cheese | Childhood Memories of growing up in the 1950s and 1960s.

Once again, I’m apologising for such a long absence. I began to fear that I was running out of topics to cover which relate to the 50s and 60s. But I miss blogging and I have acquired a number of followers so I’m going to start again with a topic I know I’ve covered before. Hopefully it’s a bit different this time.

I did a ‘big shop’ this afternoon at a local supermarket. I often find myself musing whilst shopping on how very different food shopping was when I was a child. Not that I ever did the shopping!

As I was browsing along the fruit and vegetable aisles I was choosing between various types of peppers and mushrooms, picking out the best avocados, kiwi fruit and pineapples and wondering which apples to buy. Way back in the 1950s pineapples only came in tins. We had mushrooms when we picked them in the local woods and fields and I’d never heard of peppers or kiwi fruit.

In the aisle displaying tinned goods I bought a tin of coconut milk which I use in curries. Once a year, when the fair came to our local town, my dad would buy or win a fresh coconut. Once home he would drill a hole in it and pour out the coconut milk to share out as an exotic drink. Then he would break the shell up in his garage and share out the pieces so that we could eat the fresh coconut.

In the cereals aisle I walk through two sides of shelves lined with every sort of breakfast cereal from the Corn Flakes, Shredded Wheat and Weetabix of my childhood through a plethora of types too many to list.

There was often a free toy in cereal packets.

Then on to dairy (and non-dairy). Back in the 50s we had milk and we had cheese. There was normal milk and long life (sterilised) milk. Now there are dozens of different kinds of milk, dairy and non-dairy. Where I lived, deep in rural Wales, our village shop sold one kind of cheese and Kraft cheese spread triangles – which I loved! Yoghurts didn’t come on the scene until the mid 60s.

There were a couple of different tea brands available in the 50s, no frozen goods, no ready meals, no dietary choices such as low fat, vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, sugar free, organic, decaffeinated. Fruit and veg were largely seasonal apart from oranges and bananas. Very limited and much simpler! But I would rather have the choices of today than the limited range available in the 1950s – even though it’s fun to look back.

A friend of mine mentioned recently that her favourite tinned soup is Mulligatawny but that she never sees it in the shops any more. I remember it too and her comment made me think of some other food items which have disappeared or almost disappeared in the past few decades. Some of these have been mentioned before in posts about foods I remember eating and ones I remember arriving on the scene when I was young.

I am not saying that these things don’t exist any more (although some of them definitely don’t) just that I don’t hear of or see them any more.

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I used to love Kraft Dairylea triangles and for a while there was a box of flavoured ones being sold. I loved them! The picture is the nearest I could find to what I’m remembering but the flavours are not exactly the same.

Turnips and swedes were once as common as carrots and parsnips when I was a child but are now they are like the poor relation of the root vegetable world. I certainly never see them on a menu when eating out! And does anyone still eat tripe? Or mutton?

I was watching a programme on TV the other night called Back in Time for Tea (recommended to me by the same friend) in which a family’s home is transported back to earlier decades. In the one where they were living as if in the 1960s – complete with 60s furniture, decor, clothes and food – there was a food item in their pantry which was Heinz tinned Vegetable Salad. I remember that there was also a Potato Salad one. There are many, many varieties of salad dishes available on deli counters now – coleslaw, rice salads, cous cous salads and tons more – in plastic pots. I had completely forgotten that their precursors came in tins!

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My grandmother absolutely loved butterscotch gums and I often took her a packet – weighed out from a large glass jar into a paper bag – when I went to see her. Spangles were a popular sweet when I was a child and for a while they had a packet called Old English Spangles with flavours like mint and liquorice. They were brilliant!

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Surprise Peas, which I have mentioned before, were what came before frozen peas and were ‘freeze dried’ and very quick to cook. The rise of home freezers and cheap frozen peas meant that Surprise Peas were no longer desirable so they disappeared.

Now we come to blancmange. Everybody of my age and older remembers blancmange. It was a set milky fruit flavoured dessert made in a mould and went with jelly like fish go with chips. It could be made from scratch but there was a packet mix which most people used. I read on a website when I was looking blancmange up that the nearest equivalent is the Italian dessert panna cotta.

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Burgers hadn’t reached Britain in the 1950s but we did have things called rissoles (I never hear that word now!) and faggots. I know faggot has a non-food meaning in some parts of the world but to us it was a kind of meatball.

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A few other edible things which are no more . . . .

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It’s unthinkable in this PC age but children could buy imitation cigarettes which were sweets!

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The tinned milk products below are still available but are largely used in cooking desserts. Back in the 1950s in Britain when most homes, and many local shops, didn’t have fridges these were what we called ‘cream’ and we had them on fruit salads (tinned in those days!), trifles and fruit pies.

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