One day, when we’re finally through this obsession with novelty—when every meal doesn’t need a backstory and options—I’ll sit down with the next generation and tell them what real courage looked like. It looked like sitting down to dinner on a Thursday night knowing it was going to be fish fingers, and doing it anyway.
They’ll look up at me, blinking through their plant-based goggles, and say, “Wait… you ate the same seven dinners every week?” And I’ll nod solemnly, fork in hand, plate of perfectly predictable protein in front of me. “Yes,” I’ll say. “We did. Every week. Lamb chops on Monday. Sausages on Tuesday. Rissoles on Wednesday. Thursday, fish fingers. Friday… well, you get the idea. It was a meal plan, only we didn’t call it that—we just called it life.”
Our house ran on a tight culinary timetable. Meals weren’t chosen, they were inherited. There was no such thing as “what do you feel like tonight?” Dinner was a fixed point in the week, as reliable as the 7:30 Report and Dad falling asleep in front of it.
Today, of course, that kind of predictability would trigger a rebellion. In my house, if I try to serve the same meal twice in a calendar year, there’s muttering. There are complaints to management. Spouses raise eyebrows. “Didn’t we have this last June?” they say, as if they’ve stumbled into some dystopian loop where taste buds are doomed to repeat the same fate forever. Variety, apparently, is king. Predictability? A culinary war crime.
But back then? Predictability was comfort. Structure. A sign that the world, at least at 6pm, made sense.
Which is not to say there weren’t surprises. There was the time tripe made an uninvited guest appearance. A dish so ghastly it united an entire household in protest. Or the time we were served a “mystery meat” and, when asked what it was, Mum said with terrifying calm, “Just eat it.” Spoiler: it was ox tongue. That never happened again either. We had, it seems, finely tuned offal detectors. Even if we didn’t know what something was, we knew when it shouldn’t be there.
And yet, in the middle of that offal minefield, there was one exception. One dish that broke all the rules and still got eaten: lamb’s fry and bacon.
Now, I didn’t know it was liver, of course. Had I known, I might have fainted. But as it was, I loved it. The sharp, slightly metallic tang of the lamb’s fry, cushioned by crispy bacon, onions and thick gravy—glorious. It was bold. It was strange. It was brown. But it worked. It made Thursday night feel like something had happened. Something adventurous. Edgy, even.
And yes, I know now what lamb’s fry really is. And no, I don’t regret it. Because that taste—liver and all—still brings back the warmth of that kitchen. The clink of cutlery. The feeling of being eight years old and entirely unsurprised by anything except a plate that didn’t look like yesterday’s.
In retrospect, those seven meals weren’t boring—they were the scaffolding of childhood. You knew what was coming. You knew when. And occasionally, when something came out of left field, like lamb’s fry, you discovered a new favourite before your frontal lobe was even fully formed enough to resist it.
So when future generations beg for stories of wildness and rebellion, I’ll tell them about the night I didn’t spit out the liver. The night I said yes to something unknown, possibly terrifying, and oddly delicious. And how, against all odds, I still think about that meal with fondness.
Because that’s how it was in the Great Culinary Repeats of the ’70s. You didn’t choose your dinner—you inherited it. You didn’t judge it—you endured it. And sometimes, you even liked it.
The Afterword 
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