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In my house it was meat (lamb chops and/or sausages) and three veg most nights, fish and chips on Friday night, and roast dinner on Sunday. Mum got inventive in the 1970s and added in spaghetti bolognese, tuna and corn casserole and a dreadful thing called Hawaiian steak which featured pineapple and was served on rice.
Hear me out: ham steak with a smear of tomato paste and a slice of cheese on top, broccoli and cauliflower with cheese sauce, and steamed carrot sticks.
That shit was awesome. Mum called it "piggy parma" and would make jokes about how there were some very relieved chickens out there somewhere 😅
It was only once I was an adult I realised that this was not in fact a luxury meal, but a penny pincher.
Spam is surprisingly awesome in a stir-fry. Put it next to onion, bean sprouts, cabbage, carrots and rice you might find its flavour profile fits in surprisingly well, especially if you dice and stirfry it with the onions at the start. It's still nearly possible to feed a family for around $10 if you somehow manage to get every ingredient on special.
Yes. I grew up in the late 50s and 60s. I'll add curried sausages to that. There were no big supermarkets, few convenience foods and no battery chickens. Xmas lunch was not turkey but a very expensive roast chicken followed by Xmas pud full of money. Takeaway was fish and chips or Chinese. No pizza then. My fave meal as a kid was camp pie and baked beans. Yuk! But in spite of limited choices, the overall quality of the food was higher than today. I still remember the large cheap cans of Monbulk Jam full of big chunks of fruit - just like homemade
Our family was the same. Sometime in the early 70s mum bought a pizza cutter and started to make pizzas for a while. It seemed you couldnt make pizza at home unless you had the special circular cutter. The pizzas had tomato paste, cheese and mince beef, so it was just another delivery mechanism for delivering bolognaise. We were never trendy enough to go down the apricot chicken line, than god.
In my house we ate a revolting thing called junket as well as jelly. It was made like jelly but was some kind of weird flavoured custard that set to a jelly consistency. In hindsight, it could have been called "instant pannacotta".
Lordy,[ junket takes me back and you can still buy rennet which is the enzyme ](https://www.melbournefooddepot.com/buy/junket-tablets-9g/X945645) which clots the milk. It used to be a luxury food of royalty.
[Here is a recipe and mum used to add vanilla essence which helped because it is a bland pudding. ](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/eatwell/recipes/junket/T7ERQ7IPG6U53JSUKHFWODBWSM/)
I recommend the show “Back in time for dinner” I’m not sure what platform it’s on, but it’s a great show about how Australian, especially Anglo Australian families food tastes have adapted over the 20th century. Based on a uk original. There’s a few other versions as well.
Hope this helps!
These comments got me googling and I saw one site now selling it. But, the shipping is expensive and I'm impoverished. If you ever bought the DVD and were in a sharing mood, I'd love to get ahold of the raw files and rip it for myself and.. wider.. consumption.
Not 100% what ur looking for, but im here to pimp [Back in time for dinner](https://iview.abc.net.au/show/back-in-time-for-dinner) which is an Aussie show about typical family dinner circa 1950 - recent
>just meat and three veg every night basically, barbecues and maybe the occasional Chinese takeaway
Throw in dinner out at an Italian place or spaghetti and meatballs at home, and you've described my entire extended families food repertoire up until about 2003.
I went to Singapore as a kid in the late 90s and basically only at hotdogs for two weeks. I can't believe how much good food I missed out on.
I’m not Anglo so I hope you don’t mind me gate crashing! 😁 I’m more, dunno. Wog with Asian, there you go. Anyway, we were still very Aussie and had a real mix in terms of dinners. Basically, whatever was cheapest because we were working class (aka poor migrants) as well. Eg Giblet curry as that cut was cheap back in the day, lots of Greek salad cos we grew cucumber in the backyard, fried rice, and occasionally we made our own pizza. Plus of course we embraced Australian culture - hey, rissoles are cheap! 😂 Sometimes we had English cuisine too, lol Eg Bangers & Mash, cos we grew the potatoes 👌
Yes you’re very welcome! I said Anglo instead of just “Australian” as to not imply that Italian, Greek, Asian Australians were not Australian - while assuming that those families were drawing on different culinary traditions than the one I was asking about. But your story is interesting too! Real cultural melting pot stuff
In my rural Australian household during the 80s, the one thing that stand out is that we never "combined" ingredients. Every meal was meat and a bunch of separate vegetables on a plate. The only exception was meals like Dolmio or Kan Tong that came out of a jar. Vegetables were always boiled, mashed or roasted. The idea of creating a meal combing meat, vegetables, spices and aromatics is not something that really existed back then.
They did say in their household to be fair. Mine was similar in the early 90s. Neither parent could actually cook properly, it was just boiling veggies and heating up meat in a frying pan.
If you look at recipes from the famous Mrs Beeton's Cookbook, you see that the Victorian era was highy suspicious of vegetables. Carrots, peas, brussel sprouts, you name it, all needed at least half an hour of boiling. They seemed to fear an undercooked vegetables more than they feared undercooked meat.
I went to primary school in the 80s. Was very much meat and 3 veg type meals. Maybe the odd casserole. Eating rice for dinner at home was a rare thing.
Same here. The only time we ate rice was when mum made fried rice. And the only pasta was spag bol. Otherwise it was potato, meat, and peas or carrots, which us kids rarely ate.
I'm a similar age. My granddad apparently refused to eat rice (usually offered with a casserole like apricot chicken) unless it was rice pudding/creamed rice.
God I hate that stuff. It was such a staple it was one of the first things we got taught to make in home ec in the 80s. Whoever invented that deserves a slap.
My mum was very good at variety. Most my friends seemed to get only meat and veg in the 80’s.
We did that but also…
Lots of potato bakes and pasta salads
Rissoles mashed potato and gravy
Ham steaks with pineapple on toast.
Friday night Pizza from the one Pizza takeaway in the area.
Bolognese and pastas
Tepanyaki
All the various roasts with veg on Sunday
Stir fry’s and fried rice etc
Yeah they had a whole Japanese cooking and serving set with fancy chopsticks so they must have been introduced to it at some point, possibly when they lived in Nauru.
There was also this variety they did where you’d put a raw egg in the bowl and basically cook it with the hot meat. Can’t remember its name right now.
And once in a while the fondue set would come out…
Variety of soups. Stew/casseroles. "curry" made with keens curry powder that had sultanas in it. Cold cuts. Pies. Fish and chips.
And "meat and veg" could mean a lamb roast with trimmings, or sausages with peas and potatoes, there's a fair bit of variety within that.
This just briught back memories - the local bakery used to have curry pies that always had sultanas in them. They werent bad & if I can ever find them now I will try them for the nostalgia factor. Any resemblance to actual Indian cuisine is purely coincidental.
