Dinner, supper, tea, doesn’t matter what you call it, it isn’t what it used to be.
Take my meals over the last few days for instance. Saturday I ate Italian (minestrone followed by spaghetti and meat sauce), Sunday Thai (Thai green curry and rice), Monday French (escalope of pork in a green pepper sauce with sauté potato), last night Chinese (Ribs, Prawns in ginger, Chicken with bamboo and water chestnuts), and tonight we are having Moroccan (spiced lamb, chick peas, and sweet potato cooked in the tagine with flat breads).
I hasten to add all these meals were home cooked and quite delicious.
How different from my childhood. Back then it was sausage and mash, fish and chips, meat pie, liver and onions, and a roast on Sunday. Spaghetti came in cans and rice was made with milk. I can remember endless joyous childhood teas when all I eat was beans on toast – how I loved beans on toast, still do.
In the town where I lived the only take-away was Kimberley’s fish and chip shop, pubs didn’t do food, not even sandwiches, and restaurants (I can only remember one) served pretty much the same fare as we ate at home, just on posher plates. You could get beef burger, egg, and chips at the Wimpy, and steak and roast chicken at the Berni, but these were in the larger towns not the little town of
There were no fast food places (well,
The fist time I tasted ‘foreign food’ was the anglicised spaghetti bolognaise made by the school cook at Lord Bill’s. Minced beef and tomato, topped with overcooked spaghetti, covered in grated cheddar, and baked in the school ovens until it was crisp. Delicious.
She also made a version of curry with stuck together boiled rice, full of raisons and not hot at all, we all loved it.
And of course there were those Vesta curry meals.
Then the Chinese came to town and the world changed overnight. Chan could cook bean sprouts to perfection. Bean sprouts? What was a bean sprout? And his Chinese curries were to die for, and some town residents probably did.
Soon you could buy chilli mixes at the bottom shop, and rice, and dried spaghetti. And then everybody was boiling spaghetti and rice for forty minutes, trying that ‘foreign muck', and quite enjoying it. It was a gastronomic revolution. My mum even started to buy and use spices! Well, not buy them. By this time Swartz had opened a factory on the industrial estate and my Uncle Len was working there.
Yes what a change in such short a space of time.
What foreign muck shall I have for tea tomorrow?
Vesta anyone?
With a Vesta Chinese meal you used to get flat noodles (like little strips of beige plastic) that you fried, puffing them up into little curls of beige polystyrene (like Quavers but less tasty).
ReplyDeleteWhat a treat! Talk about exotic...
Joan
My mum used to have a "thing" about Vesta curries, so much so that, because her fridge/freezer's just packed up and she had to throw out all of the contents, I did wonder whether you could still get them.
ReplyDeleteStrangely enough, I do, however, believe that the worst meal I ever had as a student involved canned beefburgers, and this is from someone who sometimes had to eat those flat tinned pies for his tea... M.
Yes, canned beefburgers - YUK, they were awful. Just what meat were they? No don't answer that.
ReplyDeleteSharon Taylor on Facebook:
ReplyDeleteMy Mum made what I thought were very hot curries as a child, but in my haste to eat, I once had a very good heat factor on the curry level, thankfully it has calmed down now. I don't include apples, raisons or the like in my curries these days, if it isn't prepared to order from the best restaurant close to home, I use Pataks and add a twist......tastes nice and life is too short....
Philip Heslehurst on Facebook:
ReplyDeleteAnd his Chinese curries were to die for, and some town residents probably did. :-) lol very good
Sharon Hutt on Facebook:
ReplyDeleteWow did you grow up in Thame? I grew up in Aylesbury. I remember the spice factory. And special meals at Wimpy in grey old Friar;'s square. Parents flatly refused to take us on MacDonalds as 'anything served in foam cartons is not real food'. I see you didn't eat Spam in your house...
Della Jayne Roberts on Facebook:
ReplyDeleteI remember when we first came home from Australia to Cornwall (1988) and decided to make a Chinese!
No canned bean sprouts, water chestnuts, jars of sweet or spicy sauces. No, only some celery ...
But they knew who we were - the local Spa owner knew everything that went on in St Stephen.
Andrew Height on Facebook:
ReplyDeleteActually Sharon we did in fritter form. I was born and raised in Thame I am a Thamensian in fact.
David Bell commented on Facebook:.
ReplyDeleteDavid wrote: "Vesta Chinese - I remember the wonder of frying the prepacked noodles and watching them puff out and explode - At the time I had never seen the like before."
Andy Lloyd on Facebook:
ReplyDeleteIn my childhood, the only 'foriegn' people in Macclesfield were the owners of the Ming Yin Chinese restaurant. This was one of only two restaurants in town. How things have changed. The Ming Yin only closed fairly recently probably due to the competition from about twenty town centre eateries but also possibly because of the name.
Andrew Height replied:
Yes - There are to over forty restaurants and take-aways within 10 minutes walk of my door.
Catherine Halls-Jukes on Facebook:
ReplyDeleteoh my god, I have gone from hoe made meals and how the real english fare was fed to me as a child (my father-in-law refused to come to our house because i cook foreign muck !!!!) to discovering that Andy lwas bought up in Thame and realising how little we know about our friends............