Can you remember what you ate

 as a child?

I was asked that question yesterday. The person who asked it is Italian by birth. She has been here for many years but still tends to cook the sort of food she would perhaps have cooked in Italy fifty or more years ago.

I thought about it and told her that I could. I am a bit hazy about my very early childhood but I do remember porridge and vegetables from the garden. I remember the currant buns the baker made especially for the small children of the place we lived in. They seemed big to us but they were actually about a quarter the size of those he sold to older children and adults. If you did not go to school then you knew that on one morning a week you could go pedalling on your "dinky" down to the bakery and he would hand out buns to the seven or so of us who lived in the town.  We were considered spoilt. Perhaps we were but we certainly knew to say "thank you".

When we moved to the city the Senior Cat built up another garden. He had to. We depended on it for food. Grandpa had one too. How they found time to garden is a mystery given one was studying for his university degree and the other was running his tailoring business.

There was a lot of pumpkin in our diet. They were easy to grow and kept well. In summer we had a lot of tomatoes. Mum would bottle them in a "Vacola" outfit and we would have them right through winter. We ate quite a lot of fish. Grandpa knew the fishermen and would get it directly from them. Meat appeared on Sundays and, with any luck, the rest of the roast joint would appear in our sandwiches on Mondays. Eggs came from the hens Grandpa kept or that Nana would bring if they had any to spare. We had whatever fruit was in the garden or, occasionally, oranges Grandpa would bring back from his customers in the hills behind us. Bananas were an occasional "treat" too. They had to be bought.

Very occasionally we would have ice cream as a very special treat. There was only one flavour available - vanilla. There were also "ice blocks". They came in red, orange, green and a virulent blue. On the rare occasions we were permitted to have them Mum used to insist on us having the orange or green sort.

When we moved to the remote bush we had more meat and no fish. There was a forequarter of mutton one week and a hind quarter the next. Like everyone else in the town we depended on a local farmer to kill a couple of sheep and deliver the meat. It was usually tough and the whole process would have a food inspector panicking.  The farmer killed a steer once and everyone had tough beef for a couple of weeks. With it we would have a lot of pumpkin, potatoes and peas that came in packets and had to be reconstituted. Occasionally Mum would make pastry and we would have pasties but that rarely happened. She would mince the meat herself - or my brother would do it under her supervision. I would be set to do something like scrubbing the potatoes. Fruit came in tins unless we went to the shop in the "big" town some thirty-five miles away. You could buy apples there - and very expensive bananas and oranges. Apples were a treat.

It was not until we moved to the then tiny dairying town that we had real milk again. Until then we had gone back to powdered milk which had to be reconstituted each morning using a whisk. It tasted awful but that was the water. Rainwater was only used for drinking and we dared not waste a drop.

 The milk in the dairying town came straight from the cow. Mum would heat it on the stove top because it was not pasteurised. We drank a lot of milk. It was my brother's job to get a gallon can of it each morning from the dairy.  He would ladle it out himself and leave the money on the shelf.

When we moved again we had to go back to the limitations of tinned fruit and of course mutton and pumpkin.

Somehow we survived all this and were actually pretty healthy even if we did spend our pocket money on tubes of Life Saver peppermints and "conversation" squares. 

I knew about "spaghetti" and "baked beans" from tins. I did not know about pasta or curry or stir-fry. Broccoli was unknown to me. Rice came as either rice pudding baked in the oven or steamed rice served up with "mince and tatties". I suspect the rice was intended to fill us up. Grandma just gave us mince and tatties. 

But unlike many other children we had a Yugoslav neighbour for a while. She liked to cook and we children would sometimes get strange sweet cakes or biscuits. Mum never seemed to mind this. It helped to feed us and she could always give another English lesson in return. It gave me an interest in the food of other cultures.

Now I cook quite differently but I still eat a lot of vegetables.  Middle Cat cooks a great deal of food inspired by her Greek-Cypriot MIL. I suspect Brother Cat does a considerable amount of stir-fry. It is fast and save on the number of utensils used. (His partner prefers to clean the car.)

But yes, I remember when chicken was a Christmas Day treat. I remember the cake on Sunday and the weet-bix with Vegemite after school. I remember seemingly endless "stews" made from whatever Mum could find to put together.  We ate it all.

And, at the annual School Fete day we had toffee apples and marshmallow in ice-cream cones and peanut brittle. It was all pretty good stuff.