It's hard to date some photos isn't it, I tend to look at what I'm wearing, how old my brother looks as he's four years younger than me and then where we are. This was taken at Pontins, the Middleton Towers camp I think, we only ever went to two of their camps, but this was my parents favourite one.
I went down a rabbit hole of thinking about the past yesterday after watching the YouTube channel British Nostalgia while I ate my breakfast. They are good videos if you can get over the AI voiceover that occasionally gets his words wrong and puts emphasis in the wrong places, and if you just laugh at the photos not always matching the commentary.
This is the video that I watched.
It was very true of a lot of the meals we ate back in the 60s and 70s in Manchester, England.
It's funny, as children we never thought of ourselves as poor, although we lived in just three rooms. They were the downstairs rooms of my Nana's house. We shared the bathroom that was upstairs and had to be quiet so as not to disturb her whenever we used it, but I never minded that. When I was thirteen in 1973 we got a brand new council house and moved out ... much to my Mum's relief.
We ate simply and cheaply, and I could cope with most foods, although even then I hated meat. But I was forced to eat it, we always had to clear our plates ... 'or the starving children in Africa would be upset'. Even as a child I thought that Mum's statement was ridiculous. Mum was not a good cook, which was slightly ironic as she was a school dinner lady! We ate the most basic foods, overcooked to within an inch of their lives, hence my hatred of Brussels sprouts to this day ... and my brother's pea phobia .
So watching this YouTube video brought back a lot of memories, good ones and bad ones ... liver and onions when overcooked would be useful for a cobbler, he would be able to resole leather shoes with the liver glued on with the gloopy onions. Well my Mum's version anyway. 😖
But one thing we never had, but my ex-husband did, was Connie Onnie butties, or sandwiches if you from the posh end of the street.
Sugar sandwich, sitting on back doorstep, on Monday mornings (wash day) watching Mum put sheets through the mangle. Condensed milk sandwiches (on plate, sat at table. Sticky, sweet and drippy) Golden syrup suet pudding, boiled in a cloth. Boiled cabbage (I got into trouble for suggesting we sent it to the starving children in Africa because I didn't want it)
ReplyDeleteBrilliant memories of your food. Oh my Mum's boiled cabbage was slimy and awful, I would have sent it anywhere if I could have. :-)
DeleteWe never had condensed milk sandwiches but I remember brown sugar sandwiches were good.
ReplyDeleteI obviously really missed out on all of these didn't I. :-)
DeleteWe were 'proper posh'! I had never heard of sugar sandwiches until I listened to a radio 4 programme when I was about 8; I was very taken aback that they were a thing. Although my mother would give us Dutch rusks brought over by her sisters with bitter and brown sugar as a treat.
ReplyDeleteHaving learned to cook in the Netherlands and then later as an auto pair in France
Au pair ! in France her cooking style was more continental, and her liver and onions was another favourite treat, as opposed to school liver - ugh. She had nearly starved as a child in Holland in the war and never forgot. Her first taste of white bread from an air drop was a revelation.
DeleteI hadn't heard of them until I met my first husband and he told me about his childhood meals.
DeleteThat was weird I actually read the original comment as 'Au Pair', strange how the brain works!! Imagine the thrill of white bread for the first time. :-)
DeleteWe sometimes had golden syrup sandwiches on white bread. The very thought makes my teeth ache now. Catriona
ReplyDeleteOh yes, I can just imagine the sweetness, and all the tooth fillings in years to come. No wonder dentists were kept so busy!
DeleteWe used to have jam or syrup sandwiches, meat or fish paste sandwiches. Yuk! To this day, I can't eat any of those. My mother also used to make rice pudding, but it was mostly milk and not much rice. I remember squabbling with my sister over who was going to have the skin. I have just got back into making rice pudding again after well over 60 years. I make it in the slow cooker with whole milk and a tin of evap. milk. It's yummy scrummy and even better cold. I use a tweaked version of the Carnation recipe and it is now a weekly essential. Essie.
ReplyDeleteYes, we used to have jam or paste sandwiches at the weekends, when for some reason Dad was always in charge of Saturday lunch. He could make a little jar of meat or fish paste cover SIX rounds of sliced bread. I was amazed when we had tea at my aunties house one week, and she used a full jar on every two rounds of bread. I thought it was lovely, but my Mum and Dad complained all the way home about how sickly they had been.
DeleteThe saddest poor food I read about was kettle soup from the 1930s. It was just a bowl of boiling water seasoned with pepper, eaten as if it was a real meal, so the children went to bed with something hot inside them.
ReplyDeleteWe had a lot of homemade soup with thick slices of plain bread, or toast made on the toasting fork at the fire. The basic white loaf was real food, not UPF stuff. Toast and dripping was a treat, or bread and Mum’s runny jam.
That is so sad isn't it, imagine being a parent and having to do that. Yes, white bread was a lot more unprocessed back in the day, I loved toasting it in front of the fire upstairs with my Nana. I was upset to find that I had left her toasting fork behind when we moved from Wales, it was hung on the wall next to the log burner. :-(
DeleteJam, syrup, sugar sandwiches - no wonder my ageing teeth are needing a lot of expensive attention!
ReplyDeletePig’s liver overcooked…..as mentioned……like shoe leather
One strange treat, even when we were far too old for such things , were Farleys Rusks, we would eat them dry, like a large biscuit or with warm milk if we had the ‘ collywobbles “ !
Alison in Devon x
My older son loves Farleys Rusks, he was very happy when I started buying them again for his little brother when he was six. He was also very happy when his own children were eating them and he could pinch a couple for breakfast. Sadly he was never around at breakfast time to give his grandchildren some, or he would have been pinching them all over again. :-)
DeleteToast and dripping! Delicious and there was always a big pot of dripping from the Sunday roast - nothing was wasted.
ReplyDeleteThat is something that I have never tasted, although I used to love a 'dip butty'. Just a slice of white bread dropped into the frying pan after the bacon had been lifted out for my Dad's breakfast.
DeleteI lived on a farm both in England and Canada, so I would class my meals as posh as usually there was always a good amount of food on our table. . But, we did have dripping on bread, suet pudding, fish paste sandwiches, plus some of the other food mentioned above. One thing that was absolutely disgusting, (for me anyway) was a pudding made with macaroni instead of rice, I think rice was not very plentiful in the 40"s so Mum would substitute the macaroni. We always had lots of milk, so that was a regular dish, To this day I cannot and will not eat macaroni and cheese, it's not the taste but the texture. Yuk!!
ReplyDeleteOh my … your mum sounds like mine when it comes to cooking … she was a school cook too. She also liked boiling everything to mush. I had an absolute hatred for a Sunday dinner after being made to sit there until I either finished it or was sick. Again … there were children starving in Africa. Never had a Connie onnie sandwich but we used to have treacle sandwiches (golden syrup) and they were scrummy 🙈🙈🙈
ReplyDelete