Cooking in the 1970s

I remember being out in rural Derbyshire and a butcher had peacock hanging outside. A fox had got into the grounds of a stately home. Always regret not trying it!

Smash was a sad disappointment, but the advert was one of my all-time favourites.

My mum was a keen gardener as well @mathanxiety. We also had a fruit cage. Unfortunately she grew a lot of things that she loved and that the rest of us were not so fond of.

She grew masses of spinach, rhubarb, gooseberries and red, white and black currants. Fortunately she also grew other things we did like such as strawberries and raspberries.

Summer pudding was a frequent dessert in our house, but my mum never put enough sugar in it, and we all used to have to get the sugar out to add it to make it palatable.

So basically your father ran a little private greengrocers!

Mine just had a patch in a London garden - we did have rhubarb - I forgot about that - homemade rhubarb fool was so good.

We were once given a pheasant at Christmas and my parents left it in the cellar too long - it exploded!

We had half of a sizeable garden under fruit and veg. Beans (broad, French) carrots, purple sprouting broccoli, artichokes, white asparagus (grown under upturned buckets), new potatoes, peas, spinach, cauliflower, onions that would be tied in plaits to dry in the shed, rhubarb, currants of all kinds, gooseberries, pears, Bramley pippins, Victoria and greengage plums, raspberries, loganberries, Alpine strawberries which ran amok, rosemary, parsley. Also a beautiful array of flowers front and back. We used to set out jars of beer to drown slugs in

There was so much work involved, but the garden was dad's pride and joy. When he had a stroke, mum couldn't keep it all up so bit by bit it almost all returned to grass. She still keeps all the fruit trees in good nick, and the loganberries are indestructible.

You could get sliced ham and chicken in delis in Ireland (or at least the specific part of the Dublin area where I lived) in the 70s. I had both in friend's houses. Mum was very heavily invested in doing everything by hand (hippie approach) including making all our clothes, clothes, knitting, baking and cooking, and disapproved of everything ready made.

We got potatoes from relatives down the country, and eggs from an aunt who had an egg producing farm. At Christmas another aunt always sent a turkey, which had to be hung for a while, followed by cleaning out remaining lights, etc, removal of its feet and head, and some plucking to clean it up. One year I was sent out to the shed to get an onion from the onion plait a few days before Christmas, and when I opened the door, there in the dark was an upside-down dead turkey staring balefully at me. I can't remember if I managed to reach around him to get the onion.

[quote SparkysMagicPiano]@user1485813778

This one?[/quote]
That's the one that had my steak au poivre in it!

@SparkysMagicPiano

That must be where our smoked haddock mousse came from! Page 102.

We used to have that at Christmas.

@mathanxiety

Those were the days that dads spent on vegetable patches.

Mine grew blackcurrants, redcurrants & gooseberries. We also had 2 apples and a pear tree - the fruit of which was fairly dire. Veg was spinach, runner beans & broad beans and some strange cucumbers.

The cold meat was a European thing I think - you couldn't really buy it in supermarkets - other than ham, tongue or pork pie - my mum bought it from delis.

@user1485813778

This one?

• An exception was fish fingers, which I tasted at the house of a friend and insisted on for breakfast from then on - fish fingers between two slices of buttered toast with a squirt of lemon juice...

Nothing like that here either, TatianaBis. But no cold meats as my mum thought that was the mark of poor housewifery. Meals out were rare, and definitely no fast food, ever, except when my lovely aunt and uncle and cousins visited from the other side of the country, and they always stopped at the local chipper and brought delicious fish and chips with them for us all to tuck in. Mum had a bee in her bonnet about so many things. She was right about some things but for the wrong reasons.

Dad grew vegetables and fruits - so many different items we never had to buy any, or any jam.

Hard Rock Cafe! Wowee!

I've no idea what this Vesta thing is. We were not allowed any processed food - Findus, Bird's Eye, Frey Bentos, alphabet potatoes, tinned fruit, Angel Delight, Smash, spam etc. No McDonald's either, although we were allowed to go to the Hard Rock Café or Tootsie's for burgers.

Although we did have quite a lot of cold meat - garlic sausage, salami mortadella - no-one worried about nitrites in the 70s, not even my mum.

@user1485813778 Yes, beef risotto; you still see it occasionally in cheap shops. They also did chicken supreme, beef curry, beef italienne; and for a while tacos and tostadas.

Mind you I lived in India for a while when I was a child, so I did get to taste a whole different world of cuisines then!

I can probably count on one hand the meals out we had when I was a child. Most memorable was a birthday diner and the Golf Hotel which was gross and my mum got very drunk and fell off her chair.
I had banana split and thought it was all very jolly! My brother remembers my dad being furious with my mum for getting drunk.

Vivid memories of the complete Vesta range (chow mien, paella, was there a risotto?), Frey Bentos tinned meat pies, findus crispy pancakes, mince and boiled potatoes, artic roll, tinned Nestle cream and Swiss roll...weird mousse, ski black cherry yoghurt.
But then my mum bought ‘the cookery year’ and everything went up a notch...but like others, restaurant meals were a once a year treat at the local Chinese restaurant, and a meal out at the Wimpy on holiday. I still remember my first spaghetti boglonese cooked by a friend at university around 1980 - she started cooking the pasta before the sauce...put me off for a while!

My age group, after I left school (1972) and we all worked in London, would invite people to dinner and serve dishes like prawn cocktail, stuffed peppers, spag bol, bortsch, etc. I can remember never having come across stuffed peppers before (we never had anything like that at home). If we met out for a meal it would be pizza/italian usually.

My experience was a little different as I’m Danish. There are lots of similarities, of course, in traditional Danish dishes, to British cooking. Maybe more of a focus on pork in DK. I was a child of the 70s so really my main early memories of food I remember from the early to mid 80s.

What struck me most when watching Delia’s old cookery shows is when she cooked with peppers and encouraged everyone to ask their local grocers for them so that they would become eventually become more widely available. And things like garlic/olive oil/etc being still quite alien in some regions.

I don’t actually think the 70s were the ‘dark ages’ - I think they probably had more things right than we do now (although that’s a discussion for another day...) But it is nice to have easy access to so many ‘exotic’ foods, ingredients and culinary experiences now.

My favourite meal when I was a young child was roast chicken - we didn’t have it all that often as it was expensive compared to pork and beef. My mum was very much a hippy and was really into all sorts of ‘worthy’ food. So I generally preferred the food my grandmother made.😉 We’ve recently started buying organic chicken from local producers and it tastes exactly like that very delicious chicken I remember having at my grandparents’ house, with much more flavour to it and the most wonderful, unctuous skin!

Many of my happy memories of childhood are centred around really delicious food. Yes, it might have been simple and on the blander side and not all that ‘excitingk, but there was plenty of tasty food. To this day the nutty smell of butter heating in the pan and frying meatballs/pork chops/whatever, takes me right back to my grandmother’s fantastic cooking.❤️

with the glace cherry?

Melon slices with ground ginger sprinkled on top was a regular starter at home.

I remember the grilled grapefruit with brown sugar! I really liked those but we had them for breakfast.

Held my first dinner party (!) in 1983 using a book published at the end of the 70s. It had a recipe for every day of the year and was actually pretty seasonable in its approach.
I cooked steak au poivre with a creamy sauce and then a kind of grand looking parfait (also creamy!) for pudding. Starters was grilled grapefruit with brown sugar: straight outta the seventies!
I was in sixth form and mostly what I remember is the huge amount of nasty Mateus and Blue Nun that we all drank.

Is it really bad that my main cookbook (the only one that actually lives in the kitchen) is a copy of my mums favourite from the 1970s?