Baked Beans on A Friday


when I was little...say around ten years old Friday afternoons were happy times.
It was when my sister and I went to my grandparents' house after school. The house was full.
With people talking , eating homemade cake and drinking tea as we, my mother and her friend and my elder sister and her children crowded in to a bungalow the size of a large chicken coop.
Eventually only my twin sister and sister were left and tea was served on a coffee table in front of the tv. Baked beans on cheap white bread toast and tinned fruit cocktail and evaporated milk.
Bloody lovely.
It was a happy house, and we children, who were used to a rather less favourable environment at home , sucked up the pleasure and warmth in it all, like hens do in an early evening sun.

On tv every Friday was an American soap opera...I was reminded of it this morning after I had read of the death of Dorothy Malone ...She of the shiny blonde hair and breathless voice

Funny What You Remember

68 comments:

  1. Beans on toast (it has to be cheap white bread) with a poached egg on top. Pretty much the ultimate comfort food. Then mandarins with evaporated milk. Or even better - jelly mashed up with evaporated milk. Bliss!
    I'm the same age as you, so many of your memories resonate. I don't know what my kids would do if I put tinned fruit and evaporated milk in front of them. It's not something they have every really come across. How times change!

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    1. Ohhhh yes jelly and Evap......sieved into mush through your teeth

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  2. We had tinned fruit cocktail and evaporated milk for sweet on Christmas Day. Nothing like it.

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    1. The milky sweet juice was the best bit.....and the half glacé cherry

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    2. Yummy, and still is. My cupboard is full of evaporated milk and tins of fruit cocktail.

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    3. In fact my eating habits haven't changed much since the 1950s.

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    4. Anonymous6:58 am

      Ohhh.. Not having had any in years and reading comment after comment about evaporated milk and fruit cocktail. I shall have to pop to the shops later See what I've been missing!

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  3. My grandfather always had tinned pears in syrup with evaporated milk and a slice of bread and butter to dip in.

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    1. I'd drink evap milk best now if I could

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  4. I wish that my grandparents had played a bigger part in my childhood but two had died and the other two had moved up to Newcastle-upon-Tyne. They were as poor as church mice.

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  5. I regularly used to visit an elderly Welsh Aunt who always fed me with beans on toast with bacon, and a cup of tea served with a big lump of white Cheshire cheese. Bloody marvelous boyo.

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    1. And Victoria sponge cut thick with raspberry jam

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    2. Walnut cake, with sickly cream and halved walnuts on the top.

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  6. I've never tried beans on toast, sounds wonderful, of course I love beans, hot/cold no matter how served. Nice memory!

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    1. Toast has to be thin white bread with lists of butter

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  7. My brother and I were raised by my grandparents and my grandmother baked every Saturday. She would make a vanilla cake with a can of fruit cocktail mixed into the batter. We had whipped cream with ours, warm from the oven. Those are good memories.

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  8. My Dad would never let us watch Peyton Place.He thought it too risque for our young minds.Little did he know I was reading Valley of the Dolls under the covers by torchlight!

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    1. My dad was a big paperback book reader. He was horrified when he found me reading "Spartacus" at about age 14 and took it away from me. (It had a description of the naked Spartacus standing in a gladiator arena with his "blackened parts" exposed.) Undeterred, I took up "Forever Amber," which he hadn't read. Little did he know that one was even racier.

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  9. I too had happy times at my maternal grandparents house. it was a sweet escape from the horrors at home.

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  10. Anonymous5:32 pm

    I don’t remember Peyton Place (I’m too young!) but I do remember my mother serving up tinned sausage and beans on toast, followed by Arctic Roll, with much aplomb. Is it any wonder I married a hairy chef. I reckon I was scarred for life.
    JP

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  11. We still quite often have baked beans or poached egg on toast on a Friday for supper. It heralds the start of the weekend for me.
    Arilx

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  12. Hve you never read the book? Still one of the most gripping and extraordinary novels of the 20th century. The film was bad enough but turning it into a Soap did it no justice at all...

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    1. No, but I remember you talking about it once

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  13. I remember Peyton Place as it was unique in being a night time soap opera here.

    How I love your memories of time spent at your grandparents house. My grandmother lived in another town but I would spend a week with her in the summers - best week ever! And to this day best memories ever...

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  14. Peyton Place got me into trouble at school. I spelt the word 'color' because that's how it was spelt in the opening titles of the programme. 'In color'. I actually argued with the teacher. So unfair.

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    1. Oh I remember that too!

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    2. I spelled it colour and got it marked wrong here in the USA. I thought I was being cosmopolitan and got my comeuppance for it.

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  15. I never knew any of my grand parents, but both my daughters loved going to my mum's and she always gave them egg and chips.

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  16. On a Sunday my aunt always made a wibbly wobbly pink blancmange x

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  17. Friday nights at my paternal grandmother’s meant matzo ball soup and chicken. Sliced cucumbers were the only accompaniment to the chicken which, anyway, was just the soup chicken rwheated. To drink there was black cherry soda. No dessert. Afterward I would do my Shirley Temple performance to great acclaim from my grandmother, father, and bachelor uncle. That was my one night a week with my father.

