Eating in the fifties

[CGW]

3 hours ago, ChipButty said:

Who remembers going out to buy your new clothes for Whit Sunday?

We used to call it "shoplifting"! ???? 

[chickenslegs]

1 hour ago, roo860 said:

Seriously, we didn't have alot of money for clothes, food was more important. My dad used to buy my clothes from the Army Navy Stores. I used to go to school dressed as a Japanese General!!

I think I first heard that joke on the Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club TV show in 1975.

But, it still made me snort beer out of my nose 45 years later.

[chickenslegs]

5 hours ago, roo860 said:

I remember being at my public school, I was a 6th former, we used to toast bread on the open fire, we'd then get the first year oinks to bend over and use their ar#e as a toast rack!

????????

Is your name Flashman?

[4MyEgo]

7 hours ago, Airalee said:

Don’t know why people think you’re being so harsh.  I had a mother that would have made “mommy dearest” look tame by comparison.  Thank goodness she died before my dad did.

Thanks for sharing, my daughters 5 and 10 argue a lot when playing, the 5 year old is very strong (spoilt), as everybody loves her dearly, she is a real Shirley Temple but has to have her way, anyways after yelling to the from a distance to settle down, when I have had enough, I will up and go to wherever they are, upon arrival take off my belt from my trousers, tell them that I had warned them several times about their bickering and tell them to turn with their back to me, both laughing, me belt in hand folded over.

 

I say do you think it's funny do you, they stop, well sort of, until I take a deep breath and down it comes, straight to the concrete floor, with both off them running forward and turning around looking at me and laughing, hands over mouth, wth the youngest saying, again, again, papa and running back to me and turning around....lol

 

I then say to them, girls, you should have met my dad, his belt never missed.

 

The above said, the day I hit my kids, will be the day I would be like my dad, never gonna happen, the scars are still there, I leave that to their mum, me running in and covering them and saying, don't mummy, don't their sorry, with their mummy, looking at me saying your too soft, no I'm not mummy, just all bark and no bite ????

 

[thaibeachlovers]

21 hours ago, vogie said:

Yes and we never had lunch, we had dinner and our next meal was at tea time.

I grew up very confused as to what was dinner as it could be either at midday or evening. I think dinner always had a desert and lunch didn't but still not sure.

In Ireland the evening meal was supper and not much to eat at all which is sensible. One doesn't want to go to bed with a full stomach.

Breakfast should be the largest meal, dinner not so large and supper small.

[thaibeachlovers]

17 hours ago, roo860 said:

I remember being at my public school, I was a 6th former, we used to toast bread on the open fire, we'd then get the first year oinks to bend over and use their ar#e as a toast rack!

????????

Didn't call them public schools in NZ- private schools.

Back then we were called fags in first year ( before fag meant something else ) and toasted bread on the one bar electric heater in our fagmaster's study. Happy days.

[thaibeachlovers]

17 hours ago, transam said:

We were the first in our street to have a telly, 1953, the street were in our house watching the Coronation...????

Don't think NZ had tv till the 60s. I went to the neighbour's to watch it. Everything on it was dire, but we watched it because it was telly.

 

[thaibeachlovers]

17 hours ago, ivor bigun said:

I remember my dad bringing a banana for me ,i took the skin to school to show my friends, i can remember my Grans kitchen ,always fresh baked cakes and home made jam.

Nanny used to cook fantastic food and i went to private school(day boy) until i was 12 we used to toast bread in the school kitchen and put lots of dripping on it lovely (posh wasnt i) ???? actually every one of my family even have letters after their name and 2 awards ,all except me ,not so posh after all.????

actually we did have a nanny until i was about 14,i was the eldest.

happy happy days. 

I'd get sent to the grocers for a load of bread. Before sliced bread and in 2 halves joined together wrapped in a piece of paper ( no such thing as plastic bags ). By the time I got home I'd eaten the middle out of the loaf but it didn't look as if I had. Happy days.

