Food when I was growing up

I can't remember what was usual for breakfast. I'm sure it was probably porridge in the winter but summer? Maybe we didn't have breakfast in the summer or maybe we had porridge summer and winter.

The house where I was born is still standing but it has electric lights now. Back to back terrace in Woodhouse, Leeds.

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The bath was in the kitchen and the toilets were outside but between my birth and my father's demise he had the second bedroom converted into a bathroom and the loft made into two bedrooms for my sister and myself (luckily, my cousin was a shopfitter for Burton's Tailors).

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Yorky said:
I can't remember what was usual for breakfast. I'm sure it was probably porridge in the winter but summer? Maybe we didn't have breakfast in the summer or maybe we had porridge summer and winter.
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I generally had some kind of sugary cereal with milk for breakfast on weekdays. On Saturdays that my dad wasn't working, we had eggs, or pancakes, or waffles with some kind of breakfast meat.

CD
 
Yorky said:
I was entitled to free school lunches.
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There was a stigma attached to free school lunches, maybe there still is. As every Monday morning each pupil is called up in class to pay his due (3 shillings I think it was) it didn't take long for the two "free dinner" pupils to be noticed. The ridicule got such that I asked my Mum if I could take a packed lunch in future. My first one was tomato sandwiches and my Mum asked if they were OK. I told her that they were very good and subsequently I was given tomato sandwiches for what could have been every day for another two years.

However good the tomato sandwiches were, no-one ever wanted to swap.
 
Brekky was 2 weet bix milk and sugar. I usually was first up of the boys. Cream off the top of milk. My bros just got milk lol.
No free lunches in nz .plenty of swaps of food in the playground at lunchtime.
I would get porridge if staying at my nanas.

Russ
 
One of my earliest food memory involves mushrooms. My dad got extra pocket money doing land surveying on weekends. One weekend he didn't have any work, so he and a friend went mushroom hunting in the southeast Michigan woods. They were very successful and he came home with HUGE pile of wild mushrooms. I was outside playing, came into the kitchen about dinnertime and immediately gagged! My Mom was frying up a huge skillet of mushrooms in butter, and I HATED the aroma! Man, what I would give for that skillet of mushrooms now!

And another thing I remember is chicken wings. Mom would bake up huge trays ( Everything looks big when you are 5 - 6 years old ) of chicken wings with sour cream and I think Italian dressing mix packets sprinkled over them. This was late 50s, when wings were dirt cheap and not the pricey treats they have become. I've tried to replicate her wings several times, but they just didn't seem as good as the ones when I was a child.

mjb.
 
Well, here’s a good story, and something I never knew about my wife’s upbringing.

Remember a couple of weeks ago, I posted in the groceries topic about buying some pepper loaf and Dutch (old-fashioned) loaf lunchmeats? I pointed out at the time that both are considered from another era and aren’t popular like ham or turkey are.

Today, when we got home from shopping a little, MrsT was peckish, so I made her a folded-over sandwich of one slice of Dutch loaf, mustard, a little raw onion, and one piece of bread.

“Here, eat that.”

I went back in the kitchen to make me one, and all of a sudden I heard, “Oh my god!!! Dutch loaf!!! This is Dutch loaf!!! I haven’t had this since I was a kid!”

Now, I grew up on the stuff, as Mom bought it quite a bit, second only to bologna, so I knew what to expect.

Turns out, though, when MrsT was a wee thing, and her folks would go to Pennsylvania (right to the exact area we’re looking to move to) to visit family, her dad would buy a whole unsliced block of Dutch loaf, however many pounds that is, and bring it home and freeze it, because they couldn’t get it in extreme upstate NY.

They’d eat that a lot, all through the year (five people can go through a lot of lunchmeat), but as the kids grew up, got married, moved out/away, they stopped doing that, so she hadn’t had any Dutch loaf since she was probably 16 or 17 years old.

She actually started to cry.

