Food and drink from the past.

Home made ginger beer and lemonade, rabbit stew with herb dumplings, braised oxtail, "ladder staves" (braised beef short ribs), jam roly poly (boiled in a cloth), were all favourites with me when I was young. I still cook things like steak and kidney pudding, and beef short ribs, but cannot persuade DH to eat rabbit or oxtail. I quite liked liver when I was a child, and it was mostly calves liver my mother bought. It was a cheap meal. If I could find calves liver now, I probably wouldn't be able to afford it. The last butcher I spoke to about it said he didn't stock it because it was more expensive than fillet steak and no-one would buy it. I watched 'back in time for dinner'. I hope it was contrived because I would hate to think any modern family would be so dim that they would be unable to work out how to use the tin opener. If they had studied it for five minutes they could surely have worked it out - it's not rocket science.

When I was growing up we ate a rolling menu of about ten meals and puddings, rarely anything new. It was all traditional home-cooked food but, looking back, very bland and boring.
I still make Eve's pudding, rice pudding, apple pies and lemon meringue, Bakewell tart and custard, lots of the old-fashioned puddings. Sweet tooth! This is usually only on Sundays when the family comes to tea.

I make Eve's pudding when the family come to lunch. DS2 love apple pie, but the GDs like the cake bit!
x

Greyduster In the Autumn/Winter period Lidl have frozen "veal" liver, and it is very reasonably priced!

When I see it I tend to buy about 4 or 5 packs. Mr P doesn't like it, so all the more for me!

Soups and pies were favourites in our house .The 7th of 8 children my dad died in 1957 when I was12. The age range of the others was between 9 and 22. My mother had been a nurse and had to return to work at nights. She would arrive home at 8.00am and clean out the ashes and prepare the evening meal before going to bed. Soups and pies were favourites and her rhubarb pie was brilliant. When baking she would always wear a white apron and remove her wedding ring. She hated seeing Fanny Craddock.....remember her, cooking with all her jewellery on. I still adore soup and in winter usually have 4 or 5 in the frezer including very easy ones like carrot, orange and coriander, broccoli and Stilton. These 3 only take half an hour to make. Mum always baked extra to give to the milkman, dustman and others saying if you respect them they will treat you well. When she finally moved into a small house on her own she never had to put her in out as her friends the dustmen I sisted in collecting it from her back door to save her the trouble. I have never forgotten that.

I remember Mum making semolina cheese pudding , it was delicious . The cheese was the end of the slab , probably had the rind in and the blue scraped off

Thanks for that, Phoenix. I'll remember to look out for it. I was in Lidl only yesterday. Just don't tell my DD; she'll never speak to me again (very touchy about veal!)

My Mum got a pressure cooker in the early fifties and I remember returning from school to see my Dad's favourite rice pudding dripping from the ceiling . I remember the mincer going hell for leather on a Monday, grinding up sunday's roast ready for mince and tatties that night. The Sunday roast was always known at BSL (bloody Sunday lunch); my Dad would be carving the meat, the table would be rocking back and forth and Dad would be yelling in his 'Army Officer' voice 'Dorotheeeeeee, this bloody meat is NOT cooked properly'. It was repeated every sunday for as long as I can remember. My most favourite meal from that era was mince slice - mince and veg squashed between two pieces of pastry - and that was a school meal! Oh, memories. Life was so uncomplicated in those days.

What I forgot to say when I mentioned slurpy chops was that garlic was also an important ingredient. My ma made curries too – albeit with commercial curry powder rather than her own garam masala.We did have a fair amount of meat and two veg but she was also quite adventurous with her cooking. The idea that the 1950s was all tasteless slop is ridiculous. Just for the record Chaucer (1345–1400) wrote about garlic and other culinary herbs. Interesting food was not invented by modern television chefs.

What a fabulous walk down the memory lane of culinary delights. I remember them all.

I was never hungry in the 1950s and we were all slim and healthy.

I just remember 3 meals a day and no snacks, but we did have occasional sweets. Happy Days

I used to love Farola pudding. The only place to buy Farola these days is Asda, and then only intermittently. I don't have any at the moment and am making do with semolina.

My mother wasn't the best of cooks so I don't have fond memories of favourite meals. She wasn't a bad baker though, melting moments, sponge puddings and bread and butter pudding appeared fairly often, no wonder I've got such a sweet tooth.

