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 ?!

Chips, pek and beans 🤢. I mean, what even is Pek?! And the mix of warm and cold on one plate is just ugh. I've avoided all forms of processed meats since "growing up", and billy bear luncheon meat (or whatever it is called) for my kids is a big no no.

Then there's potted meat sandwiches and oxtail soup. Grim.

My Dad fancies himself as Tom from The Good Life. We had chickens. Nice eggs but he was too soft to kill them until they were ancient and tough as shoe leather.
We had lots of fruit and veg from the garden in summer but Mum wasn't a keen cook. Her currys had sultanas in. Gammon had pineapple rings on (tinned). Fray Bentos pies in a tin were a thing. She had standards though. We ate brown bread and she cooked our chips in Spry Crisp n Dry not lard.
We loved visiting our auntie for the white bread and lardy chips.

Chest freezers were quite a status symbol, I didn't have one.
Often kept in the garage, with much calling out between the owning couple about "Just getting something from the freezer Darling!"

A friend had one in the kitchen, and I was green with envy, until one day I had a peep in it, and it was totally empty apart from a small box of fish fingers at the bottom.

60s child, mother was a good plain cook but a bit fussy. She was excellent at pastry. We had roasts on Sunday followed by apple pie or crumble, eaten at lunch time so we had tea later with trifle and home made cakes like jam tarts or chocolate eclairs. In the week we ate stew, or home made steak and kidney pie, or braised steak and onions, liver and onions, pork or lamb chops. We always had fish on Fridays, fried in home made breadcrumbs. I don't remember much chicken. I think it must have been very expensive. I remember Mum going back to work in the early 70s after she lost a baby and things changed, more convenience food was coming in and we sometimes got birds eye boil in the bag stuff which we thought was the dogs bollocks at the time (probably was actually )

Ooh yes curry with sultanas, desiccated coconut too! I still like some chopped banana on my curry and not too hot mind. And i like gammon with pineapple rings - i leave off the glace cherry though. For school dinners we had battered spam, chips, scraps and gravy - yum.

This is such a fab thread. I'd forgotten about those frozen mousses and the pate in a tube. Also liver, and steak and kidney pies with lots of kidney, sometimes steak and kidney pudding. There did seem to be a lot of red meat, chicken far less common than now. I think we had smoked haddock occasionally, with an egg?
Definitely no shop bought cakes. But we had biscuits. Swede yes. So watery. And marrow.

I didn't mention puddings earlier, they didn't feature much in Mum's 60s menus. But she did a very good rice pudding, and stewed fruit with custard was popular, as was strawberries with cream in the summer. Everything was seasonal, and I still eat that way really.

Mum wasn't a baker, but at about 9 or 10 I discovered Mary Baker cake mix, and realised that if you could read, then you could cook. So the BERO book became a firm friend, and I was in charge of all cake making!!

Once married, I branched out into Black Forest Gateau, lemon meringue tart, French apple tart, much to my MIL's amazement as she thought you HAD to have a Victoria sponge for Sunday tea!

Ada i remember my Dad saying that to me when I was about 8, if you can read, you can cook! I immediately got put in charge of all toffee, fudge and tablet making. Plus i had to make up his egg sandwiches and flask of tea for his night shift.

Very basic plain food. Sorry though this is gonna be long!

Mince & tatties
Sausage and mash
Pork chops seemed to feature a lot 😷
Stews & casseroles (I include stovies in this) served with plain boiled potatoes, mash if we were lucky.
Gammon occasionally, chicken sometimes - again with boiled potatoes and veg (carrots, neeps, peas, broccoli nothing very exciting)
Shepherds pie.

Omg yes liver & onions 😷 dads favourite - I hated it!
Faggots - which I actually loved!

Steak and kidney pud which I also loved but we didn't have this very often.

Roast on Sunday usually pork - with lush home made crackling!

Yes to spam fritters - usually with home made chips and beans.

If we'd recently been visiting "home" (Scotland - I'm scots born but dad was in army) we'd have scotch pie with mash & beans - we all LOVED this. Couldn't get scotch pies outside Scotland at the time. They'd also have brought back from Scotland slice, "good" bacon, "good" fish, tattie scones, white pudding, pan loaf, irn bru, "good" rolls...