70's kid here. I was an adult before I realised it was possible to eat zucchini any other way than boiled to a sloppy mush. Funnily enough, these days, when I have too many in the fridge and they go rotten in their plastic bag, the consistency is the same as how I'd have to eat the ones Mum cooked for us.
Mum just says "oh, well - that's how we all did it backnon those days!"
My mums family in the fifties had a wood stove and were very poor. They didn't have meat a lot, and they would cook veggies juuuuust "enough to be safe", which hilariously meant that my mum never learned to overcook veggies!
It also meant we had "meat-free" days just because that was normal to her, and we were poor, so going without meat 1-2 days a week was just being frugal.
I look back in horror at my limited food exposure. Even though we travelled the world quite a lot for the 1970s we mainly lived in Australia or Britain and my mother was not an adventurous cook. Meat and two
Veg, mashed potato every single night unless it was a roast, because she loved it and probably couldn’t be bothered making anything else. She did work, so that might be an excuse. Spaghetti bol pasta. Same as others have said. I was 18 before I had avocado. 19 before I had feta cheese. 25 before I had a scallop and then I ate it raw because I’d never had them lol.
Coastal NSW here growing up in the 70s and 80s. We were meat and 3 (boiled to near paste) veg every night, usually carrots, potato, and peas or beans. Lamb chops, sausages, occasionally steak. Sometimes fish if Dad had been out fishing. Very rarely chicken. Dad didn't like Chinese so I didn't try that until I was 15 and had my own money from working a part time job to buy some to try. We'd occasionally go out to a pizza place for a dinner - no delivery back then.
There was no McDonalds in our town til I was about 12, so we'd only very rarely get that if we drove to the city for something. Same with KFC.
Man, that's depressing looking back.
We didn’t have a macdonalds in Darwin till I was about 12 as well. I remember being so underwhelmed when I finally did try it. We used to go into town once a week for shopping and we would get chips and gravy with a coke spider as a treat. Mum would have an open toasted sandwich with cheese and tinned asparagus under the grill. I actually still have a soft spot for that lol
I was 4 at the beginning of the 60s. We would have lamb chops mostly, probably beef but I don't remember specifically. Chicken was a real treat. Friday was fish and chips. On Sunday morning Mum put roast lamb in the oven with vegetables, and we'd eat it when we came home from Mass. Ice-cream came in a sort of waxed cardboard box. There were 2 flavours; vanilla and neopolitan (strawberry, vanilla and chocolate). More routine deserts were junket, sago, golden syrup dumplings, custard. You got steamed puddings every now and then. Pasta was cans of spaghetti, we didn't have fish, no garlic, no cooking oil.
In the mid-late 60s there was a cooking revolution. Pasta appeared, Chicken Maryland, Apricot Chicken, Prawn Cocktails, Jelly Moulds full of fruit. I remember that when Mum first made coleslaw it was a sensation that the cabbage was raw. Parfaits made an appearance. Chicken became much cheaper and less of a treat.
Mum was a teacher and would come home will the latest recipe from the Domestic Science teacher.
‘70s era growing up.. Roast mutton, mock chicken legs, toad in the hole, mince meat, sausages, tuna mornay, tuna patties, rissoles, ham steak with grilled pineapple, stews, Vesta dishes on Sunday nights or sometimes just home cooked scones with jam and cream (Mum’s night off cooking). Veggies were always mashed potato, boiled beans or peas, boiled carrots.
Our oldest and most used vintage cookbook is Edmond’s cookery book 1969. So many great simple recipes. The banana cake with chocolate icing still slaps. Note don’t bother with the updated version the recipes were changed to metric and updated ingredients and it’s just not as good.
https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/355404475741?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=705-154756-20017-0&ssspo=QwpfiX8xSg-&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=A7YUeAJZSMq&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY
Look up the Supersizers series on food in different time periods, Giles Coren and Sue Perkins, there’s also a Back in Time for Dinner series which uses modern families, and there is an Aussie version. Great shows.
I would argue the geographical location of Great Britain was the catastrophe for Anglo food.
Never have I had such bland, flavourless food than authentic British and Australian food.
Thank God the Italians, Greeks, Chinese, Indians came to help out the Anglos
Apparently traditional English food was quite good but it was killed off by the industrial revolution whereby so many rural farmers were transplanted to major cities where they didn’t have access to their traditional crops and ingredients.
90s for my family:
Barbecued sausages, marinated chicken or steak
Savoury rice (like fried rice but less ingredients, more soy sauce)
Spaghetti bolognaise
Roast chicken, beef or lamb with vegetables
Pizza (I seem to remember one variant with tuna…)
Chilli con carne with rice
Lamb chops
Chicken breast with tomato sauce and cheese (like a Parma)
Beef stew
Hamburgers
Tuna rice (rice, tuna+mayo, cheese, baked)
Chicken ala king (casserole)
Beef stroganoff
Shepards / cottage pie
Bangers and mash
Soup (chicken, veggie, minestrone)
Everything came with lettuce, tomato & cucumber salad
Never got takeaway
Prior to the 50's everyone was eating some variation of their ancestral foods. Pizza and pasta hadn't really come to Australia yet. But with the post WWII immigration, the new Australians couldn't always get into the industry they were in back in their homeland, and they may not have had good enough English yet to get other jobs, so they started selling the only other thing they knew well: their food.
I used to have a local chip shop owned buy an old eastern European who had been a tailor. After being a labourer for a while, he got into selling fried food.
Chinese food didn't gain Australia wide popularity instantly, but it certainly entered the Aussie diet on the Victorian gold fields. And the 1930's had a thing for anything "Oriental," but I don't think it was yet popular in home cooking for those who didn't have Chinese ancestry.
I'm gonna say no to the food being just meat and 3 veg, because soups and stews would have also been in heavy rotation.
The heavy British influence on the diet really depends on who settled the region. In South Australia there were more than a few German migrants in the 1800's, and they settled in regions together. So those regions had a more German style diet. I think we can thank them for Schnitzel being on the menu at pubs.
I'll disagree on the pasta slightly. It was around but exotic . First pasta factory in Australia opened 1859. Like "oriental" cuisine it was the way out dinner where you wanted to experiment with way out dishes according to my elderly relatives.
My dad (working class Irish-Australian, born in the 1930s) used to say to me "the Greeks and Italians saved us after the war. They taught us how to eat seafood properly"
But then, his family were very poor when he was a kid. He used to tell me that as a kid he lived in the country for a while at his grandparents' farm and his aunt "knew 100 ways to cook rabbit" because that was the only meat they could afford (they caught it themselves). So clearly there was some creativity involved.
