Old seventies menu,when melons were gondolas

[ChrissyShenkle]

This was posted on my local Facebook from a hotel that's now closed
Hard to believe that fruit juice was a starter, and what the hell are eggs indienne?

I was going to mention "The Hamlyn All Colour Cookbook" (top left) Inside is a recipe (and glorious technicolour photo) of Chicken In Aspic. They stuffed a lot of savoury foods in aspic in the 70s. Book written by Mary Berry!

To the poster who said that being vegetarian in the 70s was hard, it was actually quite easy as many people didn't eat meat every day as it was relatively more expensive.

I don't recall eating meat every day in the 60s or 70s.
Cheese was not an everyday staple either.

There were hardly any vegans as it was a very restricted diet. You could only eat vegetables and only those in season. I do remember a growing group of people who discovered mung beans and alfalfa , which I grow now but I'd imagine that they'd have been horrified at the thought of replicant meat which is highly processed and uses far more energy than rearing chickens or pigs.

@ChrissyShenkle

eggs indienne = curried eggs? 🌹

My MiL still orders a glass of orange juice as a starter

Oh yes, remember all of this. You knew it was "fancy" if the tiny glass of orange juice was on a daily.
And all the "recipes" using cans of condensed milk.....
One (allegedly) favourite starter was to get a slice of packet ham, pipe in some cream cheese and then roll it up like a cigar..... the 1970s really had some terrible food 😂

I will have the grapefruit cocktail, a cheese and tomato omelette, and the pineapple fritters please.

Someone has put a copy of a Berni Inn menu from the early 80s on this thread . What is interesting is how expensive the main courses are compared with now, and also in relation to the starters and deserts on that menu.

Eg now if you pay around £15 - £22 for a non-.steak main course, your starter will be around £8. On the 80s menu, main courses were around £5-6 but starters and deserts under £1 (from what I remember).

Regarding fruit juice as a starter - I've just booked to go on a coach holiday to the Isle of Wight with a friend and there is a sample menu on the website - with orange juice as one of the starter choices !

My mum used to make this in the 70s. It was my favourite

My mum used to make a cheese cake which had cottage cheese in - must have been a low fat one! Cottage cheese, jelly and tinned pineapple on a biscuit crumb base . It was surprisingly nice !

A tiny little glass of fruit juice for a starter. And it wasn't even fresh. What on earth were we all thinking?

I think we'd all been to Spain with Freddy Laker and discovered Gazpacho and the closest we could rustle up in Blighty was a glass of Libby's orange or tomato juice, made from concentrate, out of a carton or bottle.

I'm sure we must have our own embarrassing food clichés today and only time will tell what they are. But my guess is anything with pulled pork or salted caramel will feature.

I've got the Cooking for Christmas one and I used to borrow the cake decorating one from the library. Never decorated any cakes though 😂

😍
We'd go once a month shopping to Nottingham (I'm from the other end of the tram line 😂) and then call at the Savoy for a treat. Always remember a waiter called John who had long hair and my mum would go "I bet he's a student" 😂
Sometimes we'd go to the Hutt outside Newstead Abbey but the Savoy was the best. I went there for my 18th, just me and a handful of girl friends. 1983.

Em what do you mean you find it hard to believe fruit juice was ever a starter? 🤣

It still is in some countries!

That doesn't mean it isn't weird. It's a drink, not food!

@ASighMadeOfStone John - yup, I remember him. He was a career waiter and could either be hysterically funny or very, very grumpy!! He and I worked mainly in the downstairs steak bar. Do you remember the Egyptian restaurant manager Sam?

Aw wow. We always ate in the downstairs steak bit. I think I do remember the manager, yes.
Such happy memories. ❤️

as a young married couple mid 1970s the berni inn was definitely a treat twice a year on our birthdays and we always had the same, prawn cocktail, steak with chips etc, and black forest gateaux with cream for afters

My gran used to grill a grapefruit sprinkled with brown sugar for our breakfast as a special holiday treat. It was bloody lovely! (The grilling was just to melt the brown sugar).

We'd eat it with her grapefruit spoons that she'd got as a present and were otherwise used for yoghurt.

Memories of Berni Inns, those were the days. I love an Irish coffee 😍

I used that cookbook for years, along with the Delia Smith ones.

For my O' level cookery practical in the early 1980s I had to plan an elegant three course dinner menu and I did a starter that consisted of cottage cheese and chopped up grapefuit, put back into the hollowed out grapefuit skin. Hilarous considering there was no actual cooking involved. I'm pretty sure that came from the Hamlyn All Colour Cookery Book, or something very similar to it. It seemed like the height of sophistication and inventiveness to me at the time.

These take me back! And I have the one in the middle on the bottom row, just for nostalgia. Childhood meals, right there.

Oh I loved both of these! Had totally forgotten about them. Thanks for the nostalgia!!

They watered down tinned soup?

I remember https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/beef-bourguignon essentially a long cooked beef stew with red wine and then ( 70s variant ) slices of baguette on the top and grilled last minute

I had never even seen, let alone eaten, fresh salmon until I was 18 and went to a dinner dance in the officers mess at a nearby military training place. Until then, I'd never thought of salmon as a whole fish, as I'd only ever had the tinned variety. Even tinned salmon was a special treat in those days! We usually only had pilchards.

I remember DH and I treating ourselves to some smoked salmon from our local delicatessen shortly after we were married. It was sliced by hand in the shop and the slices were wafer thin, you could see though them. I think it was sold by the quarter-pound, or maybe even by the ounce, in those days. You certainly wouldn't have found it in any supermarket, not even the posh ones.

Thinking about it, I had also never heard of tuna (at all!) until I was in my early 20s and had left home. My parents had never bought it, as it was too expensive, so I simply didn't know it existed. I'm talking about tinned tuna, by the way. I didn't have fresh tuna till I was well into my 40s!