[TooBigToFit]

And back in the fifties, there were probably still a few groups of canibals around the world feasting on the occasion lost tourists.

Edited March 2, 2020 by TooBigToFit

[toofarnorth]

21 hours ago, vogie said:

Yes and we never had lunch, we had dinner and our next meal was at tea time.

Interesting , a good topic here with mates.   We had ( in the 50's ) Breakfast , lunch and tea.   In the '60's , Breakfast Lunch and dinner .  Sundays were different .  We had breakfast , dinner and supper.   If a Thai asks me what we have here now it is brunch and dinner.   A different routine possibly by being here and retired and 73 yo. Oh and not getting out of bed at 7 am for food.

[CGW]

17 hours ago, transam said:

We were the first in our street to have a telly, 1953, the street were in our house watching the Coronation...????

You must have been proper posh! first telly we had was in 1959, remember Dad twiddling lots of dials and telling me never to touch! First thing I remember watching was gratuitous violence in the form of cartoons.

Once "governments" realised how easy it was to influence the masses with propaganda & garbage through the TV it wasn't long before they were easily available! & the masses were all addicted, remember having a slot TV at one time, can't recall what coinage you had to feed it ????

[toofarnorth]

18 hours ago, malarkyman said:

Jimmy edwards , WHACKO them were the days of real gems of britt comedy"s.

Ok , but the topic is eating in the '50s . Saying that in about 1958 and first day at senior school  I got whacked for refusing to eat the school dinner.  It was supposed to be stew , lumps of gristle and fat instead , vlie , took me years before I could eat a meat pie.   Best food I remember from the '50s was Sunday dinner , roast beef , yorkshire puds, peas etc.

[sharktooth]

6 minutes ago, toofarnorth said:

Ok , but the topic is eating in the '50s . Saying that in about 1958 and first day at senior school  I got whacked for refusing to eat the school dinner.  It was supposed to be stew , lumps of gristle and fat instead , vlie , took me years before I could eat a meat pie.   Best food I remember from the '50s was Sunday dinner , roast beef , yorkshire puds, peas etc.

Dinners at my primary school were so bad we used to stuff the food in our pockets and chuck it away in the playground. Head Master wouldn’t let you out if you left food on your plate.

[transam]

3 minutes ago, sharktooth said:

Dinners at my primary school were so bad we used to stuff the food in our pockets and chuck it away in the playground. Head Master wouldn’t let you out if you left food on your plate.

Must confess, my school dinners were really good, especially the variety of stuff with custard on offer for afters, plus waiting for that call   .."Anyone want seconds".......????‍????

[roo860]

14 minutes ago, transam said:

Must confess, my school dinners were really good, especially the variety of stuff with custard on offer for afters, plus waiting for that call   .."Anyone want seconds".......????‍????

Apple crumble!!!! 

????

[Cryingdick]

The only difference between eating now and the 50s is that most of us still had teeth in the 1950s.

[xylophone]

22 hours ago, transam said:

For me it it was all mum's creations

And that, unfortunately was the case in our poverty stricken council house...... 

 

This because my mum must've been the worst cook in the world and it didn't help that when she was about 13 she was sent to work in an armaments factory and consequently lost her sense of smell and taste, to a certain extent, so you can imagine the sort of food I/we ate.

 

Apples were the only thing in good supply as we had a large cooking apple tree in a garden which seem to last the whole year, and for those eating ones, I and a couple of kids used to go "scrumping", supposedly picking up windfalls, but anything low hanging was fair game.

 

Bread and margarine sandwiches for tea, and my saviour was school dinners, and despite how many other children used to hate them, I was overjoyed to be able to eat as much as I possibly could! I think it was the school dinners which kept me alive, because I certainly couldn't face what my mum would cook.

