Mary Berry and Judith Chalmers tell you how to stock your freezer! 1976.

[Redheadedstepchild]

Just thought I would let you all know:

(Run time 6m39s)

So many useful tips!

You just have to watch it. I can't explain.

We had a big chest freezer but it was because my parents owned a kind of Fawlty Towers type small hotel and we kind of lived, "Out of the shop" as it were.

It was indestructible, that thing. When bits of it went a bit rusty or strange, my mum covered it in Fablon and gave it a glamorous new look.

Oh a fabulous freezer 😂

Absolutely!

We start with the 'category-based drawers' and end up with a right shambles.

Thank you for the great videos. I was going through some old family photos recently and I was wtf is that? It was a wheelbarrow bbq (mid 1980s I think). So they actually existed in suburbia.
The chest freezer is the reason I’ve been vegetarian most of my life. Most people don’t buy a whole animal from the butchers these days I’m guessing but back in the 70s it was a thing. It was portioned up by the butcher but you literally got the whole thing including the head. Actually a whole head might not have been as gruesome but our family had ordered half a pig 🤮

@Gliblet "A lot of people would still have had open fires and you wouldn't have wanted to light the fire just to toast your crumpets in the middle of summer"

Gliblet, the video was made in 1976 not 1676. Yes, some people still had open fires (although they were becoming more of a novelty) but they usually had grills and toasters too. I was born in 1957 and I never knew anyone who toasted crumpets over the fire and I was brought up very rurally.

Bejam, of course, I was trying to remember who it was we went to in the Seventies, before Iceland, I think it was?

So true 🤣. Some people here think the 70s was the dark ages.

Ditto. Well, I do the 'category based drawers’ in the freezer and my husband just ignores them. Like he ignores my carefully planned system for the kitchen cupboards - I can never find anything because he just shoves stuff away randomly.

Sorry everybody, I'm getting a bit addicted to Mary and Judith!

The perfect chip!

Another stellar episode! Judith was on fire!

Kicking off with an observation on how colanders could be useful for the visually impaired. "We had a blind chap on here."

Mary looks a bit bemused.

Then at timestamp 1.22 she utters the immortal line, "You do you."

Quickly followed by, "I've got a crinkly thing that make mine all wiggly woggly."

Mary's real chip pan gets shamed at 4.33.

There’s much more but enjoy for yourselves:

The link needs a bit of fiddling with to work in the UK. Apologies. Seemed to be alright when I previewed it.

I remember people buying frozen food from Dalgety. Height of sophistication.

I remember going to Bejam’s as a kid. My mum used to buy the multi-pack of frozen strawberry mousses, which seemed like a real treat.

@Redheadedstepchild you have driven me down the same rabbit hole!!!! I am currently watching Mary & Judith out on a picnic "at a local authority site in Buckinghamshire, which are popping up all over the place, giving a continental air".

They were such a treat we were too impatient to wait for them to defrost and always ate them frozen like ice cream 😂 Luckily she always threw in a packet of Angel Delight as well for a creamy dessert. 😋

from the freezer tutorial we have already learned that picnic beakers can be called into action for 'moulding' chicken stock or holding windfall apple purée.

A few years ago I started using old sauce jars (250-300ml) to freeze batch cooking. A doddle to fill. Stack nicely. (Practically) infinitely reusable and no plastic in sight.

I've been watching that as well! Can you get the chip pan episode to work on here?

I feel like I've failed you all with my lack of deep fried lard knowledge.

Also, if you are real fan of Judith and Mary, what is the correct prononciation of the word, "Margerine?"

You pronounce margarine with a soft g. Well, I do. Not that we ever had it in the house then, nor do I now. Olive oil or butter all the way!

I'm sure I've read that it was originally pronounced with a hard g.

Edit it was originally a French word The orthography of soft ⟨g⟩ is fairly consistent: a soft ⟨g⟩ is almost always followed by ⟨e i y⟩. The notable exceptions are gaol (now more commonly spelled jail) and margarine (a French borrowing whose original hard ⟨g⟩ softened for unknown reasons, even though the name Margaret has a hard ⟨g⟩).

Is that a trotter in her freezer? Shudder!

Unwrapped and in a bag with an unwrapped pepper.

🤮

No! Absolutely not! If bloody Thames TV will stop being silly and let me upload a fifty year old video, I will demonstrate the correct way to say margarine in polite company!

Always remember to warm the bowl of your spoon before cooking.

@Redheadedstepchild, just consider me as having put a smiley emoticon on your posts from hereon in