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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 27, 2018 13:47:40 GMT
I regularly ponder when certain "modern" elements entered my diet. I know that we had frozen pizza and frozen chips already by 1965. In our backwater, I don't think there were even any pizzerias in those days, so the frozen stuff was incredibly exotic. My mother being an overworked teacher, we relied on quite a few frozen items in those days. She found frozen potatoes to be a godsend. As the years passed I realised how dreadful they actually were, but it took awhile because every other place was serving the same stuff. Then I avoided all sorts of frozen potatoes for years until I finally discovered that they are actually pretty good now.
I discovered the existence of yogurt in 1969 when I started university, probably quite a few other things too, but that was also because I was living in Los Angeles which had a much greater variety of food than the small towns where I had lived before.
But of course a lot of my early diet was completely weird anyway compared to just about everybody else in town. My mother continued to cook as much French food as possible whenever she could find the proper ingredients, and my diet would have flabbergasted all of my schoolmates.
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Post by bjd on Nov 27, 2018 16:07:12 GMT
My earliest years were in England but I don't remember anything about what we ate. My parents not being Brits, I supposed they did what they could with what was available. My mother told me once that we had mint growing in our garden, and she was surprised when the neighbour asked for some for sauce.
When we emigrated to Canada, Toronto was still pretty much Anglo-bland with sliced white bread, but fortunately it was already a city of immigrants and on Friday evenings my uncle would drive to Kensington Market in downtown (at least it was downtown in those days) and buy bread and cheese and good fruit and vegetables. We had proper rye bread delivered by a Polish bakery. During the 1960s, the neighbourhood we lived in became full of Italian grocery stores, Polish delis, German bakeries so food was never a problem. On the other hand, it was certainly not very "exotic".
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Post by mossie on Nov 28, 2018 17:12:36 GMT
Don’t get me started. As a child of the early thirties food was sparse until the early fifties! Raw fish was certain death, and a lot of other stuff mentioned above was unimagineable.
As for the gadgets, there were very few, a wireless set (radio to you)was about the limit. But we gavetheAmericans our radar secrets in 1940, this included the dish aerial which gets your satellite signals, and the magnetron which powers your microwave. And the so-and-sos never said thanks, just charged us a fortune for every radar set they made for us. It wasn’t until the much loved? Maggie that we finished paying.
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Post by bixaorellana on Nov 28, 2018 19:03:57 GMT
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Post by mickthecactus on Nov 28, 2018 19:40:51 GMT
Seriously fascinating stuff! Thanks.
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Post by questa on Nov 28, 2018 21:05:36 GMT
Oz mainly stuck to the menu that Mark describes, except we had Chinese food shops everywhere. We would take a billy-can to the shop and they put in rice and veg and meat...carry home...eat...yum. The wave of post war settlers opened shops of all types of cuisines.
I made my first kedgeree about a month ago...delicious...next will be spicier, the recipe was a bit too British=bland.
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Post by mossie on Nov 29, 2018 8:10:05 GMT
Thanks Bixa for putting me straight
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Post by cheerypeabrain on Nov 29, 2018 9:44:01 GMT
One of the local chip shops will allow you to take in your own container for food...cuts out all the plastic trays and bags. I wish more did this. When I was 18 - 19 there was a local pub that did take away beer..we used to take a big jug and get it filled with beer from the pumps then carefully take it back to the flat to share 😁
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Post by onlyMark on Nov 29, 2018 17:54:36 GMT
I lived in a pub for a few years. We had a window off the bar where people could get takeaway stuff. Regularly someone would come with a jug to fill up.
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Post by mossie on Nov 29, 2018 20:19:47 GMT
That was pretty standard for good locals, in the good old days.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 29, 2018 20:46:12 GMT
In 2018, I have a bulk wine store right next door. However, such places are rare because people come from all over the city to fill up.
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Post by onlyMark on Dec 2, 2018 20:44:30 GMT
I'll put this here but it does relate to any country that eats pork.
When I was younger I'd often catch on the TV a programme where a man spoke of the ways of the countryside. Jack Hargreaves was his name and was actually a quite interesting character with a varied life. Calm and knowledgeable, he made for easy gentle listening with interesting facts and anecdotes about country life. He also presented a programme called "How" which was aimed at children to give information about science, history and so on. This and the one featured below, an episode of "Old Country", a series formally called "Out of Town", and ran from the sixties to the eighties.
In this, the first part is about other things but just before 7:40 he starts talking about pigs and what were done with them. At 7:40 we now see a traditional butcher and Hargreaves follows him as he cuts up a pig into the various cuts relating what they are called and used for - all the way to when there is nothing left at all. Fascinating stuff if you've got fifteen minutes or so to spare in between your social media posts and watching cat videos -
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Post by onlyMark on Dec 2, 2018 20:45:59 GMT
By the way, I love seeing skilled people do their work.