 

If I was unlucky enough to be forced to eat what she cooked, it would usually be cabbage which had been boiled for about two hours, so was basically white with a green water surrounding it; a piece of fatty meat which had been wrapped in string and cooked in an oven for many hours until the only edible part of the very shrunken lump was actually the string (joking on this, but not far wrong because the meat was tough like you wouldn't believe), 
and all of this covered with the green water from the cabbage with absolutely nothing added to it apart from the fat from the meat......this was our gravy.

 

And many years later when mum discovered something akin to Bisto, the large lumps in this brown mess were not pleasant at all when you chewed on them.

 

Things like turnips, marrows and swedes were commonplace and I hated them.

 

My mum's culinary skills did not improve over the years and when I was in my midteens, I was exposed to an exploding Fray Bentos tin of steak and kidney pie, which she had put in the oven without taking the lid off, and when it did come out of the oven she pierced it with an old-fashioned tin opener and the bloody thing exploded, covering both her and I with hot gravy, minute pieces of meat and pastry – – not to mention the fact that it was all up the walls and even some on the ceiling.

 

The pièce de résistance would have to be her Mary Baker sponge, and to the sponge mix she was supposed to add some milk, but being poor it was always half milk half water, but the unfortunate part about this was my sister had been cleaning up the toilet area with a small bowl of Dettol with water added, which goes cloudy (like milk) as you would know.

 

She unwittingly put it on the very small kitchen counter and poor old mum, seeing it there used it in the sponge thinking it was milk (remember she had no sense of smell and very little of taste) and promptly put it in the oven.

 

Required time passed and out came the sponge, looking just like it should do, but with a bit of a strange smell and as I was hungry I ripped into the first piece of it, only to spit it out because of the Dettol flavour.

 

I said this was the pièce de résistance, but the time that she fried an egg in Teepol-type washing up liquid would also be hard to believe, but the egg did indeed fry and looked good apart from its very soapy taste.

 

Not hard to understand why I never ate much if any of the Saturday or Sunday dinner offerings, although teatime with its bread and margarine sandwiches was a highlight.

 

As the OP has said, there was so much we didn't/couldn't have and it now seems remarkable that we survived.

[sharktooth]

My old man had a garage in the village and used to fix the knackered cars the poor folk owned. Sometimes they would pay him in meat (via the poachers), or fish cos they were skint. Me and my brother used to complain to mum about stewing steak and trout, cos our friends got fish fingers and sausages and that was what we wanted. Kids eh?

[vogie]

I remember the rich kids on our way to school affording frozen Jubblys, think they were about 4 pence. On the rare occasion I got one I seem to remember they appeared to be the size of a house brick, but triangular. It took ages to suck all the orange out of them, but once all out you were left with a block of ice that would have sunk the Titanic.

 

 

[marko kok prong]

Before my time

[SiSePuede419]

Everything today is better than the 50's.  Cars, telephones, airplanes, satellites, TVs.

 

Why wouldn't food in the 50s be inferior to today, too?

 

Blind nostalgia. ????

[vogie]

15 minutes ago, SiSePuede419 said:

Everything today is better than the 50's.  Cars, telephones, airplanes, satellites, TVs.

 

Why wouldn't food in the 50s be inferior to today, too?

 

Blind nostalgia. ????

Some food was still on ration in the 1950s.????

Edited March 2, 2020 by vogie

[seancbk]

On 3/1/2020 at 1:12 PM, CGW said:

You had a table! proper bloody posh weren't you! 

Not really.  He thought cubed sugar was posh.  
 

[CGW]

54 minutes ago, SiSePuede419 said:

Why wouldn't food in the 50s be inferior to today, too?

There wasn't quite the same amount of greed about then, food was grown for nutrition, not profit, few chemicals were used if any, animals weren't fed <deleted>, injected with anything that will increase there value - for starters - need more? 

[JWRC]

1 hour ago, vogie said:

Some food was still on ration in the 1950s.????

