Food From My Childhood

Memories of Childhood Foods

Milk

I did not like milk. Actually I hated it. Everyone had milk when I was at school; me, I just would not drink it. In fact, I was given special permission to keep the milk with me all day, I guess they were hoping I would drink it all; as far as I can remember, I never drank a whole carton.

Whatever the illness or ailment that you had, the prescription was always a nice glass of warmed milk. My parents used to say “Drink it, it will make you feel better”. Of course, I did do as I was told but, true to form, every time I was sick afterwards, so eventually they did stop giving it to me.

My parents and others still had their warm milk, but just the smell of it would make me feel sick. They would try to disguise it in Horlicks or Ovaltine but again the smell and look of it would make me feel sick, and I was sick many times just through that smell. To this day I cannot stand the smell of warmed milk, or anything like it. It just makes me feel sick.

I few years ago, on holiday, we all went into a well-known shop to get a sandwich. I had to run out and leave them there as it had that smell of warm milk and melted cheese. I was almost sick inside the shop, just got out in time. I was quite white and green looking when they came out to me with the sandwiches. We have all had many a laugh over it since.

But the strange thing is, give me custard and I love it, even though it has milk in it.

Writing this brief note has brought back so many happy memories - well, perhaps not the warm milk - so I am going to make a trifle for the weekend, and I think it is going to have to be a jam sandwich for lunch.

Linda Downes

Childhood Food Memories

My Mom loved vegetables! She wasn’t a vegetarian, she just liked them, and she would pile her plate high no matter what the meal. Mom was particularly fond of the Cruciferous kind – Cauliflower, Sprouts and Cabbage; in contrast, I as a child hated all three, but that did not deter Mom from giving me generous portions of the offending articles. Under protest I would tolerate modest amounts of cauliflower or cabbage but sprouts! that was a different thing altogether, I disliked them beyond belief. Mom would try all sorts of cunning tricks to get me to eat them, including hiding them under a pile of lovely fluffy mashed potato, I don’t know how she could think that I would eat them with the potato and not notice, it is not like they were of a similar consistency, but you had to give her 10 out of 10 for trying. As I got into my teens, I did rebel and I would leave the vegetables on my plate until, in the end, she got frustrated at the waste and gave up, replacing the three types with peas or green beans which I was always happy to eat. Today, I am much more accommodating, I will eat cauliflower, and also cabbage as long as it is either white or red, but I still do not like the green version. And I will eat sprouts, albeit in very small amounts i.e. 2 or 3 at most.

School Dinners

Although much of my early childhood was during wartime, rationing meant that we had enough food; and my mother was a good housekeeper and cook, so she made the best from what was available. I was able to walk home from primary school after the morning session and have a hot home cooked meal before walking back for the restart of lessons at 2.00 pm; and although some children had school dinners in the Junior School, I never did.

Things changed when I went to the Grammar School in 1947. It was a bus ride to get home so I had to stay for school dinners. They were horrible. At least I thought so. There was only one dish I liked; that was cheese pie, and even then I can remember that the tin sometimes gave the bottom of the pastry a metallic taste that set my teeth on edge. Cabbage was boiled to the point of submission and one time we girls were both fascinated and horrified to find a scouring pad woven into the shreds of the watery grey cabbage.

Puddings were more palatable. Rice pudding came with a dollop of orangy jam, and the custard - when not lumpy - went well with jam roly poly and spotted dick. Sago pudding however with its gelatinous affinity to frogspawn was not very popular. Eventually my mother allowed me to take sandwiches instead, and have a lovely home cooked dinner in the evening.

I think that I was very lucky because, if my mother had gone out to work, I would probably have had to endure the meals until I left school.

Sheila Clarke

I was born in the era of rationing, but only just. The last restrictions were lifted a few weeks later. The impact lived on in our house for a much longer time. My mother was determined not to run out of important items. There was no need to worry if you emptied the packet of sugar. The cupboard above would have another one. This was the trigger to buy more. This system has many parallels to modern production control systems. The Japanese word is Kanban. I am pretty sure that any reference to Japanese terms would not have been well received in those days. The important thing was that the system worked.

