More about fifties food

Now where were we nearly a week ago? Examinining the contents of the biscuit barrel I think. But to move on from there to my all-time favourite meal as a child, egg and chips. The chips were home-made of course, shallow-fried just out of the pan, and the yolk of the egg would be yellow and just a bit runny. Then liberally sprinkled with salt and vinegar, and with a huge dollop of tomato ketchup on the side of the plate to dunk the chips in, I was in heaven for as long as it took to consume the feast, which usually was not very long.
From quite an early age, I always remember, when I ate alone, I usually had a book of some description propped up in front of me. That is another bad habit that I have not been able to break. Even now, when no one else is around while I am eating, there is never a book or a newspaper far away.
The back of cereal packets were quite a good source of entertainment too, in those days. There was plenty to read on them, and things to make when the carton was empty. Most of the breakfast cereals that we had in the fifties are still around today, but I think that sugar coated puffed wheat was the only sweetened one. Weetabix had to be opened from the top in those days, and then you just had to pull back the paper inside to reveal a neat row of biscuits, or slightly less neat, if I had been at them first. I once sent off for a Weetabix Wonder Atlas which only cost tokens as far as I can remember. I kept it for decades, well into my mid-adulthood. Perhaps that might have been one of the reasons why I got so hooked on geography. I loved finding out where other countries were, and wondering what it was like to live there. Indeed, I would often take my precious atlas to bed with me as bed-time reading.
I am tempted here to let myself be completely sidetracked from the subject of fifties food, but I cannot let it go without mentioning the delightful theme of junior school dinners. We had to eat them up, that was the worst of it. Every last grey lump found in the mashed potatoes, every last piece of fat or gristle in the meat and every last spike in the spiky dark-green cabbage. I used to sit sometimes in misery, the only occupant left sitting at the long table on the long bench , with my portion of evil-looking cabbage or congealed fatty meat staring back at me, and I would miss half my play time. They were the days when I had not been quick enough to get to the waste-food container without being seen by the teacher on guard. Usually, I was quick enough, and sometimes the food was palatable enough to finish without undue problems. So I didn't miss all that many playtimes.
A clean plate was a passport to the promised land of pudding, or dessert or afters, as I mostly called it and I rarely had any problems with that. The iced cake was delicious with hot custard over it, for the custard melted the icing in a most delightful way. Funnily enough, they usually managed to get the custard right, smooth and creamy, just the way I liked it. Even things like rice pudding and tapioca, which we used to call frogs' eggs, were quite palatable. But the favourite was at Christmas time, when they put coins in the Christmas pud. I once found a silver sixpence, and I have never forgotten the thrill of it. I think that was probably the present that gave me the most pleasure that Christmas.
It was at Christmas and mostly at Easter too that we experienced the luxury of luxuries, a whole chicken, roasted brown and still sizzling from the oven. The sage and onion stuffing which invariably accompanied it had been livened up with butter and extra onions and also done to a turn in the oven until it was crisp and brown on top. At Christmas time, this was always accompanied by fairy cabbages as my mother used to call brussel sprouts and roast potatoes.
No I can't exactly make out a case for being deprived and undernourished in the post-war years. But I am sure that in reality, I was just too young to appreciate the very real privations of the forties, and by the time my memory started to function reliably, it was the fifties, and things were beginning to look up.
But until quite late into my childhood, my banana intake was rationed to one a week, and it took me quite a long while to realise that pineapples ever had an existence outside the confines of their tins. Nuts, and dates we only had at Christmas time, and the nuts were still very much in their shells. We found that a flat iron in the fire-place was the best way of cracking brazils, even though the nuts inside were invariably smashed into a hundred small pieces; and poking the point of a pair of scissors in the join at the top and then twisting it, was the best way of prising open reluctant walnuts. Nuts definitely lasted a nice long time, and at least half of the pleasure of them lay in getting the things open.
It was the same with the winkles that we kids used to purchase by the handful when the winkle man came pushing his cart along our street with his cart. We used to extract the black, slightly slimy contents from their small snail-like shells with a hair-pin or a hair-grip. That was the interesting bit, but I never ate much of them. They were too cold and salty for my taste. It was a bit of a waste of a penny really.
What else did we used to eat? Butter-beans had to be soaked overnight to make them ready for cooking the next day. I used to quite enjoy them in soups and as a vegetable, although on a white plate they would look a bit insipid. Liver done in the oven with bacon and onions was better, from that point of view. But one thing was for sure, our menu was English through and through. Not even the Italian delights of pizza and bolognese, had filtered through to us, in the fifties, and exotic Indian and Chinese dishes, without which we could not imagine life today still lay at least a decade into the future. I don't think my grandmother had ever heard of curry, but we did eat rice. In fact my grandmother's rice puddings were second to none. She used to make them with custard and they had a lovely nutmeggy skin when they emerged piping hot from the oven.
We didn't go short on home-made cakes, sponges or pies either. Making a sponge-cake required a lot of beating and we used to take it in turns to beat until the mixture had reached the required state of fluffiness, and tasted good enough for me to take a surruptitious fingerful. As for pastry-making, I used to help with that too, crumbling the fat and flour together and lifting it high in the air. I loved to watch the floury mixture cascading down from my fingers, most of it landing in the bowl, but a considerable amount having to be scooped up from the table-top before my grandmother noticed. As a reward I was usually given a bit of the pastry to fashion how I liked and put in the oven by myself on an old saucer. That bit, still hot from the oven, with a dollop of jam on the top, always tasted the best of all.