The Over 40s Club Meeting

[Miss Chicken]

It is a while since we have had an Over 40s Club (better known as the Old Farts Club) meeting.

The topic of this meeting is food that you ate as a child (especia;ly is it was different from what people eat today).

I remember when the only fast food you could buy came from your local fish and chips shops as there were no fast food chains - No McDonalds, KFC or Pizza Hut.

I also remember when Wagon Wheels were at least twice the size that they are today (at least I think they were much bigger).

 

[Goliath]

Hmm. An interesting question.

My overall impression is that there is a much greater variety of food available at the store nowadays, than when I was a child.

Plus, fewer things come in cans, and more of them come in cartons.

Certain foods are no longer available. One that I really miss is apple-lime juice--although I just checked the website of a major juice producer, and it seems to be coming back. Yay!

Thinking back to what Mom made--she had to feed four boys on a tight budget, so her options were fairly limited. We ate a lot of stews, prepared with the cheapest cuts of meat in a pressure cooker. We ate hamburger casserole, and Chef-Boyardee pizzas. We ate liver fairly regularly, despite the fact that we never failed to tell her just how much we hated it. We also ate lots of vegetables, and drank a lot of milk.

As a consequence of this fairly monotonous but plentiful and nutritious diet, we all grew into monsters: I'm 6'4" tall, just slightly taller than my older brother, and shorter than my two younger brothers.

And to this day, stews and hamburger casseroles are comfort foods, for me.

 

[JustKate]

Let me see...

In those days, back in the Dark Ages, lots of American families ate certain foods for dinner on certain days of the week. Really. I mean, for many, just about every day of the week had its appointed food. My family didn't do that most of the time, but we did have hamburgers every Friday and steak (cheap steak, since there was 5 and later 6 of us and my parents didn't have that much money) on Saturday.

Neither of those is odd, of course, but one thing I haven't eaten for decades is tuna casserole (called "tuna hotdish" in some areas of the midwest, I think). I still kind of like tuna casserole, actually, but my husband doesn't, and anyway it's made with canned cream of mushroom soup which means it's loaded with sodium, so I haven't had any in ages.

Another thing I haven't had in ages (or heard of hardly any one else having either) but don't miss one tiny bit is salmon loaf, which is this sort of meatloafish thing made of canned salmon. This does not do any favors for the salmon. It took me years to get over that and find out that I like real salmon. Years.

 

[ITL]

When I was a kid I always loved the fried onions that we got with school dinners - for some reason, they were the best fried onions in the history of existence. I simply cannot replicate their awesomeness, no matter what. You think it'd be easy - how hard can it be to fry some onion, right? But that certain something in the taste that I recall so well eludes me...

And now that fish & chips have been mentioned I wants some. It's been ages since I have, so tomorrow I will indulge.

 

[Mistral]

When I was a kid I always loved the fried onions that we got with school dinners - for some reason, they were the best fried onions in the history of existence. I simply cannot replicate their awesomeness, no matter what. You think it'd be easy - how hard can it be to fry some onion, right? But that certain something in the taste that I recall so well eludes me...

And now that fish & chips have been mentioned I wants some. It's been ages since I have, so tomorrow I will indulge.

Lard-they were fried in lard or Crisco.

 

[Capn Flukie]

I remember... um... I remember... crap. I forgot...

 

[trekkiedane]

Aahh, the foods of childhood: freshly caught European plaice (Pleuronectes platessa) was one of the delicacies when visiting grandma and granddad in their summerhouse, I spent many summers there!
My other grandma was an expert at steaming haddock... this thread is making me hungry -gotta go now; will be back later!

 

[Miss Chicken]

One of the things that I remember is that we always called the midday meal lunch or dinner and the evening meal was alway called tea.

What I remember most about Mum's cooking is blandness.

For the main meal of the day (whether it was served at midday or in the evening) we had meat and three veggies. The potatoes were either boiled or mashed. One of the other two vegetables was always peas and either beans or carrots. These vegetables were boiled until they were almost tasteless. I don't think I tasted corn until after I left home.

On Sunday we would have chicken and roast potatoes along with the boring peas and carrots.

On Thursday my mother used to bake. She would make a large sponge cake and a lot of cupcakes. All the cakes had chocolate icing. We would take the cupcakes to school in lunchboxes (along with our vegemite sandwiches and apple). The cupcakes were nice early in the week but quite stale by Wednesday or Thursdau lunch time.

Actually Tuesday might have been Baking Day. My Mum had a Baking Day, a Washing Day, A Shopping Day, a Vacuuming Day etc.

