When I was a kid, Sunday was roast chicken day, Monday was pork chops, Tuesday was mac & cheese, etc and repeat the next week. I’m married with a family and would never think of serving the same meals week after week.
Do families still do this? It sure would be easier than trying to figure out what to have for dinner every day, but I’m pretty sure my family would revolt.
Anyone?
From what I’ve seen (I’ve done a lot of consumer research work, especially around meals), generally speaking, meals are a lot less planned than they were a generation ago. When you were a kid, it wasn’t uncommon for housewives to plan their week’s menu in advance, and take that into account in their grocery shopping.
My suspicion is that the increase in women working full-time outside the home, with the corresponding growth in the restaurant industry and decline in people who actually cook meals at home, has led to a significant decline in meal planning. IME, we now see a lot more families who don’t even start to plan what to have for dinner until they get home from work / school that evening.
At our house, Tuesday has been chicken casserole night, because my husband has band practice and I can shove it in the oven and it will be ready when he comes home, depending on what time they get done. Lately I have been playing trivia on Tuesday night, so it’s whatever is fastest, often spaghetti. When I was growing up, it was fish on Friday although we were not Catholic. I didn’t learn until after my father died that he had been brought up Catholic. Sunday was always pot roast unless my aunt and uncle were visting, and then it was Porterhouse steaks.
aaaaaanthony!
Well, unlike a lot of other people (it seems), I do plan my dinners a week in advance (or maybe more). But we don’t have “one night is X” like, “Thursday is meatloaf”.
What I plan depends on several things. For one thing, every month, we order from Angel Food (angelfoodministries.org), and their menu changes from month to month. So the couple of weeks after Angel Food pick up, meals are planned around what we got from Angel Food that month. Also, weekly sales. When Kroger or Aldi (my two main grocery stores) have good sales, I’ll plan meals around them.
I do keep in mind such things as: Saturday is Family Day, and we’re out of the house most of the day, so I’m more likely to plan something I can throw in the Crock Pot, or on such and such a day, I have to drive to Maryland, and won’t be home until close to 8, so I’d better plan something extra-fast. Or maybe that’s the night I’ll pick up some carry-out.
Like the OP, I can’t really imagine serving the same seven meals again and again.
I love to meal plan [and being diabetic, I need to organize my eating to make sure I get the right portions of the right types of foods, and meal planning is the best way to do that short of only allowing something like nutrisystem meals to be the only food in the house <yucky face>] and one of the fun things to do is sit down with a stack of cookbooks, and discuss what recipes look like fun to try, and fitting them into the meal plan for the week 
Although we will plan around the basil plant … when it starts to get too tall to fit into the aerogarden we need to lop the tops off and use them because wasting fresh basil is terrible =) so once a week on Wednesdays we need to make sure that we need fresh basil for something:D
Even back in the 60s, my grandmothers cook didn’t codify the family sunday dinner [for a number of years from about 67-82 our cottage was next to my grandmothers and we always did sunday diner there in the early afternoon] It would be a nice roast beef, a leg of lamb, a ham, roast chicken … and the vegetables would frequently be whatever was fresh from the garden. There is nothing like baby peas and baby onions picked right before cooking them. Or fresh spinach german style [bacon, wilted in the bacon fat and dressed with vinegar] and a salad of loose leaf lettuces with freshly made vinaigrette with the herbs snipped right out of the garden. [a european cook beat the hell out of an american ‘homestyle’ cook most all the time for adventurous foods :D]
I will make use of cookbooks, and certain websites for menu planning, as well as cookbook programs [I have one that I am slowly entering all my favorite recipes into as it will give me the nutritional profile of the recipe, which is really good for helping me to plan my diet ] One Touch Gold has a good menu planning site that is free, and will plan for either one person, or for a family. Oddly enough, the diabetic food pyramid is good for people trying to lose weight, so it is a great resource for anybody and they do not require you to be diabetic to join =)
When I had a much longer commute and Junior had a much earlier bed time I did have a schedule, but loosely. Monday chicken, Tuesday fish, Wednesday always crockpot, Thursday pasta, Friday pizza. We don’t have such a rigid schedule now. I try not to have the core of a meal be the same two nights in a row, but I do try plan the meals for the week. I like not having to think about it when I get home.
I liked having at least one decision already made, so instead of choosing Thursday’s dinner from an infinite array of possibilities I only have to skim pasta recipes. (I don’t want to over sell it. 75% of the time pasta night is spaghetti and tomato sauce. the sauce varies but not a lot. When the machine is well oiled I throw a baked pasta, or a more inspired sauce into the mix.)
One thing I don’t do that my mom did was have set meals carved in stone and unalterable. Pork chops got cooked one way, and only that way and were always served with mashed potatoes and LeSeur peas. Fried chicken (swanson frozen) was served with mashed potatoes and corn. Chicken croquettes(also swanson frozen, or maybe Tyson, I dunno I haven’t looked for them since I escap…er moved out) were served with french fries. No deviations or substitutions EVER! My sister and I used to rib her about it but she was a single mom and had a finite amount of energy to put into dinner and she spent it on making the food good and getting it all to the table hot. She reserved creativity for other things.
Heh. My Mom did the same thing! Pork chops? Baked. With baked beans and applesauce. Kielbasa was cooked in sauerkraut and served with mashed potatoes. Steak was seared in a pan (well, cooked until good and dead in a pan is more like it. . .) with hominy (yuck!) and lima beans. Meatloaf was cooked in a tomato gravy (with Campbell’s tomato soup as the base), surrounded by diced potatoes, carrots and celery. Every entree had a complete menu.
There are a few things I do that with. Fish sticks somehow require mac and cheese, for instance. But there are probably a half-dozen different ways I have to prepare pork chops, steak, kielbasa, etc. I have a lot of recipes, and I draw from them, so things don’t get too repetitive.
The most repetitive thing I do is my middle daughter’s birthday dinner. All my kids, on their birthday, get to pick the menu for dinner. My middle daughter (now 18), for the past seven years has wanted: turkey roast, mashed potatoes (instant; she despises “real”), corn, chocolate chip muffins, and a Carvel Ice Cream Cake for dessert. Every freakin’ year. 
I don’t know what she’s going to do come her 19th birthday, since she is out on her own. Learn how to cook a turkey roast, maybe?
"Why would a company named Franco-American… make Italian food?
The Alchemist, The Venture Bros
Some people crave routine. Some people like the same food on a consistent basis.
When I was a kid, my mother would occasionally go through stretches of this, or just one or two nights a week being variations on the same theme.
I can’t think of ever doing this.
Mainly anything which will take longer to make is made on the weekends in big batches so it can be eaten and the leftovers frozen. (Soup, stew, lasagna etc) and when I do pot roast I tend to do everything… right down to yorkshire pudding so that’s also a weekend thing. After work I’m not usually so adventurous so it’s either reheated from the freezer or something fast and easy.
Mainly it depends on what I have handy at any given time, and if it’s defrosted (if it needs to be). The most planning I do is when the flyer comes in I look and see what’s a good deal and ponder what we have (or, more importantly, haven’t) eaten lately. Some things come up in rotation more often than others but that tends to be because we really like that dish/meal.
gwendee recently I had a fellow mom tell me she had no idea what to make as a side with certain things. Most people don’t tend to be taught about that so they can’t think what would go well together. I know I fall into a rut of ‘this goes well with this so we’ll usually eat them together’ but I try to change it up a bit depending what’s freshest/in the house and if I want to try something else. I like cookbooks that give example menus for this reason. It gives me an idea of what would pair well, and I may or may not try that particular menu.