Be grateful kids! In the olden days food was offal
Yes, we ate the stomach linings of animals. And that wasn’t the worst of it. What about tinned fruit? This is the first of Matthew Condon’s musings on health | SHARE YOUR CULINARY MEMORIES
Oh, dinnertime in the 1970s, I tell my children over dinner, closing my eyes with the pleasure and simultaneous pain of remembrance.
What was it like, Dad? Tell us, tell us! What did you eat?
Well, I said, we didn’t have organic stuff way back then. Anything organic just meant it had either been grown in the earth or was rotting back into the earth.
Ewwww, they chorused.
In our household we didn’t have sheets of seaweed or milk that came out of nuts or cheese that came out of goats or bread that wasn’t rectangular and wrapped in plastic or sugar-free muesli bars or eggs from chickens that lived in the Hilton or meat-free sausages or black beluga lentils.
They listened, slack-jawed.
Back then we’d never heard of dairy-free ice cream or edamame beans or sushi and fro-yo.
No fro-yo?
No fro-yo.
Then…what did you eat?
This was a tricky question because I was caught between wanting to share the full dread of my childhood diet to let my youngsters know how good they had it, how diverse and healthy and wholesome and nutritious their own diet was by comparison, and that they should be grateful for every morsel. (I admit I had admonished any sign of fussiness in my children’s palates with the standard declaration: “There are children around the world eating grass tonight! Be grateful!”) And making myself physically ill with the recollection.
What did I eat? Well, tripe for starters.
Stripes?
TRIPE. The stomach lining of a cow or a sheep or a pig. Cleaned, trimmed, cooked and served with white sauce and onions.
My daughter placed her hand across her mouth.
It was offal.
Nobody laughed.
STOMACH LINING, I stressed. Then there was lamb’s fry and bacon. The lamb’s LIVER, that was the fry bit. Wrapped in bacon to make it even remotely edible.
My youngest almost dry-retched.
But I was on a roll. A roll of horror.
Lamb chops. Lots of them. With three vegetables, the vegetables so overcooked they were rendered tasteless, reduced to a mushy, sloppy coagulant of fibre in your mouth. Rissoles. Endless rissoles. And curried sausages. Or normal sausages with some sort of tinned curried powder sprinkled on top.
My eldest, a vegetarian, quietly belched.
Not to mention the ham steaks with a ring of tinned pineapple slapped on the top. Salmon kedgeree.
What is kedg….
Don’t you mind. The great era of the Crock Pot ushered in a weekly staple – Apricot Chicken, a chicken stew sort of thing, with liberal half-spheres of tinned apricots. Yes, my dears, hot fruit for dinner.
They blanched.
A lot of things seemed to come out of tins, my youngest son said quizzically.
Yes, they did, I said, because we never knew when there was going to be a Nuclear War, so at least when the bombs hit we’d have plenty of tins of pineapple and apricots and we’d survive.
The children were silent.
I know my youngest wanted to ask how the tins managed to survive a nuclear holocaust, but he refrained.
Don’t get me started on school lunches. You have school kitchens that serve healthy salad wraps and fruit salads and lightly blanched veggies with humus dips. I had Grandma’s Devon sausage sandwiches on white bread spread with cooking margarine, the whole thing drowned in tomato sauce.
Over time the sauce totally soaked into the bread so by recess that sandwich looked like it had been murdered.
What’s margarine? my youngest asked.
Do you know what we used to have for a treat? For dessert? Do you?
They shook their heads. My daughter held her head.
Sago!
What’s that?
You don’t need to know. In fact, I’m not sure I even knew after all these years. But I still carried that starchy, slimy aftertaste in my mouth just at the thought of those accumulated litres of sago pudding during the 70s.
As for restaurants, I continued. I didn’t see the inside of a restaurant until I was in my late teens. And that was just a room at Grandad’s golf club. We never went to restaurants. Restaurants were a waste of money. Why would we go to a restaurant when we had a pantry back home full of vats of pineapple rings and apricots?
I went deeper into my 70s childhood diet – the Rice-a-Riso, the corned beef fritters, or the mysterious meals, slapped together because Mum and Dad had been working late, that were curiously called “bread ‘n’iffit”.
I was in a trance. Toad in the hole. Devil’s on horseback. Prunes and custard. Bubble and squeak.
So consider yourself fortunate, I declared. Be grateful for the modern, organic, healthy, life-extending food on your table. Fresh. Ethically produced. Full of all the vitamins and goodness you need. Not out of a plastic bag. Not out of a packet. Not out of a tin.
I looked up at the table.
But the children were long gone.