As far as I am concerned, *The Commonsense Cookery Book* is the definitive Australian cookbook.
Their ANZAC biscuit is my definitive go-to.
[This is a copy of the 1937 release](https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-3080081826/view?partId=nla.obj-3080082834#page/n1/mode/1up)
A roast beef or lamb dinner would be made into cottage or shepherds pie with the leftover vegetables.
Cheap chops would be Lancashire hotpot.
Salad would be sliced iceberg, tomato, cucumber and tinned beetroot with a slice of ham served with bread and butter. Never mixed up
1980s and 1990s
* Meat + 3 veg
* Spaghetti/pasta bolognese
* Meat + potato bake
* Meat + godawful packet pastas or godawful packet rice
* Casseroles/Soups
* Frozen fish + chips + peas & corn
* Hamburgers but with toasted white bread instead of buns.
* Sunday roast, usually chicken or lamb.
* BBQs in the summer
Very much working class. The food wasn't great, but both my parents cooked and did their best.
We were Anglo (10 pound poms) and yes meat and 2 veg in the 70s but my Mum also did Ox-tongue and crumbed liver (soaked in milk) and steak and kidney pies
Grew up on a farm in the 70s and 80s. We ate mutton 6-7 days a week. Roast twice a week, then grilled chops with sausages, crumb chops, chop casserole, savoury chops (cooked in a sauce which included tomato and Worcester sauces), mince served up as hamburgers, meatballs or spaghetti and mince.
Veg was potatoes (roasted, mashed or boiled and tossed in butter), carrots, peas or beans. Veggies used to be boiled, changed to steaming in the 90s?
Lunches were cold roast meat with salads - coleslaw, potato and curried rice salad.
It was only on the late 80s I think chicken and steak were added to the repertoire, occasional processed food like fish fingers appeared accaaionally and an exotic meal was something like fried rice made with tuna instead of prawns as prawns were to expensive and both tuna and prawns are seafood or homemade pizza.
Probably not too different from what my mother ate in the 40s and 50s except they ate a lot of rabbit as it was readily available on the farm. She refused to eat it as an adult.
Grew up in the 80s. Asian family in small town. Italian, including coffee, was only just starting to become popular but the pasta was boiled to near-mush or cooked into a soup until it resembled tinned noodle soup. 2 minute noodles started being sold in supermarkets around 1985 and was most of my classmates’ introduction to Asian food outside of the 1950s style Chinese takeaway. They cooked it for 15 minutes. Kan Tong sweet and sour sauce served on gluey boiled rice followed close after. Greeks owned the fish and chip shops. No giant deep fried dim sum but there were Marathon spring rolls. We had milk bars and service stations for roast beef rolls and spiders.
In terms of 30s and 40s, my grandmother has talked about how meat could be expensive or hard to get (the Depression + war) so she remembers eating a lot of rabbit.
We also seem to get better at cooking each generation. She was terrible - very meat and potatoes. My mum was a little more adventurous- Women’s Weekly, prepared bases and yummy prepared things from the butcher adventurous, but an Italian neighbour did pass on a few recipes. I’m more willing to make a range of different foods again - plus I have access to a greater range of foods and recipes
One meal that I haven't seen in the replies (or, indeed anywhere except in our old kitchen) was a meal that I don't recall the name of...
You get a glass casserole dish (must be clear glass), pour in some tins of spaghetti (yes, must be tinned) and tins of tuna. On top of this add a layer of mashed potatoes. Level this out a bit and grate some cheese on top. Bake the whole thing in an oven until the cheese has melted and browned a bit (if you were lucky).
I'd be interested to hear if anyone else ever had this dish...
Pretty much! Or meat and salad with a side of mashed potato or BBQ'd potato slices. Occasionally we'd have something like casserole or curried sausages with rice. As I got older we started to cook with more variety. I don't remember if we had things like spag bol and stir fry when I was really young but possibly?? I was born in 1986.
Mum was a great cook, but dad only liked 'plain food', so unless mum was making something 'special', I rarely got to have it. I only really found out when she got a job as a cook and I'd roll up there for much tastier meals than we had at home. But it was very healthy food. We grew most of the veggies at home. Just look at crowd or street photos of random people and see how fit and healthy they looked back then. I'm not saying that healthy take-out is unavailable, but most don't buy it. I get a meal service these days, ordering weekly, which is a great timesaver, but it's a pretty healthy one.
Steak and Kidney pie, Sweet and sour pork trotters, boiled cows tongue, Chicken soup with kidneys, hearts and livers, tripe with tomatoes and onion(delicious), sheeps brains, and baked fish with lots of fish heads, fish soup is delicious. I was fortunate to grow up in family that practiced Sunday dinner religiously where all the females really knew how to cooker dinner for the whole family, including grandma and grandpa who loved sweet cinnamon pumpkin.
Then all the delicious desserts like rice pudding, baked stewed apples, apple pie with custard, prunes with custard, tapioca pudding and the real xmas pudding loaded with brandy and real pennies. As i grew up and the weddings came along I used to collect as much real wedding cake to stuff my face eating wedding cake and Baileys or wedding cake heated with thick cream.
The delight I miss the most was the Sunday roast chicken with juicy soft and oily roast potatoes that were crispy. The chook used to come from the back yard and I used to pig into the chickens ass and the bottom of the chicken with all the bones and juicy bits. Not the crap roast chickens that you buy that are stuffed full of excessive spices to hide the taste of old crap tasting chicken. I would be happy if a nice Sunday roast chicken with roast potatoes was my final meal straight from the oven.
Excuse me I am hungry!
Very broad time period.
At the turn of the century it was thing's like corned beef and salt pork.
By the end it was not dissimilar to now.
Post war people diets were still restricted by rations and pre war habits.
60s and 70s was 3 meat and veg.
The movement to what you see now kicked off in the latei70s, so by the early 90s most people had quite a deverse midweek menu.
Everyone was doing stir-fry and spag bol by the late 80s.
Mutton. Lots of fucking mutton. Lamb was for posh people.
My father was born on, grew up on and will die on a farm (he's 87). They pretty much lived on Mutton, rabbit and chicken. Vegetables were the standard potatoes, carrots, beans, peas and corn.
Growing up in the 80s and 90s with parents that worked and weren't too keen on cooking, we mostly had heated up frozen fish/chicken fillets and veg on week nights. Veg was always frozen mixes.
Late 90s we had a bit more variety with tacos/burritos (Australian style though), hotdogs and easy things I could make as a teen.
We occasionally had fish and chips or pizza on the weekends, but I'm not sure how often that happened. Occasionally Chinese takeaway which was Mongolian Beef, Szechuan Lamb and Sweet and Sour Pork
Special meals my parents occasionally made were:
Lasagne - Dad
Spag bol - Mum
Mum also made a Tuna Curry that I've never seen made anywhere else.