“I don’t know,” she said, “but Fall always reminds me of home, and Mom and Dad, and being in the North Country, and this just takes me right back to being 10 years old and Mom making everybody Dutch loaf sandwiches! Just like this! With mustard and raw onion! This tastes just like home!” 😭

She never realized, in the 19 years we’ve lived here, that Dutch loaf is pretty common here.
 
Mum always had afternoon tea as well. Inherited from her mother.
Cup of tea at 3pm. Biscuits and scones if grandparents were there. And cream most of the time. Mum used to make her own jam as well.
I'm 3rd generation jam maker. Mum and nana made from necessity. Me for pleasure.

Russ
 
teamfat said:
One of my earliest food memory involves mushrooms. My dad got extra pocket money doing land surveying on weekends. One weekend he didn't have any work, so he and a friend went mushroom hunting in the southeast Michigan woods. They were very successful and he came home with HUGE pile of wild mushrooms. I was outside playing, came into the kitchen about dinnertime and immediately gagged! My Mom was frying up a huge skillet of mushrooms in butter, and I HATED the aroma! Man, what I would give for that skillet of mushrooms now!
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Now that is interesting - foods we disliked as kids but now love.
 
In the time my parents had to save on living costs we were mostly vegetarian and mostly macrobiotic, so my 'poor' diet will have been quite different from most here yet it was also based around healthy and cheap staples that are common around the world.

Breakfast would be sourdough whole grain bread with peanut butter or jam (my mom made her own) or some kind of porridge of soymilk and oats with rice syrup ( a popular macrobiotic sweetener) and a piece of fruit.

For lunch it was basically the same but with some added raw vegetables and spreads like hummus or other vegetable or nut based spreads. Sometimes soup and bread. My mom would make those too.
Snacks consisted of rice cakes, date bars, and the occasional raisin bread.

Dinner was at least half the plate full of whole grains, brown rice, or unpeeled potatoes with raw and cooked veg on the side and a piece of protein like tofu/tempeh/an egg or sometimes fish. For dessert we'd have fruit or sometimes rice pudding.

It's a way of living that's very healthy and frugal, but not fit for a developing child about 6 years of age. My parents stopped eating that way due to the doctor diagnosing me with malnutrition. However, for an adult this would be a very healthy way to save money.
My parents were very unusual cooks for the Netherlands in the 1980's.
 
My mom was pretty skilled as a chef TBH. Usual everyday food was always enough carbs as pasta, potatoes or rice with some sauce and various cheap meat cuts. The veggies weren't her specialty though, salads were fine, but the cooked veggies... oh boy did she cook many veggies to death
 
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PabloLerntKochen said:
My mom was pretty skilled as a chef TBH. Usual everyday food was always enough carbs as pasta, potatoes or rice with some sauce and various cheap meat cuts. The veggies weren't her specialty though, salads were fine, but the cooked veggies... oh boy did she cook many veggies to death
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I think most of our mums boiled veges to death as well. Never hurt me lol

Russ
 
Bread featured a lot in our family's diet when I was growing up. Breakfast was usually porridge (cold cereal at weekends), preceded sometimes by half a grapefruit (for Mum and Dad) and half an orange (for the kids) and followed sometimes by a fry and, as if that wasn't enough, toast and a plentiful supply of home made bread - wheaten bread and soda bread mainly, which my mother made regularly. We had dinner in the middle of the day and 'tea' at 6, which was something light like fish fingers or cheese sauce with bread again to fill us up. That would be accompanied by tea or cold drinks.
 
Naillig said:
Bread featured a lot in our family's diet when I was growing up. Breakfast was usually porridge (cold cereal at weekends), preceded sometimes by half a grapefruit (for Mum and Dad) and half an orange (for the kids) and followed sometimes by a fry and, as if that wasn't enough, toast and a plentiful supply of home made bread - wheaten bread and soda bread mainly, which my mother made regularly. We had dinner in the middle of the day and 'tea' at 6, which was something light like fish fingers or cheese sauce with bread again to fill us up. That would be accompanied by tea or cold drinks.
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We only had 1 choice for brekky. Weet bix.

Russ
 
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