Cooking in the 1970s

I'm remembering more things now - early 80s, grapes were out in winter as they came from South Africa and I boycotted South African goods because of apartheid. My parents did use some ingredients that were considered exotic, they liked olives, fresh herbs and seafood. I think they were more open to experimenting as they had been going on holiday to Spain and France since the mid 50s, and tried new things there (their first holiday abroad was to Mallorca in 1955 - it cost them 10 guineas each - a lot of money at the time). My mum was a good cook, and we ate well. Her baking was wonderful. I still miss her lemon meringue pie, chocolate eclairs and florentine biscuits. Dad wasn't a bad cook either. He liked making jam and pickles too, and there was a bit of a craze for home brewing and wine making in the 70s (I remember Demi-johns bubbling away in the spare room). He would have to visit fish merchants at Hull, Grimsby, and the north east coast of England and Scotland for work, and would come back with loads of fresh fish and seafood. We had a freezer from the early 70s, and that was always full.

The Keith Floyd tv shows were very entertaining. They must be worth finding. His French book is extremely good, he explains in an entertaining way.
In an interview he praised Marguerite Patten, her books taught me to cook. He also praises Elizabeth David, her first books on French Cooking inspired me to change from Vesta in my bedsit days to real cooking.

Fruit juice was a real novelty too! At least fresh juice was - it was usually bottled and long life stuff - orange, grapefruit or tomato only! My mum used to buy a pack of frozen orange juice that was in a cardboard tube - I think it was concentrated, so you made it up with water.

I didn't see Delia but she didn't appear until very late 70's
Yes, we used to watch Fanny Craddock

sweet shops were great in the 70s- sherbert lemons, sweet peanuts, cream soda, aniseed balls, pineapple cubes, cherry lips, - we used to ask for 2 ounce!

Spangles, Pacers, Treats, Opal fruits...

I had most of my teenage years in the 70's.

We didn't have a freezer. We had a gas fridge. We had a pressure cooker but no microwave, no toaster; just a basic gas cooker with four rings and an eye level grill.

Supermarkets were just appearing in the early 70s and the range of foodstuffs were far more limited. Convenience foods were Vesta curry and chow mein, Smash potatoes and tinned pies or corned beef and spam. All gross.

Food was less of 'a thing' we ate to fuel us. We didn't snack much at all. We ate what there was. Packed lunches were a cheese sandwich and an apple; some crisps if you were very lucky.

I remember one of the first McDonalds opening in Tottenham Court Road in the early 80s. Eating out was a rare thing. The odd seaside diner or ice cream parlour, fish and chips as a treat, a Chinese take away was very modern and exotic.

On Sundays we had winkles that we had picked with our grandfather, with bread and butter for our evening meal. Cauliflower cheese was a meal not a side dish.

We didn't have television so I didn't see Delia but she didn't appear until very late 70's, when the food industry and cooking changed quite significantly.

I had a parent who working in the catering industry so we had lots of things others might have considered exotic, like garlic widely used in cooking, curries, pasta, etc. I do remember having quite a lot of cheaper cuts of meat though. I particularly hated lamb hot pot made with neck of lamb, bones and all. We had a freezer and had frozen veg, frozen children's pizzas, etc. During the week dinner at primary school was my main meal and it was things like beans or spaghetti hoops on toast for tea at home. I distinctly remember eating lasagne for the first time - the pasta was green and in thick ribbons with a wavy edge rather than the sheets we have now.

I am laughing at Everyone was very slim in the 1970's - they weren't! Obesity was less prevalent, but there's no way everyone was very slim or even slim.

Nor did people cook from fresh all the time. My granny cooked us Findus Crispy Pancakes regularly if we were at her house during the school holidays and we had those little frozen mousses you could buy. We loved that kind of thing. We also had Angel Delight and it's poor relation Instant Whip (made with water because it had powdered milk in it). You could even buy orange juice powder - Kellogg's Rise 'n' Shine - in the 70s.

Tinned puddings like rice pudding and semolina were commonplace at school and at home. Tinned fruit salad served with cream or, yuck, evaporated milk was another 70s favourite. Eating melon as a starter was posh - sprinkled with ginger and with a glace cherry on top.