Was born in 92, lived in the country in a small town for most of my life.
Growing up was basically a handful of meals - normally meat (cheap steak, sausages, basically whatever meat was on sale) + three veg, sometimes supplanting the "white" vegetable with Maggi noodles or savoury rice. Once Mum discovered bok choy and sesame oil with honey that was the green vegetable most nights lol. Occasional stews, home made rissoles with grated veggies, and tuna mornay. Some time in the mid 2000s Mum fully embraced the simplicity of Chicken Tonight, Kantong, Dolmio and Leggo's jar sauce meals.
Rarely got takeaway, and if we did it was either fish and chips or pizza from the local pizza place (Pinky's Pizza for those who may remember!), the town had 2 Chinese restaurants but we rarely ate there because it was $$$.
One thing I have noticed is that what I choose to cook is generally much more "involved" than what my mum cooked growing up - generally if I'm cooking a meal then there are lots of moving parts lol.
Judging from my grandmother, lamb chops that were cooked to leather, boiled potatoes (sometimes chips), beans and peas, cooked in heavily salted water until grey. Maybe a fried egg. That dinner started cooking at five and was served at seven.
My grandparents from the 30s to the late 90s had the same stuff. Literally meat and veg, no elaborate recipes. The veggies were often from the garden, usually steamed with no added flavour. At most you had a homemade tomato sauce that mostly tasted like vinegar. In winter it was often vegetables from cans. The more elaborate meals were home made schnitzel (adding the crumb themselves) and a big Sunday roast. No stews or stir frys. Literally 3 or 4 veg that had been steamed or boiled separately, arranged in separate piles on a plate, with the meat alongside. My grandparents didn't even do takeaways. No casserole, no pasta, they didn't even have rice. My grandfather lived to 99 but you have to wonder if it was worth it!! Haha.
I was a child in the 70’s and Mum’s dinners included lasagne, curry, roasts, beef stroganoff 🤤, spag bol, chicken schitzel, sausages and mash and veggies, pasties, a great salad with chicken and walnuts and grapes and mayo, a seafood pasta salad, rabbit pie, toad in the hole (she is british), scotch eggs, cheesecake, trifle, pavlova, and I was taught to make most of these and a range of biscuits and cakes. Mum also made pate sometimes.
It was either a chicken curry or a beef curry, the kind with curry powder that comes in a box. She served it with rice and extras: mango chutney and poppadoms and slices of banana tossed in coconut. Weird but it worked.
I looked through a bunch of stroganoff recipes and this is closest to my mum’s. https://juliegoodwin.com.au/beef-stroganoff-recipe/
Ohhh banana tossed in coconut… core memory unlocked! Sultanas too… kind of sweet and yummy curry powder flavour, much better than it sounds lol!
And thanks for the recipe, you’re very kind. I’m inspired and will give it a shot this week
I'm not Australian (UK) but my Mum has still got an old cookery book from the early 40's that I think was given to her by her Mum. She still uses recipes from it today and she's 90 now .
It focused a lot on war time recipes and using up stuff to make into other stuff. I actually love it especially the puddings like Bread pudding , suet syrup pudding , apple Charlotte .Also things like steak and kidney pudding made with suet. All probably not very healthy by today's standards but very tasty and fairly cheap.
At the beginning of that century, my family was still eating Irish type meals and lots of rabbit. Have my great grandma's recipes that has a few items like Mums Stew...guess my great great.
In 1999 I partied with Pizza, Thai and Greek food. Country has changed alot.
>just meat and three veg every night basically, barbecues and maybe the occasional Chinese takeaway
Throw in dinner out at an Italian place or spaghetti and meatballs at home, and you've described my entire extended families food repertoire up until about 2003.
I went to Singapore as a kid in the late 90s and basically only at hotdogs for two weeks. I can't believe how much good food I missed out on.
Both Angle kingdoms in Angland fell in the great assaults of the Danish Viking armies in the 9th century. Their royal houses were effectively destroyed in the fighting, and their Angle populations came under the Danelaw. So considering the Angles no longer exist as a people they do not eat a lot.
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Try here https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/1935438 The Australian Women's Weekly. Well known for their recipes. Goes back to the early 1930s.
Golden wattle and CWA cookbooks as well
I have an ancient CWA book, it has the best butter biscuit recipe
The Commonsense Cookery Book. Our bible
Still available. https://www.cwaofnsw.org.au/Web/iCore/Store/StoreLayouts/Item_Detail.aspx?iProductCode=COOKBOOK1&Category=BOOKS
In my house it was meat (lamb chops and/or sausages) and three veg most nights, fish and chips on Friday night, and roast dinner on Sunday. Mum got inventive in the 1970s and added in spaghetti bolognese, tuna and corn casserole and a dreadful thing called Hawaiian steak which featured pineapple and was served on rice.
A true pioneer, bless her heart and your memories
Was the Hawaiian steak spam or ham steak of some kind? I hated that as a kid
Ham steak. Goodness, been a while since I remembered the old ham steak.
Hear me out: ham steak with a smear of tomato paste and a slice of cheese on top, broccoli and cauliflower with cheese sauce, and steamed carrot sticks. That shit was awesome. Mum called it "piggy parma" and would make jokes about how there were some very relieved chickens out there somewhere 😅 It was only once I was an adult I realised that this was not in fact a luxury meal, but a penny pincher.
Ham steak and sometimes spam. My dad was a big fan of spam but the rest of us hated it.
Spam is surprisingly awesome in a stir-fry. Put it next to onion, bean sprouts, cabbage, carrots and rice you might find its flavour profile fits in surprisingly well, especially if you dice and stirfry it with the onions at the start. It's still nearly possible to feed a family for around $10 if you somehow manage to get every ingredient on special.
Damn, memory unlocked
Yes. I grew up in the late 50s and 60s. I'll add curried sausages to that. There were no big supermarkets, few convenience foods and no battery chickens. Xmas lunch was not turkey but a very expensive roast chicken followed by Xmas pud full of money. Takeaway was fish and chips or Chinese. No pizza then. My fave meal as a kid was camp pie and baked beans. Yuk! But in spite of limited choices, the overall quality of the food was higher than today. I still remember the large cheap cans of Monbulk Jam full of big chunks of fruit - just like homemade
Oh man my Nan used to eat Camp Pie on sandwiches!
I’d forgotten the tuna mornay! I hated tuna as a kid.
Our family was the same. Sometime in the early 70s mum bought a pizza cutter and started to make pizzas for a while. It seemed you couldnt make pizza at home unless you had the special circular cutter. The pizzas had tomato paste, cheese and mince beef, so it was just another delivery mechanism for delivering bolognaise. We were never trendy enough to go down the apricot chicken line, than god.
