Monday 21st November

They say; scientists and nutritionists, that the post-war diet, with rationing still rigidly enforced was the best start to life for the post war generation, and that they are consequently healthier than the generations that followed.  Well, we were privileged; at least while we were in Cyprus, and though I never ate with the grown-ups, but downstairs in the kitchen, I am sure we were never troubled by rationing at all.  We left when I was seven, so I cannot really remember any of the food of that time, but I surely can remember the food we had while we lived in Putney, and it was pretty boring.  Bland is the best word to describe it, even onions used to upset Grandma’s constitution, so that eternal standby was used only sparingly.  I had school dinners, and they at least were nourishing and full of flavour, but at home the food was dull as ditchwater, and so repetitive, you could actually tell the day of the week by what was for tea.  Sunday was always roast, and almost always a piece of beef, which used to be overcooked almost to oblivion.  Strange to think that chicken, now the cheapest of meats, was very expensive in the sixties, and was a real treat, whereas beef was far more commonplace than it has become today.  Monday, we would have the remains of Sunday’s beef served cold with mashed potato and maybe cabbage.  We didn’t even have the excitement of pickles to spice it up; Grandma never gave them house room. Tuesday would be sausages, or a pork chop, fried in lard I might add.  Wednesday and Thursday we had something on toast, usually cheese or eggs or sometimes warmed up pilchards from a tin. Friday was fish, and usually poached in milk, and pretty tasteless, but sometimes we had that gorgeous smoked yellow haddock, a real treat.  My mother slowly took over the culinary reins from Grandma’s unsteady hands and did at least introduce a few different vegetables into our diet.  We always seemed constrained by money, or lack of it, and eating was never considered a luxury, but an unfortunate and costly necessity.

After I started working, I would try out new ideas I had read up in the Sunday Times Review, but Grandma was never too enthusiastic about my Quiche Lorraine or Chicken a-la-king, though my mother seemed to enjoy the unpredictability of the thing.

Then when I met Jennifer and her crowd I was suddenly introduced to real pasta and exotic items such as veal and sun-dried tomato, which you never really saw in the shops at all.  For several years you would have to seek out small delicatessens where these items could be bought, but now the supermarkets are literal cornucopias, spilling out all sorts of food from every corner of the globe.  Nothing appears to be unavailable, though it is sometimes on a bottom shelf or you have to ask an assistant for it, so now you can follow any recipe by those TV celebrity chefs and you know you will be able to get them at any decent sized superstore.

The latest innovation though is the total elimination of real cooking; there is an amazing variety of ready cooked microwavable meals of every variety, Indian, Chinese, Thai and Italian, and it is all so easy, and even if you suspect, as I do, that they may be full of salt and sugar and e-numbers, none of us really cares.  The irony is that real cooking programmes have never been so popular; as we sit down to watch them with our tray on our lap, tucking into yet another micro-waved ready meal.