Boil-in-the-bag fish in parsley sauce was a childhood staple. Our freezer was a battle between the forces of Captain Birdseye and Findus. Battalions of crispy pancakes, squadrons of fish fingers, and a corps of various extruded, reformed, and breaded potato products.
A large part of childhood is submerged in parsley sauce. I imagine that if you could build a pipe that goes back in time to drain my childhood we could basically form a large lake of the stuff. And who wouldn't want a lake of historical parsley sauce? Out of bags or the staple Knorr packet. You had to keep stirring it, a moment of inattention meant it clagged on the bottle of the pan and guaranteed washing up fun. My parents only had children because they couldn't afford an electric dishwasher. It was quite a shock for me to realise that sauces and soups didn't have to come out of a packet. I even assumed that soup in a tin was probably out of a packet originally. My best friend's mum was proper middle-class and used to cook things from actual recipes which was both astounding and troubling. He wasn't allowed to eat crispy pancakes unless he came round my house, which I think he did all the time. The only thing my mother ever really cooked was meat and potato pie. This was a casserole dish filled with potatoes in Bisto covered with a piece of frozen puff pastry, a sort of DIY Fray Bentos. There was supposed to be mince in it, but in my entire childhood I never found any meat in one of her pies, the best you could hope for was a lump of undissolved gravy powder.