I agree @Thymeout and I think there was real skill and a labour of love in making tasty and nutritious foods from scratch, day in day out with few shortcuts available (someone must be buying the pre-sliced mushrooms). And it wasn't just dinner, which is the most it is for most families nowadays. It was often breakfast if the man of the house wanted a cooked breakfast, which he often did especially if a manual worker, lunch/tea might also involve a degree of food preparation and of course the main meal of the day. Most deserts and cakes were also home made, which is the opposite to today. Ok, you might have a chippy tea on a Friday but the vast majority of meals had to be shopped for in person, prepared from scratch and served to larger numbers of people!

Cakes were only home made, I don't know whether you could buy them but I guess we couldn't afford

M&S. My friend's mum didn't bake (heresy) and used to buy a raspberry jam victoria sponge or a swiss roll from M&S every Saturday. Also trad bakers - we used to get doughnuts, bread pudding & iced buns from ours occasionally.

Best 70s shop was the sweet shop. We'd go on the way to school if we were lucky enough to have money and buy sherbet, weighed into the bag. Some of that one, and some of that one and that one over there. A complete rainbow. Then we'd have it at playtime. The kid with the sherbert was always the most popular.

Oh and one memorable trip to Germany (where my dad had moved to and my Uncle was stationed) via Holland - where I was delighted to have bread and hundreds and thousands for breakfast!

I don't think meat was expensive in the 70s. Chicken was more expensive but beef and lamb cheaper, except for steak. Cod was cheap but salmon expensive. I cooked spaghetti bolognese regularly though many people didn't cook pasta. I learnt how to make proper curry from an Indian colleague and used to make it quite often. I never tried to make Chinese. I always used garlic.
I was excited to be able to cook burgers and crispy pancakes at home as my parents never had that kind of food. My mother was a good cook but very traditional.
It was early 80s when I tried out more different things to cook when at home with children. Even into the 90s I think some people still cooked very traditional meat and 2 veg.

I live in Germany now and it's still really hard to buy a lot of spices - you go to the supermarket and there is this really meagre selection. And when you get it home it's all stale and pale tasting. Occasionally, in more "modern" supermarkets there are more fancy spices but they are about €6-8 for a tiny container but entire aisles full of packet mixes that all taste the same :o

I think a lot of traditional British food followed the meat + 2 veg format - certainly a lot of what we ate growing up (later than the 70s) did. You had a "meat item" so sausages, pork chops, beef burger (on its own :o), fish fingers, frozen chicken kiev or whatever and then you'd have some form of potato, either mash or boiled potatoes or frozen waffles or something and then two veg on the side. Carrots, cauliflower, sprouts, peas, brocolli, parsnips, courgettes, leeks or sweetcorn were what we would generally have. All boiled - like it never occurred to anyone to cook veg any other way!

Sometimes we'd have a meal that didn't follow that format but it would be something specific like spaghetti bolognese, or chicken supreme (made with soup :o) in a little ring of rice or something like that. Chicken stew and dumplings, I loved - that was always made with left over roast chicken, in the pressure cooker.

We went to France in about 1977 - I was bet 1 Franc I wouldn't eat a snail - I did! We lived on bread and cheese mainly - French cheese was not readily available in our local Safeway but I think you could get Brie

Ah yes, doing the shopping was interesting, before supermarkets became commonplace!

I remember going with my mum (probably the 60s and into the early/mid-70s), and we'd go to the Thrift store first, which was a grocery shop. We'd stand at the counter, and Mr Samson would walk round the shop to fetch the things on my mum's list. Then we'd go round the corner to the parade of shops, where there was a butcher, a baker, a newsagent, a chemist and a greengrocer, and we'd visit in turn (as needed). Loved watching the butcher mince the beef for us.

Meals mainly consisted of meat and veg in my house in the 70s. Mum cooked traditional English things like cottage pie, stews and casseroles, fish and chips, meat and potato pie, braised steak, pork chops, sausages and mash, cheese an onion flan, corned beef hash etc. Sunday was always a roast dinner involving either a roast chicken, roast beef, lamb or pork and yorkshire puddings and veg. My dad grew a lot of his own veg and salad, so Saturday tea was usually tinned salmon with salad. Lunches would be potted meat or ham sandwiches, soups, cheese on toast etc. A lot of meat looking back- we were very working class but mum believed food was the most important thing for her family so she fed us very well!