Yes to egg & chips as a dinner - still don't have a problem with that.

There was always bread & butter too and parents had mugs of tea us kids had milk or squash to drink.

We did have pud every night though - rice pudding, angel delight, sponge cake usually with custard or banana custard.

OMG - yes and tonnes fruit and custard! Weird! Hot & cold bits together.

By the 80's more "exotic" fare was creeping in - by which I mean spaghetti bolognese (made with powdered sauce mix) or curries (with raisins). Plus we then got a freezer and parents would stock up once a month from beejam so then we started getting frozen mousse that had to be defrosted for pud, findus crispy pancakes, hamwich, chicken nuggets.

Before getting the freezer we'd occasionally have fish fingers as they'd fit in the freezer shelf of the fridge. Mum would make chips from scratch (does anyone still do this?) which were of course deep fried in the pan set aside specifically for this which was only used once or twice a week and I suspect the oil changed MAYBE twice a year! 😷 fish EVERY Friday (catholic family) if mum managed to get hold of what she considered good quality fresh fish it would then be battered/breadcrumbed by hand (name of brand of breadcrumbs escapes me google no help!) we very much liked helping with this and getting messy! Gotta say, was better than any fish and chips from chippy.

Omelettes was considered a light lunch type thing. If it was VERY hot (mainly 1976!) we might get a "salad" which barely earned the name consisting of ham, maybe egg or cheese too, limp lettuce, half a tomato and a few slices of cucumber with like a teaspoon of Branston which we drowned in salad cream just to give it some flavour!

TowerRingInferno yes my mum tended to do "if it's Monday it must be..." Often regardless of weather/appetites etc

Iirc it was

Sun roast
Mon stew or casserole made with some roast leftovers
Tue sausage and mash or similar meat n 2 veg deal, pork chops etc
Wed pie of some description
Thu usually something involving mince. Mince & tatties mostly, but also shepherds pie, pastry mince pie, mince n dumplings...
Fri fish ALWAYS fish
Saturday something with as little effort as possible as a sort of "day off" for mum so egg & chips, sausage & chips...

As a burgeoning veggie (and I suspect I have an intolerance to certain meats) you can imagine how I felt! VERY occasionally I'd get my favourites of macaroni cheese or cauliflower cheese.

thighofrelief Oh I remember when the banana with and raisins in curry were exotic touches, flaked almonds too IIRC? It's lingered on as a sort of food ritual here!

YY To toffee, cinder toffee and toffee apples were my star turns!

Omg the boiled cabbage! Still can't bear it now! I like cabbage in a stir fry or casserole though but mum used to start boiling the cabbage before the roast went in the oven! So it was likely boiled for what 2/3 HOURS minimum? 😷

Mum was happy enough using herbs but wary of garlic and spices. Which I LOVE I think dd would go nuts if I didn't use garlic in almost everything!

Have we any way of knowing what pasta/rice cost in the 70's? That's probably why potatoes were used more surely. Yet now these are cheap fillers. I too remember mostly having tinned pasta.

Apple Amber! There's a blast from the past!

Re shop bought pies - even now mum won't use factory made pies, she'll buy "shop bought" but from her butcher or fishmonger who make their own pies so essentially "home made". She wouldn't order pie at a restaurant as she doesn't see it as a special item and it's likely factory made - she's probably right!

I can remember watching Eddie murphys skit (linked) and relating SO MUCH! "My fish and chips is way better than the chippy's and more than half the price" on this she was right - curries and "Chinese" food - not so much.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AAx553k7W5s

I was portrayed as a "fussy eater" in my family, truth was I didn't like the taste or texture of meat especially red meat and it was mostly meat! If we had chicken or fish I was happy to eat those and always ate my veggies. Once I turned veggie I became a much better eater AND the stomach issues (excess wind, cramps, nausea, diarrhoea - usually in the evenings) I'd suffered all my life to that point all but vanished! I was one of the few people NOT surprised when the connection between red meat and various stomach issues was made.

"Whenever we were ill, she used to make a boiled egg chopped up in a cup (why cup?) with lots of butter." Chucky eggs! Love these still have them and gave them to dd when she was ill too. Eggs have tons of nutrition and easy to digest so perfect for the ill/elderly, popular in the residential nursing homes I worked in too. Only got lucozade if we were ill too.