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Post by mossie on Dec 2, 2018 22:14:12 GMT
Quite something, it takes me back to childhood. Our village butcher had a brick shed in the shop garden beside the path, this was his slaughterhouse and one would hear the pigs squealing in here as one walked past. My wife was brought up in a council house in deepest Suffolk, and they kept a pig in the garden as described in the programme, which would be sorted out by the village butcher just as shown. Totally impossible today with all the pettifogging rules and regulations, not to mention the squealing of all the dogooders who rule the roost now.
My mother kept six laying pullets (young hens) to provide us with our breakfast eggs. When they stopped laying they had their necks stretched, us boys had to pluck them, and they would be boiled for the table. Could be on the tough side, not like the specially fattened capon which was Christmas Dinner
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Post by onlyMark on Dec 3, 2018 4:29:38 GMT
The man mentioned, Jack Hargreaves, was motivated to make these programmes because he saw the growing chasm between rural and city life, so he wanted people to be more knowledgeable about what goes on in the countryside. I do wonder in thirty or forty years what the young of today who then become old will say, when they say, "I remember when........" Possibly something like, "I remember when you didn't have to use gender neutral pronouns."
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Post by onlyMark on Dec 4, 2018 10:33:11 GMT
Trip Advisor's Travellers' Choice Awards has named a restaurant in Nottingham as to be the best in the UK and the 4th best in the world.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 4, 2018 11:10:08 GMT
If Trip Advisor says it, it must be true.
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Post by onlyMark on Dec 4, 2018 12:34:38 GMT
Only half true but that goes for everyone else as well.
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Post by cheerypeabrain on Dec 4, 2018 21:13:40 GMT
But then we have Marks & Spencer. I was drooling my way around the food hall this afternoon...all that special festive nosh...
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 4, 2018 21:33:11 GMT
We still have Marks & Spencer Food in Paris. Those shops stayed when the big stores closed. We like Marks & Spencer Food. Some of it, at least.
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Post by lagatta on Dec 4, 2018 21:47:56 GMT
Yes, I still remember when it closed here. They were never fashionable, but had good value in clothing basics... especially underthings.
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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 23, 2019 19:26:15 GMT
CNN can be really unfair sometimes, even when they are trying to be mostly funny. Even I felt mild outrage at this article since I think that at least half of the dishes mentioned are edible, but every single photograph is quite horrible on purpose, even the tea. British food: 20 classic dishes
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Post by onlyMark on Mar 23, 2019 19:28:51 GMT
I can take more appealing photos than that.
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Post by mossie on Mar 23, 2019 19:56:40 GMT
So MacDonalds is cordon bleu ?
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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 23, 2019 19:57:26 GMT
I can take more appealing photos than that. I think anybody can.
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Post by cheerypeabrain on Mar 23, 2019 20:49:42 GMT
I don't know anybody who eats jellies eels, and not many eat offal these days...black pudding and kidneys is something older people may still enjoy but I reckon most folk under the age of 50 eat more Italian, Indian, Mexican and Chinese food than other stuff. We still like our Sunday roasts tho. I only serve Yorkshire puddings with roast beef but lots of folk serve them with any roast meat or poultry. Roast beef is served with horseradish sauce (not in my house), roast pork with apple sauce, roast lamb with mint jelly. My Gran used to make a vile concoction called 'bread sauce' to have with Turkey on Christmas day...I'd never heard of cranberry sauce until the 80s...
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Post by cheerypeabrain on Mar 23, 2019 20:53:16 GMT
Mossie...do you remember Wimpys and Golden Egg fast food restaurants in the 70s? Now they were something else...proper greasy spoon food
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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 23, 2019 21:01:36 GMT
Since I have stayed in a number of Ibis hotels in London, I must say that black pudding is almost always part of the breakfast buffet.
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Post by bixaorellana on Mar 23, 2019 22:39:41 GMT
I have to be odd man out here, I'm afraid. Really, I don't think the food in the pictures looks that bad except for the tea, which seems to have languished for a while before being photographed. The beans on the breakfast plate don't look good either, but that is only because I personally don't care for them. Presenting the rest of the food as amusingly bad is just childish. I know what all of those things are and have even prepared a great many of them, although admittedly black pudding/blood sausage is not the most attractive comestible, even though I like it. One of silliest things in the article is mocking shepherd's pie. Can someone explain to me how it looks any worse than lasagna? In some ways, it's almost the same thing.
The article starts off by explaining how certain odd-sounding dishes are actually good and composed of nice ingredients. It then veers into middle-school "humor" using tired stereotypes. Sorry to semi-rant, but for me it's less about whether or not British food is good or bad, and more about my annoyance at articles fostering the infantile habit of automatically rejecting unfamiliar food.
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Post by mich64 on Mar 23, 2019 23:31:17 GMT
'bread sauce' to have with Turkey on Christmas day Do you remember what the bread sauce tasted like or what it was made from Cherry? I have never had roast lamb. My father loves apple sauce with his roast pork. While horseradish is common here, I do not remember it ever on our table with roast beef or with anything for that matter. Every Christmas there was cranberry sauce with turkey and even it we had a roasted chicken on Sunday. Since I have stayed in a number of Ibis hotels in London, I must say that black pudding is almost always part of the breakfast buffet. Also was a part of breakfast buffets in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
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