Eating in the 1950s ...much less choice, but we were healthier

I really enjoyed Further Back In Time For Dinner, fascinating history of family eating over the decades, including things such as Vesta - nostalgia fest! Also great is Nigel Slater's Toast, about his childhood, around (not surprisingly) the foods he remembers.

My mum hated having to cook. It was a chore for her. She was mince Monday, stew Tuesday, corned beef Wednesday, ect. To my knowledge apart from baking she never used a recipe. She hated rice ,pasta and anything that she could remotely call foreign. She did bake lovely pastry though. I'm the only one of her daughters who loves cooking and baking.

Why was I skinny when we had a cooked breakfast, school dinner, home made bread butter and cakes after school and a cooked meal at 6.30pm.??!! My poor mum must have spent her life in the kitchen!

You can still get Vesta Chow Mein and Paella. My husband popped them in the shopping basket the other day. I won’t be eating them, that’s for sure.
Ooh I loved condensed milk sandwiches LouLou21.

Lovely nostalgic post seacliffe. God knows what was in those vesta meals but at the time they were soo tasty and like Patti cakes I remember my dad, who served on board ship in Hong Kong during the war, taking us for Chinese meals - generally the 'businessman's special' ? 1st course 'cornflour' soup with every variety tasting exactly the same next usually a mild chicken curry then apple pie and custard made, I'm sure, with water rather than milk! We loved it and would roll out of the restaurant stuffed to the point of nausea. Then there was meat paste sandwiches, tinned pears with evaporated milk in which my nan used to like to dip her bread and echo margarine (ugh!), fly pie and stodge at school and not forgetting instant whip and cremola foam and ice cream cake for a birthday treat. Can anyone remember the brand name of the orange powder/crystals in the early 70s which miraculously turned into orange juice when water was added?

Never Vesta. Grandad & uncle served in India during war so came home with these amazing recipes which they taught my mum. We had loads of Indian food & also Chinese for some unexplained reason.
We had to go into London to Soho to get ingredients though. I don't remember when we could but them locally. We did grow our own garlic though.

One of my best memories is Mum and Dad making toast over the fire with a toasting fork and they would spread it thickly with New Zealand butter or pork dripping if we had any, absolutely delicious. They also used to roast chestnuts in the ashes of the fire when they were available. Simple pleasures but so memorable.

That mention of condensed milk made me remember. We had porridge made with milk and water, then we were allowed a spoonful of condensed milk whirled on top. Delicious.

I remember our school lunches were completely foul, and I avoided having to eat them whenever possible. I used to go most of the day on the tiniest portion of cereal I could get away with. Tea was always fairly substantial, sandwiches, or something hot, and homemade cakes. My mum reminded me the other day she used to spend most of Fridays baking 4 family sized cakes a week, plus pies, puddings etc

We didn’t have much at all in the way of “bought” foodstuffs. Perhaps a few very plain biscuits, of which we were never allowed more than 2. We weren’t allowed fizzy drinks either, except at Christmas, but we did have squash. We also walked, or as we got older, cycled to most things. I was certainly fitter, but I certainly ate more fat and sugar.

As we were moving into our rented flat straight from our wedding reception, I did my first food shop a couple of days before the wedding. It included a Vesta curry and a Fray Bentos steak pie! I shudder now when I think of the meals we had in the first weeks of married life. Luckily, I became more adventurous - and sensible. That was 1969.

We still eat liver and onions - when I can get it! And liver stroganoff -Yum!

If I remember rightly, Marco Polo brought pasta back from China in the 15th Century, so pasta was certainly already invented by the 1950s!

We had a packet of spaghetti in the larder for years and years, right though the 60s.

And surely everyone had one of those plastic pineapple ice buckets - slightly larger than life, but a 3D version of a pineapple, even if you hadn't ever seen a real one. (Those ice bucket things definitely featured in "Made in Dagenham", which had lots of authentic 50s/60s items in the houses)

I remember having cravings for Vesta Curry & Vesta Paella in the 60s when I was expecting my first child. I also craved sour green plums ..not at the same time of course. You can still actually buy these Vesta meals, I saw them in Poundstretchers a few months ago and bought one for old times sake...in fact it's still in the cupboard ....must try it and see if it still holds the same taste I remember.