My mum used to make chips in an old chip pan with a colander type thing in it. The chips were cooked in melted solid lard and then when the pan was cool, put back in the cupboard to get solid and stayed there until we next had chips. They were the most divine chips ever!!

My dad was Italian so we had lots of Italian food - he was a marvellous cook. My sister, brother and I were introduced to Italian food long before 'spag bog' became a staple in most households.

I've posted about this on another thread and I'm glad to see that other Grans who remember this era thought that "Home in Time for Dinner" wasn't a true representation of food in Post War Britain.

As we were there, I think our memories are far more accurate. For example I have no memory of the National Loaf and I was born in 1946. I asked a friend who was born in 1945 and she doesn't remember it either.

My memories are the same as the ones above, chips in the chip pan of lard, bread and butter pudding, apple sponge, beef stew, cauliflower cheese and plenty of salad usually with beetroot.

School dinner varied. I went to 3 Primary Schools in this era and the food in the first two was OK. The third school was dire with awful grey meat, stalky cabbage, and lots of rice or semolina pudding. We also had fish with huge bones. I did love what we called cake and custard, steamed pudding with lots of bright yellow custard. There were often seconds of cake and custard and we all went mad for it.

My dad used to be in the kitchen usually heating up a can of soup and he did do the washing up from time to time. My father in law on the other hand was never seen in the kitchen - but he wasn't typical I'm sure.

I only watched this show last night (recorded it) and thought it was fascinating. I was born in 1950 so only remember the second half of the decade really, but I do recall tasty stews, pies and cakes.
My mother was forever making jam from fruit trees in the garden. My dad liked anything with custard on it - it wasn't a real pudding otherwise. Likewise any main meal was acceptable with a few chips - from the chip-pan with its (reused many times) lard.
I still use my mother's wartime cake recipe called Belgian Loaf which never fails to raise compliments. I don't think our kitchen was as pretty as the one shown.

But wasn't it all rather stodgy stuff? I can't imagine eating like that now, or what size I'd be if I did!

We burned it off walking to school, playing outside, doing housework, carrying shopping home. Our homes were kept cooler so we used it up keeping warm.

There was less sugar and less between meals.

My mother's meals were not actually stodgy - we ate a lot of meat and vegetables and fruit. Yorkshire puddings, bacon roly-poly with suet crust and onions (yum) and fruit pies and milk puddings filled us up but did not deposit fat like the fatty sugary nothingnesses that children eat all day now.

I found this site, it has a semolina cheese recipe or two as mentioned above. Fascinating. I just remember semolina as something that made me feel ill at school.

recipespastandpresent.org.uk/semolina.php

My mother's speciality was thick soup that you could stand on. We came home for lunch every day and had that to look forward to. She would buy a big marrow bone every week and when she had extracted the stock with the pressure cooker, the dog had the bone and we had the soup. I mostly remember the butterbean soup, but surely we didn't have that every day? . She was a great cake baker and used to send me a sultana cake every few weeks when I was at University which probably explains the weight gain!

I was born in '41 and I've never heard of the National Loaf. All our bread (white and delicious) came from the baker down the road who made it on the premises overnight. And sometimes we had a real treat - 6 mixed buns. 1d each.

I wish I could make the cakes I used to make, without getting fat on them.

I watched the programme last night, and felt very sorry for the poor woman, she was completely out of her depth as she obviously wasn't the sort of woman who was an inventive cook. However they did make it very clear that she hadn't chosen the meals at all, they had been chosen for her. If I had been handed those ingerdients I would have used them in a very different way. They also didn't mention that for many people, as they had had a cooked meal at lunchtime cold suppers that didn't use up precious fuel were the norm, so cold leftovers - even liver, as my mother recalls - were often used, but they made more of an attempt to pretty them up in my mother's family. She was 15 in 1950 and she says that my grandmother would slice things up finely and sprinkle them over salad, or mix them with mustard or something, horseradish, and put them in sandwiches.

We had bread and jam, with perhaps a homemade plain cake, for the last meal of the day. Called it "tea". Cooked meal was lunchtime.

I always had Ovaltine or Bournvita in bed.

Has anyone mentioned junket yet ?

Blancmange pink, wobbly and sick inducing.

I was born in 1937 and have no memory of that bread , I lived in Scotland during the war and have lovely memories of Gran making all sorts of jam , but I hated the gooseberry jam . Granda brought us a real honeycomb , it sat in the middle of the table and we chewed the wax like chewing gum , the honey went on homemade bread and many a spoonful was sneaked