Vogie, you also said everythng today is better than the fifties. I don't think that. We never had an abundance of money, but dad grew all his own vegs and we had lots of fruits, mum was a good cook and we ate healthy food. we actually talked, you know together as a family, the highlight of my week was us all around the piano on a Sunday singing along as my brother played. My dad used to pull my sleigh over the fields in winter, with me roped on so he wouldn;t loose me in the drifts, in summer it was a long bike ride every sunday and he would teach me the names of the roadside flowers, find birds nests and show me the eggs, sure we never had technology. but we had other things which I am thankful for.

[rickudon]

In the 50's ......

Breakfast - cornflakes, milk, toast and jam, cup of tea ..... rarely a real 'English Breakfast'.

Lunch - school dinners, say no more, Saturday Beans on toast, Sunday -roast dinner.

Evening meal - boiled meat, boiled potatoes, boiled peas! Or tea-time - sandwiches, cakes and tea.

[Andrew Dwyer]

2 hours ago, vogie said:

I remember the rich kids on our way to school affording frozen Jubblys, think they were about 4 pence. On the rare occasion I got one I seem to remember they appeared to be the size of a house brick, but triangular. It took ages to suck all the orange out of them, but once all out you were left with a block of ice that would have sunk the Titanic.

 

 

Used to eat those in the 60’s after school, once you had managed to get the damn thing open we used to gnaw away at them.

 

Makes my teeth hurt just thinking about it now !!

[BritManToo]

10 minutes ago, Andrew Dwyer said:

Used to eat those in the 60’s after school, once you had managed to get the damn thing open we used to gnaw away at them.

Makes my teeth hurt just thinking about it now !!

Makro used to sell them, they still might.

[BritManToo]

2 hours ago, SiSePuede419 said:

Everything today is better than the 50's.  Cars, telephones, airplanes, satellites, TVs.

Why wouldn't food in the 50s be inferior to today, too?

Blind nostalgia. ????

I wasn't around much in the 50s, but I was in the UK for all the 60s and the food was good.

New Zealand Lamb, Argentine beef, Danish bacon, South African apples, Spanish oranges, Bananas from the Windies.

Choice of electronic entertainment was a bit limited, radio or nothing.

[vogie]

4 minutes ago, JWRC said:

Vogie, you also said everythng today is better than the fifties. I don't think that. We never had an abundance of money, but dad grew all his own vegs and we had lots of fruits, mum was a good cook and we ate healthy food. we actually talked, you know together as a family, the highlight of my week was us all around the piano on a Sunday singing along as my brother played. My dad used to pull my sleigh over the fields in winter, with me roped on so he wouldn;t loose me in the drifts, in summer it was a long bike ride every sunday and he would teach me the names of the roadside flowers, find birds nests and show me the eggs, sure we never had technology. but we had other things which I am thankful for.

JWRC, I don't remember saying that "everything today is better than the 50s" but what I will say, it was different, some good, some bad. I was brought up by my grandparents, my grandfather had his own land where he bred pigs and chickens, we were very poor but we never went hungry. He also grew rhubarb, gooseberries and blackberries. You seem to have led a very happy family lifestyle, I never met my real father and my step father was none too keen on me, I had a half brother who they would take on holiday and leave me at home. My grandparents never owned a bath, so I would trudge down to my mothers house on a Friday evening for my weekly bath, all they had was a tin bath which would be filled by kettle, my step father would bathe first, then my mother and finally I got in the sludge????.

I did have many friends of my age and I enjoyed our adventures.

I remember the windows of my bedroom rattling with ice on the inside in winter, also their was never anyone to help me with my homework, if I did anything wrong, my granny would say "I'm going to tell your mother" I might not see my mother for days, but I knew I was in for a slap when she finally turned up, it is no wonder I was nervous and developed a stutter.

So I suppose there is good and bad about 50s as there is in modern times, but I would go back tomorrow without the blinking of an eye knowing what I know now.

People were much friendlier then, I remember our next door neighbours, she would buy uncut bread and make us chip butties, luxury.????