Food plays such an important role in our lives. We get up, have breakfast, in most cases we stop to have lunch and stop again to have our evening meal.

We plan our meals, shop for them and prepare them. However, according to Jackie Malcolm, a senior lecturer at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee, it is only our culture that dictates that we eat three meals a day. We could quite easily have just one.

Any celebration involved food and when when we’re not following the cultural norm – birthday cake, Christmas dinner, haggis, neeps and tatties on Burns Night – we are often following our own family pattern.

Who amongst us does not have a favourite recipe passed on from our mum or our gran? And don’t we still cook a recipe the way they taught us?

We can still taste specific foods that we ate in the past many years afterwards. And certain food can take us right back to another time in our lives.

It was this that fascinated Jackie and led to her writing a thesis called 'Food is a trigger for memory'.

To that end she visited five sheltered housing complexes across Dundee, talking to elderly people who still lived – and cooked – independently.

She was amazed at the stories that came out. “It was quite emotional and humbling for me,” said Jackie.

“At 55, I was aware that the rationing in the post war years had been hard, but I don’t think I had ever really appreciated how hard they were and I don’t think other people do either. I got some phenomenal stories.”

She found these older people spoke not just about the food they ate, but where they bought it. And it wasn’t just the taste they remembered, there was also touch and smell.

One woman said she knew what time of day it was by the smell coming from the nearby bakery.

Another remembered that the couple who lived downstairs always had stew on a Monday. She knew that when the man’s wife died, he continued to have stew each Monday because the smell still wafted up to her.

Reminiscing about food brought out other memories too. One woman said that for Christmas she got an apple, an orange, a little chocolate treat and some ashes.

She told Jackie that the ashes were to remind the children how lucky there were. In some areas of the country, even though there was no money, the children still hung up their stocking but found only ash in it on Christmas morning.

This is a good example of a ‘hidden’ history that comes with ‘remembered’ experience. Another woman spoke of Mrs Headridge’s Stovies, saying that when her children were small she asked the pensioner downstairs what she could make with mince when there wasn’t enough for a meal, hence they were known for evermore as Mrs Headridge’s Stovies.

By looking at these natural conversations, Jackie was able to highlight the socio-cultural changes that have occurred over the lives of the participants.

Dundee is interesting in this respect as it was dominated by the burgeoning jute industry until the middle of the 20th century, employing a larger proportion of women than men to work within the mills.

The 1901 census showed that 31% of the female population of Dundee were employed in the city’s mills. As a result it was referred to as a ‘woman’s town’, so come the 1960s and '70s when the rest of Britain was coming to terms with more women going out to work, the women of Dundee were already quite used to juggling the demands of employment and domestic duties.

It is also interesting to note in relation to this, that Dundee was home to its own William Low supermarket chain, established in the Overgate of Dundee in 1868, decades before supermarkets became commonplace in other parts of the country.

According to a report by marketing, technology and data specialists, CACI, Dundee now has the largest square footage of supermarket space per capita in Britain.

Most memories of food evoked a sense of nostalgia for a time considered lost.

People remembered 'Rough and Fraser’s warm bacon rolls, bought and eaten after the dancing', or 'the smell of mint humbugs from Keiller’s sweetie factory on a cold, frosty morning'.

Jackie found that in the 1950s almost all the participants had porridge for breakfast, and that they still generally have the same breakfast each morning – often still porridge, though some had cereal, tea and toast. Almost all of them remembered having mince and tatties, fish and chips and home-made soup.

It was also striking that everyone remembered set meal times – dinner at midday and tea at 6 pm. Not one of the participants said they had snacks in the 1950s. That, perhaps, is the biggest change of all.