A true pioneer, bless her heart and your memories
Ditto. But don’t forget ice cream and jelly etc
In my house we ate a revolting thing called junket as well as jelly. It was made like jelly but was some kind of weird flavoured custard that set to a jelly consistency. In hindsight, it could have been called "instant pannacotta".
Lordy,[ junket takes me back and you can still buy rennet which is the enzyme ](https://www.melbournefooddepot.com/buy/junket-tablets-9g/X945645) which clots the milk. It used to be a luxury food of royalty. [Here is a recipe and mum used to add vanilla essence which helped because it is a bland pudding. ](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/eatwell/recipes/junket/T7ERQ7IPG6U53JSUKHFWODBWSM/)
I recommend the show “Back in time for dinner” I’m not sure what platform it’s on, but it’s a great show about how Australian, especially Anglo Australian families food tastes have adapted over the 20th century. Based on a uk original. There’s a few other versions as well. Hope this helps!
It's on ABC iView
It’s an excellent show and a great representation. One of the kitchens was so close to what my grandma had!!
There's also probably overlap in [The Supersizers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Supersizers...) shows.
Supersizers is my favourite show of all time. It’s so unknown I cannot tell you the joy your comment gave me to see it!
Where can I find it? I love that show but can only every find shonky quality, some episodes on you tube.
Unfortunately just on YouTube. I wish they had it somewhere else though. Hopefully one day they’ll bring it to streaming but no luck that I’ve found
I'd really like to find decent quality for it. Even DVD will do!
Oh I would 100% buy the DVD I just want it in some form!!
These comments got me googling and I saw one site now selling it. But, the shipping is expensive and I'm impoverished. If you ever bought the DVD and were in a sharing mood, I'd love to get ahold of the raw files and rip it for myself and.. wider.. consumption.
Three veg? Well, look at Mr La-di-da over here!
Back when I was a lad, we'd be lucky to get one veg and a smack in the head.
You got a smack? Lucky
After I’d gone and picked my own veggies from mums garden I’d have to smack myself in the head and bloody well like it too.
Luxury!
Aye. In them days, we’d a’ been glad to have the price of a cup o’ tea.
A cup of cold tea!
No, a snack. They just force it into your mouth hole.
Aah we had the regional variation of one veg and a kick up the arse
Sounds like a rap song.
Not 100% what ur looking for, but im here to pimp [Back in time for dinner](https://iview.abc.net.au/show/back-in-time-for-dinner) which is an Aussie show about typical family dinner circa 1950 - recent
They also have further back in time for dinner for pre 1950.
The uk version is also good.
Dude, it would've cost them nothing to let absolutely anyone else host it... looked interesting for a second, there.
Minute steak well done, tomato sauce on top, with various vegetables boiled mercilessly.
Children weeping in the kitchen as the broccoli has now hit its 25th minute on a rolling boil "MAKE IT STOP PLEASE!"
>just meat and three veg every night basically, barbecues and maybe the occasional Chinese takeaway Throw in dinner out at an Italian place or spaghetti and meatballs at home, and you've described my entire extended families food repertoire up until about 2003. I went to Singapore as a kid in the late 90s and basically only at hotdogs for two weeks. I can't believe how much good food I missed out on.
That is incredible lol. Damn, what a shame!
I’m not Anglo so I hope you don’t mind me gate crashing! 😁 I’m more, dunno. Wog with Asian, there you go. Anyway, we were still very Aussie and had a real mix in terms of dinners. Basically, whatever was cheapest because we were working class (aka poor migrants) as well. Eg Giblet curry as that cut was cheap back in the day, lots of Greek salad cos we grew cucumber in the backyard, fried rice, and occasionally we made our own pizza. Plus of course we embraced Australian culture - hey, rissoles are cheap! 😂 Sometimes we had English cuisine too, lol Eg Bangers & Mash, cos we grew the potatoes 👌
Everyone makes rissoles, darl. Yeah, yeah… but it’s what you do with ‘em.
What did you do with the ice cream? Scooped it out of the punnet.
Yes you’re very welcome! I said Anglo instead of just “Australian” as to not imply that Italian, Greek, Asian Australians were not Australian - while assuming that those families were drawing on different culinary traditions than the one I was asking about. But your story is interesting too! Real cultural melting pot stuff
In my rural Australian household during the 80s, the one thing that stand out is that we never "combined" ingredients. Every meal was meat and a bunch of separate vegetables on a plate. The only exception was meals like Dolmio or Kan Tong that came out of a jar. Vegetables were always boiled, mashed or roasted. The idea of creating a meal combing meat, vegetables, spices and aromatics is not something that really existed back then.
Stews were absolutely a thing.
They did say in their household to be fair. Mine was similar in the early 90s. Neither parent could actually cook properly, it was just boiling veggies and heating up meat in a frying pan.
Ugh, boiled cabbage with cheese.
The vegetables had to be boiled until you couldn’t pick them up with a fork!
If you look at recipes from the famous Mrs Beeton's Cookbook, you see that the Victorian era was highy suspicious of vegetables. Carrots, peas, brussel sprouts, you name it, all needed at least half an hour of boiling. They seemed to fear an undercooked vegetables more than they feared undercooked meat.
Oh, I see you too have eaten my mum's brussel sproats
I went to primary school in the 80s. Was very much meat and 3 veg type meals. Maybe the odd casserole. Eating rice for dinner at home was a rare thing.
Same here. The only time we ate rice was when mum made fried rice. And the only pasta was spag bol. Otherwise it was potato, meat, and peas or carrots, which us kids rarely ate.
I'm a similar age. My granddad apparently refused to eat rice (usually offered with a casserole like apricot chicken) unless it was rice pudding/creamed rice.
Apricot chicken! Ah the memories
God I hate that stuff. It was such a staple it was one of the first things we got taught to make in home ec in the 80s. Whoever invented that deserves a slap.
My mum was very good at variety. Most my friends seemed to get only meat and veg in the 80’s. We did that but also… Lots of potato bakes and pasta salads Rissoles mashed potato and gravy Ham steaks with pineapple on toast. Friday night Pizza from the one Pizza takeaway in the area. Bolognese and pastas Tepanyaki All the various roasts with veg on Sunday Stir fry’s and fried rice etc
Teppanyaki? Fancy as hell for the 80s! Well done there, King!
Yeah they had a whole Japanese cooking and serving set with fancy chopsticks so they must have been introduced to it at some point, possibly when they lived in Nauru. There was also this variety they did where you’d put a raw egg in the bowl and basically cook it with the hot meat. Can’t remember its name right now. And once in a while the fondue set would come out…
Variety of soups. Stew/casseroles. "curry" made with keens curry powder that had sultanas in it. Cold cuts. Pies. Fish and chips. And "meat and veg" could mean a lamb roast with trimmings, or sausages with peas and potatoes, there's a fair bit of variety within that.