MrsKoala - wow! Your family were posh eh?

My dad was quite green-thumbed and all but one place we lived had a decent size garden so he'd create a "vegetable garden" each time and grow potatoes, carrots, peas, marrows, tomatoes... Also sometimes fruit depending on location/conditions one place the previous occupants had planted rhubarb and dad kept that going, another had an apple tree, another a bramble bush (actually just outside our garden but we still had plenty of the fruit), one place the previous occupant had clearly loved herbs and there was Rosemary, mint, parsley and dill I think.

We had "play pieces" a snack for morning break. Normally a small chocolate biscuit like (but not the actual brands) penguins, kit kats, if we'd recently been to Scotland we'd have lovely tunnocks caramels or breakaways.

"How come we weren't all as fat as pigs?" Smaller portions (I strongly recommend comparing plate sizes! My mum still uses the same plates and they're little bigger than the side plates in my newer dinner service - which also doesn't fit in my 70's fitted kitchen!), less snacking, more active (I'm shocked how few kids walk to school now even if it's not far. I walked 1.5 miles to school every day so 3 miles MINIMUM a day), less food advertising, unhealthier food/eating out/takeaways were expensive relative to people's income. I'm also firmly of the opinion that this nonsense of cutting out whole food groups as (ironically) an attempt to lose weight causes hunger/cravings because by cutting out whole groups you miss out on essential nutrients so body craves what it's not getting. I also think artificial sweeteners are more harmful to metabolism than we are yet aware of. If somebody is having real sugar the body recognises it and adjusts appetite accordingly. I remember I was doing my nurse training when the whole "vegetable oil margarine is better for you than butter" nonsense was going on, was doing my community nursing rotation and involved in a consultation with the dietitian at the practice who was advising an overweight, recently diagnosed diabetic patient (frankly nowhere near as overweight as many now) and the patient said they'd switched to low fat spread. Dietitian basically went "no! Artificial chemicals are not food and the body doesn't recognise them as food, that's why people eat them and are then hungry half an hour later. Go back to your preferred brand of butter just have less of it." Dietitian also told patient better to have a small amount of "real" sweets very occasionally rather than "diabetic sweets" for similar reasons plus the laxative effect of these. Patient saw nurse again about 2 weeks later for something unrelated and mentioned that following the dietitian's recommendations her blood sugars were better regulated, she wasn't as hungry and was losing weight.

At the time (to my now shame) I thought of mum as "fat" and never wanted to look like her - she was never bigger than a size 14 and I'd love to have her figure then now! Dad was always super skinny no matter what he ate (full fry up breakfast every day, mess lunch so basically meat & 2 veg and a pudding too, same at dinner time, at least one pack of biscuits an evening with several mugs of tea which he takes with full fat milk and loads of sugar, supper with us before we went to bed - toast/crumpets/malt loaf with lots of butter with hot chocolate) and actually I suspect if he'd eaten less he'd have been underweight. His whole family all very slim plus he did a manual very active job and exercised.

Thighofrelief my parents and grandparents ate porridge slices. I've never had, but apparently it's really quite similar to flapjacks but much less sweet.

Corythatwas - cod roe was always my preferred item from chippy.

Drookit - my parents always found nearest farm shop and bought full sacks of spuds that then were stored in the "glory hole" 😂 (yea don't even get me started on trying to get my mum to stop using THAT phrase). Farm shop was also used to buy several trays of eggs (I think there were 2 dozen eggs to a tray?) for the month, also very large bags of carrots. One farm we used also sold the most amazingly sweet delicious plums! Dad used to "borrow" a sort of trundle thing from work to get it all home - on foot! Before we got a car in the 80's.

Graphista the breadcrumbs - was it Saxa? Saxo?

I always talk about glory holes, i have them all over the house. We always had an enormous sack of tatties and trays of eggs for the end of the month so we could get through the last few days. I think we were thinner then because there was no instant food, no microwaves, shops were shut, no takeaways, no delivery service. So you had your dinner and pudding when Dad got in from work. Then what? You'd have to properly cook something or just have an apple. Also our parents were still steeped in attitudes their parents had had re WW2 and food rationing. It was positively sinful to be wasteful regarding food and lack of a microwave meant you sat down together for a proper dinner when Dad got home.

