Nostalgic Food - Good and Bad!

My first Chinese takeaway. China Inn Clondalkin (not very original) Chicken Curry, rice and chips. My first posh Chinese meal, The Orchid Szechuan on Pembroke Road, Dublin. All in the early 80's/90's. It's gone downhill since in a lot pf places.

L1011 wrote: »

Consumer microwaves are from the 50s, pretty sure my parents got one in the 70s to enable my mother to actually make dinners... The one we had when I was a kid was a veritable antique, fully analogue controlled with dials.

Ours was the late 80s and still had dials. My mother still couldn't cook with it. My memories are reheating cups of tea and defrosting meat. Really terrible times.:eek:

phormium wrote: »

Gosh I loved the Vesta curries but it's true there was always one dry powdery bit that didn't soften!

My mother did not really cook, we had a nanny and she did most of it but on her day off curried mince stew was my mother's special plus butterscotch instant whip which I hated!

The nanny used to give us 'goody' if we were sick, it sounds disgusting stuff but if you are sick it's amazing how nice it tastes.

Ha !

Didnt see your post 'till after mine above

Probably still have some packets of Vesta and instant whip in the top shelf of a press here.

What was it about Ground Ginger to be used on a slice of honeydew melon as an appetizer ?

Talking about Vesta curries, I just googled them and would you believe it, you can still buy them! Why?????

My parents both great cooks, still are. so we had no boring ould ****e food.
Mum always used to make lovely sweet waffles on Sunday nights with her very posh electric waffle iron that relatives in the uk gifted us.
The smell of waffles to this day takes me back.

Gloomtastic! wrote: »

Buttered Marietta and Weetabix with butter and jam/marmalade.

Ye must have been loaded.

Soft boiled egg and soldiers.

I’m starting to have memories I forgot I had reading this thread!

My mother was a decent cook although she probably suffered from the same thing as a lot of home cooks back then, overdonemeatitis and boiledtodeathvegieitis. For years I didn’t think I liked veg!

Staples in our house were stew, coddle (white! None of that red nonsense!), usual meat and 2 veg stuff. Always a roast on a Sunday, with the stuffing balls and trifle made by the kids the night before. Towards the end of the year she would make apple tarts made from the cooking apples from my Granny’s apple tree out her back garden. A dinner I used to love was fried mince, mixed with mashed potato and fried in the pan, and served with beans. I type of has I suppose?

As we got older she got a bit more adventurous. I remember the big hullabaloo when one of her work friends came over to show her how to make a curry! Fried onions, mixture of curry powder and flour fried in the onions for a bit , then a pack (or tin) or chicken soup, a load of water, and then add in shredded cooked chicken. Always served with homemade chips and rice. Amazing, and so exotic at the time.

Did someone mention Goobays? There’s a blast from the past! They used to have amazing chocolate donuts.

The 'goody' we had when sick was white bread mashed up in a cup with hot milk and some sugar, gross sounding but great stuff when you didn't feel well

Dizzyblonde wrote: »

phormium wrote: »

The 'goody' we had when sick was white bread mashed up in a cup with hot milk and some sugar, gross sounding but great stuff when you didn't feel well

I never had that, although my mother did when she was young. When we'd had tummy bugs my mother would make a bowl of cornflour with hot milk as you would with powdered custard. To 'bind' our stomachs :pac:

Did anyone else put HB vanilla ice cream into a huge glass with Club orange? It'd have a huge froth on it and it was delicious!

No, we had Coke and a pink Snack bar sticking out of the ice cream.
It was called a Coke Float.

Dizzyblonde wrote: »

Did anyone else put HB vanilla ice cream into a huge glass with Club orange? It'd have a huge froth on it and it was delicious!

Absolutely, but coke was always preferred. I do remember the very odd time you’d be sent out to the ice cream van with a big bowl and get him to fill it up with whipped ice cream to have back in the house.