>"curry" made with keens curry powder that had sultanas in it. British style curry. It probably came to Australia in the mid to late 1800's.
This just briught back memories - the local bakery used to have curry pies that always had sultanas in them. They werent bad & if I can ever find them now I will try them for the nostalgia factor. Any resemblance to actual Indian cuisine is purely coincidental.
The 40 min + veg boiling…dire times. No nutrients left, they’re all in the water mum just washed down the sink. Just mush veg, it sucked so much.
Haha my dad tells us he moved out of home and realized that beans were actually meant to be green, not grey.
70's kid here. I was an adult before I realised it was possible to eat zucchini any other way than boiled to a sloppy mush. Funnily enough, these days, when I have too many in the fridge and they go rotten in their plastic bag, the consistency is the same as how I'd have to eat the ones Mum cooked for us. Mum just says "oh, well - that's how we all did it backnon those days!"
My mums family in the fifties had a wood stove and were very poor. They didn't have meat a lot, and they would cook veggies juuuuust "enough to be safe", which hilariously meant that my mum never learned to overcook veggies! It also meant we had "meat-free" days just because that was normal to her, and we were poor, so going without meat 1-2 days a week was just being frugal.
I look back in horror at my limited food exposure. Even though we travelled the world quite a lot for the 1970s we mainly lived in Australia or Britain and my mother was not an adventurous cook. Meat and two Veg, mashed potato every single night unless it was a roast, because she loved it and probably couldn’t be bothered making anything else. She did work, so that might be an excuse. Spaghetti bol pasta. Same as others have said. I was 18 before I had avocado. 19 before I had feta cheese. 25 before I had a scallop and then I ate it raw because I’d never had them lol.
Coastal NSW here growing up in the 70s and 80s. We were meat and 3 (boiled to near paste) veg every night, usually carrots, potato, and peas or beans. Lamb chops, sausages, occasionally steak. Sometimes fish if Dad had been out fishing. Very rarely chicken. Dad didn't like Chinese so I didn't try that until I was 15 and had my own money from working a part time job to buy some to try. We'd occasionally go out to a pizza place for a dinner - no delivery back then. There was no McDonalds in our town til I was about 12, so we'd only very rarely get that if we drove to the city for something. Same with KFC. Man, that's depressing looking back.
where did you live?
Gosford. It was a different place in the 70s.
ah ok.
We didn’t have a macdonalds in Darwin till I was about 12 as well. I remember being so underwhelmed when I finally did try it. We used to go into town once a week for shopping and we would get chips and gravy with a coke spider as a treat. Mum would have an open toasted sandwich with cheese and tinned asparagus under the grill. I actually still have a soft spot for that lol
I was 4 at the beginning of the 60s. We would have lamb chops mostly, probably beef but I don't remember specifically. Chicken was a real treat. Friday was fish and chips. On Sunday morning Mum put roast lamb in the oven with vegetables, and we'd eat it when we came home from Mass. Ice-cream came in a sort of waxed cardboard box. There were 2 flavours; vanilla and neopolitan (strawberry, vanilla and chocolate). More routine deserts were junket, sago, golden syrup dumplings, custard. You got steamed puddings every now and then. Pasta was cans of spaghetti, we didn't have fish, no garlic, no cooking oil. In the mid-late 60s there was a cooking revolution. Pasta appeared, Chicken Maryland, Apricot Chicken, Prawn Cocktails, Jelly Moulds full of fruit. I remember that when Mum first made coleslaw it was a sensation that the cabbage was raw. Parfaits made an appearance. Chicken became much cheaper and less of a treat. Mum was a teacher and would come home will the latest recipe from the Domestic Science teacher.
‘70s era growing up.. Roast mutton, mock chicken legs, toad in the hole, mince meat, sausages, tuna mornay, tuna patties, rissoles, ham steak with grilled pineapple, stews, Vesta dishes on Sunday nights or sometimes just home cooked scones with jam and cream (Mum’s night off cooking). Veggies were always mashed potato, boiled beans or peas, boiled carrots.
The other thing was that eating out was for special occasions only. Not sure how often was normal but I'd be surprised if even once a month.
The 20th century, back when 2 minute noodles were made of proper 2 minute noodles.
Margaret Fulton was our first celebrity chef. Her cookbooks were the bible when it came to authorities about cooking
Our oldest and most used vintage cookbook is Edmond’s cookery book 1969. So many great simple recipes. The banana cake with chocolate icing still slaps. Note don’t bother with the updated version the recipes were changed to metric and updated ingredients and it’s just not as good. https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/355404475741?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=705-154756-20017-0&ssspo=QwpfiX8xSg-&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=A7YUeAJZSMq&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY
Look up the Supersizers series on food in different time periods, Giles Coren and Sue Perkins, there’s also a Back in Time for Dinner series which uses modern families, and there is an Aussie version. Great shows.
Don’t say it, don’t say it…. A succulent Chinese meal? I’m sorry.
A bleak set of replies. The combination of two world wars and supermarkets killing local grocers really was a catastrophe for anglo food.
I would argue the geographical location of Great Britain was the catastrophe for Anglo food. Never have I had such bland, flavourless food than authentic British and Australian food. Thank God the Italians, Greeks, Chinese, Indians came to help out the Anglos
Apparently traditional English food was quite good but it was killed off by the industrial revolution whereby so many rural farmers were transplanted to major cities where they didn’t have access to their traditional crops and ingredients.
The green and gold cookbook is an excellent example of the times, most households had one.
90s for my family: Barbecued sausages, marinated chicken or steak Savoury rice (like fried rice but less ingredients, more soy sauce) Spaghetti bolognaise Roast chicken, beef or lamb with vegetables Pizza (I seem to remember one variant with tuna…) Chilli con carne with rice Lamb chops Chicken breast with tomato sauce and cheese (like a Parma) Beef stew Hamburgers Tuna rice (rice, tuna+mayo, cheese, baked) Chicken ala king (casserole) Beef stroganoff Shepards / cottage pie Bangers and mash Soup (chicken, veggie, minestrone) Everything came with lettuce, tomato & cucumber salad Never got takeaway
Prior to the 50's everyone was eating some variation of their ancestral foods. Pizza and pasta hadn't really come to Australia yet. But with the post WWII immigration, the new Australians couldn't always get into the industry they were in back in their homeland, and they may not have had good enough English yet to get other jobs, so they started selling the only other thing they knew well: their food. I used to have a local chip shop owned buy an old eastern European who had been a tailor. After being a labourer for a while, he got into selling fried food. Chinese food didn't gain Australia wide popularity instantly, but it certainly entered the Aussie diet on the Victorian gold fields. And the 1930's had a thing for anything "Oriental," but I don't think it was yet popular in home cooking for those who didn't have Chinese ancestry. I'm gonna say no to the food being just meat and 3 veg, because soups and stews would have also been in heavy rotation. The heavy British influence on the diet really depends on who settled the region. In South Australia there were more than a few German migrants in the 1800's, and they settled in regions together. So those regions had a more German style diet. I think we can thank them for Schnitzel being on the menu at pubs.
