What did you have for tea in the 60s & 70s?

[bbcessex]

I’m a 70s child with a very poor memory!!

looking at the housework thread made me wonder what a typical meal plan looked like in the 60s & 70s?

I can remember a lot of pies & stews, and chips with omelette.. what did you have ?!

Also born 1965
Mother not a great cook; but she did make fantastic treacle pudding and spotted dick, to be eaten with soft brown sugar.

Roast on Sundays
Birds eye pies
Findus crispy pancakes
angel delight
Birds' dream topping
mince with mashed potatoes
sausages and chips with frozen peas
chops
Things from the Hamlyn All Colour Cook Book were an improvement

On Saturdays (mid-70s) we used to have this sort of thing (I think DM wanted a day off cooking)

Corned beef sandwiches
Scotch eggs
Tinned pilchards
Shipphams fish paste on toast
Pork pies
Slice of pork pie - the sort that seemed to have an egg going all the way through it!
Some kind of ham that had a smiley face on it

When burgers became a thing and Mcdonalds opened the first restaurant in our town my mum insisted on making hervown burger s with mincemeat i dont think she put anything else with it any way they were not great and used to fall apart we used to get these as a" treat" on a saturday night with a can of pepsi

Gala pieMaestro those pork pies with an egg going througj i watched a documentry once about how they made them ,fascinating

As other pp said, potatoes in industrial quantities!

They were sold loose, not in plastic bags. Dm had a pull along shopping bag (trolley) which was entirely filled with potatoes in one journey. She would do a separate trip for other vegetables and fruit.

I don't think I probably ate a typical 70s diet. I remember some of the foods like instant mash or crispy pancakes from having seen the adverts on television.

My mother though had this weird fascination with yogurt. She insisted I eat yogurt every day. I think it was a fairly new "exotic" food. We had Italian friends so she used to cook a lot of Italian food. We also ate quite a lot of fish.

The only thing I can remember that was a 70s thing was pots of supermoose and angel delight.

What I remember is how seasonal things were.
We only had certain vegetables at certain times of the year.
Sunday roasts in the summer were with new potatoes, which couldn't be rasted; you had to wait for proper potatoes to reappear in the Autumn for roasties.
We always had cold meat on Mondays to use up the roast. In the winter this was with a jacket potato (again need he right type to bake) with homemade coleslaw. In the summer baby new potatoes and proper salad (I don't remember iceberg lettuce - only those big, floppy round ones).
There were about two weeks in the summer when you had strawberries.
We never had chips

Crikey, stuffed hearts, sweetbreads, brains, liver, kidney, tripe . . .my mother used to cook this stuff and she and my father happily ate it. Not us though. Although I would be happy to eat a steamed steak pudding made with suet pastry and it's sweet sister, golden syrup suet pudding. Cant face making either though, the fat . . .

O god, those little tubs of parmesan that smelt and tasted like powdered feet.

Oh yes, that dried Parmesan 🤢

I miss that parmesan!

Are stovies tattie soup? Never worked that one out although oft mentioned in my The Broons and Oor Wullie albums.

These threads always leave me wondering what people feed there children - I still serve homemade pies, steamed pudding with birds custard, roasts, chilli, spag Bol. And yes even chops and homemade chips. They get eaten. The only difference I can think of is that I use more herbs for savoury stuff and modern pudding recipes use too much sugar.

Ha Graphista. We certainly weren’t posh. In fact we were looked down on by my friends parents (my dad was in a trade and all my friends parents were teachers). We were what would be described as horribly nouveau (had a settee and a pouffe in the lounge etc ).

My parents were war babies and grew up in the 50s. They hated the food my grandparents cooked and traveled/ate out a lot and wanted to be exotic/cultured.

Looking at the menus up thread I realise I cook more like my grandparents than my parents do. I love corned beef hash and cheap fatty cuts stewed - which my parents would rather starve than eat. I love chicken livers and bacon too!

My pils were the same as my parents. I think the rationing era sent a lot of boomers the other way and they wanted to eat ‘better’ (but not better at all imo).

Someone upthread asked if people in England eat mince and tatties - the first time I heard of it was when I offered to cook for someone I was dating in the late 90s, he was from Durham. (I had no idea how to make it and the resulting meal led to an eye opening chat about garlic, how could I have known it wouldn’t have garlic? Why doesn’t it?!)

(Durham is very definitely in England I just double checked)

My cooking now is definitely a reaction to the bland fare of my childhood. I cook a lot of spicy food, and use garlic in most things.

I don't know how I survived. Not a vegetable to be seen until the fortnightly roast [Grin] same in my family - tomato ketchup was definitely a vegetable when I was growing up.

Spaghetti hoops are definitely still a vegetable in this house. So is ketchup. You’ve got to take the wins where you can get them.

When I was being sophisticated and cooking real spaghetti (i.e. not the tinned kind), I broke it up into small pieces as I dropped it into the pan of water, because I thought that's how spaghetti was supposed to be!

I used to pore over the foreign sections in my mum's recipe books (I think she had three) and try to imagine what all those exciting sounding dishes might taste like. I still love to search out exotic recipes now. Can't stand bland food.

Don't dismiss tomato ketchup, like all red fruits, tomatoes are incredibly good for you. They contain lycopene, the benefits of which are actually increased by cooking, as when making ketchup.

So keep eating tomato ketchup, it's good for you!

TristanDC That is so sweet!

During the 80's we sometimes had powdered orange juice that had to be mixed with water (sounds delightful 😂), arctic roll after a roast dinner on Sundays and steak and kidney pie on Wednesday's! I remember pleading with my Mum to buy the boil in the bag frozen chicken curry ( possibly birds eye or Findus?) and eventually she gave in and we didn't like it!! This is a great thread btw!

Oh that was Tang!! A seventies thing definitely, but you can still get it. I believed (until last or this year 😳) that it was real powdered oranges for astronauts because it was endorsed by NASA and everyone said it was 😂

I still like it

Tang! Delicious - and designed for astronauts.

Tristan a colleague invited me to her house for dinner when I was about 23 and asked me to slice an avocado for her while she was finishing up in the kitchen. I’d safely made it through school and university without seeing one so I assumed the skin stayed on ...plus I didn’t realise their was a bloody great stone in the middle. Presented her with a pile of mush with the skin still on. She looked bemused.