Why was a glass of orange juice a starter?

[NutellaEllaElla]

I learned this recently. Is it true? What don't I know that might help me understand this?

In the late 90s/early 00s I worked in a hotel with a menu that had elements likely in place since the 70s. Fruit juice starter, prawn cocktail, melon and Parma ham were frequent options; mains like Guinea fowl and beef stroganoff also popular. On big buffet nights (eg Boxing Day, NYE) the prawns in aspic would make an appearance

Just go to Blackpool!

We were there a few years ago and there was a "five-course breakfast" the first course of which was orange juice 😁

late 70s food was really German and Swiss influenced! All that Black Forest gateau, Liebfraumilch, fondue, “health food”, bran, yoghurt and muesli!

Very interesting point. I wouldn't see bran as particularly Germanic and yoghourt is more Middle Eastern, surely.

The move from blankets and eiderdowns to Continental quilts, i.e. duvets, got going in the 1970s. Were we falling into line with the whole of the rest of Europe, or just the north?

The Germans had to rebuild many of their factories because they'd been destroyed in WW2. Very expensive at the time, but it gave them a head start over our increasingly antiquated manufacturing sector by the 1970s.

We ate fray bentos and goblin tinned meat pies in the 80s and made sandwiches with jars of meat paste. We only ever had powdered mashed potatoes though when camping thankfully as it was horrible. Although the Smash advert remains the best TV advert ever.
My DH still loves prawn cocktail and beef stroganoff.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g the first yoghurt in Britain commercially available was sold as a health food and was advertised with pictures of snow covered mountains. Then Ski was introduced, the first commercially available flavoured yoghurt and that was sold as a swiss health food.
Before then any yoghurt was home made.

And pizzalands, the decor and their staff uniforms were some sort of alpine style... Odd in retrospect, even the Italian alps aren't the home of pizza but that was the first pizza most of us experienced then I think (apart from small round hard disks with a smear of tomato paste and sprinkling of cheese masquerading under that name). Also first encounter with olives, a single black olive proudly in the centre of the special pizza.

Yes, I remember Ski. An exotic treat for us back then. I was just wondering why it became associated with the Alps when its origins are a lot further east and south. It wasn't used in muesli when that was first invented around 1900. The wet ingredient then was milk or condensed milk.

Our milkman - horse and cart - used to deliver yogurt c.1955, plain, yuk or strawberry flavoured and sweetened, yum, sold by Milk Marketing Board presumably. It had a much firmer texture than the stuff Ski started to produce in the 60s? 70s? Horrible.

The last time I remember having OJ as a starter was the mid-90s in an old style hotel.

I loved Wimpy their burgers were delicious they had onions running through them if I remember right.

It became associated with the “Continental breakfast” offered especially by hotels in Germany/Switzerland. Re Ski - the clue was in the name! It was marketed with adverts and branding of people doing wholesome outdoor activities like skiing, which was suddenly ultra-fashionable in the 70s. There was something of a tourism rebirth in Germany/Switzerland/Austria, and France too, around selling skiing and chalet holidays.

Ski yoghurt itself was stuffed full of sugar and hardly healthy in today’s terms, but the branding positioned it as a health food associated with an active sporty lifestyle for postwar Brits.

Ski did a melon yoghurt they sold them in my college canteen I used to have 1 every morning break then they just stopped serving them, that was a sad day!

Take a look at this ad, for example. Opening shots of Swiss-style cuckoo clock. Very blonde, healthy-looking children and mum with fashionable 70s blonde flick. Breakfast wearing white spa-style robes. Alpine style pine kitchen backdrop. Outdoor pursuits plus “mountain” stream look. The height of aspirational food culture in the 70s!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11926609

I learn from this that Ski was a Swiss company. I suppose there was a ready-made association between the bracing clean air of the Alps (which had been the site of TB sanatoriums for a long time) and health foods. Dr Bircher, who invented muesli around1900, had a clinic in Switzerland and was convinced of the benefits of raw food. He didn't intend it as a breakfast food. Further reading here: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170808-how-switzerland-transformed-breakfast

@newnamethanks I did not know that.
I remember cottage cheese when it was a waste product from the food industry and sold as a diet aid. It was horrible. Then someone decided to make it taste nice and I now love cottage cheese.

Yes, absolutely. There was a whole culture of “Alpine” tours and health and walking holidays pre-war in the 20s and 30s, that sort of got revived as aspirational ski and outdoor holidays when Brits could afford it again after the war from the 70s onwards.

I remember having orange juice as a starter. It never tasted like an orange, it was always really sour.

I wonder why we all have bread for a starter now? I can't imagine have bread and butter before my dinner at home so why do we do it so happily in restaurants?

Bread was traditionally given free in restaurants when you went in as it was a way to keep people happy while they waited for their dinner to be cooked. Long before the invention of microwaves.

My favourite yoghurt ever was the chocolate Eden Vale yoghurt which came with a thin solid chocolate layer across the top. I used to have one in my packed lunch every day at my junior school in the mid 60s.

Oranges often were sour then. And hard to peel, and often yielding little juice if you squeezed them.

What to do mean, everyone has bread as a starter now? we don't. Actually, it occurred to me recently that what used to be the normal practice of serving everyone with a bread roll at the start of a meal in nice restaurants seems to have virtually died out. A combination of either people being carb-conscious and not wanting it, or else willing to pay extra for fancy bread, I suppose.

@Growlybear83 , was that the semi-set yoghurt? I used to like that.

Yes I think it was semi set - it was very much thicker than other yoghurts I remember. I used to love the chocolate layer on top. I wish they still made them. I think they were called choc top.

It was new then. I wonder if we'd still like it now.

Someone was telling me that they know a dairy owner, and when asked why there was quite a lot of sugar in the yogurt, the answer was because people wouldn't buy it if it didn't taste nice.

I don't eat much sugar to worry about it - but I don't like artificial sweeteners. Plain natural yoghurt is fine but would not turn down a toffee one if offered.

Thinking back to my 70s childhood, my mum took a career break for a few years when we were small, which was commonplace, so there wasn't her salary coming in. The economy tanked and people were pretty frugal with food. It wasn't until the 80s that some people were generally better off and relatively food became cheaper and cheaper until Brexit. I can remember my first tries of things like kiwi fruits, mango, etc.

I remember trying instant noodles for the first time.