Famous 1940s Inventions & Science

Sixty years ago, the average Australian family sat down to a traditional Sunday roast dinner consisting of a leg or shoulder of lamb, roast potatoes, pumpkin and a green vegetable such as peas or beans, topped off with a rich brown gravy. As was the custom at the time, the table would be set with the best linen and cutlery.

Dinner is served ...

The head of the household would carve the roast at the table, serving thin slices of meat onto each plate and the vegetables would be passed around for each person to help themselves. It was the formal meal of the week, usually following church, and often included the extended family - grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins - dressed in their ‘Sunday best'. Dessert was usually a hot pudding such as the humble bread and butter pudding, an apple crumble with cream, or baked apples.

The next day, the Sunday roast would do double duty by being sliced and served cold in sandwiches or being diced and mixed into a batter to become lamb fritters, thickish ‘pancakes' of lamb cooked in butter in a hot frypan.

Australian family meals in the 1940s and 1950s reflected Australia's then largely Anglo-Saxon society:

Meat was always the basis of the meal and it was cheap and plentiful. In many homes, it was served at each meal - sausages or bacon at breakfast, a lamb casserole or Irish stew for lunch, followed by steak or a mixed grill at night.

Vegetables were predictably the same, invariably boiled or roasted. Potatoes, pumpkin, peas, carrots and beans were the mainstays, supplemented with what you grew in the garden - chokoes, tomatoes, silverbeet, leeks. The only herbs were mint and parsley; salads were not considered proper meals. Bread generally accompanied each meal, spread thickly with butter. It was white, unsliced, sometimes square or high-top.

You were not late for meals, for there was no microwave to re-heat meals. There was no fast food, no home-delivered pizzas or frozen dinners (KFC was the first chain to arrive in Australia in the late 1960s).

Freezers and fridges were small in capacity, with freezers generally holding a couple of long metal ice cube trays and perhaps small slices of ice cream.

Families rarely ate out. In the suburbs, the only place to eat out was the local Chinese restaurant, or the fish and chip shop where you ate the meal wrapped in newspaper.