After bingeing on Easter eggs, would you miss chocolate if you could never obtain it again?

A recent survey asked people what food they would miss if never obtainable again. High on the list was bacon sandwiches, fish and chips and Sunday lunch. My husband would say cheese, and as for me, a good, hot curry!

One of the biggest changes over the years has been our eating habits. Many older housewives cling on to the traditional way of cooking, which I often do, but I am also influenced by the changing face of eating and so I serve chilli con carne, spaghetti Bolognese, curries and dishes from different cultures that would have been totally alien in the 1950s. When we eat out our food of choice can be Turkish, Lebanese, Indian, Caribbean, Chinese – so many to choose from, but rarely British.

When I was young there were two choices of food. Eat it or go without. There were no concessions for faddy eaters, or vegetarian. You ate what was put in front of you, and as a family. Dinner, in those days called tea, wasn’t served until father got home from work. And with no mobile phones, televisions and no reading at the table, something that I tried hard to rebel against, you had to talk to each other!

Meals were pretty standard then. Breakfast would be cereal, toast and dripping or jam. Full English breakfast was a treat for Sundays. The’ day of rest’ didn’t actually refer to your mother who spent most of the day at the cooker. Meat and two veg was the norm for most families main meal throughout the 50s. It was very important for women after the war years with all its restrictions, to feed their families nutritiously and this included plenty of green vegetables much to the dismay of their children. Lard figured highly in cooking. Most things were fried, never grilled, or steamed. Mother made pastry with lard and put a whole block of it underneath the joint to make dripping. Bread and dripping were staple dietary food then. The way we ate was a recipe for disaster, but we offset it by the more active lifestyle that we led.

Monday was wash day then cold meat, left over from the joint, with chips and pickle.

Other days would be sausage and mash, meat pie, bubble and squeak, when we fought over the black burnt bits, and of course fish on Fridays!

We had high tea on Sundays with potted meat or polony sandwiches. Polony was a mildly spiced red skinned sausage of foreign origin. My sister and I refused to eat Spam, which was popular in sandwiches or as fritters, thinking it revolting! It originated in the USA and as far as we were concerned should have gone back there!

Salad sandwiches were not the norm, with salad only obtainable in summer, always with Heinz Salad Cream. Olive Oil was sold at the chemist, warmed, and used to remove ear wax. The idea that it could be put on food would be laughed at. We had homemade cake and Libby’s Fruit Salad with Carnation Milk. Excitement was finding the one cherry. If visitors came for tea, the sandwiches were more exciting with tinned salmon or crab.

Much of the food that my parents ate would be considered very strange today. There was almost no part of the pig that wasn’t eaten. They ate tripe, bag, chitterlings, trotters, sweetbreads, and cowheel.

To me, offal was well, awful!