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    1. I've never eaten matzo soup...one for my list

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  18. Always will have a fond spot for beans and canned fruit. Part of my childhood too.

    Speaking of which, I grew up the next town over from where the author of Peyton Place, Grace Metalious, lived and wrote the novel. Most of the town folk hated her. The racy storylines in the novel ran much too close to the bone of actual events that most locals would have rather forgotten, but she dredged up. She was a nice woman...terrible alcoholic though. Read the book, skip the movie, the soap was trashy. X

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    1. Now that's interesting....there was a rape in the story as I recall from the film

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    2. Yup. A novel about rape, abortion, murder and so much more...in the 1950's! Libraries banned the book. Such things were too often hidden and swept under the rug back then. Gracie opened more than a few eyes.

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  19. My husband still has baked beans on toast on Friday night. I have tried serving up something else, but the disappointed look on his face when it's not beans on toast tells me not to do it again.

    Even when his birthday falls on a Friday and I suggest we could go out for a meal, the reply is could we go out on Saturday?

    And as for 'jelly and Evap......sieved into mush through your teeth' I honestly thought that was just me :)

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  20. Anonymous7:34 pm

    Cheese on toast covered with beans and a fried egg on top. Champion!

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    1. I'm beginning to collate a consensus here

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  21. Why is it that other people's houses were always better back when we were kids?
    Great memories for you, John.

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  22. Childhood food in a setting of warmth and love are timeless. My mother's apple pie does that to me.

    I came to evaporated milk later in life and am glad to hear other people like it. It felt like I was the only one! So good on oatmeal porridge, better than cream.

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    1. My grandmother fed everyone with cake and love in equal measures

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  23. Oh, how I hope that my grandchildren remember coming to visit me with such warmth! And also, that maybe when they speak of me they'll say, "She was sort of crazy but I sure did love her."

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  24. Sunday night tea: only occasionally though, with my old dad... winkles and brown bread and butter. As a child I used to love picking out the black spot with a pin. Sticking it on my face, I felt a very upmarket eighteen century lady with a beauty spot!

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    1. Lol......Sundays were always unhappy for me especially Sunday teatimes

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    2. Oh yum. I still love winkles.... my uncle tried to put us off them by hanging them ... minus the shells.... from his nostril. We did laugh.

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    3. Your uncle sounds like my brother. I used to love creamed tuna on toast as a child until my older brother went into a long description about how it was really snot--while I was eating it. Never had it again.

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  25. Same memories for me , except it was my Auntie Joyce’s home that was family gathering point . My Auntie was a fantastic pastry cook , the tea table was full of scones , pasties , curd tarts and bacon and egg flan’s . My uncle worked at the local steelworks and their house backed into the local cricket ground . Summer visits to their house were full of Uncle George ‘s chrysanths in the back garden , and cricket games with the families in the adjoining houses ........very happy times ......
    Thanks for jogging my memory , Shelly

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  26. I never knew my grandparents (of any relatives other than immediate family). These are precious memories you hold. And I bet you can remember what that loving house smelt like too.

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  27. I'd forgotten tinned fruit salad and evaporated milk. You always felt lucky if there was more than two cherries in the tin 😊

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  28. Never had beans on toast. I like lima beans on rice with corn bread and hot sauce and some times a sweet Vidalia onion diced on top. I will try your beans on toast. We used cottage cheese with fruit cocktail or peaches or pairs. Now I'm hungry and it is a little too late to eat.

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  29. I never knew my grandparents, but I remember, as a child, staying with an aunt whenever her husband was away on his work travels.
    She used to make some kind of heavenly biscotti I couldn't resist. Nobody in the family knew the secret ingredient that made them so awsome. She probably took it to grave as her daughter and DIL had no idea how to bake those biscotti. There was once even a quarrel between her and my mother caused by her refusal to disclose the secret.
    Nowdays, at a lab, the contents of those biscotti would have been, no doubt,made clear.

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  30. Such a weird show but Ryan O’Neal was dreamy. I need to read the book. Your Friday afternoons sound idyllic... except font the beans!

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  31. Fun to read every ones stories all I remember I had to eat what was put on my plate and be finished by a certain time and if I was not then my mom would put me on a small storage room and I could not come out till I was done.

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  32. I like beans on toast with grated cheese and Branston pickle :) It was always Fairy margarine when I was a kid but now I have unsalted butter. The bean juice mixed with the melted butter is just yummy.

    We always had tinned fruit (fruit salad, peaches, mandarin oranges or apricots) with Carnation evaporated milk for Sunday tea and sometimes mandarins or sliced peaches in orange jelly, usually following beef or salmon spread sandwiches or, on special weekends, it would be tinned pink salmon and cucumber sandwiches (red salmon at Christmas) finally finishing off with a slice of Victoria sandwich or fairy cakes topped with icing and 100s and 1000s. I still love salmon and cucumber sandwiches and fruit salad but now it's fresh and topped with a little cream.

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