WHAT’S your favourite food of yesteryear? Someone was on the internet the other day waxing lyrical about eating cow’s udder served warm with brown bread and butter. Not my cup of milk, it has to be said.

But it got me thinking about stuff we used to eat before the foodie explosion, that got women with mothering tendencies all excited about an Essex lad on a moped and prompted semi-detached men to stay at home of an evening so they could watch a voluptuous woman licking cake mix off her fingers in a somewhat lascivious way.

Remember how you could only buy olive oil in the chemist for clearing the wax out of your ears? And how preparing convenience food at home wasn’t about knocking up a bowl of pesto and pasta but more to do with ripping open a box of Vesta beef curry?

If it wasn’t that it was a packet of Batchelors savoury rice dished up with slices of Spam or Walls’ Bangers, each with a uniform ridge down their length and a dimple in each end.

Sunday tea was salad with salmon if you were lucky, slices of chopped ham and pork if you weren’t.

The salad wasn’t served up in a bowl but several – one for the lettuce, invariably of the floppy leaf variety, another for slices of cucumber in vinegar (and if you were really being posh you’d run the tines of a fork down its length before slicing to create a bit of artistry), still another for quartered tomatoes (sliced was considered too faffy), all accompanied by a plate of whole spring onions with their feathery root bits cut off.

There was also the beetroot (also in vinegar) and the eggs that had been boiled so intensively they usually had a grey coat round the rock-hard yolk.

And the salad dressing was not today’s vinaigrette-style approach but industrial-smelling salad cream, still in the bottle, plonked on the table.

Pride of place though went to the tin of Sockeye or John West, a tin of which was meant to do for a family of four or five. The slimy skin was a bit of a no-no, though.

Rounding it all off was a plate of bread and butter – usually white, whether it be Wonderloaf or Mother’s Pride – piled up the size of a small Matterhorn. And you had to eat it because that’s all you were getting ’til morning...

The more daring meat eaters among us wax lyrical today about offal as a delicacy, but we were getting it ad nauseum in the 1960s and 1970s.

It might not have been slivers of tender calves’ liver pan-fried and pink – it was more likely to be ox or lamb and often as tough as the backside it came from – but we ate it because there was nothing else. None of this preparing a different meal for faddy family members, you ate what you were given or nothing at all.

And do we miss it all? Well, some of it, no. But there are times when I could murder a plate of fish fingers with big wodges of freshly-cut farmhouse loaf on the side spread with lashings of Lurpak with which to make fishy doorstep sandwiches. Utter bliss.

For just sometimes a delicately pan-fried fillet of sea bass with a squeeze of lemon doesn’t quite cut it...

Law having the last laugh?

WHAT’S the betting that there’s a bunch of police officers laughing their helmets off about the arrest of former Sun editor Rebekah Brooks and her racehorse trainer husband Charlie over the News International phone hacking affair.

For their timing, it has to be said, was impeccable, given that Charlie, who is an old Etonian fellow of Prime Minister David Cameron, would much rather have been at Cheltenham races, the anticipated attendance of which he proclaimed to be “the happiest moment of his year”.

Instead of which, he was being quizzed by detectives over allegations of attempting to pervert the course of justice.

Such a crying shame that he couldn’t therefore attend his favourite racegoing event and, in his words, be “queueing for my first Guinness of the meeting”. The police might not always get things right, but on this occasion they pulled a masterstroke.

As for this whole sordid phone-hacking affair, you couldn’t make it up. It’s beginning to read like a Jeffrey Archer novel, but there again, the truth can be somewhat incredible at times.

No doubt we'll find out just how incredible when all is revealed in a court of law. For surely that’s where some of those involved are headed.