I was thinking about eating at my parents back in the Sixties and early Seventies. I know we ate most evening meals - tea - around a large dining table. I can see salt and pepper, piccalilli, bread and butter, Daddy's sauce and ketchup. I can see raffia place mats and bigger ones for the hot food dish placed in the middle of the table. Maybe a casserole or a hotpot, sausages or mince and onions. A lot of the crockery was white Pyrex with a blue pattern.
I don't remember my Dad cooking. Mum cooked everything. Sometimes we had guests like the kid from across the road, Russell James or a friend of my parents. So there we were, our parents and three sons. Often we had our two older married sisters, fellas and sprogs over from their houses. We were a big family who often came together back then. Mum was really the focal point of everything whilst she was alive.
We may have had Sunday dinners too round the dining table - a roast and all that - but I really can't recall now sixty years on. I bet we did, although church was a big deal on Sundays mid-morning back then. I had to go with my Mum at 11am and yawned the whole time!
My Mum and Dad's dining table - known as the breakfast table - was in a room off the kitchen called the breakfast room. This was our dining room. All very confusing. It was all very family-oriented and matter-of-fact. Plain honest food. No airs and graces. I don't remember my Mum cooking for friends in the evening like you might do now, though there was lots of drinking going on with chums at the weekends. There were buffets too, lots of finger foods on big occasions like Christmas and Birthdays. Lots of stainless steel pickle trays came out and little rainbow-handled forks.
I also ate in the telly room school-nights. I had tea there [the evening meal] with a tray on my knee. I can clearly see steak pudding, chips and mushy peas and gravy in front of me watching Blue Peter, Scooby Doo or similar kids' TV. Doctor Who and Thunderbirds were on later if I remember rightly. The food may have been on an oval Pyrex plate or even still in its chippy tray on a plate!
I remember making hot meals on Saturdays for my greasy mates later on in the mid-Seventies. I was quite the teenage cook! Chicken and mushroom pie, home made chips and marrowfat peas with my own special gravy were on the menu and drew my mates in like bees to pollen! I was a better cook then than I am now!
Nowadays, during the week me and the Missus eat our tea on our laps watching telly around 6.45pm. Breakfast is the same. We have a sofa each, which Blue the dog surfs between.
Saturdays we have a cooked breakfast with bread and butter and to relive those glory days of the Sixties we eat at the dining table with a mug of tea reading the papers.
Blimey, buttered bread, tea and papers!
We've become our Mum and Dads!
Where do you eat readers?
We have indeed become our parents Woodsy! Love this story as it brought back our own family meal routines which taken for granted at the time, now look on fondly and yes, we repeat some of those same ‘ways’ in our own household today.
ReplyDeleteSunday afternoon lunch (after church) was a particular favourite time as the Sunday paper brought the extended comics/funnies and it was a day of ease that melted into the evening (less at ease now as the closing credits of the Hardy Boys & Nancy Drew Mysteries signalled bedtime and dreaded Monday morning to follow).
That's a lovely image Charles, a day of ease that melted into the evening! Fab. Alas, like you say, the dreaded coming Monday always tainted Sunday evenings!
DeleteWow Woodsie -what an amazing word picture you paint! We had the similarly confusingly Ned Breakfast Room where we ate all our meals which my Mum cooked in the small kitchen in the next room, which she called the Scullery. (Doubly confusing as she kept no skulls there!) My Dad was a more basic cook, but he'd cook "Daddy Rice" which was fried bacon pieces, scrambled egg and cooked white rice coloured pink with tomato sauce! This was an obvious nod to his cultural heritage. Speaking of Pyrex cookware, I still have my Chinese Grandmother's yellow coloured glass gravy boat which evokes the odd Chinese/English cusine my Dad grew up with! Nowadays I suppose you'd call it "fusion"!
ReplyDeleteOh what memories "Eating in the 1960s brings up!
Great memories those Looey. I would have loved your Dad's Daddy Rice. Sound so much better than the packet Savoury Rice we got! Do you still use your Grandma's pyrex gravy boat?
DeleteIt's mostly for display, but yes. We used it recently, but then most of our tableware is antique, either inherited or scavenged from Op Shops!
ReplyDeleteOp shop? is that a charity shop Looey?
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