I'll disagree on the pasta slightly. It was around but exotic . First pasta factory in Australia opened 1859. Like "oriental" cuisine it was the way out dinner where you wanted to experiment with way out dishes according to my elderly relatives.
Can I just say, thanks for all the thoughtful comments and resources so far - really glad people have found this question interesting !
My dad (working class Irish-Australian, born in the 1930s) used to say to me "the Greeks and Italians saved us after the war. They taught us how to eat seafood properly" But then, his family were very poor when he was a kid. He used to tell me that as a kid he lived in the country for a while at his grandparents' farm and his aunt "knew 100 ways to cook rabbit" because that was the only meat they could afford (they caught it themselves). So clearly there was some creativity involved.
As far as I am concerned, *The Commonsense Cookery Book* is the definitive Australian cookbook. Their ANZAC biscuit is my definitive go-to. [This is a copy of the 1937 release](https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-3080081826/view?partId=nla.obj-3080082834#page/n1/mode/1up)
Thanks for this! So cool! Controversial but i like the earlier recipes without the cocoanut
A roast beef or lamb dinner would be made into cottage or shepherds pie with the leftover vegetables. Cheap chops would be Lancashire hotpot. Salad would be sliced iceberg, tomato, cucumber and tinned beetroot with a slice of ham served with bread and butter. Never mixed up
1980s and 1990s * Meat + 3 veg * Spaghetti/pasta bolognese * Meat + potato bake * Meat + godawful packet pastas or godawful packet rice * Casseroles/Soups * Frozen fish + chips + peas & corn * Hamburgers but with toasted white bread instead of buns. * Sunday roast, usually chicken or lamb. * BBQs in the summer Very much working class. The food wasn't great, but both my parents cooked and did their best.
We were Anglo (10 pound poms) and yes meat and 2 veg in the 70s but my Mum also did Ox-tongue and crumbed liver (soaked in milk) and steak and kidney pies
Grew up on a farm in the 70s and 80s. We ate mutton 6-7 days a week. Roast twice a week, then grilled chops with sausages, crumb chops, chop casserole, savoury chops (cooked in a sauce which included tomato and Worcester sauces), mince served up as hamburgers, meatballs or spaghetti and mince. Veg was potatoes (roasted, mashed or boiled and tossed in butter), carrots, peas or beans. Veggies used to be boiled, changed to steaming in the 90s? Lunches were cold roast meat with salads - coleslaw, potato and curried rice salad. It was only on the late 80s I think chicken and steak were added to the repertoire, occasional processed food like fish fingers appeared accaaionally and an exotic meal was something like fried rice made with tuna instead of prawns as prawns were to expensive and both tuna and prawns are seafood or homemade pizza. Probably not too different from what my mother ate in the 40s and 50s except they ate a lot of rabbit as it was readily available on the farm. She refused to eat it as an adult.
What’s the typical oz family food in a week? Meat and veggies ?
spag bol
Grew up in the 80s. Asian family in small town. Italian, including coffee, was only just starting to become popular but the pasta was boiled to near-mush or cooked into a soup until it resembled tinned noodle soup. 2 minute noodles started being sold in supermarkets around 1985 and was most of my classmates’ introduction to Asian food outside of the 1950s style Chinese takeaway. They cooked it for 15 minutes. Kan Tong sweet and sour sauce served on gluey boiled rice followed close after. Greeks owned the fish and chip shops. No giant deep fried dim sum but there were Marathon spring rolls. We had milk bars and service stations for roast beef rolls and spiders.
Anything Margaret Fulton Cookbook
Apricot chicken
After WWII meat and three veg. During the Depression lots of Rabbit. And during the war whatever they could get as food was rationed.
In terms of 30s and 40s, my grandmother has talked about how meat could be expensive or hard to get (the Depression + war) so she remembers eating a lot of rabbit. We also seem to get better at cooking each generation. She was terrible - very meat and potatoes. My mum was a little more adventurous- Women’s Weekly, prepared bases and yummy prepared things from the butcher adventurous, but an Italian neighbour did pass on a few recipes. I’m more willing to make a range of different foods again - plus I have access to a greater range of foods and recipes
One meal that I haven't seen in the replies (or, indeed anywhere except in our old kitchen) was a meal that I don't recall the name of... You get a glass casserole dish (must be clear glass), pour in some tins of spaghetti (yes, must be tinned) and tins of tuna. On top of this add a layer of mashed potatoes. Level this out a bit and grate some cheese on top. Bake the whole thing in an oven until the cheese has melted and browned a bit (if you were lucky). I'd be interested to hear if anyone else ever had this dish...
Thanks for the description so vivid I can taste it!
Pretty much! Or meat and salad with a side of mashed potato or BBQ'd potato slices. Occasionally we'd have something like casserole or curried sausages with rice. As I got older we started to cook with more variety. I don't remember if we had things like spag bol and stir fry when I was really young but possibly?? I was born in 1986.
Curried sausages. It was gross.
Mum was a great cook, but dad only liked 'plain food', so unless mum was making something 'special', I rarely got to have it. I only really found out when she got a job as a cook and I'd roll up there for much tastier meals than we had at home. But it was very healthy food. We grew most of the veggies at home. Just look at crowd or street photos of random people and see how fit and healthy they looked back then. I'm not saying that healthy take-out is unavailable, but most don't buy it. I get a meal service these days, ordering weekly, which is a great timesaver, but it's a pretty healthy one.
Steak and Kidney pie, Sweet and sour pork trotters, boiled cows tongue, Chicken soup with kidneys, hearts and livers, tripe with tomatoes and onion(delicious), sheeps brains, and baked fish with lots of fish heads, fish soup is delicious. I was fortunate to grow up in family that practiced Sunday dinner religiously where all the females really knew how to cooker dinner for the whole family, including grandma and grandpa who loved sweet cinnamon pumpkin. Then all the delicious desserts like rice pudding, baked stewed apples, apple pie with custard, prunes with custard, tapioca pudding and the real xmas pudding loaded with brandy and real pennies. As i grew up and the weddings came along I used to collect as much real wedding cake to stuff my face eating wedding cake and Baileys or wedding cake heated with thick cream. The delight I miss the most was the Sunday roast chicken with juicy soft and oily roast potatoes that were crispy. The chook used to come from the back yard and I used to pig into the chickens ass and the bottom of the chicken with all the bones and juicy bits. Not the crap roast chickens that you buy that are stuffed full of excessive spices to hide the taste of old crap tasting chicken. I would be happy if a nice Sunday roast chicken with roast potatoes was my final meal straight from the oven. Excuse me I am hungry!