Our food was plain. Meat, potatoes, two (or more) vegetables and gravy. The vegetables were very well cooked. Heavy on the vegetables, light on the meat. Roast on a Sunday. Cold on a Monday. Potatoes cooked every which way imaginable.

It is quite instructive to consider the things that we did not eat. Pasta? I don’t think so, although it made an appearance in later years. Rice? Only in the eponymous pudding. Curry? No. Chinese? No. Pizza? No. Burgers? No, but we did have rissoles, heavy on the breadcrumbs, light on the meat. Nothing frozen, because we did not have a freezer. I am not sure that we had a fridge in the early days. There was a larder, with a cold slab in it. This wasn’t a problem. The milk was delivered every day, in recyclable glass bottles, by a man driving an electric vehicle. How modern!

Keith Stanley

Marrow stuffed with Sausage Meat

David and I would invariably get ourselves into trouble, nothing serious, just boys being boys. As he was older than me by a couple of years, I think we can all agree that he was the instigator – yeah, right!! I remember, one time when he came down to stay with us in London, we set up our own Detective Agency and would follow people who looked shifty around the streets of Earls Court in the hope that we would see them commit a crime we could investigate; of course, we never did, which was just as well.

If you don’t know it, Ventnor, is very hilly. It was a quick journey down to the town – indeed, it was difficult not to break into a run, it was so steep – and a long, slow slog back up to St. Alban’s Road. David and I would walk down to Ventnor Pier and study the pay-outs on the machines in the penny arcade. On the last morning of one holiday, we realised that one particular machine had started paying out in a regular pattern. Naturally, we took advantage!! Soon my shorts were bulging, the pockets stuffed with penny coins, to the extent that I was having to hang on tight to them to preserve my modesty. David had slightly less than me but we considered it a good morning’s work as we trudged slowly back up the hill to our holiday home high above the sea. When I counted up, I had more than a pound in penny coins, David slightly under a pound, and those were the large old penny coins that were heavy in their own right. Although I was feeling especially pleased with this significant addition to my weekly pocket money, my parents were not at all impressed, or pleased at my economic enterprise, as the time we had spent fleecing the machine meant we’d missed our ferry booking back to the mainland and home.

Now, you are probably thinking, what has any of this to do with food. Well, I was coming to that. Consider for a moment the humble marrow. Vegetable gardeners will know all too well that you have only got to turn your back for a day and the tasty courgette you’ve been carefully growing, and were just about to harvest, has turned overnight into an enormous marrow, leaving you with the problem of what to do with it. My Mum had one solution. Looking back on it, I think she felt that she was entitled to a holiday as much as us kids, so cooking needed to be quick and easy. She would buy a marrow, cut it in half and scoop out the soft middle to remove the seeds. She would fill the cavities with sausage meat, then re-join the two halves and tie them together with string. Into the oven they went, emerging an hour or so later to be accompanied by peas – tinned, of course – or perhaps a few boiled potatoes. Kids fed; job done!

I always remember this as a tasty meal but my attempts over the years to persuade my wife to give it a try have always fallen on stoney ground. Every year we’ve faced the issue of what to do with the courgettes that have got out of hand and, believe me, you cannot give them away, no matter how well they contribute to your “5 a day”. We even resorted on one occasion to using them as prizes for the monthly charity quizzes we ran at the Ashmole Club in Hammerwich prior to the pandemic. My wife, Julie, resolutely refused to consider my Mum’s recipe, saying she didn’t fancy it but recently she finally succumbed, and I took over in the kitchen. Well, it wasn’t the best meal we’ve ever had but Julie declared that “it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be”. I’ll settle for that. Mind you, there was a lot of it!! Julie only dared the one portion but the rest lasted me for 3 days. To be honest, the marrow itself can be bland and watery, so you need something tasty or spicey to complement it. If you want to give it a go, there are several variations of my Mum’s recipe online, for example on the BBC Good Food Guide website

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/collection/marrow-recipes

And let’s face it, the 2021 growing season is well under way, so it won’t be long before those pesky courgettes start metamorphosing into marrows overnight. As I said, you just can’t give them away, even if you disguise them in marrow cake, so you might as well give my Mum’s recipe a go – that will deal with one marrow at least. Bon appétit.

Chris Graddon