I can tell who's Scots on here. The amount of mince and tatties! We always had it with doughboys / dumplings and cabbage or kale. The tatties were always plain boiled, never mashed. Do English people have mince and tatties too?

Ada i remember this lazy Susan type thing that had all the condiments you could add to a curry - about 8 different things. I really feel quite cheated if i can't lob a banana on my curry. And the older I get the more i dislike anything but plain food. Looking forward to tomorrow's porridge! Might make some treacle toffee too!

DM had a pressure cooker so there were lots of sludgy platefuls.
Bless her, she was an awful everyday cook. She could do some things brilliantly but very rarely did them.

We had industrial quantities of potatoes, used to get massive sacks of them in about size of a 5 year old child.

Can only remember mince and potatoes as shepherds pie. Had corned beef and potatoes, chops and potatoes.

We used to banana surprise which was bananas, swiss roll in custard, not sure what the surprise was but that was when we went to my aunts. My great aunt used to make pickled cabbage and pickled onions and lovely cakes, all of which I loved but did give me a pickle addiction. 😳 Lots of cabbage including posh crinckled cabbage. I love cabbage. Spaghetti hoops on toast. Soreen loaf with butter.

Jelly and blamagne for special occasions or angel delight with sprinkles. Terrible coloured water chemical squash.

Thighofrelief - yes saxa/saxo rings a bell - Google still no use!

As a Scot who's lived in England I think mince n tatties are a peculiarly scots thing. Certainly never had it at English friends houses if I went there for tea and at least one did ask for a translation! 😂 and still thought they were going to be presented with dry cooked mince and potatoes so was slightly relieved when given what she said her mum called "savoury mince" with unfortunately dry boiled potatoes and boiled to death cabbage!

Penguins yep our sacks of potatoes were huge too! But then there were 5 of us and as potatoes were served most days made sense really. I never even buy "real" potatoes now (which mum finds most disconcerting especially coupled with the vegetarianism "but what do you eat? Do you not get hungry?" Erm no. Pasta, rice, noodles all perfectly adequate carbs. Dd hates potatoes always has)

Pre-veggie I like corned beef too but we didn't have it often as dad wasn't keen "it's not real meat".

I still love corned beef, used to have loads of toasted corned beef sandwiches when sandwich toasters appeared in the 80s.

Most of the food I don't miss but did love lemonade sparkle lollies and the sweets esp. Double Dips and sweet cigarettes, parma violets etc Haven't been eating them tonight

Remember cheese on toast was Welsh Rarebit as it sounded fancier.

Hated Camp coffee and ovaltine. Sherry trifle at Xmas. Always thought I hated mashed potato but discovered Mum had been putting swede in them.

Ham, peas, boiled potatoes and butter was my favourite.

Liver and bacon with mash. My mum cut all the icky bits out, coated it in seasoned flour and fried til crispy. I loved it.

Kidneys on toast.

Roast on Sunday, and Stovies or chicken fricasse the following day depending on whether the roast had been beef/lamb or chicken.

Friday night was fish and chips, curry or Chinese (this was late 70s).

Chicken thighs or legs casseroled with mushrooms.

Mince and tattles.

Ham and tomato omelette.

Pork or lamb chops and mash.

Steak and kidney pie.

Peas and carrots featured a lot.

Born in 1965 - I remember a lot of chops, boiled potatoes, marrowfat peas and thick bisto. Cling peaches and evaporated milk for pudding. Sunday roast with proper tea - sandwiches and cake later.

Cheese and potato pie (Cheese topped mash) with spaghetti hoops. My DM still has a chest freezer in the garage even though there's only 2 of them!

She was quite an early adopter of spag bol (it was quite good!) But always served the mince first with the pasta on top. With pre grated parmesan from a cardboard tube.

She always treated spag hoops as a veg and occasionally served them with lasagne.

These days they eat loads of real veg and insist on serving a nice chilli with half a plate of broccoli, sprouts, celery and carrots.

My DF loves eating with us!