 

[ITL]

When I was a kid I always loved the fried onions that we got with school dinners - for some reason, they were the best fried onions in the history of existence. I simply cannot replicate their awesomeness, no matter what. You think it'd be easy - how hard can it be to fry some onion, right? But that certain something in the taste that I recall so well eludes me...

And now that fish & chips have been mentioned I wants some. It's been ages since I have, so tomorrow I will indulge.

Lard-they were fried in lard or Crisco.

That's part of it, I'm sure!

 

[RJDiogenes]

Well, I used to drink Goofy Grape and all the other Funny Face drinks; they're history. And for cereal, I used to eat a lot of Quisp and Quake. Quisp is apparently kind of around again, in a limited way, but Quake is still gone.

Coke and Pepsi came mostly in glass bottles. And the tin cans that beer came in were tough, not like the flimsy aluminum things today; if you tried crushing one of those against your forehead, you'd fracture your skull.

On cold Winter mornings, I used to have Cream Of Wheat, which is still around, now in several flavors; original Cream Of Wheat is still a major comfort food for me.

One of my favorite dishes from those days was something my Grandmother used to make for my Uncles, which was called "Mother's Goodies." It was vegetable soup mixed in with ground hamburger and poured over mashed potatoes.

 

[Star Wolf]

We not only drank unfiltered tap water, we drank it from the garden water hose.

 

[MANT!]

I miss the following..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKo9VIQcN9M&feature=related

My family had one..

would love to have it again..even if I have to keep adjusting the controls..

(I got my interest in Electronics by being the best TV adjuster in the family)

 

[Mallory]

My mom made us bacon, eggs and toast every morning until I turned 13. And going to school in the South in the 60s earned me things like gizzards, grits and okra for lunch. Along with those little cardboard containers of milk, of course.

 

[Trippy]

We not only drank unfiltered tap water, we drank it from the garden water hose.

QFT

Penny candy. Yes folks, a penny used to mean something and you could buy stuff with one!

 

[ShimmeringFacet]

Well, my mother is from Georgia so:
Cream of Wheat, Roman Meal, Oatmeal, cream of rice
Grits with butter. My grandmother made grits with fried fish and biscuits. The usual bacon and eggs.
Cornbread, collard greens, Okra with tomatoes, pork chops, fried and baked chicken, potato salad, meat loaf, chili beans( we had this quite a bit) black eyed peas, ham hocks, sweet potatoes, string beans. Fish was sometimes dipped in a cornmeal salt and pepper combo before frying. Once in awhile we had tacos. My mom had this taco casserole concotion she often made. Stuff like Hamburger Helper.
Holiday- peach cobbler and sweet potato pie ( never liked this, sorry) pound cake

red jello with fruit cups ( wouldn't eat that now!)

We had fast food joints like McDonalds and many of the same ones that are around now, but my mother frowned on these and didn't want to spend the money on them.

 

[WillsBabe]

My childhood diet was pretty boring when I look back at it, and contained far, far too much meat for my tastes now. My father ran his own business, so I suppose we were pretty affluent and this was reflected in rump steaks and a great deal of beef on the weekends. I remember that my mother used to bake and cook in ways that probably doesn't happen much now. She baked puddings for dessert and made her own custard and also made pies and other things. Looking back, most of my diet seemed to consist of meat and two veg in some form or another, which is the way I don't eat at all these days. Food seemed to be much blander and far more limited back then (70s/80s I'm thinking). But that may have been my family's take on food rather than what was actually available in British shops at the time.

 

[Phoenicianknight]

My dad worked 12 hours on Friday and Saturday, and my mom worked 8 hours and an hour drive home. Which meant no one wanted to cook. So Friday night was always fish and chip night (A huge bucket of shrimp and fries, and a 2 six packs of soda). Saturday night was the whole family going for pizza. Now there wasn't any pizza places with video games, it was just the entire family having pizza and having conversation.

 

[RJDiogenes]

And back in those days, TV dinners came in aluminum trays; somehow that made them taste much better.

 

[JAG]

I forgot the aluminum trays! We had the Hoffman soda man, drive past the house once a week to deliver soda. We had a milkman too. I remember Banquet had these frozen bags of Chicken ala King, that my Mom would make us over toast. They were good!!

 

[Miss Chicken]

Mum used to make us tomato and cheese jaffles (toasted sandwiches) made in a round jaffle iron

that was place in the flames of our gas stove. I think these jaffles tasted nicer than those cooked using a modern sandwich toaster.