The Good Old Days?

Everybody seems to want us to go back to the cooking of a previous generation.

I have been watching 'Delia Through The Decades' and finding myself thinking "I had that book, I had that dress - gracious, I even had that haircut!!!"

I was with some colleagues at school last week, and we all agreed, that Delia's great success was giving recipes which, if followed exactly to the letter, always worked!

 

I am also watching the Hairy Bikers "Mums know Best". I confess to a slight problem with Dave and Si in this series- yes, they are very entertaining, but their recipes [and those of their guests] haven't left me feeling "Wow, I want to go and try that out!" Furthermore, the recipes do tend to err on the side of high sugar, high fat' high calorie treats. I suppose that is inevitable - many of these heirloom recipes date back to a time when ordinary families were involved in a lot of hard physical labour, and needed inexpensive carbs to fill them up  - cakes and pastries and pies and puds. And unlike Delia's meticulous recipes, they are alarmingly vague sometimes. We couldn't understand why the cornbread was so white - you have to read the recipe on the website to discover it is made with white cornmeal.

Following the 'traditional recipes' theme, I picked up this book in the library. Written by Jane F-W, mother of the ever-enthusiastic Hugh, it is an interesting read.

But she keeps on about "Taking a trip down memory lane for my generation" [She was born in 1939] and gets her friends to contribute their favourite childhood recipes.

This is a completely different set of people to the ones who speak to the Hairy Bikers. Whereas the HB set tend to be working/middle class people, JFWs mates are quite definitely middle/upper class. So there are lots of references to nannies, cooks, shooting parties and boarding school. I remember my Mum saying that if it was a good day, she might get a slice of 'bread and dripping' when she got in from school - she certainly didn't have 'Gentleman's Relish on Toast'!Furthermore, we had rationing in this country till 1954 - but the young Jane managed to eat pretty well if her stories are accurate. For her 13th birthday, her parents took her, plus a schoolfriend, to dinner at a Greek Restaurant in London.

Our eating habits have changed so much - and we have so much more choice available to us now - even compared to 40 years ago, when Delia started.

I can remember clearly the first time I sampled yogurt [1970] and 'real' spaghetti [not Heinz stuff in a tin] - that was 1973. My first avocado was in 1976, and the first time I tasted smoked mackerel was 1982. But those items feature regularly in my supermarket trolley these days.

What are your 'food memories' ?