[Sundae]

I grew up eating a fair amount of authentic Italian food.
Not that I knew it, but although we had two Italian shops in town they mostly sold ingredients. Mama and Nona would always have their own recipe which was far cheaper and far better than anything than you could buy. And made with love.

Mum had an evening cleaning job and many of the women were Italian. They had family at our convent and many went to the same Catholic church. So they passed the recipes along. My Nanny (Mum's Mum) was apparently quite a poor cook. I don't remember; maybe we ate mostly takeaways when we stayed with her. So Mum had one big (old) cookbook and a coterie of Italian women who were worried that she didn't feed us properly!

She substituted the Italian brands for what she could buy in the local Co-op, but aside from that we ate Italian at least once a week. Pasta and sauce, cannaloni, pizza, spaghetti with meatballs, garlic bread.

Other than that:
Home made chips (fries) with home breaded white fish
Casseroles/ Stews (both making meat stretch futher and/ or using cheaper cuts) the difference being casseroles were slightly thinner and topped with hearty suet dumplings
A varity of offal - liver, heart
Steak & kidney in a home made pie
Sausages - served in a casserole or in Toad in the Hole or sausagemeat with stuffing mix in a Sausage Plait
And sometimes when things were tough, cheese on toast, beans on toast, scrambled eggs on toast. Toast makes it a meal dontcha know.
Shepherds pie made with the cheapest mince the butcher had, so fat had to be skimmed five or six times before it went in the oven, often bulked out with a small tin of beans
Lots of mashipots, to fill us up - we were all greedy children, although Steven was very fussy

And we always had to ask if we could get down from the table. Our smaller portions, the fact we were served first and the way we hoovered it up meant we were finished well before Mum & Dad. We were called back for dessert and then expected to stay for the cleaning.