I was so lucky to have a wonderful Dad who grew all our vegetables and even kept chickens and rabbits, a thing he did to get through the war. He worked so hard. We were very poor, just no money, a very simple house with no mod cons. But we had all this fresh food long before "organic" was associated to food. I'll never forget the joy of new potatoes cooked straight from the garden with new peas. The taste is totally different to shop-bought. I try to put a few veg in the garden now but my disabilities restrict me.
Would I go back to that time? Well, no, not really, Dad had to work far too hard and relying on our own crops worried him so much. I would like to be able to grow more veg though.

The history of fish and chip shops is interesting, evidently started in the 1860s. Not sure if they continued during WW2, but definitely existed just after the war. There were a few near where we lived in the late 40s and 50s.

I wonder how much life expectancy is influenced by progress in medicine rather than diet!

Mince and tatties was the staple dish in our household in the 40s and 50s. The week's menus were predictable. The fish man came twice a week; on Tuesdays we had sausages for our high tea and on Saturdays a beef stew for lunch. A salad was lettuce (from the garden) and tomatoes with perhaps a hard-boiled egg. We came home from school for midday meal and it was almost always Mum's very thick soup, stock made from knuckle bone which was pressure cooked for the stock and then given to the dog which she would proceed to bury.
Although we had the usual childhood bugs, we were pretty fit as we had to walk or cycle to school - about 1km - there and back twice a day, and there was often hockey practice after school; tennis and swimming in the summer; daily dog walking too.

If food was so unhealthy post war I wonder why at 72 I still have two parents aged 97 and my mother in law lived to 103.

Does anyone remember British Restuarants' ?where in the years of WW11 and rationing you could obtain a cooked meal.?My father, as my mother was working shifts in a hospital as it was compulsory for a woman to work in those war years, she took hospital in preference to munitions unless you had a good reason not to work , would meet me out of school and take me to this restaurant where he knew I had at least one cooked meal a day. Steak and kidney pudding and jam and treacle sponges were my favourites.I don't' think obesity was the problem then in spite of the stodge. We eat to live not live to eat.

We enjoyed Findus Crispy Pancakes which I haven't seen for ages.
I remember tins of Cremola Foam, a sweet sugary drink, you mixed the pink powder with water.
St Ivel soft cheese which came in a navy blue box.
My parents didn't find foreign food appealing so we never ate curries at all, in fact I've not tried one to this day.

In our family coffee was called Camp, came in bottle and was only used to flavour cakes!

annodomini - Your mum buried the dog?

No, our food certainly wasn't healthier when we were children, except in one area - we consumed much less sugar.

In my home sweets were bought on Saturday for the princely sum of sixpence (old money) per child, and it was up to the child whether she ate the lot on Saturday, which my sister did, or spun them out to last the week (me). There were no more sweets before next Saturday whatever you did.

Lemonade was a party drink, we weren't even given it on Sundays. Orangeade, same rules. Two biscuits for each member of the family for morning coffee (we had ours with us at school to eat with our free milk).

If we were hungry between meals and asked we were allowed to take a slice of bread. (Quite literally, nothing went on that slice, you ate it in the kitchen or outside while playing).

Dinner was a 5.30 p.m. and nothing at all to eat until porridge in the winter and cornflakes in the summer at 7.30 next morning during term time - 9 a.m at the weekends and during school holidays.

Try running that regime past the grandkids - your ears will be blue with their comments!

My mum was a very plain cook certainly nothing vaguely foreign came near our house. In the 1950's it was cooked breakfast, cooked lunch, slightly later a snack lunch and hot meal in the evening. She made everything from scratch but by the late fifties early sixties would sometimes buy a Fullers cake for birthdays or special treat. Right into the 1960's one aunt would bring her own banana to Sunday tea as she didn't expect my mum to provide everything, a left over from wartime I suspect.

As well as being more active I'm sure we used more energy keeping warm in houses with no central heating. who remembers frost on the inside of their bedroom window?