What Did We Eat?
Our food habits have changed greatly over the last 70 years, but now we seem to have largely reverted to the foods our parents and grandparents ate - simple home-cooked food - organic where possible - and grass-fed meat. Of course, a number of foods have been added to our diet - in my case all the Indian and Asian foods, particularly tofu and Asian vegetables, but often I eat casseroles (unfortunately not of pigeon) and oxtail such as my mother use to make, though without the generous sprig of thyme that she would pick from outside the back door. She never bought steak or a joint - too extravagant - and preferred long slow cooking in a battered blue iron casserole to any 'fast cooking'. Of course, we also dug our own potatoes from the fields that were utterly delicious and my father had a lovely vegetable garden.
In the very early days we kept a Jersey cow (looked after (by a cowman, Taylor) from which we had gallons of delicious creamy milk. My mother used to make butter and cream from it, but it was actually too much for the family to get through and so the cow eventually went. We always had chickens (and sometimes ducks) and always had fresh eggs, and indeed my parents used to take a box of eggs as a very welcome present whenever they went to have a meal or stay with anyone.
When young we had a Swiss nanny who introduced us to Bircher-Muesli but we also ate grape-nuts and Weetabix with the top of the very creamy milk, Cooked breakfast was often an egg or two (picked gingerly from beneath the chickens) baked in a ramekin dish and my father invariably had a boiled egg. Soldiers were of course essential. I think we had ordinary bread from a packet, this being the time before artisan bread had reappeared and after the 'evil miller' (Lord Rank according to Lady Redesdale) made us eat his 'ghost-white loaves' or dull, dry Hovis. I didn't know it then but I should have distrusted the Chorley Wood Process invented in the last century for making bread more quickly from insufficiently fermented dough, and rediscovered the soughdough that I eat today.
Of course, we didn't eat in restaurants or cafes (there were really only 'greasy-spoon cafes apart from Lyons Corner Houses) and pubs had no cooked food. Smith's crisps or little packets of peanuts were the only snacks, but it didn't matter as we ate in each others' houses where there was invariably a cook or someone in the kitchen turning our shepherd's pie or a big fry-up for breakfast. Friends were immensely long-suffering as we started to drive around and they would let us join in their meals or make or our own breakfast in their kitchen at 3am without complaint. At home, John Spreadbury's wife used to keep us supplied with cakes and shepherds' pies and was part-time in the kitchen as well as doing the cleaning.
My mother used to preside over the tea-tray in the afternoon, either in the drawing-room or the garden, and we drank her mix of Darjeeling and Earl Grey tea with cake (my father and the dogs liked ginger biscuits) obtained often from the WI. A special treat was a 'Fullers' coffee or walnut cake from Winchester. I don't think my mother ever made cake and she didn't make puddings either so our sugar intake was low - and she hated sugar anyway, scarcely allowing it in the house. She also took against salt and we had to slip it into to the vegetables ourselves.
But we ate naturally organic food all our childhood, and always home-cooked, and I doubt that anyone could have had a healthier diet.
In the very early days we kept a Jersey cow (looked after (by a cowman, Taylor) from which we had gallons of delicious creamy milk. My mother used to make butter and cream from it, but it was actually too much for the family to get through and so the cow eventually went. We always had chickens (and sometimes ducks) and always had fresh eggs, and indeed my parents used to take a box of eggs as a very welcome present whenever they went to have a meal or stay with anyone.
When young we had a Swiss nanny who introduced us to Bircher-Muesli but we also ate grape-nuts and Weetabix with the top of the very creamy milk, Cooked breakfast was often an egg or two (picked gingerly from beneath the chickens) baked in a ramekin dish and my father invariably had a boiled egg. Soldiers were of course essential. I think we had ordinary bread from a packet, this being the time before artisan bread had reappeared and after the 'evil miller' (Lord Rank according to Lady Redesdale) made us eat his 'ghost-white loaves' or dull, dry Hovis. I didn't know it then but I should have distrusted the Chorley Wood Process invented in the last century for making bread more quickly from insufficiently fermented dough, and rediscovered the soughdough that I eat today.
Of course, we didn't eat in restaurants or cafes (there were really only 'greasy-spoon cafes apart from Lyons Corner Houses) and pubs had no cooked food. Smith's crisps or little packets of peanuts were the only snacks, but it didn't matter as we ate in each others' houses where there was invariably a cook or someone in the kitchen turning our shepherd's pie or a big fry-up for breakfast. Friends were immensely long-suffering as we started to drive around and they would let us join in their meals or make or our own breakfast in their kitchen at 3am without complaint. At home, John Spreadbury's wife used to keep us supplied with cakes and shepherds' pies and was part-time in the kitchen as well as doing the cleaning.
My mother used to preside over the tea-tray in the afternoon, either in the drawing-room or the garden, and we drank her mix of Darjeeling and Earl Grey tea with cake (my father and the dogs liked ginger biscuits) obtained often from the WI. A special treat was a 'Fullers' coffee or walnut cake from Winchester. I don't think my mother ever made cake and she didn't make puddings either so our sugar intake was low - and she hated sugar anyway, scarcely allowing it in the house. She also took against salt and we had to slip it into to the vegetables ourselves.
But we ate naturally organic food all our childhood, and always home-cooked, and I doubt that anyone could have had a healthier diet.
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