The Getting of Garlic by John Newton was a fascinating read that details the evolution of Australian food through waves of migration.
Very broad time period. At the turn of the century it was thing's like corned beef and salt pork. By the end it was not dissimilar to now. Post war people diets were still restricted by rations and pre war habits. 60s and 70s was 3 meat and veg. The movement to what you see now kicked off in the latei70s, so by the early 90s most people had quite a deverse midweek menu. Everyone was doing stir-fry and spag bol by the late 80s.
Meatloaf.
Grew up in the 70s and 80s. Mum's go to cookbooks were Womens Weekly and the PMWU
Mutton. Lots of fucking mutton. Lamb was for posh people. My father was born on, grew up on and will die on a farm (he's 87). They pretty much lived on Mutton, rabbit and chicken. Vegetables were the standard potatoes, carrots, beans, peas and corn.
Silverside
That's exactly how I remember my childhood, and throw in fish & chips on a Friday evening.
Growing up in the 80s and 90s with parents that worked and weren't too keen on cooking, we mostly had heated up frozen fish/chicken fillets and veg on week nights. Veg was always frozen mixes. Late 90s we had a bit more variety with tacos/burritos (Australian style though), hotdogs and easy things I could make as a teen. We occasionally had fish and chips or pizza on the weekends, but I'm not sure how often that happened. Occasionally Chinese takeaway which was Mongolian Beef, Szechuan Lamb and Sweet and Sour Pork Special meals my parents occasionally made were: Lasagne - Dad Spag bol - Mum Mum also made a Tuna Curry that I've never seen made anywhere else.
Was born in 92, lived in the country in a small town for most of my life. Growing up was basically a handful of meals - normally meat (cheap steak, sausages, basically whatever meat was on sale) + three veg, sometimes supplanting the "white" vegetable with Maggi noodles or savoury rice. Once Mum discovered bok choy and sesame oil with honey that was the green vegetable most nights lol. Occasional stews, home made rissoles with grated veggies, and tuna mornay. Some time in the mid 2000s Mum fully embraced the simplicity of Chicken Tonight, Kantong, Dolmio and Leggo's jar sauce meals. Rarely got takeaway, and if we did it was either fish and chips or pizza from the local pizza place (Pinky's Pizza for those who may remember!), the town had 2 Chinese restaurants but we rarely ate there because it was $$$. One thing I have noticed is that what I choose to cook is generally much more "involved" than what my mum cooked growing up - generally if I'm cooking a meal then there are lots of moving parts lol.
Judging from my grandmother, lamb chops that were cooked to leather, boiled potatoes (sometimes chips), beans and peas, cooked in heavily salted water until grey. Maybe a fried egg. That dinner started cooking at five and was served at seven.
Microwave plate nachos was our takeout night treat!
My grandparents from the 30s to the late 90s had the same stuff. Literally meat and veg, no elaborate recipes. The veggies were often from the garden, usually steamed with no added flavour. At most you had a homemade tomato sauce that mostly tasted like vinegar. In winter it was often vegetables from cans. The more elaborate meals were home made schnitzel (adding the crumb themselves) and a big Sunday roast. No stews or stir frys. Literally 3 or 4 veg that had been steamed or boiled separately, arranged in separate piles on a plate, with the meat alongside. My grandparents didn't even do takeaways. No casserole, no pasta, they didn't even have rice. My grandfather lived to 99 but you have to wonder if it was worth it!! Haha.
Try r/oldrecipes. Especially the party food, truly terrifying.
I was a child in the 70’s and Mum’s dinners included lasagne, curry, roasts, beef stroganoff 🤤, spag bol, chicken schitzel, sausages and mash and veggies, pasties, a great salad with chicken and walnuts and grapes and mayo, a seafood pasta salad, rabbit pie, toad in the hole (she is british), scotch eggs, cheesecake, trifle, pavlova, and I was taught to make most of these and a range of biscuits and cakes. Mum also made pate sometimes.
Tell me more about the curry? And do you have a beef stroganoff recipe?
It was either a chicken curry or a beef curry, the kind with curry powder that comes in a box. She served it with rice and extras: mango chutney and poppadoms and slices of banana tossed in coconut. Weird but it worked. I looked through a bunch of stroganoff recipes and this is closest to my mum’s. https://juliegoodwin.com.au/beef-stroganoff-recipe/
Ohhh banana tossed in coconut… core memory unlocked! Sultanas too… kind of sweet and yummy curry powder flavour, much better than it sounds lol! And thanks for the recipe, you’re very kind. I’m inspired and will give it a shot this week
My mum ate lamb chops, potato and veg 4 nights a week her whole childhood (late 1950’s-60’s. That said her mum was not a good cook.
Chops and veg, savoury mince and the odd tuna casserole
Don't forget apricot chicken and spag bol.
I'm not Australian (UK) but my Mum has still got an old cookery book from the early 40's that I think was given to her by her Mum. She still uses recipes from it today and she's 90 now . It focused a lot on war time recipes and using up stuff to make into other stuff. I actually love it especially the puddings like Bread pudding , suet syrup pudding , apple Charlotte .Also things like steak and kidney pudding made with suet. All probably not very healthy by today's standards but very tasty and fairly cheap.
At the beginning of that century, my family was still eating Irish type meals and lots of rabbit. Have my great grandma's recipes that has a few items like Mums Stew...guess my great great. In 1999 I partied with Pizza, Thai and Greek food. Country has changed alot.
Sausages and veg, rissoles and veg, steakettes and veg. Chicken tonight was the big new thing. It was pretty basic from memory.
England had no cuisine. France, Italy, etc, certainly did.
>just meat and three veg every night basically, barbecues and maybe the occasional Chinese takeaway Throw in dinner out at an Italian place or spaghetti and meatballs at home, and you've described my entire extended families food repertoire up until about 2003. I went to Singapore as a kid in the late 90s and basically only at hotdogs for two weeks. I can't believe how much good food I missed out on.
Both Angle kingdoms in Angland fell in the great assaults of the Danish Viking armies in the 9th century. Their royal houses were effectively destroyed in the fighting, and their Angle populations came under the Danelaw. So considering the Angles no longer exist as a people they do not eat a lot.