We also used to have the “wafer man” that came around at tea time me in a blue VW style van and sell ice cream sandwiched between two wafers. He had this divider tool that would indent a standard block of HB ice cream into segments with each segment being 15p each so you could get a 15/30/45p wafer depending on how flush you were that day.

At some point, my dad picked up a sandwich grill type thing (a George Foreman when GF was just a boxer). It seemed ever so fancy.
My mum's big, thick, homemade burgers were overcooked in this most Saturdays.

This was before the sandwich toasters that seal the edges so toasted sandwiches were new to us as well.

I don't know who came up with it but I remember making toasted chocolate sandwiches!
Made with cooking "chocolate"!

I have to admit that I had a soft spot for the crispy pancakes. Never had for dinner - more of a snack/informal lunch kind of thing.
Haven't tasted them in over 30 years, I'd say.

Artic roll.
Artic roll.
Artic roll.
That was such a treat.

Mackerel.
We ate a lot of mackerel during the summer!

While I love fresh mackerel fillets, dredged in flour and quickly fried with fresh white bread and tea, I really dislike mackerel as part of a dinner, now. Too many mackerel dinners, I guess.

Dizzyblonde wrote: »

I never had that, although my mother did when she was young. When we'd had tummy bugs my mother would make a bowl of cornflour with hot milk as you would with powdered custard. To 'bind' our stomachs :pac:

Did anyone else put HB vanilla ice cream into a huge glass with Club orange? It'd have a huge froth on it and it was delicious!

Goody for us (hated it) was when there was no money for anything else. Same as tapioca and sago. We used to stick them behind the curtains.

When I was a child, I could not eat anything without getting sick. Was always sick. We were given cornflour to bind us up as you say. Because we hated the CornFlour, we were told it was "hot ice cream" just to make us eat it. Well, even though we knew it was not hot ice cream and we were being scammed, we ate it on the off chance that it COULD be hot ice cream. Well that came back up too.

We had the ice cream in lemonade - called them ice cream sundaes, the nicest ones were with the TK raspberry.

Hated tinned spaghetti too, made me sick. Was told that the alphabet spaghetti was differnt...made fck off on my plate and ate it...yep, came back up and the hot ice cream cycle began again.

anewme wrote: »

We had the ice cream in lemonade - called them ice cream sundaes

had them with coke and called them coke floats. I remember getting one as a treat in the Ilac centre, place I think called "the soda fountain" on the stairs up to the library.

We got those 10 pack stacks of frozen pizza. Used to do them in the microwave but it was actually faster to grill them as if they were microwaved the father would make you wait 6-7mins before eating them otherwise "they will cook your insides".

Got frozen chinese meals in dunnes cornelscourt for the oven in foil trays, think the brand was "mr chow" made in bray. I remember frozen quarter pounders coming in and everybody shocked at the massive size of them!

As a kid I didn't appreciate how well we ate. I do now.
For the people who's mother's gave them some of the awful food described here, it must have been an awful chore for the said mothers.
It must have been some drudge serving up dinners daily when you have no interest or knowledge of food and cooking. And then get little or no appreciation as the food is so bad.
What a horrible job.

Rows Grower wrote: »

No one was fat, and we never heard of diabetes or cholesterol. Mainly because the only time we sat down was to eat or to watch telly for an hour or two a week.

I remember my mum starving herself every Monday because she had Weight Watchers in the evening.......

tickingclock wrote: »

Noone was a coeliac either or allergic to anything and the words childhood obesity weren't linked together.

Yes there were not so many fad avoidances back then. But I also heard sth interesting about gluten.

A lot of food cupboard items were reformulated to remove butter and animals fats. They were replaced with worse fats and then also more gluten containing products to be vegetarian friendly.
A lot of glutebn intolerant - as opposed to allergic - coaeliacs didnt know they had it. they just thought they had sensitive stomachs or sth nebulous.

One reason why ppl may have preferred the taste of the good old days and its not just nostalgia.