the Estoril Sol, iirc) and eathing nothing but Melba toast, three meals a day.

I went to school with a girl whose father owned a thriving chain of butchers shops. They had shepherds pie (all those choice leftovers, minced) and jelly and ice cream every weekday evening.

When I first came to boarding school in the UK, I found the food repellent. Egg Florentine - bullet poached eggs congealed onto beds of over cooked dripping spinach, or bleugh - grey mince on soggy toast, served cold.

My kids eat a slightly expanded variety of what I ate when I was little. We eat more pasta than I did as a girl, but other than that it is very similar. My mother is a good cook & has always been adventurous. I never ate anything out of a packet - other than Angel Delight & jelly.
My kids also get to eat more fruit & veg out of season than I did too, because it was much more expensive to eat out of season fresh produce 30 years ago.

eeeee by gum

in my day it were a lump o coal and you'd like it. or get a clip roun' th'ear 'ole

Splurt my mother used to say "You'll get what you're given and like it"

I grew up in the Highlands and in Germany. My mum (and later, Dad) cooked largely from scratch and cooked good wholesome food, but it was a bit of a wartime diet, as that's what they'd grown up with. Wiht the odd spag bol or stir fry thrown in.

I was just thinking this the other day: my dad still has a small bottle of olive oil in the cupboard that he uses for special meals, whereas we buy it litres at a time. And my mum, who has been professionally trained and run her own businesses as a caterer, still makes her food from a linited number of ingredients.

I remember the first time I tasted smoked salmon, it was on a plane and I was 14. Sometimes I buy a packet and eat the lot myself and think of that.

DH on the other hand lived in London and has had more 'fancy' food than you can shake a stick at - his mother is very into healthfoods and the latest thing. Thankfully he does the cooking in our house.

It was the opposite in many ways for us.
Living in the Tropics,(tiny island in PNG) we were brought up on mangos,lychees,pawpaws,fresh crabs,clams and then staples such as rice came from the Chinese trade stores.
On the rare occasion we had OJ it came I a rusty can.
(BTW,Northerner and Marthamoo,why did your fathers hog the OJ??)

What we craved was European staples.My mother occasionally put in an order with some food company for things like apples,potatoes and pies and we would go down to the tiny little airport (dirt runway actually) and watcher the little Cessna come in with our order!!!

We were surrounded by foreigners though (Aussiea and Chinese mostly,with some SE Asians) so were brought up eating that food too.
Also had American missionaries near us who we were friendly with.Going to their house was a microcosm of the States circa 1974 (they would be away for about 7 years at a time,translating the New Testament into the language of wherever they were) thus their organisation looked after them.

We would have grape flavoured Kool Aid,marshmallows and the heavenly cinammon rolls they would consume by the tonne.
Because their house was on village land,the village chief would wander in and out at will,opening the massive American fridge and helping himself.

Village feasts were brill too.They would do a mumu which involved digging a huge pit,heating large stones in a fire,then wrapping fish,meat,taro,cassave and other veggies in banana leaves with coconut cream.They would be put in the pit,covered with the hot stones and earth,then taken out hours later.

Very very happy days.