It wasn't until the later in the 1980s when I was a teen that she started to cook some continental inspired recipes such as spaghetti bolognese (using dolman sauce), vesta chow mien or curry, and some more convenience foods such as birds eye burgers and fish fingers for lunch.

I still eat Crank's bread for preference. Difficult to find nowadays. Waitrose sell it, but JS seem to have discontinued it near me. V close textured but nutty flavour and good for open sandwiches.

I think pps are being a little unkind about British traditional cooking. My dgm was a superb cook. Her food could be described as South London peasant cuisine. Or rustique? Steamed puddings, apple dumplings, steak and kidney pudding with suet pastry. Bottled damsons and plums in a short-crust pie. The most delicious rice pudding. Pease pudding and faggots. Liver and bacon. Veal and ham pie. Cheese and onion tart - who needs quiche?

Herrings - you could ask the fishmonger to squeeze the fish so you could choose the hard or soft roe as preferred. Cod and parsley sauce. Smoked haddock with a poached egg. Coley and whiting were only for cats. Saturday tea we had winkles, prawns and whelks from the stall outside the pub. We all learned early on how to pull apart a prawn and to use a needle to twiddle out a winkle from its shell. Never had eels, but there was always a tank of them outside the fishmongers.

My cousin and I often reminisce about Nana's cooking. She rang me from Canada the other day for the recipe for bread pudding. More suet with lots of mixed spice and currants and caster sugar on top. Waste not, want not.

My DM learned to make a Singaporean style curry from a fellow student nurse in the 1950s, and then taught herself to cook after she married. Later she became a school meals cook and did Hotel Catering City & Guild qualification on day release. Her ambitions were limited mainly by the availability of ingredients in 1962 west Cornwall. The nearest supermarket opened about 1969, and was 15 miles away. The butcher worked out of a mobile shop, dry goods were sold loose in the village shop, cheese was Cheddar, and vegetables were grown locally... lots of cauliflower for months on end. Onions were sold door to door by Breton 'onion-johnnies' on bikes. Fish was delivered to the door when there was a good catch, and was usually mackerel, but we also got crabs regularly from the fishermen, and I used to catch prawns in the rock pools, although they were tiny and it took forever to catch enough for prawn cocktails. We ate well and our food was fairly varied after DM had bought Robert Carrier books and done evening courses. There was a fair amount of Vesta and Angel Delight too though.

Meat was definitely more expensive, just like good meat is expensive now.

Ah the 70s!

In the early 70s the only pasta we could get was macaroni, in a box. At some point later in the 70s buitoni brought in the veeeery loooong spaghetti.

I remember the Vesta meals - particularly the Chow Mein and also the flavoured beef rice. Loved that, and had it with tinned mince (we never had fresh).

Yes, meat was expensive. Chicken was less expensive but even that was a bit of a luxury. I remember my mother winning "a chicken dinner" in a competition once.

Through the 70s it was chips with everything mainly. Nice chips though - cooked in lard and really crispy. I miss those chips!

My gran was a good cook and loved making pasties, pies and cakes.

My mother was a reluctant cook and working as well.

One thing I remember is the tiny portions. A boiled egg and one round of soldiers was an actual meal.

And orange juice was a tiny glass. Meals were served on smaller plates than now.

I remember seeing a documentary on how meat would be replaced by Tofu and being terrified.

What memories are coming back to me. I had forgotten about shopping at Bejam, (Iceland?) and Sterilised milk which seemed to be more common in Birmingham.
I still use Delia books, I have the three separate volume version. I found something new in it making pancakes, add some melted butter to the batter just before cooking. Lighter immediately.

My grown up kids still ask for "Fish Envelopes" from the Hamlyn Colour book.

@Grumpyhoonmain, you don’t say where your parents lived, but onions, bananas and rice were readily available in ordinary shops as far back as I can remember, and that’s well before the 1970s.